Children’s Literature as Communication
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AUTHOR ""
TITLE "Children’s Literature as Communication: The ChiLPA project"
SUBJECT "Studies in Narrativity, Volume 2"
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Children’s Literature as Communication
Studies in Narrative Studies in Narrative (sin) comprise studies using narratives as approaches or methodological tools to explore aspects of life, language, and literature as well as studies that explore and contribute to the notion of narrative from theoretical and epistemological perspectives. Volumes published in this series draw on a variety of approaches and methodologies cross-fertilizing different traditions and disciplines.
Series Editor Michael Bamberg (Clark University)
Advisory editorial board Susan Bell (Bowdoin College) Jerome Bruner (New York Unuiversity) Jennifer Coates (University of Surrery Roehampton) Michele L. Crossley (Edge-Hill University College) Carol Gilligan (New York University) Rom Harré (Linacre College, Oxford) Janet Holmes (Victoria University of Wellington) Charlotte Linde (Institute for Research Learning) Dan McAdams (Northwestern University) Allyssa McCabe (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) Eric E. Peterson (University of Maine) Catherine Kohler Riessman (Boston University) Ted Sarbin (University of California, Santa Cruz) Deborah Schiffrin (Georgetown University) Margaret Wetherell (Open University)
Volume 2 Children’s Literature as Communication: The ChiLPA project Edited by Roger D. Sell
Children’s Literature as Communication The ChiLPA project Edited by
Roger D. Sell Åbo Akademi University
John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Children’s literature as communication : the ChiLPA Project / edited by Roger D. Sell. p. cm. (Studies in Narrativity, issn 1568–2706 ; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Children’s literature--History and criticism. I. Sell, Roger D. II. ChilPA Project. III. Series. PN1009.A1 C51383 2002 809’.89282--dc21 isbn 90 272 2642 3 (Eur.) / 1 58811 258 6 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)
2002071239
© 2002 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
To Kaj-Gunnar Lindström, Bengt Sandell, and Bengt Stenlund, with thanks for invaluable support
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Table of contents
Members of the ChiLPA Project, Åbo Akademi University Introduction: Children’s literature as communication Roger D. Sell Part I Initiating: Resources at hand 1. Orality and literacy: The wise artistry of The Pañcatantra Niklas Bengtsson 2. Orality and literacy, continued: Playful magic in Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan Janina Orlov 3. Intertextualities: Subtexts in Jukka Parkkinen’s Suvi Kinos novels Kaisu Rättyä 4. Intertextualities, continued: The connotations of proper names in Tove Jansson Yvonne Bertills 5. The verbal and the visual: The picturebook as a medium Maria Nikolajeva Part II Negotiating: Issues examined 6. Growing up: The dilemma of children’s literature Maria Nikolajeva 7. Childhood: A narrative chronotope Rosemary Ross Johnston 8. Child-power? Adventures into the animal kingdom — The Animorphs series Maria Lassén-Seger 9. Gender and beyond: Ulf Stark’s conservative rebellion Mia Österlund
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10. Politics: Gubarev’s Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors Jenniliisa Salminen
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11. The unspeakable: Children’s fiction and the Holocaust Lydia Kokkola
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Part III Responding: Pragmatic variables 12. Early immersion reading: The narrative mode and meaning-making Lydia Kokkola
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13. Reader-learners: Children’s novels and participatory pedagogy Roger D. Sell
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14. Primary-level EFL: Planning a multicultural fiction project Charlotta Sell
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15. Secondary-level EFL: Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi Lilian Rönnqvist
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16. Bilingualism, stories, new technology: The Fabula Project Viv Edwards
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Index
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Project, Åbo Akademi University"
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Members of the ChiLPA Project, Åbo Akademi University
Roger D. Sell, Founder Director of the ChiLPA Project, is J. O. E. Donner Professor of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University. He has published extensively on English and American authors from several different periods, and on the pragmatics of literary communication. His main interests within children’s literature have been in the children’s stories of Robert Frost, and in the potentiality of children’s literature within language education programmes. His books include: Literature as communication: The foundations of mediating criticism (Benjamins, 2000), Mediating criticism: Literary education humanized (Benjamins, 2001), Robert Frost: Stories for Lesley (University Press of Virgina, 1984), and Literature throughout foreign language education: The implications of pragmatics (Modern English Language Publications in Association with the British Council, 1995). He holds an OBE for services to English Studies, is an Ordinary Member of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, and has guest lectured widely on five continents. Niklas Bengtsson holds degrees in both Comparative Literature and Comparative Religion from the University of Helsinki, and has also studied at the Finnish University of Industrial Arts. Having earlier served as Principal of a children’s art school, and as Editor of the Nordic Council of Ministers’ journal of children’s culture, he is currently Secretary of the Finnish National Council for Literature. His own publications include a history of the Finnish Bookplate Club, a study of contemporary children’s literature outside of Finland, a book on wines and religions, a co-edited study of the book in Finland, a report on the economic basis of Finnish publishing, and numerous other writings on religion, wines, and literature. Janina Orlov holds a degree in Russian Language and Literature and Comparative Literature from Åbo Akademi University, both of which subjects she has taught at the same university and at the University of Turku. Her special interests are in children’s literature and literary history, on which she has guest-lectured in many countries and published extensively. She has translated Russian literary texts into Swedish for both radio and television productions, and has also done Swedish translations of Finnish young adult fiction. Most recently she has been responsible for a chapter on children’s literature in a major new history of Finland-Swedish literature.
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Members of the ChiLPA Project, Åbo Akademi University
Kaisu Rättyä holds a degree in Comparative Literature, Nordic Philology, and Finnish from the University of Jyväskylä. Having earlier served as Secretary for the Finnish Network for Cultural Studies, she is now Director of the Finnish Institute for Children’s Literature in Tampere. Her publications include a study of serial books for children and young adults, and a survey of British and American mystery and adventure series in Finnish translation. Yvonne Bertills holds a degree in Finnish Language and Literature and English Language and Literature from Åbo Akademi University, where she now teaches Finnish literature in education and Finnish children’s literature. In her children’s literature research, she is bringing together reader response criticism, translation theory, semantics, and onomastics. Maria Nikolajeva, one of the ChiLPA Project’s three Expert Consultants, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University and Docent in Children’s Literature and Literary Theory at Åbo Akademi University. She has published numerous articles on children’s literature, and her books include Children’s literature comes of age: Toward a new aesthetic (Garland, 1996), From mythic to linear: Time in children’s literature (Scarecrow, 2000), How picturebooks work (Garland, 2001, co-authored with Carole Scott), and The rhetoric of character in children’s literature (Scarecrow, 2002). She has been a Fulbright grantee at the University of Massachusetts, research fellow at the International Youth Library in Munich, and H. W. Donner Visiting Professor at Åbo Akademi University, and she has recently completed a two-year spell as Visiting Research Professor at San Diego State University. From 1993 to 1997 she served as President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. Rosemary Ross Johnston, another of the ChiLPA Project’s Expert Consultants, is Director of the Centre for Research and Education in the Arts at the University of Technology Sydney. She has published widely on children’s literature, and has recently co-authored Literacy: Reading, writing and children’s literature (Oxford University Press, 2001). She is Founder Editor of CREArTA, an international interdisciplinary journal for the arts, and has also served as Secretary of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, and Assistant General Secretary of UNESCO’s International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures. In 2000 she was H. W. Donner Visiting Professor at Åbo Akademi University. Maria Lassén-Seger holds a degree in English Language and Literature, Comparative Literature, Library Science and Folkloristics from Åbo Akademi University. She is at present a junior research fellow in the English Department, on secondment from her post as librarian in the university library. She is a regular reviewer of children’s literature, and her own research interest is in the motif of metamorphosis in twentieth century English children’s literature.
Members of the ChiLPA Project, Åbo Akademi University
Maria Österlund holds a degree in Comparative Literature, Swedish, and Education from Åbo Akademi University. She lectures and writes on women’s studies, children’s literature, and adult literature, and also on children’s television. Her main research interest is in constructions of girlhood in Swedish young adult fiction of the 1980s. In 1999 she was awarded a prize for young researchers by the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, and in 2001 was appointed by Astrid Lindgren’s Solkatten Foundation to a visiting research fellowship at the Swedish Children’s Books Institute in Stockholm. Jenniliisa Salminen holds a degree in Russian and Finnish from the University of Turku. Her research interests are in children’s literature, and especially in the secondary worlds of Soviet children’s literature. Lydia Kokkola (formerly Williams) holds a degree in English and Education from the University of Exeter, and took her doctorate from Åbo Akademi University. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Turku. One of her main research interests has been literature in foreign language education, and in 1998 her doctoral thesis on young EFL learners and their books was published by the Åbo Akademi University Press. A book on representations of the Holocaust is forthcoming with Routledge. Charlotta Sell, who holds a degree in Education and English Language and Literature from Åbo Akademi University, is a teacher in Cygnaeus Skolan, Åbo, but is at present on secondment as a junior research fellow in the English Department of Åbo Akademi University. Her interest in multicultural education at the primary school level has also taken her to Reading University, where she has worked with Professor Viv Edwards. Her own field study is to be published in the form of a doctoral dissertation. Lilian Rönnqvist has a degree in England Language and Literature, German, and Education from Åbo Akademi University. She has extensive experience of school teaching at various levels, and was a member of the Åbo Literary Pragmatics Project. At present she is teaching in the Sydväst Polytechnic. Her current research explores the potentialities of young adult fiction as a means for cultural mediation in language education programmes. Viv Edwards, the third of the ChiLPA Project’s Expert Consultants, is Professor of Education at the University of Reading, where she is Director of the Reading and Language Information Centre. She has a particular interest in the linguistic dimensions of multicultural education, and in pedagogical technology. This is reflected in her work as Co-ordinator of the Fabula Project, a collaborative venture with researchers in Ireland, Spain, Friesland and France. Her books include Reading in multilingual classrooms (Reading and Language Information Centre, 1995), and she has co-edited the Encyclopedia of language and education (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997).
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Introduction Children’s literature as communication Roger D. Sell
1.
The ChiLPA Project
Literature can function as a significant and democratic channel of human interactivity. This kind of claim, though not very central in literary criticism written during the twentieth century, is by no means new, and by the end of the nineteenth century an educated guess would have been that literature’s interactive potential was on its way to being fully realized. Not only were advanced western societies at last approaching a state of universal literacy. The importance of literature’s human dimension was often taken for granted by the kind of public discussion it came in for. In Britain, for instance, many critics were still joyful gentlemen-amateurs and freelance journalists, some of whom even tended to treat literature as if it were a form of covert autobiography. Here they sometimes went to absurd lengths, for which they have subsequently been reprimanded. Yet their emphasis on the readily accessible pleasures of reading, and their strong sense of a literary author as having ideas and feelings to be transmitted to other people, were perhaps too willingly forgotten by some of their successors (cf. Sell, 2001c). The twentieth century was the period during which scholarship in all fields of knowledge became professionalized. By 1950, many of the people making public statements about literature were no longer joyful amateurs and freelance journalists, but the salaried employees of colleges and universities. Their professionalist orientation was already reaching the point at which most of their own publications were read only by people holding the same expert credentials as they themselves. This was also the period during which the very paradigms developed by scholars in the humanities, though catalytic for a wide variety of insights, had less and less to do with human beings — or at least with human beings as they experience themselves. As early as the 1920s, some literary-critical discourse had already taken the imprint of Modernist elitism, and during the remainder of the century there were aspects of criticism and literary education which became steadily more scholastic. True, the
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Introduction
New Critics’ warning against “the intentional fallacy” (Wimsatt, [1946] 1970) and the literary structuralists’ and poststructuralists’ embrace of the “death of the author” (Barthes, [1968] 1979) were, as literary-theoretical pronouncements, in fundamental opposition. The former helpfully stipulated procedures by which a critic could focus on literary texts as timeless works of art, whereas the latter valuably drew attention to literature’s ideological consubstantiality with society in some particular historical phase. Yet both stances could be reduced to professionalist jargon, and with social consequences that were basically the same. Dogmatic New Critical formalism and dogmatically deterministic structuralism or poststructuralism both suggested that literature was not, in some readily comprehensible way, about, or part of, human life as it seems to human beings, and both therefore tended to reduce the circle of those venturing an opinion in literary matters, perhaps even turning would-be readers into might-have-beens. Given that the twentieth century also saw — in the gramaphone, the radio, film, television, and video — a technological re-vamping of the ancient and more direct appeal of oralvisual culture, and given that the condition of postmodernity involves serious challenges to traditional legitimations, to distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, and to any claim for some single canon of great books, one of the questions arising for our new century is: Will literature, in the long run, survive? The present volume breathes a robust optimism. It takes for granted that, even if the actual term “literature” is eventually discarded as too exclusive, or even if the concept of literature is broadened so as to recover the generic scope it still had in the eighteenth century, and to embrace a greater range of sociocultural diversity, people will go on reading books for their sheer human value. But especially as commentators on children’s literature, the authors of the chapters which follow do not allow themselves to be wrong-footed by purely academic developments. On the one hand, scholastic professionalism has not been without its benefits. The splitting up of a scholarly field into various specialisms; the concomitant production of specialist bibliographies, journals and other research tools; the organization of specialist symposia, conferences and networks: all this is a way of getting serious scholarship off the ground. And when, during the last two or three decades of the twentieth century, this kind of organization was finally extended to research into children’s literature, it inevitably helped to legitimize that newish field in the eyes of specialists engaged elsewhere. On the other hand, to consolidate such substantial gains is not necessarily to adopt jargon, methodologies or theories which would drive a wedge between children’s literature and the human world within which it occurs. On the contrary, by getting to grips with children’s literature as it really is and functions, children’s literature scholars may even be able to establish links with other disciplines, so that the proliferation of different specialist fields of knowledge might itself become a candidate for compensatory re-appraisal.
Introduction
The scholarly, cultural and human consequences of locating children’s literature within various broader kinds of socioanthropological purview are worth serious consideration. Indeed, research into children’s literature could well take a lead in re-humanizing literary research in general. After all, there could hardly be a more worthy cause. To undervalue the human dimension of literature, not least of children’s literature, is actually to disnature it, and in doing so, to undervalue the human beings by, and for whom, it is written. This is what prompted the Finnish Ministry of Education, the Åbo Akademi Foundation, and the Senate of Åbo Akademi University to set up, in 1998, the ChiLPA Project. The acronym “ChiLPA” stands for “Children’s Literature, Pure and Applied”, and the project is a research and doctoral training programme within the university’s Faculty of Humanities. Its scholarly aim is to explore the children’s literature of several different cultures, with an eye both to its content and literary form (the “pure” side), and to its potential social functions, especially within language education (the “applied” side). These two perspectives are brought together within a theory of literature as one among other forms of communication. In this kind of approach, the role of literary scholars, critics and teachers themselves can be seen as one of mediation, between particular real authors and particular real readers (cf. Sell, 2000, 2001a, 2001b), or in the case of children’s literature between authors and the parents or teachers of particular real readers, for instance.
2.
The framework of ideas
A first premise is a very traditional one, which in the twentieth century received a new lease of life from work in a field which partly resisted the humanities’ general trend towards elitist de-humanization: the field of philosophical hermeneutics. As emphasized by Hans-Georg Gadamer ([1960] 1989), a situation in which communication is genuinely taking place is triangular. Two parties communicate about some third entity. The basic situation can still be thought of in this way even when the two parties are the two halves of one and the same self-communing individual, as when we talk to ourselves or write a diary, and even when the third entity also includes one or both of the communicating parties, who in that case speak of “me” or “you” or “us”. Equally well, the third entity can be somebody or something quite unconnected with the communicants themselves, and can actually involve an element of hypotheticality or even outright fiction. This is the case with many jokes about celebrities, for instance, and with most of the texts we label as literary, including literary texts for children. Regardless of the precise way in which the communicational triangle happens to be realized, genuine communication is a form of interpersonal activity, which may bring about a change to the status quo. Changes to the status quo begin as a
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Introduction
change in the communicants’ perceptions and evaluations of the real, hypothetical or fictional entity under discussion. Communication can be thought of as a semiotic process by which people bring that third entity under negotiation. In doing so, they inevitably open themselves to the possibility of mental re-adjustments, whose scope can range from the merely very minimal to the absolutely all-embracing. This means in turn that communication is inseparable from the processes of human growth and individuation. The otherness of some of the people with whom we communicate will turn out to be a significant otherness for us. Directly or indirectly, what happens may eventually even contribute to changes in an entire communal thought- and life-world, and may also lead to any number of different courses of action. The obvious didactic intent of many of the books addressed to children has sometimes been thought to distinguish them from literature of other kinds. What gets forgotten here is that, even after the nineteenth century restriction of the term “literature” to novels, poems and plays, the didactic intent of texts read by adults could be just as obvious, and not only in the case of sermons and devotional tracts. Defoe’s novels can be very preachy at times, and so can Richardson’s or even Fielding’s. But so, too, can novels by Dickens, poems by Tennyson, and works by Shaw, Lawrence and Pound. Nor have authorial attempts to influence the adult mind been any less real when less conspicuous. To produce a piece of language for other people’s attention is always to aim at some kind of interaction with them. Writers for children may simply have been more consistently frank and straightforward about this. But as with any other form of communication, the impact achieved by children’s books is not necessarily the one intended. To coat a bitter moral message in sugary fiction, for instance, may merely reinforce some children’s taste for sugary fiction. Communication is a bi-directional process, taking place between particular free agents, who approach the interchange from inevitably different — sometimes very different — starting points. Even in cases where there is a mutual desire for understanding and collaboration, the pragmatics may be unauspicious. The ranges of knowledge and the systems of values brought into play on the two sides of the interchange may vary too widely for a particular form of words to work in the way their user had envisaged. The combination of these pragmatic realities with the participants’ parity as autonomous human beings is quite enough to ensure that, in any given case, communicative outcomes are unpredictable. That is why a communicative approach to literature will hold all three apexes of the communicational triangle constantly in view. The chapters of this book do tend to triangulate their discussion in just this way. But at the same time, each chapter examines some particular phenomenon which can nevertheless be mainly located at just one of the triangle’s apexes, thereby making possible a trinitarian structure for the book as a whole. In Part I, the chief emphasis is on the position of those by whom communication is initiated: the
Introduction
writers of children’s stories and novels, the makers of picturebooks. The question raised is twofold. What communicative resources lie to hand for them to draw on? And how does their communicative initiative make use of them? Part II concentrates mainly on the “third” entity about which the two parties enter into negotiation. Particular attention is devoted to some of the major life-issues broached by children’s literature. Part III, finally, is about the position of the readers or listeners who respond to the communicative initiative. Special note is taken of children who read children’s literature in a language which is not their mother tongue, and within programmes for language education. This line of interest, reflecting the particular research tradition out of which the ChiLPA Project has developed (cf. e.g. Sell, 1995), ensures that pragmatic variables are very strongly foregrounded.
3.
Using resources
So Part I discusses the resources of tradition, language and image, with all their associated intertextualities. In using what is available to them here, the producers of children’s books have to adapt themselves to it. As with any other activity within society, so with communication, the notion of an unrestricted individual freedom is a non-starter. To use a communicative medium in a way that was quite unprecedented would not, in fact, be the behaviour of a communicator but of a solipsistic monad. Language, genres, and representational devices are not understandable except through communal agreements as to what they mean and how they work when used in particular ways. On the other hand, the literate tradition to which both adult and children’s literature primarily belong is, as a cultural phenomenon, rather different from a tradition of anonymously oral transmission. The literate form tends to retard the processes of textual change over time, and to hand down an author’s work to subsequent generations as the work of that particular author, whose communicative initiatives may even have been distinctive. Literary authors really can leave the mark of their own personal style and mind-set. By the time they have finished, the socially inherited range of resources may, in its turn, have somewhat adapted itself to their individual ends. A genre, for instance, may have a very long history behind it, but with each new use can potentially be changed. To spell this out, literary communication, like any form of genuine communication, tends to involve a co-adaptation between the communally given and the personally new. So an adequate account of communicative pragmatics, including literary pragmatics, will be profoundly historical, but without becoming deterministically historicist. Authors, like other men and women, are very much social beings. But again like everyone else, they are actually social individuals. It is this same relative autonomy which enables human beings to communicate in the first
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place: to distance themselves from their own immediate context; to empathize with somebody whose context is different; and to weigh the two contexts and their lifeworlds against each other, with a change to the status quo as one possible outcome. Admittedly, there are still scholarly approaches to pragmatics which do involve a strong element of historical determinism. Here communicants are seen as more or less passive robots, socially conditioned to understand and behave in certain fixed ways. Such a view, though in direct descent from the more behaviouristic sides of twentieth century linguistic thought, is nowadays most likely to be supported, at least in connection with literary communication, by a gesture towards “the death of the author” — towards structuralism and poststructuralism as developed by Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Kristeva. This research paradigm was initiated largely by Claude Lévi-Strauss, when he borrowed de Saussure’s structuralist theory from linguistics into cultural anthropology. But Lévi-Strauss’s seminal error was in ignoring the following words of de Saussure himself: Language [langue] is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual …. Speech [parole], on the contrary, is an individual act. It is wilful and intellectual. (de Saussure, 1978 [1916], p.14)
No matter whether the structured system be that of language, the psyche, society or culture, human beings can to some extent operate it, and are not to be conflated with it. That is why Raymond Tallis, without wishing to re-instate “the transparent, self-possessed, controlling Cartesian cogito”, has objected to Lévi-Strauss’s talk of the myths “think[ing] themselves out in the men and without men’s knowledge” (Lévis-Strauss, 1970 [1964], p.46). Tallis’s own project is to re-assert the centrality of individual consciousness, of undeceived deliberateness, in the daily life of human beings. We are not absolutely transparent to ourselves but we are not utterly opaque either; we are not totally self-present in all our actions but nor are we absent from them; we are not complete masters of our fates, shaping our lives according to our utterly unique and original wishes, but neither are we the empty playthings of historical, political, social, semiological or instinctual forces. (Tallis, 1997, p.228)
Tallis does not relapse into the sometimes hegemonic universalizations of liberal humanism. His account of the human being sees elements of positioned structuration and elements more arbitrarily personal as interweaving with each other. In this way he offers precisely the philosophical grounding needed for a pragmatics — including a literary pragmatics — that will be sensitive, not only to contexts in their full historical inflection and power of influence, but to the human dynamism by which differently contextualized world-views can be jostled together in communication, and sometimes even changed.
Introduction
From oral tradition, children’s writers have been able to draw on a wealth of legend, fables and fairy tales, and also on what is often described as a kind of folk wisdom. One of the best ways to study the co-adaptions of the children’s writer and tradition here is through comparisons and contrasts with the way such materials have been used in oral tradition itself, and with the further proliferation of oral versions which a literary use can paradoxically generate. Such an approach means that children’s literature specialists will be entering into dialogue with specialists on folk lore, but this will only make the literacy of literary communication more apparent. For an author, the opportunity to make some personal imprint is always available, not least at the level of sheer artistic and intellectual sophistication. As Niklas Bengtsson explains in Chapter 1, by the twelfth century AD, when the ancient Indian Pañcatantra came to be written down by Pûrnabhadra, it was already on its way back towards a more oral phase of its history. It was now somewhat less of an educational manual for the sons of a ruling class, and somewhat more of a collection of trickster’s tales, embodying the kind of a-moral guile by which the lower orders resist their social superiors. Yet at the same time, Pûrnabhadra’s text also has a claim to be the first writing down of stories for children, and exhibits a very high degree of structural artistry. In Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan, similarly, the elements of the popular wondertale and Russian skazka are obvious enough, yet are turned to decidedly literary ends. As Janina Orlov points out in Chapter 2, Pushkin was writing at a time when the ancient oral materials were being re-valorized within the ideologies of romanticism and nationalism. His primary aim was to re-invigorate Russian literature in general, by drawing on what he saw as a source of pristine strength. Not only that, but his poem can itself be read as a problematization of the oral-literate binarism. With a metapoetic subtlety quite foreign to the folk tradition, it probes its own ideological premises, as if asking the questions: Is the oral really so very much better? Indeed, will any kind of communication ever be adequate? In all this Pushkin was obviously writing for adults. Yet in recycling the folktales, he was also remembering his own childhood, when he had heard them from his nanny. In a book about children’s literature his place is well deserved, quite simply because children themselves, and subsequent children’s writers, have found in him what they were looking for. He appeals to minds of widely different ranges of knowledge and experience. In this respect his case is part of a larger pattern. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels are merely the best known of several other very grown-up works which belong to children’s literature by adoption, so to speak. Conversely, the Winnie the Pooh books and The Wind in the Willows were by no means the first or last books written for children but enjoyed by adults as well. Barbara Wall and, following her, some members of the ChiLPA Project, mention that writers for children may deliberately communicate in such a way as to
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imply an adult co-reader (Wall 1991, pp.35–6; see also Beckett, 1999). But in having some plurality of address children’s literature is by no means unique. Textually created respondent personae — implied readers, implied listeners — are necessary for any kind of communication at all. But private letters and conversations tête à tête, in which the respondent persona tends to be closely modelled on just one particular reader or listener — or one type of reader or listener —, do not constitute a general norm. A communication which is in any sense public will have as its implied respondent a human construct that, to a greater or lesser degree, is composite or even markedly heterogeneous. Of literary communicators, Shakespeare was writing both for the well-to-do spectators in the galleries and for the groundlings. A publishing love poet, similarly, or any love poet whose poems are at least intended for circulation, is at once very private and not very private at all — a poem like John Donne’s “The Ecstasie” even includes a blatant invitation to eavesdroppers (Sell, 2000, p.171). As for the texts we think of as children’s literature, many of them can be seen as providing an intellectual space in which the young and old can meet each other, so that the youth-age distinction will gradually be eroded. This is in fact the main sense in which children’s literature is educational, coaxing children into a wider human community. Like other processes of communication, this is not confined to the time during which communicants are actually speaking and writing or listening and reading. The interactivity of words continues for as long as a communicant goes on thinking about them. As some ChiLPA members are careful to point out here, a children’s book can be part of our mental world for a very long time indeed. As we age and become ever more fully a member of that wider human world into which it was introducing us, our interpretation of it is also likely to change. This is especially true of books exploiting the resources of intertextuality, where writers can again be thought of as exercising an authorial inititiative. Far from being merely passive channels through which the culture’s intertextualities resistlessly flow, authors can pick and choose, and can use things in their own way. In Chapter 3 Kaisu Rättyä shows that Jukka Parkkinen’s handling of earlier textualities in two of his Suvi Kinos novels is decidedly postmodernist in its metafictional sophistication. What he does is to use certain stories from the folk tradition, the Bible, and both adult and children’s literature as sustained and thought-provoking subtexts. Adult readers may pick up most of the clues, whereas child readers are prima facie likely to pick up rather fewer. But Suvi, the precocious child protagonist, is herself alert to them, and many young readers may gradually be able to follow suit. The books’ main theme is the education of Suvi herself, and especially her mastery of literacy and its attendant ranges of allusion. By reading about her, young readers are also going to school, as it were. But pragmatic differences between people differently placed in life should not be underemphasized, and there are more pragmatic variables than just the age
Introduction
factor. This becomes very clear from Chapter 4, where Yvonne Bertills discusses intertextuality at the micro-level of word connotations. In Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books, many of the characters have a very carefully constructed proper name, bringing in some particular chain of associations, which will either reinforce, or throw in question everything else we get to know about them. The problem is, though, who is “we” here? Fully to take Jansson’s hints, one has to be an adult speaker of Swedish as used in Finland. Adult Swedes will get much of the point, but not all. Swedish-speaking Finnish children will get some of it, but again not all, and children in Sweden will get still less. As for what happens when a translator tries to find equivalents for Jansson’s proper names in some other language, it is then that the pragmatic links between words and their intertextual histories within particular cultures become most obvious. So here is one of the chapters in Part I of this book which most deliberately considers both parties to the literary-communicative process: not only the initiator working with available resources of language, but also some of the variously positioned respondents. Bertills is already opening up the issues to be dealt with in Part III in connection with foreign language education. So much for the oral and literate resources, and their intertextualities of subtext and connotation. All this, though, is, precisely, verbal, whereas children’s literature has also traditionally drawn on visual resources as well. In our own time, the art of the picturebook has reached a very high stage of development, commented on by several ChiLPA members here, partly because it, too, raises issues of communicative pragmatics. Pictures can be no less allusive than words, and for an adult co-reader, the illustrations in Maurice Sendak’s We are all in the dumps with Jack and Guy: Two nursery rhymes with pictures (1993) will mean much more than for a child who is unfamiliar with the imagery of Nazi concentration camps. Here, within the relationship between particular real child readers and particular real adult coreaders, is another educational opportunity. Granted, many of today’s picturebook-makers are probably not really addressing children at all. Instead, they are reconstituting the children’s literature genre as a genre of adult literature, just as Pushkin converted an oral genre to a literate. But for all that, children, together with co-reading adults, remain the picturebook’s primary target group, and when picturebook-makers tailor a communicative initiative for that readership, they are drawing not just on words, and not just on imagery, but on words and imagery in combination. As Maria Nikolajeva demonstrates in Chapter 5, there can be: symmetry, when words and pictures present the same information; complementarity, when they compensate for each other’s inadequacies; enhancement, when the one significantly amplifies the meaning created by the other; counterpoint, when the two sets of expressive means are in creative collaboration; and contradiction, when the two meanings they give rise to are divergent. Since the different narrative levels of setting, characterization, perspective, temporality, and modality can all be affected by these various kinds of
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text-image relationship, the resources available to the makers of children’s books again leave ample scope for creativity.
