The Delights of Impossibility: No Children, No Books, Only Theory

Abstract

The Delights of Impossibility:No Children, No Books, Only Theory Roderick McGillis (bio) Living in childhood without a sense of home, I found a place of sanctuary in "theorizing," in making sense out of what was happening. —bell hooks My title refers to impossibility. Let me explain. We have convincing studies of children's literature that demonstrate the non-existence of children, their books, and writing about their books. Children are non-existent because the notions of childhood we have are constructions of adults who cannot recall precisely what it was like to be a child; all definitions of the child and childhood are made by those who are not children, and therefore these definitions do not speak of something absolute, but rather of something relative that satisfies the desires and hopes of the adults who make the definitions. Children's books do not exist because, once again, adults write books for children, and in doing so seek to draw children into the world as the adult perceives it; children, whatever they are, do not (or only rarely) write the books they read. And the criticism of children's books does not exist because it cannot exist if there are no children's books to criticize; indeed, even if there were such things as children's books, the criticism of them would still come from those adults who occupy positions of authority within the institutions that offer commentary on books: the popular press, the more specialized journals, and the universities. In other words, what we call children's literature is an invention of adults who need to have something to write about, something to play with, something to help them construct a vision of the way things are and ought to be so that the present generation, and more importantly, the next generation will behave according to standards those adults who write children's books and publish them feel comfortable with. The previous paragraph echoes, rather faintly, the work of Jacqueline Rose (The Case of Peter Pan; or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, 1984) and Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child, 1994). I evoke these writers not to sanction their theories or to criticize them, but rather to raise some of the problems we have with children's literature. The first problem is, then, definition. Rose and Lesnik-Oberstein problematize the definition of children's literature by arguing that such a literature does not exist. For those who think that it does exist, another problem arises: how do we define children's literature vis-à-vis its audience? In other words, when we speak of children's literature, do we speak of books marketed for people of a certain age, and if so, then what age? Are fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds children? Are people who wear diapers children? Just whom do we refer to when we say "children"? At what age does one stop being a child? Is there such a creature as an "inner child" in each of us? And even if we can decide the answer to these questions, we have another problem, one that Peter Hunt keeps insisting on: how do we incorporate a sense of history into what we mean by children's books? If the term "children's books" refers to those books that children read, then what does this say about all those books long forgotten, but perhaps recently dredged up by literary scholars of a historical bent who snoop about the by-ways of literary history for the likes of Eliza Fenwick or Mary Martha Sherwood or Catherine Sinclair or Lucy Clifford or L. T. Meade or Evelyn Everett-Greene? Who reads these authors any more? Do books that once may have been children's books cease to be what they once were? Do they become something else? But let me return to another perennial problem in the study of children's books. How do we take seriously books written for an audience of juveniles who have hardly acquired the skills to read anything beyond the most rudimentary stories, written in the most rudimentary language, and dealing with the most rudimentary subjects? If we have a children...