Introduction: Internationalism and Children's Literature

Abstract

Introduction:Internationalism and Children's Literature Roderick McGillis In her study Children's Literature Comes of Age, Maria Nikolajeva comments, "With very few exceptions, children's literature in different countries has little in common" (43). She goes on to say that "although the general exchange of information in the world is growing, children's literature is becoming more and more national and isolated" (43). I begin this brief introduction to William Moebius's hommage to Jean Perrot with a nod to internationalism and to Nikolajeva's assertions about it because the subject is dear to Perrot, who takes an opposite view. Nikolajeva and Perrot, in effect, participate in an ongoing debate concerning the international status of children's books, and, by extension, of the culture children are inheriting as the world community evolves into the next century. Implicit in this debate are the questions: how do books reflect nationality, or do they? Does literature speak a universal language? Is it translatable from one language and place to another? How does one culture receive another? Jean Perrot has, for the past twenty years or so, worked tirelessly for an understanding that accepts national differences, and yet he fiercely believes that such differences do not mount barriers to conversation, mutual respect, and international exchange. The approach he brings to his study of children's literature, as he says, "takes account of cultural and national diversity which cannot be reduced to one-direction market forces" (215). What is more, unlike Nikolajeva, Perrot warns of "an erosion of national characteristics and conformity with supposedly 'natural' standards." For him, the openness of any culture depends upon that culture's "ability and willingness to translate, appreciate, integrate, and import outstanding foreign works" (216). Culture, then, is something distinctively national and transportable. Openness is necessary to any culture that hopes to breathe vigorously and grow. I'll return to internationalism later. But now I must look to Moebius's "hommage." My first reaction to this essay as a contribution to the literary theory column was blunt: "hommage" is not theory. The mid-Atlantic voyage is hardly appropriate for a column that deals with questions of literary meaning, the political implications and formal properties of literary texts. And we are all familiar with Henry James's own attitude to children's literature. Moebius's essay, then, appeared to me to contain no theory and very little about children's literature. And not a lot about Jean Perrot either. So why include Moebius's essay in the theory column? The answer is simple: my first reaction was wrong. The form of the essay implies a theoretical position, and the content of the essay tells us, in its own manner, a considerable amount about its subject: Jean Perrot. In the final analysis, the intention is to introduce Perrot's work to readers who may not be as familiar with this work as they might be. Here is a scholar of children's literature who has a truly international stature, and who has served both the Children's Literature Association and the world community of children's literature writers and critics through his active involvement in ChLA and other organizations and through his ground-breaking creation, the Charles Perrault Institute for the study of children's literature and culture in Eaubonne, France. Moebius's essay takes the form of a fictional meditation in which Henry James journeys to Europe on a refloated Titanic with a famous fellow-traveller, Edith (Wharton), and later overhears a curious conversation in Paris's Jardin du Luxembourg. The kind of critical discourse at work here is perhaps best exemplified in Christine Brooke-Rose's 1991 novel Textermination, in which a host of literary personages from Emma Woodhouse to Goethe to Prince Rama to Casaubon to Madame Bovary to Fabrice del Dongo gather in San Francisco for the Annual Convention of Prayer for Being (clearly a parody of the annual MLA meeting). This ficto-novel is the flowering of what criticism has flirted with since its beginnings in Plato's dialogues. In English criticism, we have such examples as John Dryden's "Essay on Dramatic Poesie" (1668), Walter Savage Landor's "Imaginary Conversations" (1824-29), Oscar Wilde...