4. Negotiating issues Now if, as in most literary texts, the “third” entity under discussion happens to be fictional, this in no way reduces the communicative potential. As Part II of this book seeks to show, the writers and readers of literary works, not least works of children’s literature, can enter into negotiation of some major issues. Today, such a statement will hardly cause surprise. Especially for teenagers, there is a whole genre of books which quite explicitly take up particular “problems” — drugs, loneliness, bullying, racism, sexual orientation, and so on. But not all children’s literature is so directly pedagogical, and there was once a time, still within living memory, when critics said that literature in general and children’s literature in particular were not “about” life, but belonged instead to a category of phenomena that was essentially different and special. Literature was Fantasy, literature was Art, literature was Literature, with capital “F” and “A” and “L”. This is where we come back to the anti-intentionalism of New Critical literary formalism, the hallmark of a period when, thanks to one line of Romantic-Symbolist-AestheteModernist poetics, the idea had got around that fictionality was somehow a more central part of literature than of, say, ordinary conversation. Literature was somehow not “for real”. In postmodern times, by contrast, fact and fiction are more likely to be seen as relative concepts which interpenetrate each other. To make a rigid distinction between them might nowadays be perceived as arrogating to oneself the kind of scientific, and ultimately political legitimacy which has long since come under question. Even today, not everyone is convinced by poststructuralist attempts to deconstruct the logocentric certainties of ontological realism. But there would probably be fairly widespread agreement that, as Hayden White (1978) argued, the writings of, say, biographers, historians and journalists are, whatever else they are, narratives. No matter how well such texts succeed in establishing historical facts and probabilities, they can never be anything other than a selection of observations, collected from a certain spatio-temporal-cum-ideological viewpoint, fleshed out with deductions or plain guesswork, and shaped into a coherent and agreeable form. This involves a compositional process requiring something not unlike the imaginative creativity that animates, say, a novel. Conversely, out-and-out fiction is coming to be seen as hardly a possibility. A fiction with no starting-point in, or no bearing upon what its teller thinks of as reality would be incomprehensible and worthless. Plato, admittedly, did actually say that poets are liars, and many literary texts, including many children’s books, clearly do flout Grice’s communicative maxim of
Introduction
quality (Grice, [1967] 1991). Their untruthfulness is both specific and episodic: they mention things and places and people that have never really existed, and events which have never really happened. But Aristotle soon countered Plato by suggesting that historians are distinctly disadvantaged as compared with poets, in that a narration which is specifically and episodically true may convey very little impression of life in general — of what happens most typically. To which Sir Philip Sidney later added that a poet’s fiction can also convey an honestly moral sense of how life ought to be — or ought not to be. John Searle has had some inkling of these matters, for he once remarked that the “undeceptive non-truth” in the “non-serious texts” of literature can communicate what somehow feels like a “serious” speech act. “Almost any important work of fiction conveys a ‘message’ or ‘messages’ which are conveyed by but are not in the text” (Searle, 1975, p.332). Yet Searle was still tied to a formalist aesthetics — as in his description of literary texts as “non-serious” — and had apparently not yet been sensitized by Hayden White’s postmodern kind of historiography to the explanation for the phenomenon he noted, an explanation lying just under the surface in none other than Grice. Fiction’s disregard of specific and episodic truth is not a suspension of the principle of cooperative communication, but an implication of truths of other kinds: general truth and moral truth. Even a fantasy fiction cannot set up its strange heterocosm except through contradistinction from such implicated general or moral truths, which are not necessarily challenged thereby. If, under conditions of postmodernity, we hesitate to speak of these truths in Aristotle and Sidney’s way as totally universal, we are only the more likely to regard the fiction of a literary work, including a work of children’s literature, as representing the intuitions of general or moral truth characteristic of some particular person or community. So fiction certainly can be a means for negotiating real issues. Not only that, but it can also be a means of persuasion. In this respect as well, literary communication, and communication of any other kind, are co-adaptative. And here, too, the crucial point was made by Aristotle. The most effective rhetoricians, he noted, meet their audience half-way. They take considerable pains to present themselves as the kind of person the audience will feel at home with. However reluctantly, however briefly, they make concessions to the audience’s likely point of view, in the hope of winning concessions in return. In short, good communicators readily accept that communication is profoundly give-and-take, and that social change is never absolute and instantaneous. The new always has to be co-adaptively grafted on the old. So perhaps children’s writers who have tried to coat some bitter moral message in sugary fiction are not so mistaken after all. With particular child readers, their work may easily have backfired. Yet they have written it on what is the only realistic general principle of rhetoric. Sugary fiction, they have assumed, is what children like already. By pandering to this taste, they have thought they may be able to entice children into swallowing their bitter message. If they have been wrong in their more
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specific assumption about children, if children are not hopelessly sweet-toothed, so to speak, the general rhetorical principle still applies. The co-adaptive concession offered should merely have been a concession of some other kind. All this does not mean that the only motivation people have for entering into communication is the hope of winning a debate. On the contrary, a true communicative hopefulness involves a preparedness to lose the argument, and even to change one’s own mind. In genuine communication, the parties accept each other’s human parity, which means that either or both of them may be influenced. Or neither of them, of course. But if neither party is influenced, then after a free and open dialogue there will at least be an agreement to dis-agree — a “reasonable disagreement”, as Habermas (1993) calls it. This in itself means that the world’s total store of wisdom will have been somewhat increased. As another result of the condition of postmodernity, we can no longer think that human beings are, or ought to be, all the same. Although they all have the same rights, this includes the right to be themselves, which calls for a politics of recognition (Taylor, 1994). An ideal of humanity as just some single, universal entity would now be regarded as potentially sinister and hegemonic. Instead, we tend to have a new ideal, of many different voices in dialogue, but not necessarily in consensus. When we genuinely enter into communication, our hope is that the circle of those in contact will be peacefully widened. Although a difference between one grouping and another can be problematic, it can also be the reason for, and stimulus to communication in the first place, and communication is after all a process for which, as social individuals, human beings are very well equipped. In principle, their relative autonomy of intellect, imagination, and will enables them to understand people whose formation is quite unlike their own. Without disguising differences, and fully accepting that agreement may sometimes get no further than an agreement to dis-agree, genuine communication is nevertheless communication in the etymological sense. To however small an extent, it is a making-common, a creation of areas of community. That is why one of the arguments traditionally offered for reading literature, an argument already partly rehabilitated by Wayne C. Booth’s The company we keep (1988), is that literature gives its readers the experience — not just an illusion — of being not alone in the world. In much children’s literature, this experience is offered very directly. It is as if children’s writers, and the society which sanctions their work, wanted to welcome children into human life. Jukka Parkkinen is by no means the only children’s writer whose plots have drawn young protagonists into a wider circle of companionship, and whose own effect as a writer has been likely to do the same for child readers, so breaking down the youth-age binarism. Some evidence may seem to contradict this. Many of the children’s books which cater for an adult co-reader thereby introduce a thought-world from which child readers are at least partly excluded. Jacqueline Rose’s well-known study The
Introduction
case of Peter Pan, or the impossibility of children’s literature (1984) even suggests that genuine communication between adult writers and child readers would be beside the point, and could never really happen. For those who have ears to hear, some of the matters intimated by children’s literature certainly can seem very adult. In portrayals of infantile sexuality or of children’s physical bodies, for instance, there can be something almost voyeuristic (cf. Kincaid, 1992). More generally, the writing of a children’s book can be a way of expressing emotions which children by definition cannot have. Above all, some children’s writers have given vent to a nostalgia for their own — or their parents’ or grandparents’ — childhood, as a golden age of innocence long since lost, and have fostered this same nostalgia in adult co-readers. As sociologists now emphasize, the Rouseauistic idyll of childhood is very much a cultural construct, whose role in our social symbolic is becoming ever more central. When children commit acts of murder, or become the objects of paedophiliac attention, this nowadays seems especially frightful, even though these phenomena have been just as widespread in earlier periods of history, and without causing any more concern than when the criminals or victims were adults. It is as if, within a secularized Weltanschauung, the image of the pure and beautiful child has become the adult’s last relic of spiritual wholeness (Jenks, 1996). If children’s books written in anticipation of an adult co-reader did not to some extent channel an adult kind of sensibility, symbolism, and ideology, this would be very surprising. But in what we think of as a genuine children’s book, the address to child readers remains primary, and involves an undampened communicative hope. In Chapter 6 here, Maria Nikolajeva, who views children’s literature as negotiating precisely the child’s initiation into human life, does recognize that some of the books purportedly written for children are actually postlapsarian, representing a stage of initiation which is already attuned to sexuality and death. But one of the questions she raises is whether they really are children’s literature still, or whether they come closer to adult literature. Somewhat more typically, many children’s books are carnivalesque, with child protagonists temporarily assuming powers and liberties like those of the mediaeval fool on Twelfth Night, only to return at the end of the story to the child’s normal inferior status, in a world of adult order restored. Most typically of all, though, the children’s book has been prelapsarian. It has conveyed a sense of Arcadian innocence and harmony, which applies throughout the entire story, on the more or less explicit assumption that childhood is, as it were, a safe and delightful place, both for the child characters in the book and for the child listener or reader. Nikolajeva sees this as representing a sense of the child’s still undimished potentiality to become or to do anything within human power. As a result, such texts can powerfully boost child readers’ self-confidence, which at the earliest stage of their initiation is just what they need. In Chapter 7, similarly, Rosemary Ross Johnston argues that the kind of book society seems to regard as a real children’s book entails an ethics of hope. This sort
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of book, while not necessarily suggesting that the world is any pleasanter than it really is, has a certain forward thrust. More specifically, in negotiating the nature of childhood it tends to set up a particular kind of chronotope. Its representation of the constellations of time and space within which children live and move and have their being involves suggestive images of diverse forms of human life and togetherness. This warm abundance can provide, among other things, a firm resistance to the lifeless uniformity of consumerist culture. In developing such insights, what Johnston and Nikolajeva specially stress is that children’s literature has always had its own sense of time. It is here that the more primitive resources of orality are profoundly catalytic. The time of children’s literature is not the linear time associated with literacy and adulthood, but the circular time of folk tradition — the “great time” of myth and archetype. If narratives for children are to preserve the life-potential of the human child in an undiminished form, then a story which apparently leads young protagonists towards the restrictions of adulthood can never be more than mere carnival “time-out”. Other scholars, though accepting that children’s literature is mainly designed for children, find it less readily supportive of their energies and potential. Starting from the insight that childhood is a social construction, they analyse children’s literature in more or less Foucauldian terms, as an exercise in discoursal control. According to this view, the authors of children’s books depict the child as doubly “other” — as a further, fictionalized construction based on society’s already preconstructed “non-adult” —, so providing ample opportunities to insinuate a social centrality for grown-ups. Perry Nodelman, who draws on the work of Edward Said, even suggests a homology of children’s literature with colonialism and orientalism. His claim is that adults assign to children this exaggerated otherness in order to be able to manipulate the field of representation. By marginalizing the child as innocent, powerless, and above all different, they define themselves as powerful. So for Nodelman, children’s literature is a way of dominating children, and of imposing on them adult assumptions about what “a child” is or ought to be. Adults “write books for children to provide them with values and with images of themselves we approve of or feel comfortable with” (Nodelman, 1992, p.30). Again, it would be surprising if the educational function of children’s literature did not often take this form. No society will survive which allows its members to do whatever they want. Civil rights entail civil responsibilities, and both children and adults have to accept a fair amount of regulation, which certainly will be discoursally channelled in the ways Foucault has shown. Given, too, that societies always tend towards implicit or explicit hierarchical structures, in which some people seem to acquire more power to impose such restraints than others, and given that some of these power-holders have always seemed to relish the exercise of their prerogative, or to have been extremely nervous about losing it, what can we expect? Social
Introduction
regulation is often likely to be sinister and excessive. At worst it will endorse a total disempowerment, seriously infringing the autonomy of those it seeks to control. Maria Lassén-Seger does not see find such disturbing tendencies at work in children’s literature generally. But in Chapter 8, she examines a case where they do seem to be in the ascendant: K. A. Applegate’s enormously popular Animorphs series. Here the child protagnonists have the ability to take on animal bodies as a way of resisting the invasion of the planet Earth by a tribe of ghastly outer-space parasites. At first it might seem that the children’s metamophoses give them enormous power. On closer examination, appearances turn out to be deceptive. The young heroes and heroines’ moments of victory come precisely when they leave their children’s bodies behind them. Metamorphosis is nothing more than carnivalesque time-out, during which they never cease to think of themselves as “merely” children. Not only must they learn to accept the discipline of the group, and to control their own bodies. They must also experience childhood as their elders clearly want them to: as a phase of contemptible weakness. In Chapter 9, by contrast, Mia Österlund discusses an example of the canivalesque which does, for once, seem to have consequences that are both lasting and positive: Ulf Stark’s young adult novel Dårfinkar och Dönniker [Nutcases and Norms] (1984). Here Simone, the protagonist, is a 12-year-old girl who for a time cross-dresses as a boy and calls herself Simon. Many earlier commentators saw this as conforming to the pattern of the classic disguise comedy of mistaken identity, and as doing nothing at all to question the social status quo. At the end of the novel, Simone stopped using the name Simon, put on a conspicuously feminine pink dress, and that was that. According to Österlund, it is certainly possible to read the book in this way. But for her, it is not the only way. In fact she sees the possibility of this non-radical reading as Stark’s co-adaptive concession, by which, like any skilful rhetorician, he is hoping to win concessions to his own view, which she finds a good bit more rebellious. Reading the novel in the light of recent feminist theory, she shows how the conservative interpretation can co-exist in tension with a subversive interpretation against its grain. By adopting a male persona, Simone throws in question society’s structuration along the lines of the masculine-feminine dichotomy, and herself comes to experiment with a life-mode that goes quite beyond it. Whereas earlier she had unconsciously taken on the role of the nice little girl, acutely ashamed of her flamboyantly feminist mother, on finally re-assuming the pink dress she has a new awareness of what she is doing, which inevitably means that the gesture is ironical. Her mental bondage is a thing of the past. Österlund’s chapter does not belong to Part III of this book. But like other contributors, she is very careful to emphasize pragmatic considerations. A reader’s ability to discover either a conservative or a radical message in Stark’s novel is partly related to that reader’s personal preconceptions. Österlund’s own subversive reading comes much more “naturally” in the year 2002 than it could have done
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when the novel was first published, quite simply because feminist thought has itself moved on in the direction she sees Stark as already signalling. In Chapter 10, similarly, pragmatic variables are very much the concern of Jenniliisa Salminen. In examining the way Vitaly Gubarev’s Korolevstvo krivyh zerkal [The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors] (1952) negotiated questions of contemporary Soviet politics and propaganda, she is sensitive to the interpretative consequences, not only of sheer historical distance, but of a reader’s age and social status. Gubarev’s book is an illustrated fantasy story, about a girl who leaves her happy Soviet home to travel through the looking-glass, into a strange kingdom where crooked mirrors deceive the hard-used citizens into thinking that they are healthy and well-off. Its first adult readers were free to take this unjust world as either a feudal or bourgeois-capitalist antithesis to the Soviet paradise, or an exposure of the Soviet Union’s own true nature. Perhaps partly thanks to this ambiguity, the book was immediately popular. Yet it is still very widely read today, ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the precise political bearings can no longer be exactly the same. How, then, are readers re-interpreting it? As for the implications of a reader’s own age and social status, on first publication Korolevstvo krivyh zerkal was read by at least three different kinds of reader: by children, who would enjoy the adventure element and perhaps pick up some clues to good behaviour from the heroine, but were unlikely to read between the lines and find political satire; by adult co-readers, who probably did cotton on; and by official government censors, who were perfectly capable of reading in the adult way but who, by not imposing a ban, were ostensibly reading like children. Once again, much light is shed by the concept of communicative co-adaptivity, which applies not only to features which can be read as either politically conservative or politically subversive, but to the historical circumstances within which such contradictory readings were actually possible. For one thing, ever since Czarist times there had been a tradition of licensed satire through Aesopian “other world” fables. For another, Gubarev had already written a book idealizing the Soviet hero Pavlic Morosov, which may have won him some immunity. The appeal of Gubarev’s through-the-looking-glass fantasy to a child reader has always been direct enough. But this is another of those cases in which communication probably continues far longer than the mere act of reading or listening. The book is very likely to live on in the memory, to be subjected to increasingly adult interpretations as the respondent’s own experience and understanding continue to develop. And the same can be said of at least some of the children’s books now seeking to negotiate another very adult issue, as we may think: the Holocaust. As Lydia Kokkola argues in Chapter 11, the historical facts of the Holocaust actually put a strain on any language used to describe it. In 1967 George Steiner was still saying that the only appropriate response was silence pure and simple. As for bringing the Holocaust within the purview of children’s literature, there are
Introduction
additional problems of tact and ethics. Most obviously, an assessment has to be made as to just how much horror a young mind can take. Yet by 1988, Steiner had begun to think that silence is a “suicidal” option. Or as Leventhal (1999) puts it, to be silent is to “relegate the Holocaust to oblivion, to rob it of any articulation and thereby to continue, by other means, what the Nazis sought to do in the first place”. By hushing up the past, by not handing down a knowledge of it to younger generations, we may come dangerously close to a Holocaust denial that is complicit with the original oppressor. Kokkola studies some of the ways in which, faced with this dilemma, children’s writers have opted for silence after all, but not silence pure and simple so much as various kinds of pregnant silence. In some cases she finds that the strategies used tend to belittle the magnitude of the issue, basically by leaving child readers in uncurious ignorance, and by shifting too much of the burden of narration and explanation onto the adult co-reader. But she also singles out a number of books which, though sufficiently ungraphic and selective to safeguard a child reader’s spiritual well-being, nevertheless include enough hints and information to start a serious process of thought and enquiry, which an adult co-reader will be able to support in ways sensitive to the particular young individual’s knowledge and emotional needs. Here again, then, children’s literature can have a crucially interactive role in welcoming children into a larger human community, and in helping them get accustomed to it in all its aspects. This has nothing to do with adults winking to each other behind the child reader’s back, and nothing to do with adults marginalizing and disempowering children. Least of all is it a matter of seeing either life in general or just childhood through rose-tinted spectacles. What such a text’s author hopes to make possible for children is a sustaining adult companionship, as they come to face some of the most difficult and painful of all home truths.
5.
Responding despite pragmatic variables
Especially, but not only in the case of the Holocaust theme, children’s literature illustrates one of the most basic facts of all communication: that when two communicants enter into dialogue they never share precisely the same positionality. However minimally, what they bring to the interchange in terms of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge, presuppositions, attitudes, and values will be different. That is why people communicate in the first place: to extend the amount of common ground. That, too, is the sense in which communication is dynamic. Any instance of communication is a historical process, by which the status quo may be changed. Most immediately, it may increase what people know, and alter the way they think and feel.
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At the most basic level of semiotics, contextual disparities between initiators and respondents are significant because of the arbitrary and conventional nature of the sign. The relationship between its signifier and the thing signified does not carry meaning except within the conventions obtaining in a certain range of cultural situations. There is no self-evident reason why a canine quadruped should be called dog, but within any situation in Anglophone cultural contexts where reference is likely to be made to canine quadrupeds, dog is the recognized word. Which is not to say it will never go the same way as duck and jumbo. At some future time, dog, too, might also be used to designate some sort of vehicle of transportation. If so, anybody wishing to understand what sense of the word is intended will have to take slightly more careful note of the precise circumstances under which it is being used. We sometimes talk about the “dictionary meaning” of words, as if there were meanings which were primary and inviolable. But in the course of time word meanings do change to meet new historical needs, and a good dictionary actually illustrates, not so much meanings, as various kinds of use in different situations. Somebody not aware of these quite practical and time-specific conventions may be unable to understand what is going on, or to be effective as an agent. Linguistic savoir-faire of this most fundamental kind is important enough. But contextual dispararities at the higher level of non-linguistic knowledge, presuppositions, attitude, and values are clearly very significant as well. Communicants who accept each other’s human parity approach the interactive process in good faith. Sharing the communicative hope that the circle of those in dialogue will be widened, they are obligated to make an effort of imaginative empathy in order to try and understand each other. Empathy will not necessarily end up as sympathy. In fact the world would be a very boring place if everybody felt the same way, and any talk of consensus or social harmony can nowadays seem to carry those sinister implications of hegemony. But genuine communication at least improves the chances of peaceful co-existence. A disagreement which arises from a real attempt to agree — from trying on the other person’s point of view for size — is far more constructive than a blank refusal to compare notes. Three of the most important pragmatic variables have already been noted: historical epoch; personal age; and culture. Because of disparities between one historical epoch and another, readers reading an old text, no matter how genuine their effort of imaginative empathy, no matter how faithful their reading to the text’s significance in its context of original publication, way well find a further, and sometimes very different significance as well, which will in one way or other be specially relevant to their own time and place. A present-day feminist can find a meaning in Ulf Stark’s text of 1984 which was not there for most early readers, because they were still tied to a sense of gender roles as inevitable. As for the variable of readers’ personal age, this is a question of whether they read like a child, like an adult, or, possibly as with Soviet censors, like a child and like an adult
Introduction
simultaneously. Books such as Parkkinen’s Suvi Kinos novels are intellectual spaces within which this particular kind of pragmatic disparity is deliberately counteracted, as children and adults come closer together. Cultural disparities, similarly, are not necessarily a barrier that is fixed for all time. The connotations of proper names in Tove Jansson are a very serious challenge for a translator. But a reader who is not an adult Swedish-speaking Finn is not for that reason completely excluded from the Valley of the Moomins. In Part III of this book, the pragmatic differences of personal age and culture between the initiator and respondents are brought into sharper focus by a discussion of children’s literature within language education. This begins in Chapter 12, with Lydia Kokkola’s exploration of the pragmatic values of youth and nonnativeness as they affect linguistic knowledge and competence at a fairly basic level. Her focus is on the texts which Finnish 9- to 10-year-olds are expected to read in programmes for English language immersion education. All over the world, language immersion programmes are becoming more and more popular, at least with parents. This means that more and more children are receiving their education through a language which is not their mother tongue. In point of fact, there is still insufficient research on how this affects their ability to learn and understand. In some of the English immersion programmes in Finland, children learn to read English and Finnish at roughly the same time, even though these two languages are fundamentally different in terms of the relationship between phonetics and orthography. So can Finnish children really make sense of this situation? Does the way they read an English children’s story actually amount to understanding? Or is it at least closer to understanding than the way they read non-narrative texts in English? As a form of communication, is narrative perhaps more basic and more easily assimilable? In answering these questions, Kokkola draws on cognitive theory as embodied in Bruner’s account (1986) of the “narrative mode” of understanding, and Egan’s account (1988a & b) of “mythic thought”. Her suggestion is that storylogic may indeed be intellectually fundamental, a hypothesis which her analysis of readings of particular texts by particular young Finnish children strongly supports. The practical conclusion to be drawn seems clear enough. Pupils acquiring all their formal learning through a foreign language need to develop a competence to read several different kinds of texts, and not least informational texts and reference books. But especially in the early stages of foreign language reading education, children’s literature should have a very central place. At a more advanced stage of language education, children’s literature can still be important for developing basic comprehension skills. But comprehension can increasingly extend to matters of non-linguistic knowledge, presupposition, attitude, and value. In Chapter 13 Roger D. Sell argues that children’s literature can be one important element in a larger participatory pedagogy, whose overarching aim will be to give language students a chance to try on the alien culture for size.
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Without in any sense surrendering their identity as Finns, Finnish school pupils reading a children’s book by a British author need to read, as much as possible, like the book’s implied child-reader, so bringing into play a world-view which would not be out of place in Britain itself. In other words, here is a prime opportunity for them to gain practice in an imaginative empathy which, though not at all the same thing as uncritical sympathy, can promote a fuller understanding. Ultimately, such empathetic understanding is what enables people of different cultural backgrounds to live in peaceful co-existence, and to function as successful agents within each other’s societies. Much of the groundwork for participatory pedagogy has been carried out by the so-called intercultural understanding movement, one of the dominant trends in language education theory from the late 1980’s onwards. Earlier approaches had repeated the tendency of both structuralist linguistics and behaviouristic applied linguistics to concentrate on linguistic form or langue — basically on vocabulary and grammar. This had been somewhat at the expense of the pragmatics of language as used in context — or parole —, so that the classroom discussion of sociocultural issues had been somewhat limited and stereotyping. The intercultural understanding movement, by contrast, spells out very clearly the relevance of context to the working of the linguistic sign. By the same token the movement strongly emphasizes the need for a contrastive analysis of the learner culture and target culture side by side, which would enable the language teacher to take on the role of mediator between the two. Especially in the work of Charlotta Sell and Lilian Rönnqvist, the ChiLPA Project’s indebtedness to this movement is very marked, Even so, the continuing importance of langue — of a good command of linguistic form — still needs to be clearly insisted on, and note should also be taken of further developments in the theory of intercultural understanding itself. Some of the earliest work did not recognize the full scope for a participatory pedagogy and tended to keep the target culture at arm’s length. When this happened, the foreign cultural milieus were seen less as an opening for subjective self-extension into fields of new experience and activity than as objects of study. Hence arose a rather cerebral kind of cultural analysis, which could even extend to the phenomenon of literature. Byram (1989), for instance, saw literature mainly as an elitist ideological construct tending to reinforce existing power structures. More recently, scholars such as Schewe (1998), and also Byram himself (as in Byram and Fleming, 1998), have come to accept literature’s educational potentiality with far fewer reservations. In Chapter 14, Charlotta Sell reports on plans for a field study in a Finnish primary school, where English children’s books will be used within a programme of anti-racist multicultural education. The pramatic values of non-nativeness and youth are the same as in Kokkola’s chapter, except that in this case the children are 11- to 12-year-olds. As for the books used, these will themselves foreground questions of sociocultural and ethnic difference, and the programme will be
Introduction
designed to profit from this. There is no mistaking the element of participatory pedagogy here, and the link with the intercultural understanding movement is no less clear. Especially important, too, has been the theoretical and empirical work already carried out on explicitly multicultural education, within Anglo-Saxon cultures with a long history of conspicuous minority groupings, and of the related educational challenges. To visitors from, say, Britain or the United States, Finland can still seem “pure” or “white”. But one of the key points of multicultural education is that, in a world of rapidly increasing internationlization, young people growing up in relatively homogeneous social settings may call for special consideration. And in any case, Finland, too, is now showing clear signs of the present-day migrations of peoples and mobility of labour. As to the programme’s precise form, Charlotta Sell includes information on: criteria for the choice of texts; the need for individualized learning; reading and discussion strategies; group- and whole-class activities; reader response research; vocabulary acquisition; and lesson plans. When her field study has been thoroughly analysed, this should give a much clearer idea, not only of how the pragmatic values of youth and non-nativeness have affected these particular readers of these particular children’s books, but also of the extent to which the children’s reading has been genuinely communicative, involving empathetic understanding, and perhaps even a modification of their own attitudes. In Chapter 15 Lilian Rönnqvist, too, discusses the variables of non-nativeness and youth. The young people she has in mind are 13- to 19-year-olds, and she is careful to define, in the manner of the intercultural understanding movement, the exact cultural interface she is dealing with. Her pupils are members of the Swedishlanguage minority in Finland, and the teenage novel she plans to discuss with them, Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (1992), is an Australian book reflecting the experience of Australia’s ethnic Italian minority. Her reason for this choice is two-fold. On the one hand, even many Australian readers will not know all there is to know about the life-style of the Italian minority. So the book’s writer will have needed to include a certain amount of direct or indirect explanation, which will also be helpful to young readers in Finland. On the other hand, Rönnqvist’s young Finland-Swedish readers, in contemplating their own relationship to the Finnish mainstream, will be well placed to empathize with the novel’s minority protagonist. So in both respects, the choice of this particular book gives them a leg-up, which for foreigners who are still fairly inexperienced readers can make the crucial difference between sheer hard slog and enjoyment. In anticipating likely problems of cultural comprehension and interpretation, Rönnqvist makes use of Ronald Posner’s (1989) semiotic division of culture into the social, the material, and the mental, but partly so as to show that the issues can be so complex that this division begins to collapse. As examples, she discusses attitudes, practices or institutions related to education, to friendship and dating, to
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food, and (resuming the theme discussed by Yvonne Bertills) to proper names. In all these areas, her students will sometimes experience what Carol M. Archer (1986) calls culture bumps, and will not always be able to fill in the text’s gaps in the way envisaged for its implied reader (cf. Iser, 1974 & 1978). Sometimes they may use their inferential powers to move from the known to the unknown, just as they constantly do within their own native culture. But sometimes they may need help, which is when Rönnqvist sees the teacher as playing the role of cultural mediator. Neither a foreigner nor a native can ever know “everything” there is to know about a culture, needless to say. A culture is not static and delimited, and no experience of it is ever more than a mere cross-section. But the most important lesson foreign language pupils can learn is from seeing their teacher herself try to put two and two together. Her best chance of mediating is by being a living example of intelligent deduction and imaginative empathy at work. Even with a text that is specially conducive to a participatory pedagogy, the combination of the pragmatic values of youth and non-nativeness can mean that the teacher still has to take on the role of adult co-reader, even when such a reader is not actually written into its implied reader construct. The teacher is in fact a mediator-companion. Like Rönnqvist’s Finland-Swedish pupils, the learners discussed by Viv Edwards in Chapter 16 belong to communities in which more than one language is spoken: both English and Welsh, or both English and Irish, or both Dutch and Frisian, or both French and Basque, or both Spanish and Catalan. Her chapter also introduces two further elements. First, the support given to the language learner comes not just from the teacher but from computer technology as well. Secondly, learners’ response to the story being read takes the form of a new story written by the students themselves, perhaps in collaboration with each other. Edwards explains how, starting with Dennis Reader’s children’s picture book, A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts (1989), a multinational team of translators, educational researchers and software engineers collaborated on the development of the Fabula programme, which allows teachers and children to produce their own bilingual, multimedia stories. The overall aim was to promote language learning and storycreation within the various language pairs. One of the main issues to emerge from an evaluation of the software was the role of “parallel authoring”. Originally it had been supposed that stories deposited in a virtual library on the Fabula website in one pair of languages could be adapted for use in other languages. For instance, it was assumed that the English component of a Welsh-English story would be re-usable in conjunction with French or Spanish. But it soon became clear that bilingual story-creation was better suited to a process in which the children’s dominant language was driven by their knowledge of the weaker language, and that texts created for one setting could not easily be re-used with other languages. There were far-reaching consequences for story writing, in terms of both textual cohesion and child-writers’ sense of audience.
Introduction
In fact the other main finding had to with attitudes and motivation. The experience of working with bilingual, multimedia story-telling had a positive effect on children’s attitudes towards minority cultures. The high status of the new technologies appears to have had a favourable influence on the way children feel about the minority languages in their region. More generally, the opportunity to create stories to be shared by the large numbers of readers visiting the Fabula Virtual Library emerged as a very strong stimulus to the children’s own writing.
6. Scholarship and criticism The Fabula experiment shows that children’s response to a text for children can be so energetic that they go on to create fascinating new texts of their own. It also demonstrates that their partcipation in literary interchange can be communicative in the deep sense of “community-making”. As the participants’ perceptions of different groupings have changed, they have had a sense of coming together. Last but not least, it suggests that the technological re-vamping of oral and visual culture, far from being a threat to literate culture, can enter into fascinating symbiosis with it, just as the oral and the literate were already mutually influential in Pûrnabhadra’s Pañcatantra and Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan, and just as the literate and the visual combine forces in the picturebooks discussed by Maria Nikolajeva. Here are computer-literate children for whom the human centrality of children’s literature is already very real. In short, there are grounds for thinking that the communicative hope with which children’s writers enter on their work is justified. Children are willing and able to be drawn into a larger circle. As readers, they still behave like most adult readers were behaving before the rise of twentieth-century literary scholasticism. They just get on with reading, and read in whatever way comes most naturally to them — unless, perhaps, directed by an adult to do otherwise. Although, in contexts of language education, teachers may be helpful mediators and useful examples of the empathetic process in action, children are just as unlikely to want or need the services of professional scholars and critics as they are to become, at a young age, scholars and critics themselves. Whether children themselves would actually make the best critics of children’s literature has been a question sometimes asked (see e.g. Chambers, 1985, pp.138–64). But even if they would, they are hardly likely to bother. To say this is not to disparage children’s literature scholarship and criticism per se. The point is rather that the scholars and critics who perform their social function to the fullest will be the ones who most thoughtfully contemplate the questions of who they themselves are, of what it really is they are discussing, and of whom they are writing for.
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In 1968, John Rowe Townsend said that there were two distinct categories of people who write about children’s literature: “book people” and “child people”, i.e. bibliophiles, bibliographers, literary scholars, and critics on the one hand, and on the other hand, parents, teachers, educationalists, children’s librarians. Nowadays there is also a third category: “theory people”, including, for instance, literary and cultural theoreticians, sociologists, and psychologists. All three categories are ever more productive in their findings, but within the world of academic professionalism their interests could well become too specialized to let them see the wood for the trees. The ChiLPA Project assumes the need for a dialogue between specialists on the children’s literature of many different cultures, and at the very least between specialists on literature, orature, visual culture, social and political history, language, and education. This is the only way to ensure due attention to what children’s literature really is and does in a due number of different aspects. The ChiLPA Project’s theory of communication is one attempt to link many different aspects together, in ways which fully recognize that children’s literature can be humanly central to the societies in which it occurs. As for the readers of children’s literature scholarship and criticism, some of them are themselves going to be professional scholars and critics of children’s literature. Since the main target audience of children’s books is even less likely to read scholarship and criticism about them than most adult readers are likely to read scholarship and criticism about adult literature, the risk of an introverted scholasticism here is all the greater. But other readers are still likely to be parents, teachers, educationalists, and librarians, and any real reader who was only a book person, or only a child person, or only a theory person would be overvaluing the one term at the expense of the other two and thereby missing the full picture. All things considered, then, perhaps the best rule of thumb for future commentators on children’s literature is that they need to address themselves to readers who, whatever else they may be, are rounded human beings, no less sensible and intelligent than they would hope to be themselves. This, after all, is the way the best literary commentators have always gone about things in the past.
References Archer, C.M. (1986). Culture bump and beyond. In J.M. Valdes (Ed.), Culture bound: Bridging the cultural gap in language teaching (pp.170–78). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, R. ([1968] 1977). The death of the author. In his Image, music, text: Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (pp.142–8). Glasgow: Fontana. Beckett, S. L. (Ed.) (1999). Transcending boundaries: Writing for a dual audience of children and adults. New York: Garland. Booth, W. C. (1988). The company we keep: An ethics of fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Byram, M. (1989). Cultural studies in foreign language education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Chambers, A. (1985). Booktalk. London: Bodley Head. Egan, K. (1988a). Primary understanding: Education in early childhood. New York: Routledge Egan, K. (1988b). Teaching as storytelling. London: Routledge. de Saussure, F. ([1916] 1978). Course in general linguistics. London: Fontana. Gadamer, H.-G. ([1960] 1989). Truth and method. New York: Seabury Press. Grice, H. P. ([1967] 1991). Logic and conversation. In Steven Davis (Ed.), Pragmatics: A reader (pp.305–13). New York: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. (1993). Justification and application: Remarks on discourse ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Iser, W. (1974). The implied reader: Patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jenks, C. (1996). Childhood. London: Routledge. Kincaid, J. R. (1992). Child-loving: The erotic child and Victorian culture. New York: Routledge. Leventhal, R. S. (1999). George Steiner, language and silence: Essays on language, literature and the inhuman. Available online: www.jefferson.village.virginia.edu/holocaust. Lévi-Strauss, C. ([1964] 1979). Overture to Le Cru et le Cuit. In Jacques Ehrmann (Ed.), Structuralism (pp.31–55). Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday. Nodelman, P. (1992). The Other: Orientalism, colonialism, and children’s literature. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17, 29–35. Posner, R. (1989). What is culture? Toward a semiotic explication of anthropological concepts. In Walter A. Koch (Ed.), The nature of culture (pp.240–295). Bochum: Brochmeyer. Reader, D. (1989). A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts. London: Walker Books Rose, J. (1984). The case of Peter Pan, or the impossibility of children’s literature. London: Macmillan. Schewe, M. (1998). Culture through literature through drama. In M. Byram & M. Fleming (Eds.), Language learning in intercultural perspective. Approaches through drama and ethnography (pp.204–221). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J.(1975). The logical status of fictional discourse. New Literary History, 6, 319–332 Sell, R. D. (Ed.) (1995). Literature throughout foreign language education: The implications of pragmatics [= Review of English Language Teaching 5/1] London: Modern English Publications and the British Council. Sell, R. D. (2000). Literature as communication: The foundations of mediating criticism [Pragmatics and Beyond, n.s. 78]. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sell, R.D. (2001a). A historical but non-determinist pragmatics of literary communication. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2, 1–32 Sell, R. D. (2001b). Mediating criticism: Literary education humanized. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sell, R. D. (2001c). Communication: A counterbalance to professionalist specialization. In H. Grabes (Ed.), Innovation and Continuity in English Studies: A Critical Jubilee (pp.73–89). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Sendak, M. (1993). We are all in the dumps with Jack and Guy: Two nursery rhymes with pictures. New York: HarperCollins. Steiner, G. (1967). Language and silence London: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. (1988). The long life of metaphor: An approach to the “Shoah”. In B. Lang (Ed.), Writing and the holocaust (pp.154–174). New York: Homes and Meier.
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Tallis, R. (1997). Enemies of hope: A critique of contemporary pessimism, irrationalism, antihumanism and counter-enlightenment. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutman (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition (pp.25–73). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Townsend, J. R. ([1968] 1990). Standards of criticism for children’s literature. In Peter Hunt (ed.), Children’s literature: The development of criticism (pp.57–70). London: Routledge. Wall, B.(1991). The narrator’s voice: The dilemma of children’s literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan. White, H. (1978). The fictions of factual representation. In his Tropics of Discourse (pp.121–34). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore. Wimsatt, W. K. ([1946] 1970). The intentional fallacy. In his The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (pp.3–18). London: Methuen.
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Part I
Initiating Resources at hand
AUTHOR "Niklas Bengtsson"
TITLE "Literacy and orality"
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Chapter 1
Orality and literacy The wise artistry of The Pañcatantra Niklas Bengtsson
1.
Orality within literacy, literacy within orality
One of the most important resources available to writers for children has always been the fables and fairy tales of non-written tradition. As a field of scholarship, these are in the first instance the concern experts on folk lore, who have have done much to clarify our understanding of how stories originate, travel and blend, tracing them through particular historical phases of particular cultures. But even when oral materials are used by writers, they do not simply pass over into the province of literary scholars. In an attempt to understand how fables and fairy tales have featured in written texts, one of the most helpful approaches draws on comparisons and contrasts with their functioning within the earlier orature. Nor is it as if stories, when written down, were frozen once and for all into some definitive form. They are just as likely to be re-written by some other writer, and may well feed back again into the oral tradition as well. This means that for scholars interested in children’s literature as a social phenomenon, the dialogue with folklorists will be very important. Indeed, the borderlines between the two disciplines will sometimes be rather fuzzy. Folklore research can help us understand an important part of the imput into children’s literature, important points about the way children’s writers treat this, and something about the impact of children’s literature itself on the culture at large. The historical and comparative methods of Victorian folklore researchers resulted in discoveries which are still valuable, even if later scholars have had to reject some of the main hypotheses proposed. One towering figure was Theodor Benfey, whose continuing significance for the study of fables and fairy tales lies in his theory of borrowing or migration, which was influential for the so-called Historical-Geographical School (Handoo, 1978, pp.5–9). Underlying Benfey’s work was a strong sense of resemblances between the stories of Europe and those of the Indian subcontinent, and in 1859 he even went so far as to suggest that India was their original homeland (Wehse, 1990, p.15). Since the same kinds of fables and
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fairy tales are now known to have been current in Babylonia by 2300 BC (Snodgrass, 1998, p.xiii), this suggestion is no longer taken seriously. Yet even so, the ancient Indian classic The Pañcatantra, which new folklore research continues to illuminate, was certainly the first work ever written down for children, and this in itself means that the Indian influence has been enormous, not only on the genres of fables and fairy tales, but on those genres as taken up in children’s literature. As with several other classical fairy tale collections, and not least the Grimm brothers’ Kinder und Hausmärchen, the relationship between “genuine” folklore and its printed, more “literary” versions can seem rather paradoxical. The twelfth century version of The Pañcatantra by Pûrnabhadra still contained some very clear elements of folklore, even though by that time the materials had undergone many centuries of editorial work. As a result, different scholars have tended to find it important for different reasons. Some would stress that the very title of The Pañcatantra connotes literacy: it translates as “the five books” (or “chapters” or “formulas”). Despite the folktale origins, and despite the clear tendency of the collection’s fables to take on a new folklore life of their own, which later editions could once again engage with, The Pañcantantra has sometimes been classified as a work of literature in no uncertain terms (Edgerton, 1965, p.20; Ehlers, 1990, pp.91, 98; Hämeen-Anttila, 1995, pp.vii–viii, x, xvi). Meanwhile other scholars, particularly some of those whose own main interests are in Indian oral traditions, are just as emphatic in seeing it as folklore (Handoo, 1989, pp.2, 13, 31). The connection with other folklore, and especially subsequent folklore, has come in for much study (Beck, Claus, Goswami & Handoo, 1987, pp.170, 209, 235, 253, 256; Islam, 1970, pp.47, 105, 224, 258; Sankaran, 1984, pp.286–287, 295–296; Srivastava, 1984, p.322). The ambiguous character of The Pañcantantra is one example of the much wider cultural phenomenon discussed by Walter J. Ong (1982). Ong is specially interested in how the invention and gradual spread of writing affected human consciousness — the ways people actually think, feel, remember, and explain. But at the same time, he is at pains to stress that more ancient, oral forms of consciousness can be surprisingly “tenacious” (Ong, 1982, p.115). Within a very sophisticated literate culture, and even within actual works of literature, there can be a kind of residual orality, whose associated ways of thinking, feeling, remembering, and explaining are at least as likely to be exploited by the writers of children’s literature as by any others. Indeed, the very marked coexistence in the first work ever written for children of both literate and oral sensibilities itself calls for special attention, both for its direct or indirect impact on subsequent children’s writers, and as an occurrence in its own right. Why did it turn out this way? Where, so to speak, was Pûrnabhadra’s collection coming from? In the case of The Pañcatantra, this kind of question is more difficult to answer than in that of the Grimms’ collection, quite simply because the Indian fables’ history is less well known. But even here we are not completely in the dark. Perhaps
Orality and literacy
the main point to notice is that when The Pañcatantra was composed and written down in Sanskrit, this language was nobody’s native language. Authors in ancient India were (at the very least) bilingual. Sanskrit was a learned language, associated with what anthropologists nowadays call the Great Tradition: i.e. pan-Indian materials such as the Vedic texts and sacrificial rituals, and the epics and mythologies of pan-Indian divinities. The so-called Little Tradition, by contrast, consisted of regional languages and dialects, with their own literatures and folk memories. The co-existence of the two Traditions meant that whenever authors wrote in Sanskrit, they tended to preserve and transfer what they saw as the most valuable elements of their own native-language culture for the benefit of the wider audience beyond their own particular nook of earth (Beck et al., 1987, p.221; Ramanujan, 1987, p.xvi). The Pañcatantra, thanks to the bilingual character of its very circumstances of composition, could become a highly artistic collection of fables and fairy tales, and yet still transmit an old oral tradition to a new and much larger audience of a new, literate type. For educated people, the background of The Pañcatantra was not just oral tradition. Those who composed and wrote it down also drew on earlier literary texts, including, for instance, the Jatakas, the Mahabharata, the books of wisdom, and the Sanskrit textbook of polity, Kautiliya’s Arthasastra. At the same time, the oral sources were clearly manifold. There were even similarites with certain fables of ancient Greece, though whether they originally came from Greece or India is a moot point (Ehlers, 1990, pp.96, 98–99, 110–111). And as I have hinted, a fable’s inclusion in The Pañcatantra was not the end of its life among less educated communities. Given the strict regulations of Sanskrit tradition, the polished refinement of The Pañcatantra did present the fables in a literary form, which some folklorists certainly have described as frozen. Yet oral narratives are nothing if not malleable, and the temporary freezing of the tales in The Pañcatantra’s Sanskrit itself gave rise to a new wealth of story-telling within non-literate traditions. Both the ancient literature and its living oral variants in India’s many modern languages are at the very heart of the subcontient’s culture (Beck et al., 1987, p.222; Handoo, 1989, p.130).
2.
Transmission
The earliest version of The Pañcatantra of which we have knowledge was written at some time between 200 BC and 300 AD. Despite the efforts of several scholars, this “original” version or Urpañcatantra has still not been rediscovered. As for later versions, there are: the Tantrâkhyâyika, written in Sanskrit at some time before 1000 AD; the Pañcâkhyanaka, which in Europe also goes under the name of Textus simplicior; and The Pañcatantra of Pûrnabhadra, or Textus ornatior, written in
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1199 AD. A twelfth century abbreviation of The Pañcatantra, written by Narayan Pandit and referred to as the Hitopadesha, is also widely known. In addition, The Pañcatantra was included in a still larger collection of tales, the Kathasaritsâgara [The Ocean of Story], written in the twelfth century by Somadeva. Nor was Greece the only country to provide analogues. The Pañcatantra, with its distinctive mix of literate and oral sensibility, and losing nothing of its power to stimulate further story-telling, both literate and oral, was the first such body of narrative to travel from one civilization to another (Sulu, 1995, p.212), and some of the translations actually represent the collection’s oldest known versions. On the command of King Khôsrôi Anôshakruvâ (531–579 AD), a Persian physician named Burzôe or Barzûjeh translated it (together with eight other Indian tales) into Pahlavi. This version itself is now lost, but a Syriac translation of it from about 570 AD is well known, and so is the Arabic translation, the Kalila-wa-Dimna, from about AD 750 – the title of which derives from the names of the two jackals, Kalila and Dimna, who are introduced in the first fable. As for European translations, although the earliest one was the eleventh century Greek version, Stephanites kai Ichnelates, by Symeon Seth, John of Capua’s Latin translation of about 1270 AD, the Directorium vitae humanae, was far more influential. Interestingly enough, in the West it was a translation — a fifteenth century Persian version — that provided even the most commonly used name for The Pañcatantra’s narrator: Bidpai or Pilpai, who in the Indian versions is called Vishnusharma (Ehlers, 1990, pp.93–94; Hämeen-Anttila, 1995, pp.viii–ix; Snodgrass, 1998, under “Panchatantra”). By now, there are translations into over fifty langauges, only a quarter of which are Indian, and the total number of different translations and trans-creations is well over two hundred (Edgerton, 1965, p.10). The impact of The Pañcatantra on European literary traditions has been much studied, and so has its place within European popular narrative and folklore, where, even if its influence on animal tales has not been all that marked, it has nevertheless contributed much to the actual form and style of fabling (Cocchiara, 1971, p.296; Bødker, 1957, p.4; Snodgrass, 1998, under “Panchatantra”).
3.
Didacticism, structure, setting
The Pañcatantra’s division into five books is on a thematic basis. Their titles are: The separation of friends; The winning of friends; War and peace; The loss of one’s gains; and Hasty action. In Pûrnabhadra’s Pañcatantra, the version to which I shall now mostly be referring, the main effort of composition went into the first book, which consists of 33 stories, whereas in the other four books the number of the tales varies from nine to seventeen (not counting the frame-tales). But throughout the entire collection, there can be no mistaking its practical purpose. The affinities with the
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ancient collections of artha (worldly wisdom) and niti (polity) are very clear (Edgerton, 1965, p.10), and the five themes are obviously felt to hold important lessons for real life. But the didactic element is certainly not as strong here as in, for instance, Kautiliya’s Arthasastra. In the very preface to Pûrnabhadra’s Pañcatantra, the goddess who is addressed is Sarasvatî, the patron of literature (Hämeen-Anttila, 1995, pp.x, 271), and in the collection as a whole there are clear signs of a powerful literary ambition in the narratological arrangements. Each book has its own frametale, and these all are emboxed within the main frame-story of the entire collection, with further narrative levels in the form of tales within tales. So arises a structural hierarchy and unbroken chain of tales that is one of The Pañcatantra’s most striking features. The overall impression is neither of a rag-bag of folktale odds and ends, nor of somebody just preaching. We are dealing with a work of art, carefully finished and coherent. The only partial exception is the fifth book, whose frame-tale does not fully enclose its fables. It introduces them, but does not round them off (Hämeen-Anttila, 1995, pp.x–xi). The framing tale of The Pañcatantra as a whole tells of King Amarashakt’s despair at the ignorant stupidity of his three sons. Since all attempts to teach them grammar, sacred law, and polity have been so time-consuming and fruitless, ministers advise the king to place them under the supervision of the brahman Vishnusharma, who has promised to make them masters of the science of polity in a mere six months. This the king agrees to, and as it turns out, Vishnusharma is able to keep his promise. How? By getting the boys to learn by heart the text of a book he has written: The Pañcatantra. Compared with the tight structure of The Pañcatantra at a more local level, the main frame-tale is fairly relaxed. But it does present a clear picture of Vishnusharma, the octogenarian brahman who is the work’s author, and it does prompt readers to read the entire work as a textbook of wisdom for real life. Also, it constructs the fictional situation within which the wise old man tells stories to the stupid young princes. So if The Pañcatantra is the first book ever written for children, it is at the same time the first didactic children’s book, even if didacticism is not the only goal. There are clear hints of an educational potential in some of the detail of the frame-tales for the second, third, fourth and fifth books, and in point of fact the brahman’s idea of teaching his charges through the examples of fables exactly corresponded to ancient educational practice. In India, the oral tradition which transmitted the epics was at the same time that period’s mass media, certainly functioning as a vehicle of mass education as well (cf. Srivastava, 1984, p.317). Over the centuries, The Pañcatantra’s didactic and educational function became very deeply ingrained in Indian tradition. Its tales and fables have held an important place within the curriculum of Indian schools (Sankaran, 1984, p.299; Srivastava, 1984, p.323).
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According to Gerhard Ehlers, the name Vishnusharma must be a pseudonym (Ehlers, 1990, p.97). But who the old man really was, and when he lived, we can only guess, and the identity of King Amarashakt and the name of his kingdom are just as problematic. Some versions of The Pañcatantra make him the king of Pataliputra or Patna in Bihar. Others make him the king of Mahilaropya or Mylapore in Madras (Srivastava, 1984, p.317). In Pûrnabhadra’s Pañcatantra he is the king of Mahilaropya, and his sons are called Vasusakti, Ugrasakti and Anekasakti, which could be roughly translated as God-might, Terrible-might, and Manifold-might (Edgerton, 1965, p.21). But at least all such names of characters are very clearly Indian, and so are the species of animals mentioned, and the way the animals are humanized. There are both elephants and jackals, and the elephants are arrogant, while the jackals are machiavellian. In fact the jackals are the Indian equivalent of Western fables’ crafty foxes, though considerable shrewdness is also associated with certain other animals as well.
4. A typical tale In the second tale of the third book, War and peace, for example, there is a very sage hare named Vijaya, and the tale’s climax is based on a Hindu belief which connects the hare with the moon. Where Western tradition has spoken of a man in the moon, Hindus discern a lunar hare (Edgerton, 1965, p.114; Hämeen-Anttila, 1995, p.286). The same story also includes a band of elephants, and the king of the elephants is compared with Airâvata, the steed of the god Indra. Appropriately, the tale’s setting is lush with lotuses and tropical cassia trees. Yet its starting-point is a twelve-year drought. This makes life so difficult for the elephants that they embark on a migration, to a stretch of water known as The Moonlake. It is this lake and its surroundings which are described as a kind of earthly paradise, and even erotic overtones are not excluded. The young women bathing in The Moonlake are ravishingly curvaceous, and the lake’s water is said to be sweet from the elephants’ own rut. Not that sex is by any means the story’s main point. Both here and elsewhere, it is one factor, or it is at least not denied, but The Pañcatantra as a whole, even if some of its tales were also included in Shukasaptati, the ancient collection of erotica, does not belong to that category. In this particular fable, the most significant thing which happens when the elephants rush into the water is that many of the hares who live along the lakeside are trampled on and killed. As a result of this catastrophe, serious tensions arise between the two species. What is central to The Pañcatantra is just this kind of conflict between the weak and the powerful. So does this make it a kind of mirror for magistrates? Is its aim to educate the young of a ruling, literate class in the ways of government and justice? No, not entirely.
Orality and literacy
In Pûrnabhadra’s Pañcatantra, the lessons which do get taught are emphasized by being written in verse stanzas which interrupt the main flow of narrative prose. These stanzas can come either at the beginning or the end of a tale, but also in the middle as well. And their essential character is proverbial, gnomic, aphorisistic. If anything, they belong less to an educated class than to the folk. They are at not so much literate as oral. It so happens that the tale of the elephants and the hares at The Moonlake is told by a crow. The crow attracts the interest of an audience of fellow-birds by speaking some of these pithy stanzas. He begins a transition from the immediately previous story by quipping: “Even in a bluff may lie success, if a king is without power. By the bluff of the moon the hares dwell in peace” (Edgerton’s prose translation). This makes the other birds curious, and they ask him to tell the whole story. When he does so, it is as part of his ongoing attempt to demonstrate that the owl does not deserve to be chosen as king of all birds. In fact each of the tales in War and peace belongs to the discussion between the king of the crows and his counsellors, and is narrated either by the crows themselves or by the characters in the crows’ tales, who extend them still further by recounting tales of their own. As for The Pañcatantra’s human narrator, in War and peace he is no more than briefly mentioned at the beginning. Otherwise the narration is taken care of by the nonhuman narrators he has set up, and it is they who seem to control the connections between different tales. Because these non-human narrators also tell stories about men and women, there is actually no hierarchical distinction between human beings and animals. And it is precisely the interrupting verse stanzas which not only sum up the morals of the various tales, but which in a way link all the different narrators together, by bringing the tales they tell into a carefully arranged dialogue with each other. Without the stanzas of gnomic wisdom, readers would simply be much less likely to notice the bearing of one tale upon another. In each of the five books, the stanzas actually unite the meanings of all the individual tales at a higher discoursal level. So despite the elaborately literate sophistication of the narratological structures, the style and sensibility of that higher level are not so much literate as oral. Nor is it easy to see how the actual stories told could be summarized in any other spirit. Readers, and especially child readers, will not be all that interested in moralizing anyway. What will captivate their imagination is rather the colourful and rapidly developing story itself, with its speaking animals, and their exciting or frightening or amusing adventures. In the story of The Moonlake, the most fascinating element is surely the resourcefulness with which the small hare stands up to the enormous king of the elephants. The only way he can do this is by resorting to a strategy which, if copied by a young prince on inheriting a royal crown, would mark him as a most cynically evil politician. The hare is a cheat! Pretending to be the messenger of the Lord Moon, he announces that the elephants have made that potentate angry
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by killing his blessed hares and violating The Moonlake. The king of the elephants confesses to the truth of this charge. But when he tries to purify himself in the waters of the lake, the moon’s disc is shattered there into thousand little moons. According to Vijaya the hare, this makes Lord Moon even more angry than before. So what does the elephant king do next? He promises to leave The Moonlake and never come back.
5.
The resources for children’s literature
Vijaya’s trick catches the very essence of The Pañcatantra, because the figure presiding over the entire collection is actually the crafty jackall. Even though Pûrnabhadra’s Pañcatantra is presented in the frame tale as having educational and didactic goals, the fables themselves are mostly a-moral or positively immoral (cf. Edgerton, 1965, p.11; Hämeen-Anttila, 1995, p.xi), and the same applies to the stanzaic interruptions in which the implicit wisdom is made explicit, and which in the tale of The Moonlake consist of no fewer than nine proverbial aphorisms, very much in the manner of oral narrative tradition (Ong, 1991, p.24). As a book for princes and other powerholders, The Pañcatantra would offer delightfully refined entertainment, but would hardly tell them what to do. The advice it offers is much more likely to profit a common people in their struggle against unjust rulers. Taken as a whole, the collection hybridizes the literate skill of the royal court with the racy oral wisdom of the folk, in a way which subsequent children’s literature was then free to emulate, whether consciously or unconsciously. If the lesson to be learned from Pûrnabhadra’s version is very much a matter of shrewdness, this kind of folk wisdom was not so clearly apparent in earlier versions. The viewpoint of Tantrakhyâika, for example, was more aristocratic (HämeenAnttila, 1995, p.xi). By the twelfth century The Pañcatantra, in its cyclical movement between literacy and orality, was clearly returning closer towards the ordinary people and genuine folklore. As a result, the lofty educational goal was considerably weakened, so that even if the book retains some didactic elements, it also releases a very powerful impulse to imaginative fiction in its own right. Here, too, children’s writers of a later date could not fail, directly or indirectly, to take notice.
References Beck, B. E. F., Claus, P. J., Goswami, P., & Handoo J. (Eds.) (1987). Folktales of India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bødker, L. (1957). Indian animal tales: A preliminary survey. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Cocchiara, G. (1971). The history of folklore in Europe. Philadelphia: ISHI.
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Edgerton, F. (1965). Translator’s introduction to The Panchatantra (pp.9–20). London: George Allen and Unwin. Ehlers, G. (1990). Indiens Pañcatantra und seine Bedeutung für die Weltliteratur. Wie alt sind unsere Märchen. Veröffentlichungen der Europäischen Märchengesellschaft, 14, 92–112 Handoo, J. (1978). Current trends in folklore. Mysore: University of Mysore. Handoo, J. (1989). Folklore: An introduction. Manasagangotri, Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. Hämeen-Anttila, V. (Ed.) (1995). Viisi kirjaa viisaita satuja Intialainen Pañcatantra. Helsinki: Suomen Itämainen Seura. Islam, M. (1970). A history of folktale collections in India and Pakistan. Dacca: Bengali Academy. Mathur, R., & Manabe, M. (Eds.) (1984). Indian and Japanese folklore. Japan: KUFS Publication. Ong, W. J. (1991). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London and New York: Routledge. Ramajunan, A. K. (1987). Foreword. In B. E. F. Beck, P. J. Claus, P. Goswami & J. Handoo (Eds.) Folktales of India (pp.xi–xxi). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sankaran, S.G. (1984). Folktales of Southern India. In R. Mathur & M. Manabe (Eds.). Indian and Japanese folklore (pp.273–314). Japan: KUFS Publication. Snodgrass, M. E. (1998). Encyclopedia of Fable: ABC-Clio literary companion. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. Srivastava, N. P. (1984). Folktales of Northern India. In R. Mathur & M. Manabe (Eds.). Indian and Japanese folklore (pp.315–329). Japan: KUFS Publication. Sulu, A. V.(1996). Panchatantra and the epics as children’s literature experience. In M. Machet, S. Olèn and T. van der Walt (Eds.), Other worlds other lives: Children’s literature experiences. Proceedings of the International Conference on Children’s Literature 4–6 April 1995 (vol. 2, pp.211–228). Pretoria: Unisa Press. Wehse, R.(1990). Uralt? Theorien zum Alter des Märchens. Wie alt sind unsere Märchen. Veröffentlichungen der Europäischen Märchengesellschaft, 14, 10–26. Regensburg: Erich Röth Verlag
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AUTHOR "Janina Orlov"
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Chapter 2
Orality and literacy, continued Playful magic in Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan Janina Orlov
1.
Hybridization and problematization
In the previous chapter, Niklas Bengtsson was discussing an interrelationship between the resources of orality and those of literacy as seen in an ancient Indian text. Here I shall be dealing with the same question, but as it arises from a literary work published in the mid-nineteenth century. By that time, the oral materials of folk tradition were not only being meticulously studied by the comparativehistorical methods of folklorists such as Theodor Benfey. Throughout Europe, they were also becoming highly valorized for reasons connected with romantic and nationalist ideology. Writers and composers were drawing on them as a source of what they saw as pristine authenticity and undegenerate strength, and were constantly on the look-out for ways of injecting these qualities into new work, so as to make a radical break with what they felt had become a lifeless over-sophistication in non-oral traditions. Closely associated with this complex of ideas was an analogy between the history of the race and the history of the individual. Just as a people was now thought to be able to replenish its creative stores by drawing on these purer, earlier riches, so each adult human being was encouraged to look back to the time of personal infancy as an epoch of natural wisdom and spiritual health, whose visions had all too quickly become overclouded by the worldly cares and passions of adulthood. In Wordsworth’s phrase, “the child is father of the man”. The child knew best. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that Pushkin, in writing his Tale of Tsar Saltan, not only brought about a hardy hybridization of the literate tradition with the oral, but reached back to memories from his own childhood, so achieving originality in an unusually literal sense of the term. This was not because he wanted to write for children here. In drawing on the folk elements to which he had been exposed as a child his aim was rather to re-invigorate Russian literature as a whole. That The Tale of Tsar Saltan did indeed become a regular part of children’s reading was in the first instance a consequence of somewhat later educational policies (Setin, 1990, p.233).
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And ironically enough, The Tale’s sophistication lies in placing the ideology within which it was composed under problematizing scrutiny. Pushkin’s response to the oral tradition’s beautiful simplicity, strong narrative pulse, and otherworldly charm was ebullient enough. But he did have, it would seem, some hesitations. It is as if he was saying that, ultimately, the power of words is always limited, quite irrespective of whether they are spoken within an oral culture or written within a literate. In a way, the situation is reminiscent of one of the formulaic expressions in old Russian folktales themselves: “It cannot be said in a fairy tale; nor written about with a pen” (Ni v skazke skazat’; ni perom opisat). The narrative desideratum towards which this formula gestured was formidable. A story should tell of something wonderful and quite extraordinary, a marvel, a miracle, something which neither speech nor writing would be able to catch. Confronted with expressive ambition of this order, story-telling, whether by word of mouth or by words committed to paper, might at first seem doomed to failure. Yet perhaps there was still some other mode. Perhaps Pushkin could rest his hopes on that tertium quid — on that very hybridization of the oral and the literate. With a bit of luck, a strangely beautiful imaginary universe might be communicated by a kind of playfulness, which would bring the two received discourse types, inadequate in themselves, into a new synergy. So although The Tale’s actual story has an easily identifiable background in myth, there is a good deal more going on here than just the repetition of a well known pattern. Nor is it surprising that the process of creation was long-drawn-out. Pushkin made the first notes in 1822, when he was living as a young poet in exile in southern Russia. He did not complete the work until he was staying with his newly wed wife in Tsarskoye Selo, outside St. Petersburg, in the late August of 1831. And although The Tale’s sources have not been completely charted — and perhaps will never be —, the ingredients which went into its lengthy incubation were clearly very heterogeneous. The Thousand and One Nights, the chapbook story Bova Korolevich (originally Bevis of Hampton), and Chaucer’s “Lawyer’s Tale” have all played a part, and there are even traces of several other texts by Pushkin himself, while folktale motifs such as “the three golden sons” and “the banished wife” (Chudesnye deti and Oklevetannaja zhena) are also in clear evidence. Even in terms of pre-texts, then, a kind of merger was taking place between the spheres of orality and literacy, and the same applies to the way Pushkin chose between verse and prose. Traditional folktales are in prose, whereas The Tale of Tsar Saltan consists of twenty-seven stanzas of varying length, in trochaic tetrameter couplets. But far from being an unambiguously literary feature, the trochaic tetrameter couplet is the verse-form used in many folk lyrics and epical folk songs, some of them strongly humorous (Gasparov, 1974, p.60). Thanks to Pushkin’s playful innovations, what we have here, then, is a folktale which was no longer simply a folktale, and literature which was not literature in the previously conventional sense.
Orality and literacy, continued
In the poem as he finally completed it, the symbiosis of the spoken and written word is not only a matter of blended motifs and text-type innovations. At least for an adult reader, it is also represented thematically as well. The whole point of the story has to do with varying constellations of various forms of communication, a project for whose successful realization the element of play was crucial. Everything depends on a kind of implicit contract between performer-narrator and audiencereaders. Both sides agree to unite in the mode of “make believe”, the mode which is always central to fairy stories, but on which Pushkin may here be relying even more than was customary.
2.
The story
The poem begins with Tsar Saltan overhearing three sisters discussing what they would do if they were to become the Tsar’s wife. The third and youngest promises to bear him a “bogatyr”. To quote from W. Arndt’s English translation (1972), “Had I been the Tsar’s elected,” Said the third, “I’d have expected Soon to bear our father Tsar A young hero famed afar.” (ll. 11–14)
As soon as he hears this, Tsar Saltan steps forward to reveal himself, and to propose to her. He also tells the two older girls that they can come with their sister, but in the capacities of weaver and cook. The marriage is solemnized later in the same day, and during the wedding night a child is conceived. Then, however, the Tsar has to leave for battle. While he is away, the Tsaritsa gives birth to a son, and writes a letter to her husband to tell him the good news. But the letter’s message is tampered with by her sisters, “the wicked aunts”, who deceitfully arrange for the death of both mother and child, by having them put in a casket and cast into the sea, as if at the behest of the absent Tsar himself. They enclosed the prince and queen In a keg at once brought forward, Tied it up and rolled it shoreward And committed it to sea, As by Tsar Saltan’s decree. (ll. 102–106)
While in the casket, the child grows, and begs the sea for help. The waves are compliant and wash the casket ashore. When the child goes along the seashore looking for something to kill and eat, he witnesses a fight between a swan and a kite.
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He kills the kite, and the grateful swan offers him many favours. Now a kite you brought to earth, Killed a warlock; of your worth Never henceforth need remind me, Ever by your side you’ll find me. (ll. 185–90)
In point of fact, the mother and son have landed on a desert island. But stage by stage, a new kingdom is established there, with magical assistance from the Swan Maiden, who eventually becomes the young man’s bride. In another development, the young man is given the name Gvidon, and is chosen to be the new kingdom’s ruler. In the end, even Tsar Saltan hears rumours about the wondrously prosperous island, and wants to go and see it for himself. Prince Gvidon, meanwhile, has been longing to see his father, and has visited him three times in disguise. During his visits, the wicked aunts tell Tsar Saltan about all sorts of other marvels, in order to prevent him from going to Gvidon’s island. Ignoring the aunts, finally, Tsar Saltan travels to the island anyway, and the story ends with a family reunion and a feast. The Tsar, having forgiven his enemies, is put to bed half drunk. The narrator’s summing-up is tongue-in-cheek: Late at night some subjects loyal Helped to bed His Highness Royal. I was there, had beer and mead, Dip a whisker’s all I did. (ll. 991–94)
3.
Pushkin and the poetics of skazka
Even from such a brief summary, something of the relationship with the skazka or Russian fairy tale will probably be clear. But what was the skazka exactly? What was it that Pushkin was playfully engaging with? And how did he himself see it? Etymologically, the notion of skazka implies the spoken word, since the verb “skazat” means “to say” or “to tell” (cf. saga). Yet the stem “-kaz” also has the sense of “showing” and “pointing”, so suggesting an element of visualization. Historically, “skazka” has referred to both authentic documents and imaginary stories, with the latter meaning not becoming dominant until the eighteenth century (Dal’, 1980, IV, pp.190–1). According to Vladimir Propp (1984), in the form of the folktale the skazka can now be defined as deliberate and poetic fiction, and in the case of the wondertale Propp says it is a positive distortion of reality. The primary function of the genre is entertainment, though this still need not exclude some deeper meaning or didactic intent. Its potential for literature with practical aims is clear.
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On the other hand, the poetics developed by Propp relates to the skazka of orature. If and when a tale is captured in writing, the characteristic flexibility of the live performance is lost (Jakobson & Bogatyrev, 1974, p.61). The topicality of the narrator-performer’s — the skazitel’s — message will not be clear, and neither will the paralinguistics of gesture and facial expression, which writing cannot express. When an oral tale undergoes a literary adaptation, so that the spoken word is transformed into the written, there is also a transfer from one convention to another, so that the semantics of formal functions and clichés changes as well. The fact that a sophisticated literary tale can restore or, rather, transform these features by means of imitation is actually paradoxical. Even if the element of topicality seems to be preserved, it is now a topicality that is limited to the epoque and milieu of the author, and to the author’s own poetic aims and ideology in general, since once the text is written down, it becomes fixed. To quote Propp, A literary work, once it has arisen, no longer changes. It exists only when two agents are present: The author (the creator of the work) and the reader. The mediating link between them is a book, a manuscript, or performance. A literary work is immutable but the reader always changes. (Propp, 1984, p.7) Folklore also presupposes two agents, but different agents, namely, the performer and the listener, opposing each other directly, or rather without a mediating link. As a rule, the performers’ works are not created by them personally but were heard earlier, so performers can in no way be compared with poets reciting their own works.… Performers do not repeat their texts word for word but introduce changes into them…. [W]hat is important is the fact of changeability of folklore compared with the stability of literature. (Propp, 1984, p.8)
Since the traditional world of fairy tale or skazka is highy visual, it appears to be very concrete. And since what it conjures up involves its own special configuration of time and place — or chronotope, to use Bakhtin’s term —, its presentation calls for clear and explicit images, with no empty verbosity. The very different world it bodies forth can even be inhabited by stereotypes and clichés, and as readers we just accept the motto “said and done” (skazano sdelano) as a kind of guarantee that the story has actually happened. The chain of events is strictly formalized, with no deviations into story-impeding lyricism. All the same, the genre’s images of reality can certainly stand for “something else”, so bringing us closer to poetry, riddles and dreams. But in that case, the “something else” is difficult to pin down outside the text’s own heterocosm. Neither is it a matter of the lessons ordinarily conveyed by allegory. As Jack Zipes puts it, rather, the fairy tale, oral as well as literary, struggles to humanize dark forces which are bestial and barbaric, and which have always threatened both human minds and
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and human communities with the destruction of free will and compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer such very real terrors through metaphors (Zipes, 1999, p.1). Through its affinity with the tradition of literature, the literary fairy tale (literaturnaya skazka) provides the narrator with a different kind of narrative flexibility. But somehow or other, the restrictions or characteristics of the traditional skazka still have to be preserved. Otherwise the spirit of the tale is lost. Through its kinship with prose fiction — with novels and short stories — the literary tale may actually be able to form a synthesis in which the poetic and the prosaic unite. As for Pushkin’s own view of such matters, he uses the term skazka in many different ways and connections. But with him, it always conveys a suggestion of the everyday and colloquial. Particularly relevant here are some remarks he made in 1833, in a conversation with Vladimir Dal’ about contemporary Russian literature (Zueva, 1980). He thought that the language of folk tales was uniquely expressive of the tone of Russian thought, speech, and life, and would therefore be a natural resource for a truly living literature. This is why he experminented with the fairy tale genre himself. To repeat, his primary aim was not to write a story for children. Like Wordsworth in composing the Lyrical Ballads, he was rather hoping to develop a national literature which would be cleansed of unnatural sophistication and artificiality. As for other connotations the skazka may have had for him, the semantic nuances do vary, but there usually seems to be a connection with the wondertale, even if in widely varied ways (Petrunina, 1987, p.230). Structurally, The Tale of Tsar Saltan itself represents the wondertale, a genre which usually has a happy ending involving a triumph over over death. Or as Jack Zipes puts it, “The ending is actually the true beginning” (Zipes, 1999, p.4), which is why the wondertale reflects the idea of Utopia. According to Zipes, the characters, settings and motifs are combined and varied according to specific functions to induce wonder. It is this sense of wonder that distinguished the wonder tales from other oral tales such as the legend, the fable, the anecdote, and the myth; it is clearly the sense of wonder that distinguishes the literary fairy tale from the moral story, novella, sentimental tale, and other modern short literary genres. (Zipes, 1999, p.5)
At the same time, the presence of “wonder” is not in itself enough to make a tale a wondertale. As Vladimir Propp clearly saw, there really is the question of stucture, and much depends on how the wonder relates to everything else within the story as a whole. But as it happens, in Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan the wonder element does have just the kind of predominance which the wondertale genre demands. On the other hand, Pushkin’s sense of skazka could also be rather vague and unspecific — more or less similar to the general meaning of rasskaz (“story” or “tale”). On the whole, he would certainly have thought that genre boundaries and
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conventions are of secondary importance, and that they merely offer a kind of guideline for insecure readers. As with any other major writer, genres were of course one of the givens in the situation of writing, but a given which could be accepted playfully. Necessarily, any author has recourse to the genres which, at the particular cultural moment, happen to be available. But in adapting to them, authors can bring about an adaptation of the genres themselves to their own authorial purposes, so that the act of writing becomes a co-adaptation, between the socioculturally given and the particular individuality (Sell, 2000, pp.178–93). In the case of Pushkin here, the co-adaption above all consisted of an openly playful bringing together of the written mode with the spoken. And as a way of suggesting that the bringing-together resulted in a considerable range of effects, and very much problematized any preference for the one mode over the other, I must first distinguish been “clashes” and “encounters”. When the literate and the oral “clash”, they are in a phase of opposition or rivalry. An “encounter”, by contrast, involves a phase of more harmonious co-existence.
4. Oral-literate encounters In Pushkin’s fairy tales, the element of oral-literate encounter is very clear. A contemporary critic compared The Tale of Tsar Saltan with an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty by Pushkin’s friend and colleague Vasilij Zhukovskij: “When you read Sleeping Beauty you cannot forget that you are READING; but when you read Pushkin’s tale, it is as if you were LISTENING to his story, in order to get hold of your sleep, the way Russians usually do” (Komovskij, 1883). Similar observations were made by Marshak (1951), a translator, and the author of several children’s books, whose essay on Pushkin’s fairy tales particularly mentions the sounds and rhythm in The Tale of Tsar Saltan. This is very relevant here, since the tale’s soundplay cannot be fully apprehended until the text is read aloud. It is a case where literature is very clearly taking its way back to the sphere of orality. The oral sphere is also where we find the narrator — the teller of the tale. “I was there, had beer and mead, / Dip a whisker’s all I did”. (Ja tam byl; / med, pivo pil — / I usy lish obmochil.) These closing lines recapitulate one of the Russian folktale’s most typical devices. But when transferred to the literary tale — to the tale “with a face”, since we know there is an author — the meaning of the device changes. In a traditional oral folktale, it signals to the audience that the story is over, and that the performer is thirsty. In a literary tale, besides imitating the oral element, it is a means by which the author can write his narrator into the text and fix his position. At the same time, the “fake orality” creates an impression of the tale as being told here and now. Several narrators in other works by Pushkin — verse as well as in prose — are of this same type, but there are two sub-types. Some narrators, like the one in this
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tale itself, are eyewitnesses. This is again the case in Eugene Onegin, for instance. But there are other narrators who have heard the story from someone else, or have read it somewhere, as in The Tales of Belkin. In this second kind of case, then, the stories are presented as second-hand information. As a result, the narrator-teller figures as somebody who passes the story on, and is thereby closely related to the skazitel or tellerperformer of the oral tradition, communicating a well known story, spicing it up, and “gossiping” in a way sympathetic to his own contemporary sociocultural context. With an eyewitness narrator like the one in The Tale of Tsar Saltan, by contrast, the situation is different. A statement like “I was there…” can be a pretext for focussing on actions, values and sentiments which, in the current context of performance or reading, are not necessarily acceptable and politically correct. After all, the adressees or the audience collaborate with the teller through their mutual understanding that the fairytale is mere fiction. As Jakobson suggests, “the traditional departure of the epilogue from the utopian happy ending of the [Russian] fairy tale may utilize also contemporary political topics” (Jakobson, 1966, p.95), and this potentiality for a kind of double-edged communication is actually one of this genre’s main features. Whether the fairy tale is a literary work or an orally transmitted folk tale seems in this respect to be of secondary importance. This feature will not in itself turn the literate-oral encounter into a positive clash.
5.
Oral-literate clashes
5.1 Letters So much for features of genre and communicative structure. But as I mentioned at the outset, in The Tale of Tsar Saltan the literate-oral polarity is thematized as well. This is where we can only speak of the bringing-together of the oral and the literate as a clash. Not only that, but the clash is the catalyst to the story’s entire chain of events. A main focus of the story is on manipulated communication. A private correspondence is abused. The Tsar’s wife writes to him about the birth of their son. Proudly like a mother eagle, She sends off an envoy far With a note to cheer the Tsar. (ll. 60–3)
But together with the “schemestress” Babaricha, her jealous sisters confiscate the message and send off a forged one instead. But the palace cook and seamstress, Babarikha too, the schemestress, Their perfidious plot all hatched,
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Have the courier trailed and snatched. In his place they send another With false witness to their brother, Saying that the Tsar had won Neither daughter, neither son, Nor of mouse or frog a litter, But some quite unheard-of critter. (ll. 63–70)
Tsar Saltan’s reaction to the falsified letter is first of all that of a distressed father. He is simply beside himself with grief. But when he returns to his senses, he sends a reply: He had this decree conveyed: “Let the Tsar’s return be waited And the cause adjudicated.” (ll. 75–77)
And once again the wicked sisters and Babaricha interfere, with dire consequences. So that day the fuddled slouch Pulls his order from his pouch: “Let the Tsar’s decree be heeded: With no more delay than needed, Be the Queen and what she bore Cast into the ocean’s maw.” … They enclosed the prince and queen In a keg at once brought forward, Tarred it up and rolled it shoreward And committed it to sea, As by Tsar Saltan’s decree. (ll. 89–94, 102–6)
So deceptions become facts. Implicitly, here, the forgery of letters actually throws in doubt the value of a written document. In a normally non-literary context, a written message, besides making its words actually visible and less ephemeral, is likely to acquire more weight and dignity than a spoken one. This, too, is what ought to have been the case within the fictional world of Pushkin’s Tale. But what actually happened there reveals the written word’s vulnerability. It can be manipulated just as easily as its oral counterpart. The letters which are actually received in the story have power, despite their speciousness, and even seem to have a special authenticity as the written version of genuine speech, the wife’s word to the husband, and the Tsar’s command to his servants. They thus seem to represent a kind of borderland
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between oral and written activity, though at the same time they also problematize the relationship between the real and the fictional, between the letters truly written by their signatories and the fabricated substitutes. 5.2 Rumour As a consequence of the manipulated communication between husband and wife, a father is deprived of his newborn son, who in his turn is deprived of his father. It was actually the efforts of Prince Gvidon to unite with his father that resulted in the creation of the new island kingdom. And during his three visits in disguise at Tsar Saltan’s court, Prince Gvidon hears of three marvels from the schemestress Babaricha and the two jealous sisters. In order to prevent Tsar Saltan from going to Gvidon’s island, which they have heard about from seafarers, the wicked women tell him about the marvels, hoping these will surpass the wondrous island in splendour and fascination. In point of fact, however, the women base their tempting descriptions on rumour. They have only heard about the marvels, and may not even completely believe in them. Here, indeed, is yet another layer of fiction, and by implication yet another question as to the relative potential of speech and writing. The three marvels can be traced back to the traditional fairy tale world, and it is fairy tales which have obviously supplied the three women with details. So even within the tale and its own world, we are confronted with still further elements of fairy tale. Pushkin’s Tale is like a Chinese box or matrioshka-doll. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Prince Gvidon manages to bring about all three marvels on his own island. The rumour about the third marvel, for instance, is as follows: Here’s what stuns the world astounded: There is fame abroad, well-founded, Of a princess far, far off No one can adore enough … Here you’d say without a blunder, “There’s a wonder that’s a wonder.” (ll.700–710)
This turns out to be Gvidon’s future bride, the enchanted Swan Maiden. In the end, she really is a princess that “no one can adore enough”. So as with the forged letters, something merely worded becomes reality. Here, though, the words do not need to be written. The oral is just as powerful.
Orality and literacy, continued
5.3 Proverbs When the time comes for Prince Gvidon to propose to the Swan Maiden, the narrator allows these two characters to meditate on the course of events. During their discussion about marriage, the Swan Maiden utters two proverbs about the position of a wife. In this way, yet another aspect of verbal communication is represented within the text itself. In this tale, proverbs appear both explicitly and implicitly. Insofar as they are sayings which embody general truths, they can be seen as a kind of result or summary of human experience in general, reflecting the entire society within which they are current. Obviously, too, they are very much part of the oral folk tradition. Even when brought into a literary text, they can appear with their original, usual meaning, as a confirmation of certain common circumstances and types of experience. So when the Swan Maiden says to Prince Gvidon, who is very eager to marry her, that “Wiving, though, is not like trading” (Zhena ne rukavica), and that “Wives are not, like mitts of pelt, / Plucked and tucked behind your belt” (S beloj ruchki ne strahnesh, / Da za pojas ne zatknesh), she acts in accordance with her present situation. No contradiction is to be found between the proverbial utterance and the particular context. A general truth becomes individual, a proof of the constant oscillation between the public and the private sphere that goes on in the text as a whole. Some of the Tale’s more implicit uses of proverbs are with reference to Tsar Saltan. And here, too, there is sometimes a conformity between the truth which the proverb has always been taken to state in the past and the facts of the present situation. One proverb concerning the Tsar is about his mercifulness: “There is no greater mercy than the one in the heart of the tsar” (net bol’she miloserdia, kak v serdce carevom), which is easily applicable to the events of The Tale’s closing stanza. In the last but one episode, Tsar Saltan deviates from the traditional fairy tale pattern according to which evil is in the end always punished. When the wicked women realize that the game is up, they at first try to hide. But once they are found, they confess their misdemeanours, and strike lucky: But the palace cook and seamstress, Babarikha too, the schemestress, Ran to hide in niche and nook; Found at last and brought to book, They confessed, all pale and pining, Beat their breasts and started whining; And the tsar in his great glee Let them all get off scot-free. (ll. 983–90)
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Or to take other examples, after reading in the forged letter about the birth of “some unheard-of critter”, Tsar Saltan’s wild grief takes a particular form: But the Father Tsar, apprised Of the message thus devised, Started raising blood and thunder; Ready to string up the runner. (ll. 73–76)
The Russian original here speaks of the Tsar’s desire to hang the messenger, a reaction which reflects the proverb “The rage of the Tsar is the ambassador of death” (Gnev carev — posol smerti). Further on, similarly, when the Tsar calms down and, instead of punishing the innocent messenger, formulates a reply, what he actually says is: “Let the Tsar’s return be waited And the case adjudicated.” (ll. 79–80)
In referring to the law (the adjudication of the case) here, his message echoes the proverb “The will of the Tsar is the law” (Volja carja — zakon). But a literary text may also use a proverb against the grain. Rather than endorsing custom and tradition, it can problematize and resist. A little later on in the story, this same proverb about the Tsar’s will being law is alluded to again, but now in a context of contradiction. When the nobles at Saltan’s court carry out the false command “Be the queen and what she bore / Cast into the ocean’s maw”, they actually behave in the spirit of the proverb, but, unfortunately, without knowing what the Tsar’s will really is. In this case, it is as if Pushkin is implying that proverbial wisdom should not be invoked too uncritically. Before throwing the Tsaritsa and her child in the sea, the tzar’s servants might have done well to ask whether this was really likely to be his wish. But perhaps a critical response to oral tradition comes easier to a literary author, and to a literary author’s readers, than to people who have not themselves had access to literacy. The apparent injustice of the decree concerning Prince Gvidon and his mother is never questioned by the population, quite simply because “the will of the Tsar is the law”. His behaviour is perceived by the people in a way dictated by the oral proverb. They judge from appearances, and believe that they are doing the right thing. It is only we ourselves, in collaboration with Pushkin, who are aware of the real circumstances.What we can see here is that the truth of the proverb has nothing to do with the Tsar as an individual. If it relates to him at all, it is only to his public person. Orality is not necessarily any closer to truthfulness than the message of a forged letter.
Orality and literacy, continued
6. Origins For our understanding of Pushkin’s playful bringing together of the oral and the literate to be complete, we need not only to consider features of text-type and thematization, but to return to origins. In one sense I have begun to do this already, in speaking of the skazka. Especially in the form of the wondertale, this genre is indeed archaic, primordinal, seminal. Throughout the history of literature, it has been drawn on in many different ways, in modern literature often as something to be parodied, but leaving many other traces or Märchensplitter as well (Westin, 1998, pp.53–54). So much so, that many different accounts of its essence have been suggested, and the genre can even seem to be playfully underdetermined as to its own nature. Yet even so, whenever we are addressed by any such ludic text we still need to have at least some idea of what a skazka or fairytale “really” is — or was. Otherwise, we shall simply not get the playful point. In a way, then, the features of the genre remain constant, despite being constantly dislocated. Any kind of allusion to the traditional folk tale, or even to the literary fairy tale, has the same starting-point: an understanding of skazka as a deliberate and poetic fiction, a distortion of reality. In another, but closely related sense, our return must be to Pushkin’s own personal origins: to his own childhood. When he created his own fairytale world, introduced for the first time in the prologue to Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820–28), the work with which he made his break-through, and further developed in his skazki and several poems, the foundations he was building on were stories he had once heard from his own nanny. In a letter to his brother of November 1824, he testified to the continuing impact of such materials. At the time, he was living in exile on his father’s estate at Michajlovskoye, where he was already working on the notes which later were collected under the title Zapiski Skazok [Notes on Fairy Tales]. Not only did he feel that such tales were on a par with literary works. He also confides to his brother his sense of an oral-literate clash, in the contrast between folklore and the more aristocratic education to which he had also been exposed. Do you know how I spend my time? I write memoirs until dinner; I dine late. After dinner I ride on horse back. In the evening I listen to fairy tales, and thereby I am compensating for the insufficiencies of my accursed upbringing. How charming these fairy tales are! Each is a poem! (Pushkin, 1967, pp.168–9)
In contrast to over-refined artificiality, he was able to turn back to what he saw as the the beauty and purity of the “literally unedited”. True, when The Tale of Tsar Saltan describes the life-story of Prince Gvidon, this can be read as a rather sophisticated kind of metapoetics. The transformation of a desert island into a prosperous kingdom, by a prince who, in his longing to be
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acknowledged by his father, and with the assistance of a Swan Maiden, builds a world of his own, can be read as a metaphor for the process of artistic creation in general, and not only as it relates to fairy tales. Yet The Tale also involves a movement in the opposite direction: a de-artificialization. For Pushkin is also writing himself back to childhood, and thereby, as he feels, to the origin of poetry and spontaneously naïve inspiration. His intellect is nothing if not adult in its self-conscious sophistication. But in order to achieve his aims, he desires to be child-like as well. In “Autumn” (“Osen’”), a poem completed in 1833 and usually regarded as one of his most important programmatic statements (Lotman, 1996, p.511), Pushkin, as a poet, describes how inspiration enters his mind when the creative process is first getting under way. To some extent the situation described in the poem resembles the life-style described in the letter to his brother. After a frosty day on horseback, the poet, the “I” of the poem, sits at the fireside with a book, letting his thoughts freely roam. Lulled by his own imagination, he forgets about the world. This is when poetry awakens, and the “fruits of his dreams” come towards him in the shape of “old acquintances” from the world of fairy tale, the world of his childhood stories. Slumber is replaced by feverish activity, as rhymes “come running” and the poet’s fingers “long for the pen that longs for the paper.” A poem’s conception has begun. A reading of The tale of Tsar Saltan which closely studies the synthesis of oral and literary narrative tradition, of stories emanating from childhood and a playfully individual poetics that forms its own universe, does reveal this movement back to origins. Pushkin’s poetical playground communicates both the imaginative world of childhood and what he saw as the abode (Urheim) of all poetry. In this highly sophisticated work of adult literature, as perhaps in very few other places, the child really is father of the man. Children, and writers for children, have been quicker to see this than many professional Pushkin scholars, whose thoughtworld, in the nature of things, has tended to be more exclusively literate. Especially in a case like this, sharp demarcations between the adult and the child, and between the traditions of speech and writing, can hardly promote understanding and appreciation.
References Arndt, W. (1972). Pushkin threefold: The originals with linear and metric translations. New York: Dutton. Dal’, V. (1980). Tolkovji Slovar’ Zhivogo Velikorusskogo Jazyka, IV. Moscow: Russkij Jazyk. Gasparov, M. L. (1974). Sovremennyj Russkij Stix: Metrik i ritmika. Moscow: Nauka. Jakobson, R. (1966). Selected writings IV: Slavic epic studies. Paris: Mouton. Komovskij, V. D. (1883). Cited in D. Sadovnikov, Otzyvy sovremennikov o Pushkine, Istoricheskij Vestnik, XII.
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Marshak, S. Ja. (1951). Zametki o skazkax Pushkina. In S. Ja. Marshak, N. L. Brodskij and V. V. Golubkov (Eds.), Pushkin v shkole: Sbornik Statej (pp.369–89). Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii pedagogicheskix nauk RSFR. Lotman, Y. M. (1996). Dve Oseni. In his O poetax i poezii (pp.511–16). St Petersburg: Iskusstvo. Petrunina, N. N. (1987). Proza Pushkina (puti evoljucii). Leningrad: Nauka. Propp, V. (1984). Russkja Skazka. Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo Universiteta. Pushkin, A. (1967). The letters of Alexander Pushkin (trans. J.Thomas Shaw), Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sell, R.D. (2000). Literature as communication: The foundations of mediating criticism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Setin, F. I. (1990). Istoria Russkoj Detskoj Literatury Konec X - pervaja polouina xix veka. Moscow: Prosvešcˇenie. Westin, B. (1998). Strindberg, sagan och skriften. Stockholm: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag. Zipes, J. (1999). When dreams come true: Classical fairy tales and their tradition. New York: Routledge. Zueva, T. V. (1980). Skazka o Care Saltane A. S. Pushkina. Problemy izuchenija russkogo narodnogo poeticheskogo tvorchestva: Vzajmovlijania fol’klora i literatury. Moscow: Moskovskij Oblastnoj Pedagogicheskij Institut.
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AUTHOR "Kaisu Rättyä"
TITLE "Intertextualities"
SUBJECT "Studies in Narrativity, Volume 2"
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Chapter 3
Intertextualities Subtexts in Jukka Parkkinen’s Suvi Kinos novels Kaisu Rättyä
1.
A postmodernist trilogy
In Finnish children’s literature, the past two decades have seen an increase in selfreflexive fiction, metafiction, and intertextual playfulness. The Finnish critic Ismo Loivamaa (1996) has suggested that, in adolescent fiction, this trend has partly replaced confessional-style novels and novels about sexuality. Examples of postmodernist experimentation, and of writing which narcissistically draws attention to its own constructedness, are not difficult to find. Finland, in other words, reflects the broader international tendency to explore and extend the range of children’s literature by placing the conventions of linear narrative under interrogation. This larger context is surveyed by the Australian scholar Robyn McCallum (1996), for instance, who identifies four of the strategies used in self-conscious fiction: parodic play, thematic word-play, non-textual elements, and various combinations of fiction and non-fiction (e.g. diaries, letters, historical documents). Although the fun and games of such foregrounded intertextualities have already been a significant resource for children’s writers for over a century, in much recent work it becomes still more central, calling for high levels of sustained alertness and activity on the part of readers. Here I shall concentrate of two children’s novels by Jukka Parkkinen: Suvi Kinoksen seitsemän enoa (1995) [The Seven Uncles of Suvi Kinos] and Suvi Kinos ja puuttuva rengas (1998) [Suvi Kinos and the Miss Ingring]. Parkkinen’s hallmarks include an innovative play with language, a kind of screwball comedy, and witty allusions to the canonical classics of both adult and children’s literature. Writing and literature appear as a motif or theme in several of his works. His debut children’s novel, Korppi ja kumppanit (1978) [Raven and Partners], alludes to Finnish poets and novelists such as Aleksis Kivi, J. L. Runeberg and Mika Waltari, and is also a kind of nonsense combination of the raven of folklore with the plot of a detective story. The fascination with nonsense re-appears in Parkkinen’s science fiction adventure story, Sinun tähtesi, Allstar (1994) [Your Star, Allstar], in the form of
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quotations from Alice in Wonderland. And in Mustasilmäinen blondi (1990) [The Black-Eyed Blond], a young author and his writing get mixed up the plot of a Chandlerian hard-boiled detective story which he himself is writing (Havaste, 1999; Loivamaa, 1996). In several interviews and lectures Parkkinen has himself mentioned his use of not only the detective story plot but the formula for the western as well. Most of his characters have been boys, as in the books about young Osku (1989–1994) and in Kaupungin kaunein lyyli (1986) [The Prettiest Girl in Town]. But in the Suvi Kinos trilogy he provides Osku’s female counterpart. As its title suggests, Suvi Kinoksen seitsemän enoa (1995) is about Suvi and her seven uncles — Ruben (Rupu), Naftal (Tenunenä), Simeon (Simo), Leevi, Asser, Isaskar and Benjamin (Pikkuveli). During her first seven years, the orphan Suvi grows up under the guidance of her dead mother’s brothers, so becoming a member of what is a rather unusual family unit. Then in Suvi Kinos ja puuttuva rengas (1998), we read of her next seven years, up until her early teens. The theme is her quest for personal identity within the community established by the uncles and their families. What she has to come to terms with is her own past, her father’s family, and her general family inheritance, all of which is dealt with partly through her own first-person narration, and partly by way of a counterpoint between her memories and manifold literary allusions. The third and final novel, Suvi Kinos ja elämän eväät (1999) [Suvi Kinos and Life’s Lunch-Box], continues the story of Suvi’s life, to the point at which she is a young literary scholar and expecting her first baby.
2.
Peritext and the memoir genre
Our first contact with a novel is not our reading of its first lines. A literary text comes to us surrounded by a paratext, consisting of both epitext, i.e. discussion of the text elsewhere within society, as for instance in interviews, diaries and letters, and peritext, i.e. elements which are in direct material contact with the text itself, such as words and pictures on the cover, the title-page, the foreword, the blurb and so on (Lyytikäinen, 1991; Genette, 1987). As far as the peritext is concerned, the publisher often has more of a say in it than the author. But even so, it can crucially affect the way readers approach the text proper, and in the case of children’s books carries a message both for adult purchasers and co-readers and for the children who represent the primary implied audience. On the cover, we read that Suvi Kinoksen seitsemän enoa is the hilarious memoir of a little girl. The blurb says that the little 6-month-old baby is taken care of by the gigantic Turakainen brothers, and an illustration by Tuula Mäkiä, stretching across both front and back covers, represents Suvi’s first memory. This takes the form of a photograph of the young baby sitting on the open hand of her youngest uncle, in the company of four of the other uncles. The bottom of the back cover is further
Intertextualities
decorated with the two remaining uncles, already dead, who look like angels in Rubens. Also, the blurb advises readers to dismiss all thoughts of another story which might occur to them: The brothers were bachelors, and also held doctoral degrees in various fields of knowledge, and to crown it all were giants two-meters high. If anyone happened to remember the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that could be forgotten straight away. (Parkkinen, 1995, back cover, my translation.)
This alone is probably enough to make most readers — adults and children alike — wonder how the story of Suvi is different from that of Snow White. Intertextuality is an issue even before the book has been opened. The peritext of the second novel, Suvi Kinos ja puuttuva rengas, emphasizes the memoir-genre even more. Even though the Finnish word for memoirs does not appear on the title-page, it is there on the book’s cover, where a sub-title describes it as the second part of the memoirs of Suvi Kinos. This time, there are not one but three photos on the cover. The first, on the front cover, depicts a situation verbalized in the novel: Suvi’s first day at school. Here the uncles appear in a picture behind Suvi, but with their heads cut off by the frame. Above the photo, there are again the two angel-uncles, smiling in Renaissance-style poses, and in the lower right corner there is a quill, presumably as a symbol for writing and remembering. In one of the photos on the back cover, Suvi is standing in the living room, dressed in an overlarge tutu and bubble cap. The other photo shows a summer villa, owned by Suvi, while the blurb refers back to the first volume, and mentions some episodes in this new one. Its final sentence reads: “An orphan girl matures into a understanding young women” (my translation). A further peritextual element is a foreword, purportedly by Suvi herself: I want to remind the reader that the names of the characters appearing in this book have been changed, and so have their professions, home towns, ages, sex and the things which happened to them. Everything else has been described as truthfully as the author of this has experienced it and remembers. In Villa Lande Suvi Kinos (Parkkinen, 1998, p.5, my translation)
Autobiographers often make a kind of pact with their readers, which will sometimes include a claim to authenticity despite their use of fictional names (Lejeune, 1989). But Suvi’s words act very differently here. The strong hint is that everything is fiction, and readers may also come to think of the credits placed at the end of a film in order to assure viewers of the product’s fictionality. Fictionality, not authenticity, is precisely what the foreword foregrounds, reminding us, if anything, that we are not
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reading the memoirs of a real young girl, but the second part of a mock-memoir trilogy by a novelist — who happens to be an adult male, and who is inviting us to be amused. In children’s literature generally, there are not many examples of fictive or documentary memoirs, even if retrospective first person narration is in itself canonically established (as in Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye). Closer to Parkkinen’s trilogy are works in the form of diaries, not only genuine diaries, like Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, but also fictional and playful ones, like Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ or, perhaps still more to the point here, the humorous fictive diaries of young boys which were already leaving their mark on Finnish children’s literature by the 1920s. No less interesting is the parody of the autobiographical pact in a Finnish children’s novel that is otherwise very different (Westin, 1988, pp.191–217): Tove Jansson’s Muminpappans bravader skrivna av honom själv (1950) [The Exploits of Moominpappa]. Unlike Suvi’s, Moominpappa’s foreword pledges the memoirs’ authenicity: My once good memory has admittedly got a little shaky. But apart from some small exaggerations and changes (which doubtless only improve local colour and liveliness), this autobiography will be completely truthful. (Jansson, 1950, my translation)
A more ironic attitude towards memoirs is also encouraged in the opening pages of the text proper in the first of the three Suvi Kinos books: The earliest memories of my life anno zero are not mine, of course, but have been told by my uncles. I have put their stories together and filled in the gaps with the anecdotes I have heard accidentally or by eavesdropping. This means that the happenings contain a certain self-contradiction and illogicality, which is of course understandable, since everyone wants to remember at least their own deeds as better than they in reality perhaps were. And in any case, what is the final truth? Each of us has our own truth, as Uncle Rupu or Ruben used to philosophize. (Parkkinen, 1995, p.6, my translation.)
As an adult narrator, Suvi partly knows her own earlier life from photographs and home movies, taken during holidays and at birthday parties, for instance, and linking up with the pseudo-photographic peritext. The narration is interwoven with details of Suvi’s background, of the death of her parents in a car accident, and of her arrival — like so many of the earlier orphan protagonists of children’s literature (Nodelman, 1996, p.154) — in her new home. But basically it follows the order of taken and remembered photographs, which are her main clues to who she is or might be, and which tend to suggest that any version of her story will involve aleatory instaneousnesses, and be arbitrarily framed from just some certain viewpoint.
Intertextualities
3.
Septimal subtexts
What Pekka Tammi (1991) and Kiril Taranovsky (1976) call a subtext (and what Gérard Genette (1997) calls a hypotext) is a text which is prior to the text in hand, whose fore-presence is suggested by allusions and citations. Tammi, in his Russian subtexts in Nabokov’s fiction (1999), strongly emphasizes the scope for pleasure here. Readers can be drawn into the joy of discovery, developing interpretations from what, between the text and its subtexts, amounts to a kind of dialogue. Taranovsky, in his essays on Mandelstam, says that subtexts can either lend support to the text’s own message, or polemically challenge it. According to Tammi, the working hypothesis of the Taranovsky school is that each element of the text is motivated. But as Tammi also emphasizes, much depends on individual readers. For one thing, it is they who are the final arbiters of the subtexts’ significance for their own interpretation. The definition of the text’s principle of thematic coherence is theirs alone. For another thing, they have to recognize the subtexts in the first place. (Tammi, 1991, pp.62–66, & 1999, pp.6–7.) According to Tammi, there are three ways in which a subtext can signal its forepresence fairly explicitly: its title, the names of its characters, or the name of its author can actually be mentioned; a passage from it can be quoted, perhaps in modified form, perhaps in its original language, perhaps in translation; and it can be alluded to stylistically, for instance in sound effects of rhyme or rhythm, or in syntactic similarities. Other, less obvious kinds of forepresence can combine with these three. And to add to the complications, in one and the same passage there can be several different subtexts, and one and the same subtext can include other subtexts within itself. Furthermore, subtexts can come from very different spheres of discourse. Tammi (1999, pp.91–113) mentions that one of the more explicit kinds of signal can have to do with numbers. In the Suvi Kinos books, particular prominence accrues to the number seven. For the first volume, this number is perhaps the main peritextual clue (the title translates literally as “The Seven Uncles of Suvi Kinos”), and it recurs in many different contexts within the texts of the novels proper. Sometimes it even attracts direct comment from the characters, as having some kind of significance. When Uncle Naftal, an anthropologist, has been away in Africa for half a year, he writes to announce his return home after, as he puts it, seven years, and asks his brothers to slay the lamb. Here, one might say, there are two subtexts, but when Uncle Simo reads the letter, he can only pick up one of them, and feels he must be missing something. – I can understand slaying the lamb, it comes from the Jesus’s story of the Prodigal Son, but seven years?
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A suggestion is then offered by Uncle Rupu: – In this context it is certainly connected to the Bible, Rupu surmised. — Seven is a number frequently found in folk tradition. (Parkkinen, 1998, p.192, my translation)
This little conversation is comparable to the first volume’s peritextual warning against associations with a certain other story. Seven, though also an important number in the Bible, is a very common number in folklore and fairy tales, as in the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is what the blurb is alluding to. Parkkinen is metafictionally inviting his readers to compare and contrast his own invention with all such biblical or folklore precedents, and with other precedents as well. For a Finnish reader, Parkkinen’s entire project will be in dialogue with Aleksis Kivi’s classic novel Seitsemän veljestä (1870) [Seven Brothers], which from different versions, theatre performances and television animation is no less familiar to Finnish children than adults. The allusions to it in Parkkinens’ novels are explicit and systematic. Both groups of seven brothers include two pairs of twins; Parkkinen’s seven uncles call their van Valko, which is the name given by Kivi’s seven brothers to their horse: and the home in which Suvi is brought up by the uncles is a place called Impivaara, a name on which she comments: When Aulikki went away, like all the other females of Villa Lande, apart from me and the Ulla-cats, it seemed as if the uncles’ community was a real Impivaara [literally: “maidens’ hill”, or alternatively “danger to maidens”], which outsiders could not possibly adapt to. (Parkkinen, 1995, p.129, my translation)
— at which point Finnish readers will remember that Kivi’s seven brothers also lived in a place called Impivaara, and that they deliberately isolated themselves there from the society of normal law-abiding folk. There are peritextual links to Kivi, too. The five hempen-haired men on the cover of the Suvi Kinoksen seitsemän enoa immediately recall an illustrated adaptation of Kivi’s novel by Riitta Nelimarkka. This itself is a subtext, whose forepresence, together with that of Kivi’s novel, Nelimarkka’s own subtext, can be felt in more subtle ways as well. In moving from Chapter 11 to Chapter 12, Kivi mentions how hard it is for the seven brothers to learn to read. Especially Juhani, the eldest, really has to struggle with his ABC-book. In Nelimarkka’s version, Chapter 13 is illustrated with images of winter turning to spring. First there is a man hanging up washing in a winter landscape deep in snow. Then the next page shows a dark room, into which light is entering through a window opening on to a landscape that is still wintry, except that just outside the window a melting icicle is dripping water. Juhani sits reading his book by the window, and a cat is reading an APC-book [sic!] of her own. Across the top right-hand side of the picture, behind
Intertextualities
Juhani’s back, there are four names in block capitals: Ruupen, Simeon, Leevi and Juuta. Bottom right, a wood anemone raises its head in a forest still patched with snow — the colours are red, black and white. Then the next double page is covered with wood anemones and red flowers, perhaps roses, against the snow. The imagery of the previous picture recurs, but showing a spring landscape, and the picture is framed with brown wood — perhaps the earlier windowframe, or perhaps treetrunks. Across the double page, the name Penjamin is printed in blue block capitals, with a surround of flower and leaf, and this is where I must give Nelimarkka’s version of the text not only in my English translation but in her original Finnish, since the christian name of Parkkinen’s young heroine can be read as a playful allusion to it: In the end, during those mild spring-winter days, as the result of unrelenting practice Juhani was the final brother to achieve that goal which at first seemed so impossible. The winter turned to spring, summer moved towards autumn’s purple, and again the frost traversed the region as the brothers continued their life and work in the lands of Impivaara. (Nelimarkka, 1980, Ch. 13, my translation, italics added) Vihdoin kevättalven suojaisina päivinä sitkeän harjoituksen tuloksena oli Juhanikin, veljeksistä viimeisenä, saavuttanut tuon aluksi mahdottomalta tuntuneen päämäärän. Talvi taittui kevääksi, suvi kulki kohti syksyn purppuraa, ja jälleen liehtoi pakkanen tienoita veljesten elellessä ja uurastaessa Impivaaran mailla. (Nelimarkka, 1980, Ch.13, my italics)
Aleksis Kivi’s own description of Juhani’s new turn of life with his vernal achievement of literacy is slightly different, and here I must follow the same procedure, since Kivi’s text may be a subtext to Suvi’s surname. Finally, with the coming of spring he too knew the book from cover to cover. With a proud look on his face, he closed its pages. The snow melted, flowed as water to the meadow, and thence to Sompio Swamp. Now the brothers went about building the grain barn, which they set some distance from the cabin on the smooth ground of the meadow. (Kivi, 1991 [= translation by Richard A. Impola], p.266, italics added) Ja viimeinpä, tullessa kevään, oli hänkin oppinut kirjansa kannesta kanteen; ja ylpeästi katsahtaen painoi hän sen umpeen. Kinokset [a plural form of kinos, “snowdrift”] sulivat, virtasivat vetenä alas niitulle ja niitulta Sompiosuohon; ja kävivät veljekset rakentamaan riihtänsä; perustivat sen kappaleen matkan päähän pirtistä. (Kivi, 1966, my italics)
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A literal translation of Suvi Kinos’s name would be “Summer Snowdrift”; Aleksis Kivi depicts the turn of the winter to spring with melting snowdrifts (kinokset); and Nelimarkka uses the word suvi (“summer”), and includes snowdrifts in her illustrations. As for her printing of the four Old Testament names, only one of these, Simeon, corresponds to the name of one of the brothers in Kivi’s novel, or in her own textual adaptation of it, and it is also a name which Parkkinen has used for one of Suvi’s uncles. As for the three others, Ruupen, Leevi and Benjamin, none of them is to be found in Kivi, but they do also correspond to uncles’ names in Parkkinen. A somewhat similar phenomenon, which could perhaps be described in terms of the embedding of one subtext in another (Tammi, 1999, p.38), is that despite the peritext’s ostensible warning, Parkkinen’s novels do so obviously allude to folk stories such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, or the wolf and the seven little goats. And so does Kivi’s (Kinnunen, 1987). To take some of Parkkinen’s subtexts here, the hint is often in a name. True, the Finnish name for Snow White is Lumikki, which is formed by the most common word for snow (lumi), plus a suffix used in girls’ names (-kki). But although the connection between Suvi’s surname Kinos and the Finnish name for Snow White does not involve an exact lexical parallel like the connection between the English name Snow White and the word snow, there is nevertheless an equally strong semantic parallel, since the primary meaning of kinos does indeed have to do with snow. For some Finnish readers this parallel might also carry over to a passage in which the uncles discuss the names of some of Suvi’s other relatives. Her father was known as Pyry Kinos [Whirling Snowdrift]; the uncles do not have a clear picture of him, because he was so quick in his movements. Nor can they remember the name of Suvi’s aunt, though they do know it had something to do with the weather. Sunshine? Cloudy? Snow? Her name is actually Pälvi, which means “snow-less, a bare spot” — though typically of Parkkinen’s puns, pälvi also means “hairless”, and Pälvi happened to be the wife of a man called Kaljunen, which translates literally as “Baldman”. There may also be an allusion to Snow White’s actual appearance: to the skin as white as snow, cheeks as red as blood, hair as black as ebony — colours also recapitulated in Nelimarkka’s illustrations to Kivi’s story. For during Suvi’s first visit to Sunday School, a well-known text from Isaiah (1:18) comes up: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” Thematically, there are allusions to several other stories as well. When the uncles are wondering what to do about the motherless female baby, they consider various alternatives. – Society will certainly take care of it, Rupu said. That’s why there are poorhouses, or as they now are, orphanages. – Quite so, sighed uncle Naftal as if a heavy burden had fallen from his heart. — Let’s give the child as a foster child to some family.
Intertextualities
– In which they’ll set it scrubbing floors and selling matches on Christmas Eve, said Pikkuveli innocently. – Work is something you have to learn about when you’re young, said Rupu piously. — It’s only right. (Parkkinen, 1995, p.12, my translation)
This alludes to the orphan heroines in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” and in the story of Cinderella, which is again fore-present elsewhere. In particular, Suvi later fears that the uncles will be ensnared in the wiles of a woman who will demote her from her role as family princess to a mere Cinderella. The sheer injustice of this prospect makes her feel that the snake has wriggled its way into her paradise. But throughout the trilogy’s first two novels, a more important parallel is nevertheless with the story of the orphan girl living as the only female in a family of seven unusually sized males. The main similarity between Suvi’s giants and Snow White’s dwarfs is that they are not afraid of work. As Bruno Bettelheim (1976, p.252) remarks, Like all dwarfs, even the unpleasant ones, … [Snow White’s dwarfs] are hardworking and clever at their trade. Work is the essence of their lives; they know nothing of leisure or recreation. Although the dwarfs are immediately impressed by Snow White’s beauty and moved by her tale of misfortune, they make it clear right away that the price of living with them is engaging in conscientious work.
In much the same spirit, Suvi’s uncles are passionately devoted to their various disciplines of scholarship, travelling all over the world to conferences and symposia. The main difference is that they also know how to relax, for instance with the help of their home-brewed moonshine, and are more positively interested in the company of women for their own sake. A female visitor does not necessarily have to approach them on a matter of official or scholarly business. A purely social call is just as welcome.
4. Subtexts in the Sunday School The theme of the work ethic brings in further subtexts, not only from Aesop’s fable about the grasshopper and the ants, but from the Old Testament. Suvi got to know the Book of Proverbs, and could explain the meaning of Proverbs 6:6: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways and be wise”. Thanks to her school lessons, Suvi also came to think about the avuncular names, and learned some fascinating stories:
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The Turakainen brothers had biblical Christian names, and I connected them with their old testamentical namesakes. Joseph’s sojourn in Egypt and the exodus of the children of Israel were my favourite stories, together with Jonah in the whale’s belly. (Parkkinen, 1998, pp.188–189, my translation)
Parkkinen’s text makes no further explicit references to Joseph or the exodus. But elsewhere Suvi has her own kind of exodus or escape, and the story of Joseph’s faith, of his brothers’ plan to sell him, and of his later popularity is also echoed in Suvi’s changing fortunes within the relationship with her uncles. Another frequent biblical forepresence is the Book of Genesis and the story of Jacob. This was the source of the uncles’ names, whose own father was a Jacob, so that when the names of the biblical Jacob’s sons are discussed during Suvi’s first Sunday School lesson, they come as no surprise. At some such points, Parkkinen’s younger Finnish readers might also find themselves on home ground, and certainly during the conversation about the lovestruck Uncle Ruben. This has as its subtext the episode of Joseph’s being thrown by his jealous brothers into the dried-up pit (Genesis 37), which is dealt with in many Finnish school textbooks. – Oh my God! Naftal shouted. — Didn’t you take the shotgun away from him? – You should have taken it yourself, said Simo furiously. – From a mad drunk, who suspects that anyone venturing towards the cabin is a thief who’ll try to walk off with his research material? – We should put him in chains before he does something stupid, said Pikkuveli brother gloomily. — Lock him in a wardrobe. – Let’s throw him down the cistern, Leevi suggested. – Is Rupu ill? I asked, wide-eyed. (Parkkinen, 1995, p.133, my translation)
In the Sunday School episode, several different subtexts all contribute: the Bible, Snow White, Kivi’s novel, and also Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump [Pippi Longstocking]. It begins with the quotation from Isaiah which mentions the colours of Snow White. Then there is the discussion of the biblical Jacob’s sons and their names, which recalls Kivi’s episode about Juhani wanting to have a joke with the sexton — as it turned out, he bungled the trick question, asking for the name of Zebedee, instead of the name of the father of Zebedee’s sons. And one motif shared with both Kivi and Lindgren is wrestling. Like some of Kivi’s seven brothers, both Pippi Longstocking and Suvi are keen combatants. In fact they are both portrayed in very similar terms, as wanting to measure their strength against a male opponent. Suvi tells how she took Mikko in a half-Nelson, rolled him, laid his shoulders on the carpet, and sat on him. Pippi at the circus, similarly, had laid the wrestler Mighty Adolf flat on the mat before anyone knew what was happening. As in Lindgren, too, the young girl’s fearlessness carries over to her behaviour towards her teacher.
Intertextualities
At first Mikko was dumbfounded by my shamelessness, but he soon recovered and stuck his tongue out at me. – Now now, children! scolded Martta. – That was stupid, Mikko continued, tapping his forefinger against his head. – Do you want me to beat you up, you coyote? I asked The audience followed with interest this new turn the lesson was taking. Aunt Martta knocked on the table with her knuckles, looking irritated. – But Suvi! That kind of talk isn’t right here… – I’m sorry, I said repentently. — Do you want me to beat you up, you hyena? I corrected myself. (Parkkinen, 1995, p.141, my translation)
5.
Suvi and Pippi
Other links with Astrid Lindgren are still more obvious. The title of Pippi Långstrump is explicitly mentioned, and some of its episodes work as stylistic subtexts, as for instance when Suvi is talking to her two guardian-angel uncles, Asser and Isaskar, who drowned in a pond when they were six years old. Throughout the trilogy, her conversations with them create an atmosphere of safety, and when Suvi assures them that they should not be afraid for her, that she will survive, her tone echoes Pippi’s identical assurance to her dead mother in heaven. The first time she comes into contact with them is during her own secret excursion to the fatal pond. They prevent her from falling in herself, and show her the way to a cave in which there is secret treasure, as there was in Pippi’s tree. At which point there are again parallel subtexts and subtexts within subtexts, since Parkkinen brings in R.L. Stevenson’s Captain Flint, and the song which, though sung in Pippi Långstrump, originated in Treasure Island. – This is a part of Captain Flint’s treasure, said Asser mysteriously. – Who’s Captain Flint? – A pirate, who hid his booty on Treasure Island. The one who sang: Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. – It is not like that, I said. Pippi Longstocking sings it like this: Fifteen goblins on the dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. And it wasn’t Captain Flint’s song but Ville’s. – That may be true as well, Asser admitted. (Parkkinen, 1995, p.71, my translation)
Lindgren’s novel is subtextually paired with Stevenson’s on other occassions, too, and typically with other precursors at the same time, including the omni-fore-present novel by Kivi. When Suvi wants to start school one year early, she has to be interviewed by a psychologist, who starts to test her on the meanings of words. When asked what a
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shipwreck is, Suvi says it involves a ship running aground. But then she asks the psychologist if she has read Pippi Långstrump, and whether she knew that Pippi, Tommy and Annika also ran aground. It was not a real shipwreck, Suvi explains, because they were only playing. But in Robinson Crusoe you could find a real one, and in Treasure Island, too, and in L’ École des Robinsons, and in Les Enfants du Capitaine Grande. Now quite carried away, Suvi also asks whether the psychologist has happened to notice that even Seitsemän veljestä is a kind of Robinsonade. When the psychologist unfortunately does not know what a Robinsonade is, Suvi explains that Kivi modelled his story on Robinson Crusoe, though nobody else has realized it yet. Such knowledgeability is itself another common denominator between Suvi and Pippi. Long before she starts school, Suvi has a very well stocked mind, thanks to her uncles’ academic background and their journeys around the world. Pippi, for her part, benefits from her father’s world-wide sailing trips, and from his being a Cannibal King. Captain Longstocking teaches her to speak the island language, just as Suvi’s uncles teach her how to say hello in Swahili. No less conspicuous is the matter of worldly wealth. Suvi is said to be as rich as Pippi, because she has inherited her father and mother’s fortune, and the uncles got a lawyer to make profitable investments for her on the stock market. So this modern orphan girl is as rich as a goblin, but unlike Pippi, who keeps her treasure in a suitcase, Suvi has a portfolio of stocks. In both cases, there are adults who long to get their hands on the heroine’s possessions, and are prepared to adopt illegal means, though in the case of Suvi, the investments are pretty difficult to get at, and a lot of the money is tied up in real estate — her Havukumpu villa.
6. Intertextuality and thematic motivation The subtexts are for ever proliferating. In addition to those already mentioned there are allusions to popular culture, and to Finnish baseball and to figures such as Rudolf Nurejev. So do they all have the same kind of function? At least according to Taranovsky (1976), after all, every element of a literary work is motivated (cf. Tammi, 1991, p.63 and 1999, p.6). It seems to me, at least, that the thematic justification of Parkkinen’s intertextuality becomes clearer if one compares the most frequent subtexts with those he refers to seldom or just once. One key is suggested by the list of stories and fairy tales brought in when the uncles discuss Suvi’s future. They are almost all about orphans, and this is immediately followed by a scene featuring a pseudo-nanny: the youngest uncle dressed up in woman’s clothes. Not only that, but his physical appearance cues in the subtext of Peter Pan — it reminds some of his brothers of Nana the dog (not the best friend of that novel’s paterfamilias). Barrie very much foregrounds questions of family relationships and personal growth. Peter Pan himself has escaped from his mother
Intertextualities
during the first days of his life, and cannot return to her, yet still wants to provide Wendy as a mother for the lads in his Never-Never-Land. Also, his precocious independence parallels another of the subtexts brought in during the uncles’ contemplation of young Suvi: The Kalevala, and more particularly the story of Kullervo, who as a three-day-old baby “Bursts with might his swaddling garments; / Creeping from beneath his blankets, / Knocks his cradle into fragments, / Tears to tatters all his raiment” (Crawford, 1888, p.499), and sets about avenging his father’s murder. The trilogy’s second volume carries on in the same spirit, with subtexts either about orphans and half-orphans, or in some other way foregrounding the theme of relationships. Suvi’s two cousins, who come to join the Impivaara household because their father (though not their mother) has rejected them, are named Kerttu (Gretel) and Hannu (Hansel). And when it looks as if all of Suvi’s academic uncles will soon have to be abroad at the same time, so that there will be nobody left to look after her, the anxiety she feels on overhearing Uncle Ruben’s flippant suggestion that she’ll have to go to an orphanage is fuelled by her reading: The uncles were going to abandon me! I was so shocked that I did not even cry. With my heart thumping, I foresaw an terrifying future as an orphan foster child to some unknown child-torturer. In my mind I went through what I had read: Ollin oppivuodet, Oliver Twist, Die Schwartzen Brüder, Iiris rukka. (Parkkinen, 1998, p.95, my translation.)
These classics by Finnish, English and Swiss-German authors all deal with more or less the kind of predicament in which Suvi thinks she may find herself. (Ollin oppivuodet (1919)[Olli’s Apprentice Years] and Iiris rukka (1916)[Poor Iris], by Anni Swan (1875–1958), are, respectively, an Entwicklungsroman about a young boy, and a novel about a country girl sent to live with relatives in town.) Suvi also remembers the two lost children in Topelius’s fairy tale “Björken och Stjärnan” [The Birch and the Star]. The activation of these kinds of subtexts is sustained throughout the first two Suvi Kinos novels, and as noted, the dialogue with Pippi Långstrump, in which the girl who has to fend for herself becomes the subject of a modern comedy, is especially noticeable. More particularly, Pippi does survive, and her reaction to the adult world of literate civilization, and to tidily arranged relationships, is carnivalized. She herself decides what she will do at school, and her story suggests a scope for selfrealization without the support of the traditional nuclear family. In Parkkinen, who places Suvi in the very special society of her very special uncles, the carnival is continued. The functional contrast with other kinds of subtext is, I think, clear enough. At one point, for instance, there is a cluster of subtextual references to Goethe and Cervantes. Uncle Ruben’s failed love affair has left him despondent and apathetic. The other uncles worry about him, and hope that he will not model his actions on
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the Young Werther and shoot himself. Suvi, for her part, describes him as a romantic hero, in many ways still belonging to the romance world of chivalry, like Don Quixote. These allusions support the mood of Ruben’s misery. But they are hardly relevant to the story’s main protagonist, Suvi the orphan girl, and are not repeated. In Suvi’s story, the Sunday School episode has a special kind of centrality, as focussing the themes of literacy and group-belonging. In the Kivi subtext, over a period of ten years the seven brothers gradually mature into responsible members of society, but the novel’s great climax is the point at which they break through into literacy (Laitinen, 1981, pp.218–9). In the no less strongly subtextual illustrated adaptation by Riitta Nelimarkka, similarly, the same episode is enhanced with the imagery of melting snows and the approach of spring and summer. Despite his playfulness, Parkkinen, too, is very much preoccupied with the way his child protagonist becomes a reader. When Suvi has learned to read, the uncles throw a party. Unsuccessful at first, she had been too proud to ask for help, but only the more keen to penetrate the mystery. When letters for the first time change into words, there is no disguising the fact that, as Uncle Naftal puts it, this is the end of her childhood. From this point onwards, she can help others along the same path, including her friend Mikko. What Mikko really needs is stonger confidence in himself and his own abilities. But the difficulties in reading which the book deals with are familiar to all children, and Parkkinen draws attention to what is a milestone in every reader’s life. For Suvi no less than for the brothers in Kivi, reading skills and literacy are the passport to new communities. Suvi becomes a full member of the academic circle of her learned uncles at Impivaara. So the theme in the two first volumes of Parkkinen’s trilogy is the young orphan girl’s growing up within a new community, and this is well supported by the subtexts. The theme covers the loss of parents, the experience of being an orphan, and socialization within the new group, complete with Suvi’s self-identification as a non-uncle, the difficulties of the new nannies in Impivaara, the inclusion of Suvi’s cousins, Hannu and Kerttu, within the same community, and the significance of the Sunday School. The most consistently fore-present subtexts confirm this same direction, and the self-reflexive style of Suvi’s memoir-writing gives further visibility to her successes in coping, which are parallelled by those of some of the subtextual characters. In turn, once we have read the Suvi Kinos novels, we shall not be able to re-read or even remember, say, Seitsemän veljestä, Pippi Långstrump or Peter Pan in quite the same way. The dialogue Parkkinen has set up with his subtexts will from now on be fully reciprocal and unending. All of which means that his contribution to the postmodernist children’s literature of self-conscious metafictionality gives readers, both young and old, a very great deal to think about and interpret. Unlike many other authors, Parkkinen does not simply re-tell a familiar kind of story, nor simply subvert some earlier text or texts. He challenges himself and his readers to make a new story by blending genres and canons, and texts with texts. In
Intertextualities
the last analysis, what he creates is an intellectual space in which, as in Suvi and her uncles’ Impivaara itself, the difference between young and old can gradually disappear.
References Bettelheim, B. (1976). The uses of enchantment. The meaning and importance of fairy tales. London: Thames and Hudson. Crawford, J. M. (Trans.) (1888). The Kalevala: The epic poem of Finland into English. New York: Alden. Edström, V. (1982). Barnbokens form: En studie i konsten att berätta. Göteborg: Förlagshuset Gothia. Genette, G. (1997). Palimpsest: Literature in the second degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Genette, G. (1987). Seuils. Paris: Seuil. Havaste, P. (1999). Jukka Parkkinen. In I. Loivamaa (Ed.), Kotimaisia lasten ja nuortenkirjailijoita 2 (pp.186–91). Helsinki: BTJ Kirjastopalvelu Oy. Jansson, T. (1950). Muminpappans bravader. Helsingfors: Schildts. Kinnunen, A. (1987). Tuli, aurinko ja seitsemän veljestä. Tutkimus Aleksis Kiven romaanista. Helsinki: SKS. Kivi, A. (1991). Seven Brothers. Trans. Richard A. Impola. New Paltz: Finnish American Translators Association. Kivi, A. (1966). Seitsemän veljestä. Porvoo & Helsinki: WSOY. Laitinen, K. (1981). Suomen kirjallisuuden historia. Helsinki: Otava. Lejeune, P. (1989). On autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lindgren, A. (1976). Pippi Longstocking. Trans. Edna Hurup. London: Penguin Books. Lindgren, A. (1946). Boken om Pippi Långstrump. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. Loivamaa, I. (1996). Nuortenkirjan villit vuodet: Nuortenkirjallisuuden muutosilmiöitä 1990-luvun alussa. Turku: Cultura Oy. Lyytikäinen, P. (1991). Palimpsestit ja kynnystekstit. Tekstien välisiä suhteita Gérard Genetten mukaan ja Juhani Ahon Papin rouvan intertekstuaalisuus. In A. Viikari (Ed.), Intertekstuaalisuus: Suuntia ja sovelluksia (pp.145–79). Helsinki: SKS. McCallum, R. (1996). Metafictions and experimental work. In P. Hunt (Ed.), International companion encyclopedia of children’s literature (pp.397–409). London: Routledge. Nelimarkka, R. (1980). Seitsemän veljestä. Espoo: Weilin & Göös. Nodelman, P. (1996). The pleasures of children’s literature. New York: Longman. Parkkinen, J. (1978). Korppi ja kumppanit. Porvoo, Helsinki & Juva: WSOY. Parkkinen, J. (1990). Mustasilmäinen blondi. Porvoo, Helsinki & Juva: WSOY. Parkkinen, J. (1994). Sinun tähtesi, Allstar. Porvoo, Helsinki & Juva: WSOY. Parkkinen, J. (1995). Suvi Kinoksen seitsemän enoa. Porvoo, Helsinki & Juva: WSOY. Parkkinen, J. (1999). Suvi Kinos ja elämän eväät. Porvoo, Helsinki & Juva: WSOY. Parkkinen, J. (1998). Suvi Kinos ja puuttuva rengas. Porvoo, Helsinki & Juva: WSOY. Stephens, J., & McCallum, R. (1999). Retelling stories, framing culture: Traditional story and metanarratives in children’s literature. New York: Garland. Stephens, J. (1992). Language and ideology in children’s literature. London: Longman Tammi, P. (1999). Russian subtexts in Nabokov’s fiction. Tampere: Tampere University Press.
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Tammi, P. (1991). Tekstistä, subtekstistä ja intertekstuaalisista kytkennöistä. Johdatusta Kiril Taranovskin anayysimetodiin. In A. Viikari (Ed.), Intertekstuaalisuus. Suuntia ja sovelluksia (pp.59–103). Helsinki: SKS. S. 59–103. Taranovsky, K. (1976). Essays on Mandel’štam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Westin, B. (1988). Familjen i dalen. Tove Janssons muminvärld. Stockholm: Bonniers.
AUTHOR "Yvonne Bertills"
TITLE "Intertextualities, continued"
SUBJECT "Studies in Narrativity, Volume 2"
KEYWORDS ""
SIZE HEIGHT "220"
WIDTH "150"
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Chapter 4
Intertextualities, continued The connotations of proper names in Tove Jansson Yvonne Bertills
1.
Intertextualities at the micro-level
In the previous chapter, Kaisu Rättyä was showing how one postmodernist children’s writer has drawn on the resources of intertextuality by alluding to whole texts. Some of these then serve as subtexts sustained throughout his own text, so entering into a kind of dialogue with it. What now remains to be emphasized is that intertextuality concerns not just whole texts, but units which are much smaller. Every new use of every expression, word, and even morpheme in a language happens in intertextual relationship with every use of it in other contexts earlier and elsewhere. In theory, the here-and-now occurrence of any linguistic item recapitulates and modifies all its previous occurrences, and bears a differential relation to the occurrences of every other expression in the same language culture as well. In practice, this is not something of which language users can ever be entirely conscious. The amount of language use that any individual is exposed to is in any case only an infinitessimally small part of all the language use there has ever been. And from that tiny cross-section, we develop a kind of linguistic savoir-faire that is for the most part highly automated. Yet even so, every once in a while we do think about these things. If we ourselves are trying to say or write something to which we attach particular importance, or which has to be suitable for a particular kind of setting or situation, then we sometimes begin to wonder whether this word doesn’t “go better” with that word than some other word does, or whether such and such a phrase somehow doesn’t “sound” as well as it might do. In terms of grammar and broad-brushstroke semantics, these dilemmas may seem irrelevant. Yet often we decide without the slightest hesitation that some particular expression would be simply unsatisfactory through having “the wrong connotations”. Connotations are also something we can fairly consciously respond to in the language use of other people. Our admiration of a poem, for instance, may well be expressed in terms of what the phrases, words and morphemes, in combination
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with each other, seem to “hint” or “suggest”. By this we do not mean something as specific and substantial as the Kivian subtext underlying Parkkinen’s Suvi Kinos novels, but something which, without being any the less fore-present, and without having any the less significant a dialogic relationship with the text in hand, is nevertheless at the micro-level, so to speak. From our own point of view as readers, it is for ever slipping away into subliminality. Presumably, literary writers try to handle this dimension of intertextuality with sensitivity and skill. At the very least, they will not want to turn off their readers by mis-handling it. But some writers, whom we tend to think of as playful and linguistically creative, use it in a more positive spirit, as a resource which can be adapted and expanded to their own ends, sometimes even rather conspicuously. This is what T. S. Eliot noticed in certain Elizabethan dramatists, for instance, whom he praised for their “perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings” ([1920] 1951, p.209). As for children’s writers, their position is specially interesting here, since on the one hand they cannot expect a child reader to have the previous exposure to intertextuality that an adult has, while on the other hand they may well feel that they want to develop their young readers’ sensibility — and perhaps to throw in some intertextual pleasures for co-reading adults as well. One children’s writer who certainly seems to have these aims is Tove Jansson, probably the most famous Finland-Swedish author of all, and best known for her Moomintroll books: the nine novels (1945–1970) and the four picturebooks (1952–1980). In addition to having been the object of biographical scholarship, Jansson has also come in for a fair amount of literary-critical commentary (e.g. Westin, 1988; Jones, 1984; Aejmelaus, 1994). But more can still be said, I would suggest, about her actual handling of language. Here I shall be paying particular attention to some of the names she gives her characters, and in order to highlight their intertextual workings I shall approach them from the standpoint of a translator. The intertextualities I shall consider are specific to the Swedish language, sometimes still more restrictedly to the Swedish language as used in Finland. My question is, then: What happens when an attempt is made to translate these Finland-Swedish intertextualities into the intertextualities of English as used in English-speaking cultures?
2.
What’s in a name?
In part, the answer has to do with vocabulary, and with differences between the vocabularies of the different languages. In point of fact, there are at least four ways of transferring proper names from one language into another, all of which can be variously combined (Hermans, 1988, pp.13–14). A name can be copied, i.e.
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transferred in exactly the same form as that of the source language; it can be transcribed, i.e. transliterated or adapted on the levels of spelling and phonology; it can be substituted, i.e. replaced by an expression which bears no real relation to the original; or, when the name has some connection with the standard lexicon, it can be translated, i.e. rendered by an expression which seeks to be semantically “equivalent”. But as my scare-quotes hint, in the target language a real equivalent may be difficult to find, or to concoct. Then there are issues of pragmatics. The way a proper name operates in a fictional work and its translations depends on the relationship between the texts and their various kinds of readers. Even when a name is untranslated and read within the source culture, it may well make a different impact on an adult reader than on a child reader, for instance. When somehow or other transferred to another language and read within a correspondingly different culture, its range of effect is likely to be still more complicated. Crucial here is what readers themselves are able to bring to their understanding of it — what range of linguistic and other knowledge, what preconceptions, associations, values, and so on. Two of the pragmatic variables most likely to make a difference are precisely readers’ age and cultural background. As Hunt (1991, p.87) points out, children are developing readers; their approach to life and text stems from a different set of cultural standards than that of adult readers. So however much translators may aim to render a name by some “natural” parallel, the effect they achieve may at times be quite new, sometimes bearing little or no relation to the effect created by the original, and perhaps prompting readers to have thoughts and feelings which the original author would have found surprising — pleasantly or otherwise. Beyond a certain point, translators, whether they like it or not, probably have to accept that their own role calls for great sensitivity, good judgement, and creativity. This immediately opens the door to controversy, since a critic is likely to find some of their solutions less appropriate than others. According to Riitta Oittinen (1993), tranlators’ strongest obligation is towards their own readers. Although, as much as possible, they will want to convey the same feelings and associations as the source text, in Oittinen’s view exact equivalence is a secondary aim, and the most important thing is to arrive at a mode of expression in the target language which really works. My own view, by contrast, is that, especially as regards proper names, if the translation’s reader is to get anything like the same impression as the source text’s reader, then the ideal of semantic equivalence should not be abandoned too easily, and if a name also involves some special phonetic features, an attempt should be made to recapture these as well. As for cases where semantic equivalence and formal equivalence cannot be achieved simultaneously, much will depend on the function of the name in a larger context. It is important that the translation’s reader gets the same notion of the character as the source text’s reader. But it is also
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important that in both the source and target text the proper name should have the same function. According to the language philosopher J. R.Searle (1958, p.172), “proper names [in fiction] function not as descriptions, but as pegs on which to hang descriptions.” Searle seems to think that proper names are not descriptions, and that it is the context which describes a character. This is of course partly true, especially with conventional names such as “John” or “Alice”. But even some conventional names may arouse certain expectations, and with names which are both unusual and semantically loaded a description will already be suggested by the mere name itself. In Jansson, there are even some characters whose name tells us almost all there is to know about them. In such cases, it seems to me, the ideal of translation equivalence is especially important. The distinction between conventional and semantically loaded names has been discussed by Hermans (1988). The reason why ordinary surnames, and christian names such as John and Alice, are not very strongly loaded is partly that they will not be motivated by the personal characterstics of the people who bear them, and partly that they often do not consist of elements which already belong to, or are reminiscent of, the standard language. Loaded names, by contrast, are names which recall other words and thereby suggest meanings, some of which may be somehow appropriate to their bearer. Such names, says Hermans, can “range from faintly suggestive to overtly expressive names and nicknames” (Hermans, 1988, p.13). When Jansson introduces characters by name and then goes on to give a fuller picture of their appearance, behaviour and personality in her illustrations and in the continuing narrative, the appropriateness of their name to the total impression she gives of them is not always straightforward. In Jansson, names do tend to draw attention to themselves and are not simply neutral. Admittedly, some of her names are less surprising than others, so that if the characters to whom they are attached come across as fascinating and exciting this will be largely thanks to what they are reported as saying, doing or thinking in the rest of the text. But many other names certainly are suggestive, and usually rather amusingly so, and in ways that turn out to be truly appropriate to their bearers. Some names, again, though no less playful and suggestive, are rather more thought-provoking, in that their appropriateness to their bearers is not obvious, and readers may well find themselves asking, “How on earth did a character like this end up with a name like that?” Sometimes, too, it may be difficult to decide whether the name really conveys any “meaning” at all. For all one knows, it may actually be quite opaque. But much depends on who “one” is, for we inevitably come back to the pragmatic variables. The distinctions between the obvious and more problematic kinds of appropriateness will not be equally apparent to every kind of reader, and for this reason represent an even greater challenge to any translator.
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3.
Transparency
Some of Jansson’s names, then, are not particularly humorous, and do not convey particularly strong connotations at all. Instead, they are appropriate in a rather transparent and neutral way. This is where a reader’s main impressions of the characters concerned will depend on Jansson’s illustrations, and on the text’s descriptions of what they say and do and think. One such name is Trollkarlen. This is a standard Swedish noun, which would normally be rendered into English as The Wizard/Sorcerer/Magician, and with no necessary suggestion of anything frightening or sinister. Jansson’s English translator, however, calls this character The Hobgoblin, which suggests something like “evil troll”, “mischievous imp”, “ugly evil spirit”. In the Swedish original, the character does gain a rather disturbing aura, but mainly because of the way he is introduced. To quote the translation: “Good”, said Snufkin. “It’s a strange story, and I got it from the Magpie. Well, at the end of the world there lies a mountain so high it makes you dizzy even to think about it. It is as black as soot, as smooth as silk, terribly steep, and where there should be a bottom, there are only clouds. But high up on the peak stands the Hobgoblin’s House, and it looks like this.” And Snufkin drew a house in the sand. “Hasn’t it got any windows?” asked Sniff. “No”, said Snufkin, “and it hasn’t got a door either, because the Hobgoblin always goes home by air riding on a black panther. He goes out every night and collects rubies in his hat. […] The Hobgoblin can change himself into anything he likes, […] and then he can crawl under the ground and even down onto the sea bed where buried treasure lies.” (Jansson, [1958] 1990, pp.91–92)
From this passage it is clear that the character in the novel cannot be ascribed the same traits as an “ordinary” wizard, and by choosing hobgoblin rather than wizard the translator has simply translated on the basis of the descriptions in the source text. That a hobgoblin should be dressed in black, disappear as suddenly as he appears, and ride on a big black panther may seem almost natural. What is lost, however, is any immediate sense that this is a person who can perform magic tricks — a wizard’s main attribute. The translator has used a name which is more atmospherically loaded that Jansson’s original, and one which leaves out her more transparent term’s main implication.
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4. Playfully appropriate suggestiveness Then there are the names which are more strongly and humorously loaded, and which turn out to be appropriate to their bearers. Here there are a fair number of nonsense words or nonce words, in which the element which has the “funny” ring to it will tend to be the name’s most prominent feature, and carry a very strong connotative meaning. One example is connected with the Finland-Swedish verb rådda, which means something like “to make a mess, to be in a mess, to be mentally confused”. A mess or a state of mental confusion, similarly, is describable by the noun-adjective pair rådd-råddig. In the Moomin books there is a character named Rådd-djuret, which literally means “the mess/confusion animal”, but which the English tranlator translates as The Muddler, perhaps somewhat lessening the hint of mental chaos. The name Filifjonkan, by contrast, which belongs to certain female characters, does not have any meaning in standard Swedish usage in either Sweden or Finland. It is Jansson’s coinage. Yet a reader who knows Swedish fairly well is likely to associate it with a number of words which sound rather like -fjonka, and which seem to share among themselves one particular type of meaning: fjompa and fjompig, plus fjolla and fjollig. Both of these noun-adjective pairs are used mainly in reference to women, and mean roughly silliness/foolishness and silly/foolish. The English translation of Filifjonkan is Fillyjonk, which transcribes the name at the level of spelling, and which almost manages to achieve a degree of semantic appropriateness as well. The standard English word filly means a female foal, and in upper-class male slang could once upon a time refer to a lively young girl. But lively is not really the same thing as silly/foolish, so that readers of the translation will be jumping to different conclusions than readers of the original. The translator has been less concerned to replicate the name’s “meaning” than its form. Another amusing yet appropriate name is Hatifnattarna, a group name whose second element is derived from the verb fnatta, which means something like “to flutter madly around”. The name strongly suggests something about the behaviour of its bearers, and especially about their style of movement, a suggestion which is further developed by passages of description. What do these white creature do? — “ de små vandrarna som ständigt färdas över jorden utan att stanna nånstans, drivna av längtan och oro” (1946, p.44). (Translation: they “are for ever wandering restlessly from place to place in their aimless quest for nobody knows what” (1951, pp.52–3)). Such creatures “har ingen ro i sig. Jämt på resa nånstans. Bara far och far och säger aldrig ett ord” ([1950] 1961, p.53). (Translation: have “[n]o peace, no rest. Always travelling. Travel and travel without a word.” ([1952] 1969, p.50)). The proper name and the descriptive passages do not exactly cover the same meaning, since the descriptions add the idea that the reason why these beings flutter madly around is that they lack the patience to stay still in any one place. But clearly, this is
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not exactly a contradiction, and thanks to the link with standard Swedish, the connotations of a particular kind of physical movement are especially strong. As for hati-, the name’s first element, there is an obvious suggestion of hatt, the Swedish word for “hat”, and Jansson’s illustrations, together with some further descriptive passages, clearly narrow this down to hatt in the standard Swedish sense of “the top part of a mushroom”. The characters carrying the name resemble small snowballlike mushrooms, and are also referred to as such; they seem to grow in groups of white blobs on a neatly mown lawn (1955, p.86). The English translation, however, is a transcription of their name as Hattifatteners, which connotes something completely different. Its most prominent suggestion is roughly “people or beings who make something or sombody fat”, which bears no meaningful relation to any peculiarity of the characters it describes. English idiom does not have such an obvious connection between the idea of a hat and the idea of a mushroom, and the characters’ style of movement is not suggested at all. There are merely the ongoing text’s descriptive passages to say that these characters travel all the time because they are restless. Here again, then, the translator has saved the form of the name, but at the sacrifice of connotation. Another possibility would have been to use the English verb flutter. Not only that, but something could surely have been done with fungus. In terms of both form and content, *Fungiflutterers would have been a creative compromise. To take one last example of this typically Janssonesque kind, there is the name Hemulen. It so happens that hemul does actually exist as a Swedish noun, but is extremely limited in meaning, and largely confined to legal language, particularly to the expression det finns hemul för [detta], meaning “there is good authority/warrant for [this]”. There is also the very rare adjective ohemul, meaning “unwarranted, unjustified, improper, incorrect”. For a reader who is aware of this, Jansson’s invented name would have a clear appropriateness, in that the group of characters to whom it applies are very orderly and law-abiding. Such a reader would also appreciate the humour of Jansson’s using the negating prefix o- to make the adjective ohemul as if it was a coinage deriving from the name of the characters (rather than the other way round), and would also enjoy the adjective överhemul (= “super-correct”), which probably really is a coinage ([1958] 1990, pp.64, 96, 112). As for the English translation, Hemulen is simply copied, preceded by the definite adjective: the Hemulen. And the adjectives become un-Hemulenish and superHemulenish. This is as true as possible to the form, obviously, but the hints of meaning are quite lost. The translator may or may not have considered the possibility of *the Warranted, *un-Warranted, and *super-Warranted, but these solutions would perhaps have lost too much of the original’s sound effects, and for Anglophone readers an unconventional and totally opaque name such as Hemulen is in any case not without its charm. As a peg on which to hang meanings as they gradually emerge from the story, it has its own memorability.
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5.
Appropriateness versus playfulness
Then there are the names which are playfully suggestive, but in ways which do not obviously fit their bearer. One of the strangest examples is Snusmumriken. In form, this name is the same as an existing Swedish compound, derived from the noun snus, meaning “snuff”, and the noun mumrik, meaning something like “old codger”. Snusmumrik and mumrik can both mean just “old codger”, except that snusmumrik means roughly “an old codger who uses snuff”, or more generally just “an old bore”. Since snuff-taking is a practice not universally admired, and since snus is also phonetically close to the Swedish words for “dirt” and “dirty” (snusk, snuskig), the old man conjured up by snusmumrik may even be rather disgusting. Leaving aside this unpleasant connotation for the moment, the name is at least in certain other respects fairly well motivated. The character who bears it is not a boring or nasty old man, but he is certainly something of a vagabond, and is also older — and wiser — than any other character, and actually rather a hermit. His greatest pleasure is to sit by himself, and he does not talk without due cause. His distinctive attributes include his old green suit, his old green hat, his pipe, and his mouth-organ: “He was quite happy wearing the old suit he had had since he was born (nobody knows where and when that happened), and the only possession he didn’t give away was his mouth-organ” ([1958] 1990, p.21). These details, backed up by Jansson’s own book illustrations, probably give most readers a strong enough hold on the character, and, to return to pragmatics, his name’s perjorative connotations may actually not register with many readers, including even many adults, since in standard Swedish smusmumriken is now virtually obsolete. Yet if the unpleasant associations do come across, then since this character is actually a very pleasant person, the proper name becomes rather confusing, in a playful way which the English translator does nothing to capture. Snusmumriken’s English name is Snufkin. Here the noun snus is translated to “snuff”, and mumrik becomes the particle -kin, which is very common in English children’s stories, but which does not convey suggestions of age, let alone derogatory ones. On the contrary, -kin usually suggests diminutive size and immature years, and in a way that is unreservedly pleasant, and even rather quaint and sentimental. Another difference is that the translation does not try to convey Jansson’s variation between Snusmumriken and just plain Mumrik, which serves as a kind of nickname ([1948] 1992, pp.62, 96). In the English translation, the character is always called Snufkin, which because of the diminutive particle almost sounds like a nickname already. Another example would be the name Snorkfröken, translated into English as Snork Maiden. The link to the lexicon is quite obvious to the source text reader, because fröken really is the Swedish word for “Miss” (as in Miss Marple) or “maiden”, and snork immediately associates to the Swedish adjective snorkig, meaning something like “snooty”. Yet although very clearly invoked, the association with
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snootiness is not really appropriate for this particular character, and in the Moomin books as a whole the meaning of snork is merely something like “pertaining to the Snorks”. In the English translation, the first part of the character’s Swedish name, “Snork”, is simply copied, so that the English word Snork means the same as Jansson’s Swedish one: “pertaining to the Snorks”. What the translation again fails to convey is anything corresponding to Jansson’s play with a dictionary meaning in the standard language. Given the playful inappropriateness of her nod towards snorkig, it would be unfair to say that the English translation is simply inadequate. Yet playfulness is, after all, a bonus, and can even be taken here as Jansson’s wink to the reader behind the character’s back. The effect is something like: “‘Snorkig’ by name but not by nature”. If the English translator had gone in for *Snoot Maiden or even *Snob Maiden, something of this might still have come across. Then there is the name Snorken, also copied into English as “the Snork”. On the level of form, Snorken is obviously derived from snorkig, but as with Snorkfröken, the name is not really appropriate for the character. Taken together, Snorken and Snorkfröken, merely hint at the characters’ kinship (as do also the names My and Mymlan). The specific characteristics of the Snorks are explained to Moomintroll by Snufkin: “They must be the same family as you I should think, because they look the same, except that they aren’t often white. They can be any colour in the world (like an Easter egg), and they change colour when they get upset” (1951, p.78). But no such features could have been predicted from a knowledge of the name’s etymology. As a name, Snorken is a kind of little joke, which in the English translation is quite lost, but which *The Snoot might have captured.
6. Mistranslations Even out of context, many of Jansson’s proper names amuse and tease. Used in a passage of continuous narrative, and especially when the related adjectives are drawn in, the effects are even more richly humorous. Take this, for instance: Maka på dig, sa hemulen. Det har regnat in i min säng. Värst för dig själv, sa snorken och vände sig på andra sidan. Därför tänkte jag sova i din grop, förklarade hemulen. Var inte snorkig nu. Men snorken bara morrade lite och sov vidare. Då fylldes hemulens hjärta av hämndlust och han grävde en kanal i sanden mellan sin egen sovgrop och snorkens. Det där var ohemult, sa snorken och satte sig upp i sin våta filt. (Jansson, [1948] 1992, p.94)
Here the Hemulen complains that it has rained into his bed, and asks the Snork to move over and let him sleep in his (the Snork’s) own hole in the sand. He accompanies this request or command with the exhortation, “Var inte snorkig nu” (=
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“Don’t be snorkig [standoffish-snooty/Snorkish] now”.) When the Snork just growls and goes on sleeping, the Hemulen gets revenge by digging a trench between his own, waterlogged hole in the sand and the Snork’s dry hole. “That was ohemult [= unwarranted/un-Hemulenish]”, the Snork said, and sat up in his wet blanket. As already noted, the English translator has decided that any such puns on snorkig and ohemult are less worth having than the proper names’ actual forms. And even though *the Snob or *the Snoot would have been close in both sound and sense to Snorken, the English translator’s the Snork can at least be defended on grounds of greater phonetic fidelity. What certainly is much harder to defend, I feel, is the pursuit of phonetic fidelity when translating, not the proper nouns themselves, but the related adjectives. The translator’s rendering of the passage just quoted is as follows: “Look!” said the Hemulen, “it has rained in my bed.” “Bad luck”, said the Snork, and turned over on his other side. “So I think I shall sleep in your hole”, announced the Hemulen. “No snoring now!” But the Snork only grunted a little and slept on. Then the Hemulen’s heart was filled with a desire for revenge, and he dug a trench between his own sand-hole and the Snork’s. “That was most un-Hemulenish!” said the Snork, sitting up in his wet blanket. (Jansson, [1958] 1990, p.96)
In sound, “No snoring now!” is marginally closer to “Var inte snorkig nu!” than “Don’t be snooty now!” would have been. But it has nothing at all to do with the meaning of what Jansson has written, and the phonetic quasi-fidelity can hardly justify the semantic infidelity. To point out that the Swedish verb for “to snore” is snarka, and to suggest that Jansson might have invented a nonce-adjective *snarkig (*snore-y/snore-ish) does not help matters. Yet the English translator’s sacrifice of meaning for sound is not a matter of sustained principle. There are cases where both sense and sound go by the board. The names Tofslan and Vifslan, for instance, are translated as Thingumy and Bob. The phonetic discrepancies are obvious enough, but the semantics are more complicated. Tofslan suggests tofs, which means “tuft”, while Vifslan suggests vifta, the verb meaning “to wave”, connotations which Jansson’s illustrations and ongoing descriptions of these characters support. As so often, the English translation makes no attempt to catch the semantic loadedness. Similarly, the translator does not catch the fact that, in the Swedish original, these two characters’ distinctive mode of speech is reminiscent of their actual names: to various words they tend to add on the syllable -sla-. But even more serious here is that the English renderings are gender-specific. It would be unusual for a girl to have the nickname Thingumy, and Bob, unlike Bobbie, can only refer to a boy. In Swedish, names ending in -a/-an more often belong to girls, though they are sometimes also boys’ names. In point of fact, biographical research on Jansson has revealed that Tofslan and Vifslan allude to Jansson herself and to one of her female friends, though this is something which
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many readers will not know. The issue here is that in Jansson’s text as a whole the sex of Tofslan and Vifslan is left open. This significantly affects a reader’s overall impression of the story she is telling.
7.
Child/adult, native/non-native
Names like Snusmumriken and Hemulen will be semantically loaded for a reader with a well developed command of Swedish. For a Swedish-speaking child, they will be opaque. Snufkin will be semantically loaded for both younger and older native speakers of English. But the younger ones may get more out of the -kin than the Snuf-, and neither grouping will get the same things as some adult Swedish-speaking readers from Snusmumriken. And for both adult and child readers who know no Swedish, the Hemulen will be as opaque as Hemulen to a Swedish-speaking child. Given the double nature of the problem — the differences between the vocabularies of the different languages, and the influence of these pragmatic variables —, one might well ask whether it is even remotely possible for several different groupings of readers to receive more or less one and the same impression from even a single Jansson name. Are there, or are there not, cases in which Swedish-speaking child-readers and Swedish-speaking adult readers of the original text, and English-speaking child-readers and English-speaking adult readers of the English translation, are at all likely to end up with roughly the same idea? Well, sometimes Swedish and English are fairly close to each other. So a translator, even by simply copying a name, may be able to achieve an effect very similar to that of the original. One example is the name Sniff. In both English and Swedish, sniff onomatopoeically imitates the noise made by somebody sniffing. In Swedish it does not, as in English, occur as an ordinary word. But it does recall words whose meaning is fairly closely related: snuva, meaning “head cold”, and snyfta, meaning “to sob/to simper”. In the first Moomin book, the character concerned here is actually referred to as “the little creep”. The name Sniff is used from the second book onwards, and it harmonizes fairly well with his sobbing and lamenting. Somewhat piteous, timid, and childish, Sniff complains about his own smallness, and uses it as his excuse when he is too bored to do something, or when things go wrong (Jones, 1984, pp.22, 39–40). The name could also allude more directly to his physical appearance, and particularly to his nose, which Jansson’s illustrations make very prominent. In this case, then, the associations conveyed by the name are closely connected to the character’s actual behaviour and physique, and the translation and the original can be said to be in agreement. What is more, a reader of any age is likely to get more or less the same impression from both. Another example is the name Mårran. This suggests the Swedish noun-verb pair morr and morra, meaning “growl/snarl” and “to growl/to snarl”, in which the
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m- can be sounded, and the -rr- trilled, in ways which are felt to be onomatopoeic — in reference to, say, the noise made by a large and angrily suspicious dog. In Jansson’s stories, the character carrying this name does not actually growl at the other characters, but is always thought to be the source of a distant howling they sometimes hear. In trying to suggest the nature of this strange creature to the Hemulen, Bob bares his teeth, draws himself up to his full height, and gives an intense stare. But even before this display, the Hemulen has already started to tremble, just because of the creature’s name, the awesomeness of which would be similarly quite apparent to a Swedish-speaking reader of any age. Here the English translator also goes in for onomatopoeia, not through a phonetic copying of the Swedish word, however, but through a coinage which is onomatopoeic in English: the Groke. As well as suggesting an unnerving sound, this relates to other words by which such sounds can be described: groan, growl, croak, crow. Here, then, we can perhaps credit the translator with a fairly reasonable equivalent, which will again be well understood by both children and adults. The only problem is that Mårran has that -an suffix, which often, though not always, indicates feminine gender. The Groke, by contrast, will perhaps come across as male, or as a simply neutral sort of monster. As so often, it all depends on who “one” is. Jansson herself is obviously aware that her various names will strike different categories of readers in different ways. It is clearly part of her intention that one and the same book should be, paradoxically, at least two books at once. The plurality of her implied reader, which can also be seen in the ambiguity of the names, accounts for her popularity with both children and adults. But inevitably, there are things quite beyond an author’s own control. Some real readers, in what they bring to a text, will simply be very different from any aspect of its implied reader, and one such differently constituted real reader may also be the person entrusted with the job of translating it into some other language. In turn, the translator creates the implied reader anew, inevitably a somewhat different one from the author’s own implied reader, and the translation’s real readers will resemble this new implied reader to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their own age and other circumstances. And although all human beings are capable of acts of imaginative empathy, so that they can indeed communicate with people who are unlike themselves, they can nevertheless not exceed the limits of their own understanding. Readers can read Jansson, and can read translations of her, and can thereby greatly enjoy themselves. But the number of readers who receive one and the same impression of even her proper names will probably be limited. Unless, of course, scholars and critics are able to intervene in the role of mediatior.
Intertextualities, continued
References Aejmelaeus, S. (1994). Kun lyhdyt syttyvät. Tove Jansson ja muumimaailma. [With a summary in English: When the lanterns are lit — Tove Jansson and Moominworld]. Suomen Nuorisokirjallisuuden Instituutin Julkaisuja 18. Baldick, C. ([1990] 1996). The concise Oxford dictionary of literary terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bassnett, S. ([1980] 1994). Translation studies. London: Routledge. Connolly, P. T. (1995). Winnie-the-Pooh and the House at Pooh Corner. Recovering Arcadia. New York: Twayne. Docherty, T. (1983). Reading (absent) character: Towards a characterization in fiction. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Eliot, T.S. ([1920] 1951). Philip Massinger. In T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (pp.205–20). London: Faber. Hermans, T. (1988). On translating proper names, with reference to De Witte and Max Havelaar. In M. Wintle and P. Vincent (Eds.), Modern Dutch studies: Essays in honour of Peter King (pp.11–24). London: Athlone. Hunt, P. (1991). Criticism, theory, and children’s literature. Oxford: Blackwell. Hunt, Peter. 1992. Winnie-the-Pooh and domestic fantasy. In D. Butts (Ed.), Stories and society. Children’s literature in its social context (pp.112–125). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jansson, T.(1946). Kometjakten. Esbo: Schildt. Jansson, T. (1951). Comet in Moominland (trans. E. Portch). London: Benn. Jansson, T. ([1958] 1990). Finn Family Moomintroll (trans.E. Portch). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jansson, T. (1955). Moominsummer Madness (trans. T. Warburton). London, Benn. Jansson, T. ([1950] 1961). Muminpappans bravader skrivna av honom själv. Helsingfors: Schildt. Jansson, T. ([1952] 1969). The exploits of Moominpappa (trans. T. Warburton). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jansson, T. ([1948] 1992). Trollkarlens hatt. Esbo: Schildt. Jones, W. G. (1984). Vägen från Mumindalen (trans. T. Warburton). Hangö: Schildt. [Original title: Tove Jansson: Moominvalley and beyond, 1984] Klingberg, G. (1978). Teori, arbetsbregrepp och terminologi i barnlitteraturforskningen. (Studies published by the Swedish institute for Children’s Books, 9). In G. Klingberg (Ed.), Children’s books in translation (pp.33–43). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Klingberg, G. (1986). Children’s literature in the hands of the translators. Lund: CWK: Gleerup. Koskinen, A. (1984). Kulttuurikonteksti käännösongelmana: Günther Grassin Kampela suomalaisissa vesissä. Sananjalka 26 (Suomen Kielen Seuran Vuosikirja) (pp.61–79). Turku: Suomen Kielen Seura. Newmark, P. (1988). A textbook of translation. London: Prentice Hall. Nida, E. A. and Taber, C. R. (1969). The theory and practice of translation. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Nikolajeva, M. (1996). Children’s literature comes of age: Towards a new aesthetic. New York: Garland. Nikula, K. (1994). Översättning av namn: Bo Carpelans Urwind. LSP and Theory of Translation: 14th VAKKI Symposium (pp.210–224). Vaasa, Vaasan yliopisto. Oittinen, R. (1993). I am me — I am other: On the dialogics of translating for children. Vammala: Vammalan kirjapaino. Schogt, H. (1988). Linguistics, literary analysis, and literary translation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Searle, J. R. (1958). Proper names. Mind, 67, 166–173. Stephens, J. (1992). Language and ideology in children’s fiction. London: Longman.
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AUTHOR "Maria Nikolajeva"
TITLE "The verbal and the visual"
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Chapter 5
The verbal and the visual The picturebook as a medium Maria Nikolajeva
1.
A typology of the verbal-visual relationship
In most standard textbooks on children’s literature, picturebooks are treated as a genre, alongside fairy tales, fantasy, adventure, domestic stories, and animal stories. Yet even the most cursory glance at the kind of texts discussed in such chapters reveals that picturebooks encompass all of these genres. Many picturebooks are based on classical and contemporary fairy tales. One of the best-known picturebooks of all, Where the Wild Things are (1963), by Maurice Sendak, has each and every feature we expect to find in fantasy. The Alfie Atkins books by the Swedish writer Gunilla Bergström are domestic stories. And animal-story picturebooks exist in superabundance. Obviously, then, picturebooks cannot be distinguished from other kinds of children’s literature simply on the basis of genre. The unique character of picturebooks as an art form derives from their combination of two levels of communication, the verbal and the visual. In this, picturebooks are a synthetic medium, like theatre or film, where the overall meaning is assembled by the receiver in the interaction between the different communicative means. Unlike theatre or film, picturebooks are discontinuous and have no fixed duration. Unlike theater, but similar to film, picturebooks are twodimensional. Unlike both theatre and film, picturebooks do not presuppose oral communication, although they certainly can be — and often are — read aloud. The actual reader is not the sender in the communicative process, however, but simultaneously a performer, like an actor in theatre or film, and a receiver or coreceiver, a co-reader. Many picturebooks take this adult co-receiver into consideration to a far greater extent than children’s novels do. The real senders, the creators of picturebooks, seem to realize that they may well have a dual audience. Making use of semiotic terminology, we can say that picturebooks communicate by means of two separate sets of signs, the iconic and the conventional. Iconic, or representational signs are those in which the signifier and the signified are related through common qualities, that is, where the sign is a direct representation
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of its signified (e.g. a picture of a printer on a computer menu). In most cases, we do not need special knowledge to understand a simple icon. The signifiers in conventional signs, on the other hand, have no direct relation with their signifieds. The word “print” in a menu only conveys a meaning if we possess the code, that is, if we know what the letters stand for, can put the letters together to produce a word, and understand what the words stand for. Conventional signs are based on a convention, an agreement between the bearers of a particular language, both natural languages and others, such as gestures, dress code, or emblems. For anyone outside the given community, conventional signs do not carry any meaning, or at best the meaning is ambivalent. Both conventional and iconic signs have existed in human culture from the beginning, and have given rise to two parallel types of communication, the verbal and the visual. However, a growing number of art forms and media make use of both the verbal and the visual in various combinations: from Chinese scrolls and Egyptian mural paintings, to theatre, cinema, video, comics — and picturebooks. Pictures in picturebooks are complex iconic signs, and words in picturebooks are complex conventional signs. But in both cases, the basic relation between the signifier and the signified works in the same way as usual. The function of pictures, as iconic signs, is to describe or represent. The function of words, as conventional signs, is primarily to narrate. Conventional signs are often linear (in our own culture, for instance, we read left to right), while iconic signs are non-linear and do not give us direct instruction about how to read them. In a picturebook, the tension between the two functions creates unlimited possibilities for interaction between word and image. For the study of picturebooks, several of the available theories of literature and communication have special relevance. Take, for instance, reader-response theory (e.g. Iser, 1974, 1978), with its central notion of textual gaps. Both words and images in picturebooks can stimulate readers to activate their previous knowledge, experience and expectations, and there may well be infinite possibilities for wordimage interaction. The verbal text has its gaps, and the visual text has its gaps, different from those of the verbal text. Words and images can fill each other’s gaps, wholly or partially. But they can also leave gaps for the reader-viewer to fill. Both words and images can be evocative in their own manner, and independently of each other. Reader-oriented semiotics (e.g Culler, 1975; Eco, 1979), closely related to reader-response theory, claims that in order to be able to decode messages in literary texts, receivers must possess literary competence. While classical readerresponse models ascribe to readers an automatic or intuitive ability to extract meaning from texts, semiotic models presuppose that the reader is familiar with the set of codes used by the sender, and also that literary competence can be trained. Naturally, some simple messages in picturebooks can be understood without any special knowledge. But in order to decode more complex texts, we must be trained
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in a number of conventions, such as, for instance, the special role of paratexts (covers, endpapers, title pages), layout, direction of reading, page-turning, certain graphic codes, and so on. Still another theoretical model can be borrowed from hermeneutics. Hermeneutic analysis starts with the whole or the general, proceeds to look at details, goes back to the general with a better understanding, and thence back to the details, and so on, in an eternal circle, known as the hermeneutic circle. In a picturebook, the whole is assembled by the reader through an exploration of the verbal and the visual details. Whichever we start with, the verbal or the visual, it creates expectations for the other, which in turn provides new experience and new expectations. The reader turns from verbal to visual and back again, in an ever-expanding concatenation of understanding. Each new re-reading of either words or pictures creates better prerequisites for an adequate interpretation of the whole. This is something children presumably know by intuition. Why otherwise would they demand that the same book be read aloud to them over and over again? Actually, what they hear is never the same book twice, since they enter more and more deeply into its meaning. Too often adults have lost the ability to read picturebooks in this way, because we ignore the whole and think that the illustrations are merely decorative. This most probably has to do with our society’s prioritization of communication that is verbal, and of written communication especially, even if, for generations raised on television and computers, the situation is changing. As already mentioned, most general studies of children’s literature include a chapter on picturebooks. And there are also a number of studies which concentrate on picturebooks alone. Few if any of these have focussed on the picturebook’s true dynamics — on how the text and image, the two different forms of communication, work together to create a form unlike any other. More often, they discuss picturebooks as educational vehicles, for instance within processes of socialization and language acquisition (e.g. Stewig, 1995; Kiefer, 1995; Spitz, 1999). Another line of enquiry examines picturebooks as objects for art history, exploring topics such as design and technique, in which connection the only level taken into account is the visual (Klemin, 1966; Gianciolo, 1970). Then there are a number of historical and international surveys, which focus on thematic and stylistic diversity. Here each illustrator tends to be represented by just a single picture, so that the crucially sequential nature of picturebooks is ignored; individual pictures are uprooted from their natural context and considered in total isolation from the narrative text (Hürlimann, 1968; Bader, 1976; Feaver, 1977). At the opposite extreme, picturebooks are sometimes treated as an integral part of children’s fiction, by critics employing a purely literary approach, discussing themes, issues, ideology, or gender structures, and either treating the pictures as a matter of secondary importance or ignoring them altogether (e.g. the chapter on picturebooks in Stephens, 1992).
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For some time now, it is true, a change has been under way. Critics such as Joseph Schwarcz (1982, 1991), William Moebius (1986), Perry Nodelman (1988), Jane Doonan (1993), Clare Bradford (1993) and Lawrence Sipe (1998) have begun to make various aspects of word-image interaction a central focus. As a result, some helpful terms have come into circulation: “iconotext” (Hallberg, 1982), “imagetext” (Mitchell, 1994), and “synergy” (Sipe, 1998). Yet while these terms have undoubtedly drawn attention to the complexity of the word-image relationship, there has still been no full recognition, let alone a systematic exploration, of picturebooks’ sheer range and variety of communication. In How picturebooks work (2001), on which this present chapter is largely based, Carole Scott and I have now tried to remedy the situation. Examining a broad spectrum of word-image interaction, we identify a number of ways picturebooks can communicate with readers. In symmetrical interaction, for instance, words and pictures basically tell the same story, repeating what is essentially the same information in the two different forms of communication. By contrast, when words and pictures fill each other’s gaps and thus compensate for each other’s insufficiencies, the dynamic becomes complementary. In enhancing interaction, pictures substantially amplify the meaning of the words, or occasionally the words expand the picture, so that different information in the two modes of communication produces a more complex dynamic. Depending on the degree of different information presented, a counterpointing dynamic can also develop, where words and images collaborate to communicate meanings beyond the scope of either mode alone. An extreme form of counterpoint, finally, is apparently contradictory interaction, where words and pictures create an interesting but often ambiguous imbalance in meaning, so challenging readers to mediate between the words and pictures in order to establish a full understanding of what is being presented. Several picturebook studies (Gregersen, 1974; Hallberg, 1982; Golden, 1990; Rhedin, 1993) have attempted a typology of picturebooks, but have not got far beyond the basic distinction between illustrated books (where the words carry the primary narrative and the pictures are supportive or decorative) and books in which the visual and the verbal aspects are both essential for full communication. In How picturebooks work, we identify this second category by the single word “picturebooks”, as quite separate from other kinds of books with pictures. While we agree that the distinction between the two categories of “illustrated books” and “picturebooks” is crucial, we think that further distinctions are also necessary. After all, the spectrum of word-picture dynamic to be described stretches all the way from verbal narratives illustrated by one or two pictures to, at the opposite extreme, picturebooks with very few words indeed. In a predominantly verbal narrative, pictures are usually subordinated to the words. A number of very significant children’s stories (Bible stories, folktales, Perrault’s, the Grimms’ or Andersen’s tales) have been illustrated by different
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artists, who may impart interpretations which are different from, and sometimes even inappropriate to the impression conveyed by the text. But in a way this is not too serious, since the verbal narrative story will remain basically the same, and can still be read without looking at the pictures. Even if readers have preferences for certain illustrations, perhaps because they have grown up with them, the text is not dependent on illustrations to convey its essential message. At the other end of the word-picture spectrum is the predominantly pictorial narrative, for instance wordless picturebooks. In important ways, however, these can vary in complexity. Jan Ormerod’s Sunshine (1981) and Moonlight (1982) are very simple stories, where all of the individual frames — between two and ten on each spread — depict consecutive moments with almost no temporal ellipses between them. They are easy to follow, with no substantial gaps in the story to be filled in through the reader’s own imagination. Tord Nygren’s The Red Thread (1987), with its highly sophisticated self-conscious focus on the nature of the narrative itself, offers a clear contrast to this, for it challenges the reader to create a narrative which successfully bridges the gaps between the wide variety of pictures presented. Most picturebooks belong to three main categories: those which depend on symmetrical word-image relationships, where verbal text and illustrations offer basically the same information in different modes; those which present word-image relationships which are complementary; and those where the relationships are enhancing. In these categories there are many classics and award-winners which deserve special notice for their themes, styles, exciting design, or educational values: The Little House (1942) by Virginia Lee Burton, the Babar books (from 1931 onwards) by Jean de Brunhoff, Curious George (from 1941 onwards) by H. A. Rey, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (1969) by William Steig, the Frances books (from 1964 onwards) by Russell and Lillian Hoban, or the Frog and Toad books (from 1970 onwards) by Arnold Lobel. If words and images completely fill each other’s gaps, then readers may be somewhat passivized. Nothing is left to their own imagination, and the same is true if the gaps are identical in words and images, or if there are no gaps at all. But as soon as words and images provide alternative information or somehow contradict each other, the number of possible readings and interpretations begins to multiply. Pat Hutchins’ Rosie’s Walk (1968), David McKee’s Not now, Bernard (1980) and I hate my teddy bear (1982), and John Burningham’s Come away from the water, Shirley (1977) are often mentioned as cases where words and pictures tell two completely different stories. Among the contemporary picturebook creators who apply such counterpointing very consciously and consistently are Anthony Browne, Babette Cole and Satoshi Kitamura. Their kind of work is especially stimulating, precisely because they elicit many possible interpretations and engage the reader’s imagination. See for instance our interpretation (in Nikolajeva and Scott, 2000) of the ironic counterpoint in Cole’s Princess Smartypants and Kitamura’s Lily takes a walk.
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Having thus explored the typological potential of the image-word relationship, we can now ask: How do the different kinds of relationship — symmetry, complementarity, enhancement, counterpoint, and apparent contradiction — affect various aspects of picturebook narrative? Here I shall specially concentrate on setting, characterization, point of view, temporality and modality. I cannot deal with every kind of book with pictures, since there are some which have a quite specific aesthetics of their own: ABC-books and picture dictionaries, illustrated poetry, non-fiction, comics, and photographic books. But apart from these exceptions, my observations will, I hope, have a pretty broad range of application.
2.
Setting
The setting of a picturebook establishes the situation and the nature of the world in which the events of the story take place. At the simplest level, it communicates a sense of time and place for the actions depicted. This is achieved through a more or less detailed description of exterior or interior scenes. As in a novel, so in a picturebook, the settings can be either integral or backdrop. An integral setting is an essential part of the plot, in that the story could not take place in any other setting. For instance, picturebooks set in the past demand a setting that is fairly realistic and authentic. Eloise (1955), by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight, takes place at the Plaza Hotel, and this setting is a prerequisite for the story itself. In Madeline (1939), by Ludwig Bemelmans, similarly, Paris is an indispensable part of the story. Backdrop settings, by contrast, are not essential for the plot, but they may have other functions. Interiors can tell us something about the time of action through authentic period details. They can also reflect the characters’ social status. Think only of the turn-of-the-century middle-class homes in Elsa Beskow’s Aunt Green, Aunt Brown and Aunt Lavender (1918). Exterior scenes can reflect the change of seasons (e.g. in Beskow’s The Children of the Forest, 1910), create an atmosphere, such as the rural idyll in many of Beskow’s or Beatrix Potter’s picturebooks, anchor the story in an exotic country (Curious George and Babar), or in a realm that is entirely imaginary (Where the Wild Things are). Other functions that picturebook settings may have include establishing the work’s genre expectations, as do the fairy-tale forests in Beskow’s The Children of the Forest and Peter’s Adventures in the Blueberry Land (1901), for instance. Everyday settings in Gunilla Wolde’s Thomas and Betsy books, Alfie Atkins, Barbro Lindgren’s and Eva Eriksson’s The Wild Baby books (1980–1985), or the Frances books make us expect a certain type of story, quite irrespective of whether the characters are anthropomorphic animals or ordinary children. A sudden and unexpected change of setting, as for instance in Tove Jansson’s The Dangerous
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Journey (1977) or Anthony Browne’s The Tunnel (1989), can make us assess the genre as fantasy, based on the passage from an ordinary world into a world of magic. For many stories with a historical dimension, the correct and careful delineation of setting is both necessary and educational. The details of the setting can offer information about places and historical epochs which go far beyond the young reader’s experience, and do so in a subtle, non-intrusive manner which facilitates an understanding of manners, values, and the action’s general cultural environment. Settings can also evoke nostalgic feelings, as do the idyllic landscapes of Beatrix Potter, and the contrast between the country idyll and an urban setting can even communicate ideological messages, as in The Little House. Visual descriptions of setting play an essential role in picturebooks with ethnic contents, again informing readers about the culture within which the story takes place: Australian Aborigine, Native American, African, Saami, and so on. The visual style of setting can sensitize the reader’s emotional response to a particular register (grotesque, nostalgic, everyday). And last but not least, setting can be apprehended symbolically. For instance, a doll’s house may symbolize happy childhood, or a forest may symbolize fears and danger. Picturebook settings can also contribute to characterization. Characters may be depicted within certain settings, for instance always indoors or always outdoors. Characters’ rooms may reflect their traits (tidy or slovenly, empty or full of objects). In Where the Wild Things are, Max’s bleak room, which has no toys, pictures or other decorations, and which features an disproportionately large bed, may tell more about his mother than about himself. It may also suggest the boy’s inner, subjective view of the room, which in the plot has the function of prison. Settings can also be an essential part of the plot development. Contrasts or dramatic changes of setting may not only influence genre expectation, but reflect the dynamics of events. Contrasting settings can for instance enhance thematic polarities, such as home-away, urban-pastoral, security-danger. So settings can clarify the central conflict of the book, not least in plots where the characters are removed from their normal settings, which can just as easily happen in realistic plots as in fantasy. By using an “extreme” setting — which can vary from war or some other disaster to something as innocent as sleeping over in an unfamiliar place — picturebook authors can suggest how characters are entering on a process of maturation, which would perhaps be less plausible in a normal situation. In this way setting can become a catalyst to the plot, and in certain very unusual picturebooks setting is almost all there is. Goodnight, Moon (1947), by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, is a picturebook which has practically only settings and no real characters. While most of these general functions of setting are much the same for picturebooks as for novels, the text-image interaction in picturebooks creates a variety of possibilities. In a picturebook, setting can be conveyed by words, by
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pictures, or both. The visual text of a picturebook is naturally well suited to the description of spatial dimensions, including both indoor scenes and landscape, and the spatial relations of figures and objects — their relative size, position, and so on. Like characterization, setting demonstrates the difference between communication by diegesis (telling) and communication by mimesis (showing). While words can only describe space, pictures can actually show it, doing so more effectively and often more efficiently. According to narrative theory, a description is one of the signs of the narrator’s presence in the text. The verbal narrator forces the reader to “see” certain details of the setting, while ignoring others. Visual representation of setting is “non-narrated”, and therefore non-manipulative, allowing a considerable freedom of interpretation from the reader, even if a picturebook-maker obviously chooses what to illustrate, and how to go about it. It is commonly believed that young readers dislike descriptions and even skip them altogether. So in novels for children, verbal descriptions of setting are often kept to a minimum. In a picturebook, with its limited scope for verbal text, verbal descriptions of setting are either totally absent or negligible. The pictorial description, by contrast, has unlimited possibilities. Even for the visual setting, however, there is a wide spectrum of solutions, ranging from no setting at all, either verbal or pictorial (in books which depict only the characters and the occasional objects necessary for the plot development), to a fully developed setting, which may be predominantly visual, predominantly verbal, or any kind of mixture of the two. Since even books involving very little setting may imply at least some environmental connection, for example characters in certain kinds of dress, or objects that belong either indoors or outdoors, the options for text-picture interaction are multiple and sophisticated. In the simplest, most redundant case, pictures and words replicate each other, though this occurs only in very reduced settings, where words indeed describe all of the objects in the picture, including shape, colour, and relative positions. In point of fact, it is not unusual for picturebooks to employ socalled negative space, i.e. empty areas around characters and objects. But even minimal settings can give hints about the epoch, culture or season, and can include details which indicate indoor or outdoor situations, and so on. More frequently, the pictures will expand on what the text describes. But they may also go far beyond this, so that the entire setting is conveyed visually rather than verbally. Picturebooks can make use of a variety of pictorial solutions in the depiction of setting, for instance panoramic views (especially on the so-called establishing pages), long shots, middle-distance shots, close-ups or multiple scenes (that is, two or more different settings on the same spread or page). There may also be contrasting settings on verso (left-hand page) and recto (right-hand page).
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3.
Characterization
When used in picturebooks, some of the most common devices of characterization have a new kind of potential. For instance, external description can be both verbal and visual, and these two aspects can either confirm or contradict each other. Most often, verbal external description is omitted in picturebooks, and description is purely visual, and thereby more efficient. Duplicating the description in words might only create redundancy and diminish the characterization’s impact, as when in Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) the words inform us that Peter’s jacket was blue, even though we can clearly see this from the pictures. In some picturebooks, it is only thanks to the pictures that we know the character is a donkey (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble), a badger (Frances books) or a rabbit (Aldo by John Burningham, 1991). In Little Blue and Little Yellow (1959), by Leo Lionni, the characters are merely two blots of colour, yet behave like ordinary children and have normal social relationships. This very simple story, without a single human or even anthropomorphic character, allows substantial characterization by both words and pictures. In decoding it, we “translate” the abstract images into human beings and ascribe them human traits, emotions and behaviour. A narrator’s explicit verbal comments can give readers a very clear sense of some particular perspective or analytical stance, and this is where words can actually exercise more control than an image. Pictures have no denominative function — they cannot tell us the characters’ names. Nor can they express the concrete facts about characters, such as exact age, or family relations. Gender, admittedly, can be pictorially emphasized in terms of clothes, haircut, and so on. But if a story’s characters are animals or inanimate objects, gender may have to be identified verbally, for instance by gendered pronouns and gender-specific names. A unique feature of picturebook communication is that pictures can show characters who are not actually mentioned in the words. Such characters can contrast with the protagonist, can amplify our understanding of their relationships, or may merely provide a credible background. Conversely, a character can be mentioned by words but not portrayed in the pictures; the most famous example is the mother in Where the Wild Things are. This is a very efficient narratological device, which can be described as a visual paralipsis (omission). Psychological description works best by words. Certain permanent human qualities (such as bravery, cleverness, innocence) are difficult to communicate visually, though the characters’ poses, gestures and facial expression certainly can reveal emotions and attitudes such as happiness, fear, and anger (see Scott, 2001). For more complex emotions and motives, a picture will often have to be supplemented by the subtleties of words. External and internal speech, as a means of characterization, is verbal by definition. But there are also some interesting visual devices by which speech can be conveyed, as in the speech balloons of comic strips.
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A combination of direct speech and pictures, without any comments from the narrator, can result in utter ambiguity, as in John Burningham’s Granpa (1984). And sometimes visual images may after all be the best way to convey a character’s inner life — vague, unuttered wishes, fears, daydreams, and other complex psychological states. Here pictures can make use of both universal and more individual symbols, and of colours, shapes, and visual associations which would otherwise demand many pages of words. This communicates with an immediacy that words simply cannot compete with, one striking example being the dream sequence of The Tunnel (see Nikolajeva & Scott 2001b). The character’s actions can be described verbally or visually and, as with the details of personal appearance, the two descriptions can complement or contradict each other. In all probability, this is the aspect of characterization where wordimage counterpoint can be most prominent, allowing picturebook-makers plenty of scope for irony. Pictures are obviously much better than words when it comes to a character’s position in space, and even more so when spatial relationships with other characters need to be indicated, for instance as a symbol for psychological relationships. The size and placing (high-low, left-right) of characters on a doublespread can reflect either their attitude towards each other, or some permanent psychological quality, or just a temporary mood, and changes in position can reflect changes in the characters themselves. Most of these features are based on conventions, which are not absolute rules. It is just that, as viewers of pictures, we tend to assume that, say, a character depicted as large is simply more significant (and maybe more powerful) than some tiny character crammed into the corner of the page. The position in the middle of the page emphasizes the character’s central role in the story. Perhaps it corresponds to the way in which, according to Piaget, young children tend to “centralize” themselves in their own perception. Finally, pictures offer the special resource of elaboration by close-up. In point of fact, very few picturebooks avail themselves of this opportunity. But some, for instance those by Anthony Browne, most certainly do. And it allows readers-viewers to feel that they are becoming very intimate with characters, almost as if they were talking to them. In general, we can say that picturebooks allow little room for thorough characterization in the conventional sense. They tend to be plot-oriented rather than character-oriented. Also, the plot itself is often too limited to allow much development, which means that most characters may be static rather than dynamic, flat rather than round. Even so, a surprisingly large number of picturebooks do successfully employ complex characterization through the interaction of word and image, though the scope and complexity of characterization depends on the nature of the narrative. The Wild Baby or Sven Nordqvist’s Festus and Mercury books, for instance, are more focussed on actions and relationships between characters,
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whereas Gorilla (1983), by Anthony Browne, The Tunnel or Granpa are more concerned with the characters’ inner world.
4. Perspective Perspective, or point of view, presents an extremely interesting dilemma in picturebooks, which once again has to do with the difference between visual and verbal communication, between showing and telling. In narratology, the term “point of view” is used in a more or less metaphorical sense, to denote the assumed positions of the narrator, the characters and the implied reader. With pictures, we can speak of perspective in a literal sense: as readers-viewers, we behold the picture from a certain fixed point of view, imposed on us by the artist. True, we can “read” the picture by eye movements from left to right or from right to left, or up and down, or down and up, or in a circular pattern. But the basic point of view is unchanged. Within a whole sequence of pictures, however, the point of view can certainly change, both in angle and in distance — there can be a kind of zoom effect, for instance. Further, narratology makes an essential distinction between point of view (“Who sees?”) and narrative voice (“Who speaks?”). While this distinction can seem somewhat metaphysical in a novel, in a picturebook we should probably treat the words as primarily conveying the narrative voice, and pictures as primarily conveying the point of view. I stress “primarily” because the verbal text can in itself have a point of view (i.e. use various types of focalization), while pictures can at least in some sense be “narrated.” Also, a picture of a character will in most cases represent the character as seen “from the outside”, by somebody else, and in a picture of several characters all together it may not be immediately clear that the viewpoint of one of them is more dominant. For obvious reasons, pictures do lack the possibility of internal focalization, at least in a direct sense. So whereas introspective narrators and first-person narrators have nowadays become very common in the psychological children’s novel, in the picturebook the possibilities for introspection are definitely more limited. All the same, a “subjective” point of view is not completely ruled out. A character’s feelings can certainly be conveyed by facial expression, position on the page, tone, colour, and other graphic means. Conversely, pictures can be a very positive resource in conveying omnipresent viewpoint. They can do this is a very literal sense, by giving a panoramic view of the setting, or by showing several parallel events or several characters at different places. This expresses something which the verbal text cannot express directly. Instead, it will have to say something such as, “At the same time…”. And this is where we again return to the relative coerciveness of word and picture. Since only the verbal narrative can comment on the events and the characters or address the reader immediately (“Now I will tell you…”), visual narrative certainly excludes the kinds
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of intrusive and authoritative narrators often associated with traditional children’s literature. Yet pictures are not objective and value-free, and can be positively didactic, even if in ways which are more indirect. Although most picturebooks would be normally classified as having an omniscient, omnipresent visual perspective, even in the seemingly simple cases, such as Curious George or the Hobans’ Bread and Jam for Frances (1964), the verbal and the visual perspective can be out of step with each other. Very often, while the words pretend to convey the point of view of the child (or the anthropomorphic animal representing the child), the visual point of view seems to be that of a condescending adult (see Nikolajeva & Scott 2001a, pp.120–122). First-person verbal narrative presents special problems, precisely because pictures in picturebooks are less capable of conveying first-person perspective. This makes for a contradiction. Picturebooks are supposed to be addressed to a young, inexperienced audience, yet they use, within the single set of covers, two different forms of focalization, which puts very high demands on the reader. Since identification with the “I” of a verbal text can cause young children enough difficulties on its own, the contradictory perspective of the visual text will merely compound their confusion. In picturebooks, consistent first-person narrators would mean that, while we share their point of view, we never see them actually appear in a picture. For an unsophisticated reader, this would present considerable difficulties. But also more generally, conventions of visual communication, be it painting, film or picturebook, make viewers expect to see the protagonist, something which still applies when a story is told from the first-person perspective. As it happens, there are certain ways to let the reader share a first-person narrator’s point of view and yet at the same time portray this character in a picture. For instance, the character can be placed in the foreground and viewed from behind, as in the first spread of Come into my night, come into my dream (1978) by Stefan Mählqvist and Tord Nygren. Yet even in this example, although the whole verbal text is narrated in first-person, the visual perspective very soon becomes omniscient, so entering into serious conflict with the words. While the words accentuate the emotionally charged perception of a frightened child, we no longer get this narrator’s point of view from the pictures. The pictures station us as outside observers, whereas in the verbal text the narrator continues to refer to himself as “I.” In this example there is a clear discrepancy between the immediate and naive voice of the child narrator of the verbal text and the detached and sophisticated adult narrator of the visual text. This represents an aesthetic problem of which few picturebook creators are apparently aware, and the psychological considerations are just as important as the aesthetic. The increasingly extensive use of first-person narratives in picturebooks simply cannot be justified in terms of what we know about children’s perceptions. All the empirical studies suggest that the small children to whom these books are ostensibly addressed have not yet developed a
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clear sense of an “I”, and have difficulty in identifying themselves with the strange “I” of a text. We are usually trained to adopt the focalizing characters’ subjectivity or do this by intuition. When the “I” of the story actually lacks a name, as do the narrators in Come into my night or Aldo, the problem is all the greater.
5.
Time and movement
In the question of temporality, the picturebook medium offers a unique challenge and opportunity. This, too, is where there are very clear instances of word and image filling each other’s gaps, and positively compensating for each other’s insufficiencies. There are two essential aspects of narrativity for which visual signs alone cannot provide definitive expression: causality and temporality. The point is that a visual sign system cannot indicate time except by inference. In general, if pictures suggest the flow of time, it is by depicting clocks or calendars, sunrise and sunset, and seasonal changes — in other words, though a sequence of pictures. But in most cases, a picturebook’s verbal text serves to extend such meanings, by creating a definitive temporal connection between pictures, and by making time’s progress more clear. Unlike film, the picturebook medium is discontinuous, and there is no direct way to depict the flow of movement. However, unlike decorative art, the picturebook medium is narrative and sequential, and conveys a sense of movement and of duration. In order to imply movement and change over time, there are a number of techniques used in pictures alone, as well as a variety of options employed in the interaction of words and pictures. Picturebook-makers have adopted various graphic codes, many of them borrowed from comics and photography. These include such features as blurs, motion lines, and the distortion of perspective. But the most frequent and successful device to express movement within a single picture is what art critics call simultaneous succession, a technique widely used in medieval art. This involves a sequence of images, most often a human figure, depicting moments which are disjunctive in time, but perceived as belonging together, in an unequivocal order. The changes occurring in each subsequent image are supposed to indicate the flow of time between it and the preceding one. A good example is found in the first spread of The Wild Baby, where the baby is depicted six times in a wild circular motion corresponding to the verbal text: “he always disobeyed [his mother], he was reckless, loud and wild.” The circular composition emphasizes that the events depicted here are repeated again and again over a long period of time, and illustrate one method of conveying the iterative frequency (expressed verbally by the marker “always”) by visual means. We can start reading the picture at any point and continue clockwise, several times, even though the baby is depicted in the bottom right corner moving on toward the next spread — a singulative event.
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When the baby is depicted climbing on the clothes rack, he has just lost a shoe. In the next shot (clockwise) he has no shoe. This little detail can help us confirm the order of events, even though the clockwise reading of a static picture comes naturally to Western readers. Another way to convey movement and thus the flow of time in picturebooks is by means of a sequence of pictures, though if the time-flow is also explicitly stated in the verbal text, the information becomes redundant, which weakens its overall impact. Many wordless picturebooks convey temporal relations by means of sequences of small framed or unframed pictures, as for instance the already mentioned Sunshine and Moonlight. Several pictures on the same doublespread encourage us to apprehend a temporal — and often causal — relationship between them, even when the accompanying words have no clear temporal indications. Unless the doublespread in a picturebook is one single picture, the creator may use the tension between verso and recto to imply both movement and temporal and causal relations. The Wild Baby contains many examples of different compositions, all with implied temporal and causal relations. Since the book presents an episodic plot, several spreads have a similar layout, with the verso showing one of the baby’s pranks and the recto showing the result or outcome of it. The repetition of the pattern is not only an aesthetic device, but a pedagogical one, potentially training a young viewer to make the temporal and causal connection between the facing pages. Ulla Rhedin (1993, pp.178–182) has suggested the notions of “home page” (or safe page) for verso and “away page” or “adventure page” for recto. This is not an absolute rule, but quite often the verso does establish a situation which the recto disrupts; the verso creates a sense of security, while the recto brings danger and excitement. Consider the first spread of The Wild Baby: the verso shows the mother nagging at the baby, who has already turned his back on her; he is heading towards the recto, where he is doing all the dangerous things his mother warns him against. In our culture, the “natural” way to decode movement is left to right, the way we read words. Most picturebook authors seem to have accepted this convention when they arrange the book in a single movement from left to right. The simplest and most consistent example is Rosie’s Walk. But even a much more sophisticated book, such as The Tunnel, is very clearly based on the left-to-right movement, which is accentuated by the sequence of framed pictures on some spreads, alternating with a little framed picture on the verso, and a full-page picture on the recto (“expanding” space), a frameless, wordless doublespread (further expansion of space), and a little framed picture on the recto against a black background. The narrative tempo created by this variation is disturbing, and conveys much of the book’s psychological charge. Yet the homecoming, which logically ought to take place from right to left, is conveyed only by words: “They ran back, through the forest, through the wood, into the tunnel, and out again.”
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Reading pictures from left to right is a convention, which has to do with our reading words — in a linear movement — from left to right. In the Arabic translation of The Wild Baby, the text is read right to left. However, the publisher was obviously unaware of the significance of visual reading. Instead of reversing the pictures, they merely change place. As a result, the baby on the recto walks out of the picture, back into title page, while on the verso he walks back from the dangers of the hall into the security of his mother’s drawing room. The movement becomes illogical and completely out of balance. While a verbal text, despite any temporal ellipses, will be fairly continuous and linear, pictures are always discontinuous. From the visual text alone, there is no way to judge how much time has passed between any two pictures. Similarly, whereas the duration of a verbal text is relatively determinable, to determine the duration and speed of a visual text is not at all easy. For how long a time does the action in a picture last? It is equally hard to assess the discourse time. How long does it take to narrate a picture? Since a picture is static, we might suggest that its story time is zero, while its discourse time is indefinitely long. That is, in narratological terminology, the duration pattern of a picture is a pause. When it comes to a sequence of pictures, either on the same spread or on different spreads, we encounter various forms of ellipses. Verbal ellipses can be either definite (when it is specified that two hours, five days or ten years have passed) or indefinite (“He walked a long, long time”); explicit (when the text specifies that some time has passed) or implicit. Without devices such as the image of a clock to communicate the passage of specific time, visual ellipses can only be indefinite and implicit. Depending on layout and other conventional devices, readers do fill the ellipses between individual pictures, sometimes deciding that the ellipsis is very short, perhaps just a few seconds (e.g. in Rosie’s Walk), or indeterminately long — say, anything up to several months (e.g. in Granpa). Readers may also decide that the pictures express the iterative — that something happens repeatedly. Verbal statements may compensate for the insufficiency of the visual signs and enhance an interpretation, by specifying that the events take place “That very night” (Where the Wild Things are) or “Another day” (The Wild Baby). But it is precisely the indeterminacy and ambiguity of visual temporality that makes some picturebooks exciting and complex. The different duration patterns determine the tempo of the verbal text. Alternating scenes and summaries speed up or slow down the narrative. Pauses stop the plot development altogether. Ellipses allow quick progress in time. In a picturebook, verbal and visual duration patterns are frequently in conflict. The most common temporal combination is verbal summary (story time longer than discourse time) and visual pause (story time zero, discourse time indefinitely long). While the words encourage the reader to go on, the images demand that we stop and devote a considerable time to reading the picture. In this, the picturebook
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medium is radically different from film, where discourse time is predetermined. We can thus conclude that, in their duration patterns, picturebooks are contradictory by definition. Which is not to rule out the possibility of a symmetrical arrangement in which words and pictures merely duplicate each other. But in such cases, the effect of the visual pause is disturbed, and the reader is subjected to a fixed discourse time. Regardless of whether an individual picture is static or conveys motion, the more details it offers, the longer its discourse time. The common assumption is that children do not like descriptions, preferring action scenes and dialogue. This must be an acquired preference, imposed on children by adults, since all empirical research shows that children, as well as adults, appreciate picturebook pauses, and eagerly return to them. Contemporary picturebook creators such as Sven Nordqvist or Colin Thompson deliberately overload their pictures with details, so as to invite their readers to contemplate them at length. I have just argued that we normally read pictures left to right, as we read words. But in considering a picture as a narrative pause, we perhaps need to qualify this. If a picture is totally symmetrical with the words, if, that is, it functions as mere decoration and does not contribute any new information, we may indeed read it left to right, and quite quickly. In pictures without a persuasive linear pattern and with many details, our reading is arbitrary. The artist may deliberately or unconsciously place a detail in the picture which will attract our attention and compel us to start reading the picture from this point onward. Take, for instance, the girl’s red coat on the recto of the wordless spread in The Tunnel. Since individual readers fill visual gaps differently, the actual pattern of reading a complicated picture can vary indefinitely. But if the words, even though they may be few, are well-balanced against the images, they will prompt the reader’s decoding of at least the most essential elements of the visual text. Sometimes there are actually fragmentary texts which appear inside pictures, and which have precisely this function. Such intraiconic texts occur, for instance, in Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen (1970) and We are all in the dumps with Jack and Guy (1993) (see Nikolajeva and Scott 2001a, pp.235–239). While many picturebook illustrators actively promote left to right decoding of their pictures, often as a way of developing a readiness for reading by teaching the conventions of the book (at least in the Western tradition), others may challenge this. The wordless The Red Thread has one doublespread which suggests linear decoding, but for the most part it leaves the reader-viewer’s order of perception completely unconstrained. There is no story-line, and the thread is the only connecting element between the spreads. Colin Thompson’s Looking for Atlantis (1993), with its many intra-iconic texts, compels the reader to abandon the linear narrative and instead browse through the pages, looking for details together with the protagonist. Such books provide a strong counter-thrust to the narrative linear movement that drives many picturebooks.
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The various deviations from straight, chronological narrative order — the socalled anachronies — are often limited in picturebooks because of the medium’s compact nature, which tends to exclude long time spans. But picturebooks do have their own ways of expressing anachronies, for instance in the form of visual analepses (flashbacks). In Sven Nordqvist’s The Hat Hunt (1987), the analepsis is an old man’s memory of his childhood. This is enhanced by words marking an explicit temporal change: “Now he saw […] He was only seven years old then”. Analepses in Granpa are more sophisticated. They are not marked by words, but the reader is expected to recognize the drawings on the verso pages as implicit analepses, describing scenes from Granpa’s childhood. Another example of complex narrative structure is a syllepsis, an anachronical narrative connected to the primary narrative by any other relation than temporal — for instance, spatial or thematic. A good example of visual syllepses is provided by the wordless narratives told by the small creatures in the foregrounds of Festus and Mercury books. These stories, never mentioned by the words of the primary narrative, can take on a life of their own, even if they are influenced by the events in the primary narrative, or at least are thematically connected to it. Picturebooks such as the wordless Anno’s Journey (1977), by Mitsumasa Anno, are deliberately constructed in sylleptical patterns, and David McKee’s Charlotte’s Piggy Bank (1996) takes things one stage further. Here, in contrast to Anno’s Journey, the book does have a verbal story, but a rather primitive one, with a strange and unsatisfactory resolution. It may even be rather irritating, but this is perhaps a deliberate strategy for drawing the reader’s attention to other aspects of the narrative. The story of Charlotte and her animated piggy bank is accompanied by basically symmetrical pictures, but these are minor details on every spread. Around the edges of Charlotte’s rather unimaginative everyday activities, there is dynamic and extensive life. On close examination, and as in Anno’s journey, there are figures or groups of figures with stories of their own which can be pursued through the book. Given this enormous richness of detail, the primary story loses its interest, and is probably supposed to demonstrate the image’s superiority over the word. The distorted perspective of each spread adds to the humorous effect.
6. Modality Finally, a few words about the contradiction between a more objective perception of the narrative and a more subjective perception, both of which can be cued in by either words or pictures. Another way of making this distinction is between mimetic and non-mimetic representation. Mimetic statements are those which we interpret as a direct reflection or imitation of reality, whereas non-mimetic statements are the ones we know we must interpret on different levels, for instance as symbols or
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metaphors. As empirical research often demonstrates, unsophisticated readers tend to interpret any text mimetically, identifying with protagonists and sharing their subjective perception. For instance, Max’s journey to the country of the Wild Things will be perceived as actually having occurred rather than taking place in his imagination. The essence of the mimetic/non-mimetic distinction can be captured by the linguistic concept of modality, which enables us to examine the intricate way picturebooks convey subjective perceptions of reality, external or internal, and to do so without resorting to the artificial and obsolete division of narratives into fantasy and realism. Here, though, I am not using the term “modality” in the sense recently proposed by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1996) and adopted by Jane Doonan (1993) and John Stephens (2000) for the analysis of picturebooks. These scholars are more concerned with the question of whether or not pictorial images are realistic. Seen in their way, photography has a high degree of modality (is “close to the truth”), whereas abstract or surrealist art has a lower degree (is “far away from the truth”). While this use of the term certainly makes its own kind of sense, in itself it does not further our understanding of word-image interaction. Picturebooks, more than any other kind of children’s fiction, effectively blur the common distinction between genres, and they do so by both verbal means and visual. The concept of modality helps us explore this, because it can cover aspects of an assertion such as its factuality, probability, possibility, impossibility, contingency, desirability, or necessity. We need some such all-embracing concept because, whereas mimetic, or literal interpretation means that we decode the received communication as simply true or not (“this has/has not happened”), other types of interpretation are more varied. To spell it out, when we engage in interpretations which are symbolic, transferred, non-mimetic, we decode texts as expressing a possibility (“it may have happened”), or an impossibility (“this cannot have happened”), or a desire (“I wish it happened”), or a command (“let it happen”), or a necessity (“it must have happened”), or a subjective experience (“it seemed to happen”), or probability (“it is likely to have happened”), and so on. As always, the dual narrative of picturebooks presents us with an additional problem. Since modality is a purely linguistic category, a visual image cannot convey modality, and this would normally mean that, unless we are helped by some words, there is no knowing whether what we are seeing is real or unreal, a dream, a wish, a prescription, a permission, or a doubt. Yet even in isolated pictures, artists do resort to what are actually conventional means in order to get viewers to interpret the image in a certain way, for instance as a fantasy. Pictures of mythical creatures, and of unfamiliar or distorted objects are automatically perceived as unreal, while photographic and other true-to-life images are perceived as real. Unnatural colours, for instance a red sky and blue grass, will also prompt us to interpret the picture as imaginary, whereas pictures of familiar scenes which we can easily relate to will be interpreted as real. A sequence of visual images immediately
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creates more potential for modality, and by adding verbal statements the author can further prompt the viewer to adopt a particular interpretation. For instance, a landscape painting entitled “A Dream” will most probably be interpreted as imaginary, even through the picture itself may be true-to-life. Despite such conventions, the pictures of a picturebook may still not be enough to tell us whether the narrative is objective or not — and whether we should apply mimetic or symbolic interpretation. But when words and pictures interact, the modality can be very complex. While the verbal story is often told from a child’s point of view and presents the events as true, the details in pictures may suggest that the story only takes place in the child’s imagination. The pictures thus subvert the verbal narrative as an objective story. In analyzing picturebooks, three modalities are of special interest: indicative (expressing objective truth), optative (expressing desire) and dubitative (expressing doubt). For instance, in Elsa Beskow’s Peter’s Voyage (1921), the story’s apparently indicative modality is subverted by the cover illustration, which shows the boy steering a cardboard boat over a striped rug; the boat’s makeshift mast uses a handkerchief as a sail. So although the story itself, in both words and pictures, suggests that the voyage is real, the cover provides grounds for doubt. Since we normally start reading picturebooks with the cover, the illustration prompts the reader from the beginning to perceive the story as play, so establishing its overall modality as optative. In Where the Wild Things are, neither the words nor the pictures directly suggest that the story is true (indicative) or imagined (optative), and the reader is on the whole free to assume either of these positions. However, two details do manipulate the reader towards having to choose between them. As pointed out by many critics, the verbal statement at the end of the story, about the supper being “still hot”, supports the objective, adult interpretation. Seen this way, the actual duration of the story has been probably no more than ten minutes, during which Max has lived through two years of his imaginary life among the Wild Things. Apparently neglected by unsophisticated readers, this detail is the strongest argument for interpreting Max’s story as imaginary. On the other hand, there is a visual detail which subverts this argument. In the early pictures of Max’s bedroom, we see a half-moon, whereas in the last picture, the moon is full. For an observant reader, this gives pause for dubitative thought. Barbro Lindgren’s and Eva Eriksson’s The Wild Baby goes to Sea (1982), which has many superficial similarities with Sendak’s book, contains quite a variety of such dubitative visual details which may make a reader hesitate. While Max’s imaginary boat is waiting for him, its sails duly rigged and his own name on the bow, the Baby must create his vessel from whatever his actual surroundings provide him with. The wooden crate is the only detail mentioned in the verbal text. The broom and hanger for mast, another broom for rudder, and mother’s apron for sail
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are featured only in the pictures. The picture in which the blue rug is turning into sea waves, while the boat is still a crate and the mast a broom, captures the very moment when reality and imagination meet, the moment when modality becomes ambiguous. Throughout the story, more visual details appear which suggest that the child is imaginatively transforming everyday objects in his play, yet none of these is mentioned in the verbal text, which is presented from the child’s viewpoint and therefore as a real adventure. The modality of the verbal text is thus indicative, while the visual details remind us all the time that the overall modality is optative. For those readers who still choose an objective, adult interpretation, there is irrefutable counter-evidence at the end of the book, in both text and picture: the rooster the Baby has rescued from the sea. Since mother can see the rooster as well, it cannot possibly be the product of the baby’s imagination. Here, then, is a detail which suggests probability, so contradicting the improbable modality of the whole. The most primitive way of subverting indicative modality is to insert an explicit verbal statement about the events being untrue. This common device occurs at the end of Paul alone in the World (1942), by Jens Sigsgaard and Arne Ungermann. After breath-taking adventures, the protagonist wakes up to discover that his experience has only been a dream. Some readers, on finding that they have been applying the wrong modality, may feel cheated. Another bedtime story, John Burningham’s Hey, get off our train! (1989), offers a much more subtle way of interrogating the credibility of the narrative. The symmetrical indicative modality of words and images suggests that the boy actually goes on a journey, picking up one animal after another. If as readers we prefer to interpret the story as a dream we are free to do so; but neither the words nor the pictures contain any element of the dubitative until the very last page, where the mother asks the boy whether he has anything to do with “an elephant in the hall, a seal in the bathtub, a crane in the laundry, a tiger on the stairs, and a polar bear by the fridge”. If we have decided that the boy has been dreaming, our interpretation is now seriously questioned, by words alone. A subversion of modality by visual means is obviously far richer than subversion by explicit words. The cues offered by pictures are more implicit than explicit, and therefore allow a wider range of interpretations. Such a subversion means that while the picture-word combination as a whole encourages or manipulates the reader to adopt a certain modality, some visual details will nevertheless lead to hesitation. The initial bedtime situation of picturebooks such as Mählqvist’s and Nygren’s I’ll take care of the crocodiles (1977) and Come into my night, come into my dream (the latter title itself encourages a certain type of reading), Gorilla or The Jaguar (1987), by Ulf Stark and Anna Höglund, supports the objective interpretation, even though the text does not necessarily say right out that the protagonist has fallen asleep and is dreaming. In Crocodiles, the indicative is subverted visually at the end, in The Jaguar both at the beginning and the end, and in Come into my night and Gorilla throughout the text.
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Not now, Bernard may be classified, in terms of modality, as symmetrically ambiguous. On the mimetic level, Bernard is trying to tell his parents that there is a monster in the garden. The pictures do not question his statement: there is indeed a horrible purple creature with horns and sharp teeth (symmetrical indicative modality). The verbal-visual text tells us, matter-of-factly, that the monster eats up Bernard, goes indoors, and tries in vain to attract the parents’ attention. The psychological implication of the story as we read it on the symbolic level is transparent: the neglected child is transforming his aggressions into a monster. However, there is nothing in either text or pictures that directly supports this reading. The monster does not possess any of Bernard’s features, he does not disguise himself in Bernard’s clothes, he does not have Bernard’s blue eyes. While we can easily see the Wild Things in Sendak’s book as visualizations of the boy’s aggressive emotions, the situation in Not now, Bernard is more complicated. There is no reverse transformation, or even a hint of it, to suggest that the story has been a play or a compensatory aggressive daydream. Equally, there is no hint on the symbolic level that the boy has mastered his aggressions, “killed the monster”, and become reconciled with the parents, which we to a certain extent can discern in the closure of Wild Things. The story has the nature of indeterminacy, typical of postmodern art.
7.
Dual address
Picturebooks are supposedly addressed to very young children. It should be clear by now, however, that many of them show a considerable degree of sophistication, and on many levels. But instead of questioning their suitability for a young audience, I would suggest that picturebooks, more than any other form of children’s literature, demonstrate what many scholars have come to see as one of the most prominent features of children’s literature in general: dual address (Scott, 1999). Since picturebooks, more than novels, are assumed to be read by an adult to a child, textual and visual gaps in picturebooks are deliberately left to be filled differently by child and adult, in the process described by contemporary scholars as crosswriting. In the present chapter, I have been trying to illustrate this as one of the most important of the resources now available for a writer who wishes to address children, though at the same time I have necessarily been suggesting the potentialilty of the picturebook medium for communication with adults. Once this is established, questions about the actual issues negotiated within picturebooks, and about the way they communicate between human beings whose positionalities differ not only in terms of age but of sociohistorical sitedness as well, should be that much easier to explore.
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References Anno, M. (1977). Anno’s Journey. London: Bodley Head. Bader, B. (1976). American picturebooks: From Noah’s Ark to The Beast Within. New York: Macmillan. Bemelmans, L. (1939). Madeline. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bergström, G. ([1973] 1988). You are a sly one Alfie Atkins. New York: Farrar [Original title: Aja baja Alfons Åberg, the first of many Alfie Atkins books]. Beskow, E. ([1918] 1938). Aunt Green, Aunt Brown and Aunt Lavender. London: Harper [Original title: Tant Grön, tant Brun och tant Gredelin]. Beskow, E. ([1910] 1968). The Children of the Forest. New York: Delacorte [Original title: Tomtebobarnen]. Beskow, E. ([1901] 1975). Peter’s Adventures in Blueberry Land. New York, Delacorte [Original title: Puttes äventyr i blåbärsskogen]. Beskow, E. ([1921] 1931). Peter’s Voyage. New York: Knopf [Original title: Lillebrors segelfärd]. Bradford, C. (1993). The picture book: Some postmodern tensions. Papers: Explorations in Children’s Literature, 4, 10–14. Brown, M. W., & Hurd, C. (1947). Goodnight, Moon. New York: Harper & Row. Browne, A. (1983). Gorilla. London: Julia MacRae. Browne, A. (1989). The Tunnel. London: Julia MacRae. de Brunhoff, J. ([1931] 1933). The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant. New York: Random House [Original title: Babar]. Burningham, J. (1991). Aldo. London: Jonathan Cape. Burningham, J. (1977). Come away from the water, Shirley. London: Jonathan Cape. Burningham, J. (1984). Granpa. London: Jonathan Cape. Burningham, J. (1989). Hey, get off our train! London: Jonathan Cape. Burton, V. L. (1942). The Little House. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Cianciolo, P. (1970). Illustrations in children’s books. Dubuque, IO: Wm. C. Browne. Cole, B. (1986). Princess Smartypants. London: Hamish Hamilton. Culler, J. (1975). Structuralist poetics: Structuralism, linguistics and the study of literature. London: Routledge. Doonan, J. (1993). Looking at pictures in picture books. Stroud: Thimble Press. Eco, U. (1979). The role of the reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Feaver, W. (1977). When we were young: Two centuries of children’s book illustrations. London: Thames & Hudson. Golden, J. M. (1990). The narrative symbol in childhood literature: Exploration in the construction of text. Berlin: Mouton. Gregersen, T. (1974). Småbørnsbogen. In S. M. Kristensen & P. Ramløv (Eds.), Børne- og ungdomsbøger: Problemer og analyser (pp.243–71). Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Hallberg, K. (1982). Litteraturvetenskapen och bilderboksforskningen. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, 3–4, 163–168. Hoban, R., & Hoban L. (1964). Bread and Jam for Frances. New York: Harper [One of the many Frances books]. Hunt, P. (1991). Criticism, theory, and children’s literature. London: Blackwell. Hürlimann, B. (1968) Picture-book world (trans. & ed. Brian W. Alderson). London: Oxford University Press. Hutchins, P. (1968). Rosie’s Walk. London: Bodley Head. Iser, W. (1974). The implied reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Iser, W. (1974). The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic responce. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jansson, T. ([1977] 1978). The Dangerous Journey. London: Benn [Original title: Den farliga resan]. Kiefer, B. (1995). The potential of picturebooks: From visual literacy to aesthetic understanding. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kitamura, S. (1987). Lily takes a walk. New York: Dutton. Klemin, D. (1966). The art of art for children’s books. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. Kress, G., & van Leuwen, T. (1996). Reading images. The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge. Lindgren, B., & Eriksson, E. ([1980] 1981). The Wild Baby. New York: Greenwillow [Original title: Mamman och den vilda bebin]. Lindgren, B., & Eriksson, E. ([1982] 1983). The Wild Baby goes to Sea. New York: Greenwillow [Original title: Den vilda bebiresan]. Lionni, L. (1959). Little Blue and Little Yellow. New York: McDowell. Lobel, A. (1970). Frog and Toad are friends. New York: Harper & Row [The first of many Frog and Toad books]. Mählqvist, S., & Nygren, T. (1977). I’ll take care of the crocodiles. New York: Atheneum [Original title: Inte farligt pappa, krokodilerna klarar jag]. Mählqvist, S., & Nygren, T. ([1978] 1981). Come into my night, come into my dream. London: Pepper Press [Original title: Kom in i min natt, kom in i min dröm]. McKee, D. (1996). Charlotte’s Piggy Bank. London: Andersen Press. McKee, D. (1982). I hate my teddy bear. London: Andersen Press. McKee, D. (1980). Not now, Bernard. London: Andersen Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture theory. Essays on verbal and visual representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moebius, W. (1986). Introduction to picturebook codes. Word and Image, 2, 141–158 [Also in P. Hunt (Ed.), Children’s literature: The development of criticism (pp.131–147). London: Routledge]. Nikolajeva, M., & Scott, C. (2000). The dynamics of picturebook communication. Children’s Literature in Education 31, 225–239. Nikolajeva, M., & Scott, C. (2001a). How picturebooks work. New York: Garland. Nikolajeva, M., & Scott, C. (2001b). Images of the mind: The depiction of consciousness in picturebooks. CREArTA 2, 12–36. Nodelman, P. (1988). Words about pictures: The narrative art of children’s picture books. Athens: Univerity of Georgia Press. Nordqvist, S. ([1987] 1988). The Hat Hunt. New York: R & S Books [Original title: Hattjakten]. Nordqvist, S. ([1985] 1985). Pancake Pie. New York: Morrow [Original title: Pannkakstårtan. The first of many Festus and Mercury books]. Nygren, T. ([1987] 1988). The Red Thread. Stockholm: R & S Books [Original title: Den röda tråden]. Ormerod, J. (1981). Sunshine. London: Lothrop. Ormerod, J. (1982). Moonlight. London: Lothrop. Potter, B. (1902). The Tale of Peter Rabbit. London: Warne. Rey, H. A. (1941). Curious George. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Rhedin, U. (1993). Bilderboken: På väg mot en teori. Stockholm: Alfabeta [Studies Published by the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books 45, With a summary in English: “The Picture Book — Towards a Theory”]. Schwarcz, J. H. (1982). Ways of the illustrator: Visual communication in children’s literature. Chicago: American Library Association.
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Schwarcz, J. H., & Schwarz, C. (1991). The picture book comes of age. Chicago: American Library Association. Scott, C. (1999). Dual audience in picture books. In S. Beckett (Ed.), Transcending boundaries: Writing for a dual audience of children and adults (pp.99–110). New York: Garland. Scott, C. (2001). An unlikely hero: Perspective and point of view in The tale of Peter Rabbit. In M. Mackey (Ed.), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit: A children’s classic at 100 (pp.19–30). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Sendak, M. (1970). In the Night Kitchen. New York: Harper. Sendak, M. (1993). We are all in the dumps with Jack and Guy. New York: HarperCollins. Sendak, M. (1963). Where the Wild Things are. New York: Harper. Sigsgaard, J., & Ungermann, A. ([1942] 1964). Paul alone in the World. St Louis: McGraw-Hill [Original title: Palle alene i verden]. Sipe, L. R. (1998). How picture books work: A semiotically framed theory of text-picture relationships. Children’s Literature in Education 29, 97–108. Spitz, E. H. (1999). Inside picture books. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stark, U., & Höglund, A. (1987). Jaguaren. Stockholm: BonniersJunior. Steig, W. (1969). Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. New York: Windmill Books. Stephens, J. (1992). Language and ideology in children’s fiction. London: Longman. Stephens, J. (2000). Modality and space in picture book art: Allen Say’s Emma’s Rug. CREArTA, 1, 44–59. Stewig, J. W. (1995). Looking at picture books. Fort Atkinson, Wisc.: Highsmith Press. Thompson, C. (1993). Looking for Atlantis. London: Julia MacRae. Thompson, K., & Knight, H. (1955). Eloise. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wolde, G. ([1976] 1976). Betsy’s First Day at Nursery School. New York: Random House [Original title: Emmas första dag på dagis. The first of many Betsy books]. Wolde, G. ([1969] 1971). Thomas goes out. New York: Random House [Original title: Totte går ut. The first of many Thomas books].
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Part II
Negotiating Issues examined
AUTHOR "Maria Nikolajeva"
TITLE "Growing up"
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Chapter 6
Growing up The dilemma of children’s literature Maria Nikolajeva
1.
A three-stage process of maturation
In discussing the resources available to children’s writers and the use they have made of them, Part I of this book has inevitably touched on topics which will be brought into sharper focus in Part II and Part III: respectively, the issues negotiated by children’s literature, and the relationship between children’s books and different types of reader in different circumstances. Here in Part II as well, all three apexes of the communicative triangle will have to be held in view, and from the very start. So in this chapter, which deals with the most basic of all the issues children’s literature negotiates, I must begin with one further observation about writers, and must link it to an observation about the responding readership. The plain fact is that children’s literature, with very few exceptions, is written by adult writers for young readers. This rather obvious point has fundamental implications for the way children’s literature negotiates the issue of growing up. Although the profound difference here from the literary mainstream may seem very clear, few children’s literature scholars have managed to pinpoint it, even though many have tried, including myself (see Shavit, 1986; Hunt, 1991; Nodelman, 1992; Nikolajeva, 1996 & 1998a). Whereas E. M. Forster (1995, p.44) claimed that “[s]ince the novelist is himself a human being, there is an affinity between him and his subject-matter which is absent in many other forms of art”, in children’s literature this affinity is somewhat upset, since the subject matter — childhood — is inevitably detached from the writer’s experience, even though all adult writers have once been children. The notion of childhood and the ideas about growing, procreation and death which we meet in children’s fiction reflect the views of adults, which may or may not correspond to the real status and experience of real children in any given society (Lesnik-Oberstein, 1994). Many studies of children’s literature argue that childhood is something irretrievably lost for adults, and that literary fictions offer them the tantalizing hope that its elusive Arcadia may be restored. Critics of this persuasion tend to describe children’s literature, not as
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literature addressed to children, but as a sort of storytelling therapy for frustrated adults. This is the view of Jacqueline Rose, for instance, in her well-known study The case of Peter Pan, or the impossibility of children’s literature (1984), where she more or less takes for granted that genuine communication between adult writers and child readers would be beside the point, and is not really possible. This provocative and disturbing thesis I shall be submitting to closer scrutiny. The conventional way to describe children’s literature is to divide it up into “genres” or kinds: fantasy, adventure, domestic story, school story, animal story, toy story. This partly reflects the need of teachers and librarians for clear-cut categories; they want to be able to identify books which take up certain themes and issues or convey certain ideas, for instance. In adult literature, such divisions are seldom made outside of formulaic fiction. Normally we do not refer to Pride and Prejudice as a domestic novel, to Crime and Punishment as a thriller, or to One Hundred Years of Solitude as a time-shift fantasy. They are all just novels. In general textbooks on literature, similarly, we tend to find chapters on Elizabethan literature, Victorian literature or postmodern literature. But in both textbooks and histories devoted specifically to children’s literature, a generic, or even thematic approach is much more common, and the link with the adult mediators’ concern for young readers’ education is often very clear. The main drawback of this, it seems to me, is that some of the distinctions drawn are artificial, and especially the distinction between fantasy and realism, described by John Stephens (1992, p.7) as “the single most important generic distinction in children’s fiction”. Personally, I prefer to treat all children’s fiction as essentially “mythic”, or at least non-mimetic. My basic assumption is that literature offers a symbolic depiction of a maturation process (initiation, rite of passage), so that it is not a strictly mimetic reflection of some concrete “reality”. The scope of texts written and marketed for children and young people will therefore reflect a precise phase on a childhood-to-adulthood continuum, whose ethos ranges from a primal harmony (Arcadia, Paradise, Utopia, idyll), through different degrees of departure from it, and onwards into some mission that may either succeed or fail. The view of children’s fiction as a depiction of the maturation process is not original, but can be applied for different purposes and studied by different means, partly depending on the scholar’s own general theoretical orientation. Maturation readily lends itself to discussion within formalist and structuralist theories such as Vladimir Propp’s (1968) functional model or J. A. Greimas’ (1983) actantial model, for instance, with their basic idea of a tension between lack and the liquidation of lack (Propp), or between “want” and “must” (Greimas). Somewhat similarly, a theory drawing on the model of Jungian psychoanalysis can speak of an evolution from the initial harmony (the situation before lack or injury in the structural model), through a split, towards a new, genuine harmony. For a Jungian literary critic, the external events described in fiction are merely projections of the individual’s
Growing up
inner world. While the structural model unveils the way the narrative itself is built, the psychological model explains what is concealed behind structures. Both models can describe our conceptions of what human maturation looks like or should look like, even if neither of them is pragmatic in the sense of communicating something about the real world. Given such perspectives, then, it is fruitful to examine children’s novels in order to see how they are related to the protagonist’s place in the maturation process. The closest model of all is probably Northrop Frye’s account of “displacement” (Frye 1957; cf. Wolf 1985), which can help clarify texts’ position on a spectrum stretching from pure myth to a total disintegration of mythical structures. Within this scheme of things, a crucial feature is the transformation of mythic, non-linear time into linear time. The texts which I have chosen to classify as utopian or prelapsarian roughly correspond to Frye’s mythical mode. The ones I treat as carnivalesque correspond to the span between his romantic and high mimetic. And the texts I label as postlapsarian are like Frye’s low mimetic and ironic. In a way, these categories stand close to the three classes of children’s stories described by Peter Hunt (1994, p.27) as “closed”, “semiclosed” (particularly the Bildungsroman), and “unresolved” (with an open ending, more usual in adult fiction). Among other things, this approach enables us to disregard the traditional and, in my view, rather obsolete division of children’s novels into realism and fantasy. Instead, some essential differences between children’s and mainstream fiction can be unveiled, in ways that answer questions scholars have been raising rather persistently. For a fuller account, I refer readers to my From mythic to linear: Time in children’s literature (2000). It is a commonplace that before the Romantic period children were believed to be hardly different from adults. They were certainly not thought to be better than adults. Anglo-Saxon criticism tends to focus on Blake and Wordsworth as sources of the new concept of childhood, even if similar ideas were developed by Romantic writers in other language areas as well. From our present point of view the essential point is that in the Romantic tradition childhood was equal to idyll, while growing up was equal to the loss of Paradise, and the idea of the child as innocent has continued to influence children’s fiction long after Romanticism became, in mainstream literature, a thing of the past. Traditional children’s fiction creates and preserves what can in fact be called a pastoral convention, for instance in classics such as Heidi, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Beatrix Potter’s animal stories, Swallows and Amazons, Winnie-the-Pooh, and the early Moomin stories. Of the essence here is the cyclical, repetitive nature of events, tending to promote an illusion of a never-ending paradise: “[…] in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing” (Milne 1972, p.176). As a consequence, children’s fiction has maintained a myth of a happy and innocent childhood, apparently fuelled by writers’ nostalgic memories and bitter insights into
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the impossibility of returning to the childhood idyll. This concept of a happy childhood has had little to do with the realities of childhood, and most children’s novels of more recent date successfully subvert it. The distinctions between prelapsarian, carnivalesque and postlapsarian children’s fiction, which naturally point toward the distinction between children’s and adult literature, can be understood in terms of linear and non-linear time. Especially helpful here is the Rumanian-born mythologist Mircea Eliade (1955, 1963), for whom myth describes events taking place in primordial time, and for whom profane acts have meaning only as long as they deliberately repeat earlier, sacred acts. In Greek, the eternal, mythic time is called kairos, to distinguish it from the measurable, linear time, chronos. It is the word kairos that is used in the famous passage on time in Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, for instance. And unlike chronos, kairos is reversible. It can be integrated with linear time through rituals, rites and festivals, which are human repetitions of primordial acts. In contemporary literature, the temporal pattern of kairos can even be used for parodic or carnivalesque purposes (Smedman 1988). Contemporary Western children’s fiction is written from a philosophical viewpoint based on linear time, which has a beginning and an end, and recognizes every event in history as unique. Against this background the change from circular to linear narrative in children’s fiction appears in a new light. It is when time is thought of as linear that growing up, aging and death may cause concern. In myth, by contrast, since kairos is reversible even death is transitory. The myth of the returning god, the most universal myth in all cultures, presupposes that death is always followed by resurrection. In many of the fairy tales used in childhood reading, death is similarly reversible. Snow White dies, but is brought back to life. The dead mother helps her children against the evil step-mother. And so on. The final formula of many fairy tales stresses that the plot’s linear progress is rounded into an everlasting, mythic time: “lived happily ever after”. According to Eliade, archaic man’s initiation involved three major confrontations: with the sacred, with death, and with sexuality. If we assume that the state of cyclical time, so closely bound up in the Romantic notion of childhood, introduces the protagonist to the sacred, then the following stages of initiation must involve death and procreation, two most essential aspects of human existence. As soon as children’s fiction departs from the innocent idyllic state, the introduction of these two mysteries becomes inevitable. Some of the world’s best children’s novels are focussed on the child’s intuitive reluctance to grow up: Peter Pan, The Little Prince, Pippi Longstocking, the late Moomin books, and many more. Probably reflecting their adult writers’ own traumatic memories of growing up, such books show their protagonists as responding to the situation in different ways. Peter Pan moves to a place where growing up is simply unnecessary. Pippi takes a magic pill. Moomintroll’s childish dependence on his mamma gradually disappears, as everlasting summer gives way to autumn and change. After the human infant’s
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discovery that it does not constitute a whole with its mother, its discovery of the inevitability of growth is probably just as disturbing. The fact that change, and the first step towards maturation, have become a central theme of all children’s literature is not surprising.
2.
Prelapsarian children’s fiction
Arcadian or Utopian children’s fiction creates a myth of childhood by describing it as a myth of the Golden Age. In English-language criticism, the text most often adduced here is The Wind in the Willows, but other examples are The Secret Garden, Little Women, Beatrix Potter’s stories, Anne of Green Gables, Swallows and Amazons and Winnie-the-Pooh. In Swedish children’s literature, there is, for instance, Astrid Lindgren’s Noisy Village series. As these cases clearly show, the notion of utopia cuts across the conventional genres. In fact we can distinguish three main types of childhood utopia: the fantastic (The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh), the domestic (Little Women, Little House in the Big Woods, The Noisy Village), and the social (for instance Janusz Korczak’s King Matt). Common to all three types are: the importance of a particular setting; the autonomy of the “felicitous space” set apart from the rest of the world; a general sense of harmony; the special significance of home; an absence of the repressive aspects of civilization such as money, labour, law or government; an absence of death and sexuality; and as a consequence of all this, a general sense of innocence. The setting of most idyllic texts is rural, with a dominant imagery of trees, meadows, gardens, and with emphasis placed on the characters’ own closeness to nature. The season is usually summer, and the weather is always fine, apart from an occasional storm, which may symbolize a character’s temporary unhappiness or worry. Significantly, the primordial state is described as not only spatial — an Arcadia — but temporal — a Golden Age, which can recede, or has perhaps receded already, into a vanished past. For an adult co-reader, the writer’s nostalgia may well be very plangent. The Arcadian world is also completely autonomous. The setting’s secluded character is often specially emphasized, as in the many books featuring a garden (The Secret Garden, Tom’s Midnight Garden). The garden walls or fences form boundaries with the surrounding — adult — world, boundaries which both protect and restrain. The seclusion allows children to experience the world on their own, since it is a safe world. The child is empowered in a way seldom possible in real life. Young readers may even be seduced into thinking that adults are superfluous. The special significance of home, as of a pastoral setting at large, is connected with the notion of the sacred place — the place at the centre of the universe — in archaic thought. In texts as different as Little Women, The Wind in the Willows, and
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The Hobbit, home is the foremost security. It is the place where the protagonists belong, and to which they return after any exploration of the outside world. In Arcadia, one is seldom troubled by pecuniary difficulties or matters of food supply. Pooh has an endless store of honey, and Moominmamma can furnish every necessity from her handbag, a modern variation of Cornucopia. Toad, rolling in money, is addicted to expensive toys, and the March sisters, though thinking of themselves as poor, are merely unable to buy fancy Christmas presents. Critics often discuss this in terms of class, rightly pointing out that the typical hero of classical children’s fiction is an upper-middle-class child (or an animal representing this), likely to appeal to a similarly placed audience. Yet there are also deeper, more intrinsic factors here. For a very young child, the basic necessities are simply not an issue. Gradually deprivations can set in, of course, a universal one being the separation from the mother’s breast. But since Arcadian fiction has the purpose of preserving the child’s faith in stability, the primary needs such as food and warmth, both physical and emotional, are always satisfied. This is again a case where the message sent to the child reader is at best confusing, at worst dishonest. Both the writer and the adult co-reader know very well that food and money do not take care of themselves. In fact there have also been children’s books which deal with the availability or lack of food quite explicitly, for instance in terms of reward and punishment (Bergstrand & Nikolajeva, 1999; Nikolajeva, 2000a, pp.11–16 and passim). As for two of the most important, and clearly interrelated motifs in adult literature, death and sexuality, these are totally absent from Arcadian fiction. The characters, whether they are humans or animals, are depicted at the pre-pubescent stage, the stage of innocence, where their sexual identity has not yet been discovered. Moreover, they are for ever conserved in this stage and have neither the desire nor the opportunity to evolve. So there is no growing up, no maturation, no aging, and consequently no death. Critics like Jacqueline Rose (1984) maintain that this reflects an immaturity and fear of sexuality and death on the part of individual authors. But again here, I see a feature which is an indispensable part of prelapsarian children’s literature in general. Two more profound markers of the idyllic mode are the cyclical conception of time, and something which narratologists call iterative frequency. As already mentioned, time is cyclical in any kind of idyll: either there is no linear progress whatsoever, or the linear development rounds back into the circular pattern. Characteristically, in “realistic” books such as Little Women or Little House in the Big Woods, where the progress of chronos is inevitable, the duration of profane time is exactly a year. By the end of the book, the cycle is complete. Again, many scholars have noted the prominence of seasonal changes in The Wind in the Willows. The point is, though, that these changes are cyclical and repetitive. They are not lasting, since time is circular, mythical, expandable, and the characters have the same age year after year. In The Secret Garden, similarly, seasonal change from winter to
Growing up
spring symbolizes the return to paradise. The changes in nature correspond both to Mary’s spiritual progress (which precedes the blooming of the garden) and to Colin’s (which follows it). As for iterative frequency, this term refers to narration in which an event described only once takes place several times or even regularly. This mode is distinguished from the singulative, the most common frequency in literature, in which described events happen only once. Here, too, there is a clear affinity between the idyllic and the notion of kairos, but also with pagan as opposed to Christian religious tradition. Christ’s sacrificial death is a singulative event. Unlike the death of the archaic returning god, it cannot be re-staged through regular rites. Not least, the iterative frequency of archaic narrative’s time is recaptured in the way prelapsarian children’s novels repeatedly use the word “always”. In The Noisy Village, for instance, recurrent routines are quickly established once and for all: “We have always …”, “We shall always …”. The narratologist Gérard Genette (1980: 113–127) claims that Proust is more or less unique in using the iterative. That a device perceived as exceptional in adult literature should be so common in children’s fiction is hardly accidental. With the discussion of time and frequency, I am already passing from the story level of the narrative (setting, themes, motifs) to the discourse level. But there are two purely narrative elements which are, I think, essential to idyllic texts: the use of a predominantly collective protagonist, and of the predominantly omniscient narrator. Paradise is a collective experience, which can only be enjoyed together with a group of soul-mates. Further, idyllic narratives very seldom go beyond a superficial rendering of events, and the characters have little explicit inner life. For such an external narrative, a collective protagonist has great potential. Significantly, collective protagonists are a typical feature of children’s fiction in general, while in adult fiction they appear only rarely, and then often in experimental novels (such as The Waves or As I lay dying). There may be several reasons for this. Collective protagonists supply an object of identification to readers of both genders and of different ages. Collective characters may be used to represent more palpably different aspects of human nature — one child in a group may be presented as greedy and selfish, another as carefree and irresponsible, and so on. Basically, a collective protagonist is an artistic device that lends itself to pedagogical purposes. We see it in texts as diverse as Little Women, The Wind in the Willows, The Railway Children, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Noisy Village, and Five on a Treasure Island. A final point concerns the question of authorial (adult) control, and thus the problem of the narrator. It seems that the most common type of narrator in idyllic fiction is the narrator who is omniscient, omnipresent and not seldom didactic. It is only natural that an adult author, in portraying paradise lost, should feel such a profound distance from the depicted characters and events. An omniscient narrator, at best focalizing the characters externally, is the only possible narrative form.
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3.
Incompatible desires
The foremost paradox of Arcadian fiction lies in an insurmountable contradiction between adults’ almost compulsory need to socialize the child, and their nostalgic idealization of childhood’s innocent bliss. For many readers and scholars alike, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880) is the very epitome of idyll. Yet it has also been read as a “convert-and-reform” novel, in which “[t]he reformation and conversion of Heidi’s grandfather is the major plot” (Usrey, 1985, p.233). Seen this way, the format of a children’s novel is merely a pretext for portraying a sinful and repentant adult, and the child protagonist merely a vehicle for the redemption of the adult who is the true protagonist. This, it seems to me, is unsatisfactory, and so are interpretations which seize on the opposition between the natural setting of the mountains and the civilization of the city. True enough, Heidi is a “natural” child, simple (although far from simple-minded), innocent, with a keen eye and healthy spirit. Sent away to a big city, she withers like a bird in a cage, but has enough willpower, not only to come back to the mountains, but to redeem her little rich fostersister, so demonstrating that the natural way of life, with healthy peasant food, fresh air, and a positive disposition, are superior to the dubious comforts of urban life. Yet the evolution urged on Heidi by her sojourn in Frankfurt is far too profound for her to be able to regress to her natural state as painlessly as both the novel itself and this interpretation of it seem to suggest. Like most child characters in children’s fiction, Heidi must be socialized — must adjust to the demands and rules imposed by adults. In doing so, she loses her “natural” ways and, among other things, must learn to read. Despite her physical return to the mountains, there remains an unresolved dilemma between the desire to be innocent and natural and the need to be civilized. Given the premises from which it started, this novel could not be brought to a satisfactory closure. Although Heidi’s natural state is consistently presented as preferable to the corrupt ways of the villagers and townspeople, simply to bring her back to nature is impossible. Inevitably, there must be a compromise. The title of Chapter XI, “Heidi Gains in One Way and Loses in Another”, although it actually refers to something else, would provide an apt description of the entire book. While a less sophisticated reader may find the compromise quite satisfactory (“a happy ending”), it reveals the eternal dilemma of children’s fiction, in that the child cannot be allowed to retain her primal innocence unless she dies young, before socialization becomes unavoidable. Indeed, in Victorian children’s books such as George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871) the killing off of the child protagonist is adopted as the perfect solution (cf. Plotz, 1995). So where Malcolm Usrey reads Heidi as the story of the natural child converting the adult sinner, I personally am more inclined to read in it the adult world’s oppression of the natural child, in a plot which makes the anti-social “Byronic hero”, as Usrey calls the grandfather, just as helpless as the child. The incompatible desires of the author
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— to allow the child to keep her natural innocence and at the same time be forced into civilization — must succumb to societal expectations (see Nikolajeva 2000b). In the Western tradition of children’s literature, Heidi opens a vast gallery of “natural” child characters who, sometimes gently, sometimes quite brutally, are socialized into the adult order. Yet writers deal with the dilemma in widely different ways. On the one hand, Anne Shirley must give up her vivid imagination and her exalted, poetic language in order to adjust to the norms of formal education imposed by adults. While in some senses her choice is certainly positive, since her only path to material independence and spiritual integrity does lie through education, she is undoubtedly suppressed and silenced by society, and is obliged to yield an essential part of her personality in order to win social acceptance (cf. Åhmansson, 1991). On the other hand, Pippi Longstocking, a figure overtly inspired by Anne Shirley (Åhmansson, 1994), enjoys, in addition to freedom of behaviour and an endless supply of money, both a complete freedom of speech, which she frequently exercises in her marvellous tall tales, and the freedom to resist the demands of linguistic convention itself: “S-e-e-s-i-k is the way I have always spelled it, and it seems to have worked out just fine” (Lindgren, 1959 p.45). Even the briefest comparison between Heidi’s first day in Frankfurt and Pippi’s first visit to school, or the ill-fated coffee party, reveals that Pippi can get away with anything, while Heidi has to be intimidated to the edge of humiliation. This is not simply a reflection of the sixty-five years between the two books’ publication. Above all, it is a mark of Pippi’s exceptional status. Her companions Tommy and Annika, after all, are not excused from lessons or from table manners, just as, even today, writers tend not to move beyond a socially constructed gender matrix unless what they are producing is fantasy and science fiction. In children’s literature, a “natural” child can only be portrayed within certain restrictions. In Winnie-the-Pooh, similarly, the main threat to the Arcadia of the Hundred Acre Wood does not come from bad weather or Very Fierce Animals, but from knowledge and education (see e g. Lurie, 1990, pp.154ff.; Kuznets, 1994, pp.52ff.). Pooh can actually be seen as just another aspect of the child protagonist, Christopher Robin, his projected self, and Pooh’s poems represent an oral culture in which language is not restricted by notions of correctness, where grammar can be flexible and new words coined at will. The education that Christopher Robin receives in the outside, civilized world is written, ordered, and strictly regulated. It is a scheme of things within which Spotted and Herbaceous Backsons have no houseroom. In Lacanian terms, Pooh’s poetry is imaginary (cf. Stanger, 1987, p.42), while what Christopher Robin is introduced into is the symbolic order. In the chapter “What Christopher Robin does in the mornings”, Piglet believes that the letter A is a Heffalump trap. What he reads from the sign is an “imaginary” or “iconic” meaning, not the conventional adult one. When Christopher Robin correctly writes down a message for the first time, he takes a definite step away from childhood innocence.
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Authors of children’s fiction, then, are inevitably faced with its “impossibility” (Rose 1984). The tension between the two contradictory desires cannot be resolved within one and the same text. Authors have therefore applied various strategies to circumvent the dilemma, of which I have already suggested several. For one thing, they can let the protagonist die young, before complete socialization becomes obligatory. Fully acceptable in a Victorian children’s novel, today this would be found disturbing. Another strategy involves fantasy, as in the case of Pippi’s supernatural strength, which allows her exceptional freedom. Then again, attention can be shifted away from the actual protagonist onto a substitute, as at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, where we share the separation agony, not of the child but the toys. While an unsophisticated reader may feel quite satisfied with these solutions, they are somewhat frustrating since the writers avoid addressing the crucial question.
4. Carnivalesque fiction The first stage of initiation offers the child protagonist a chance to investigate the world in the form of play, a temporary departure from idyll and kairos, a short disruption of harmony. It can be described in Bakhtinian terms as carnival (Bakhtin, 1968), where the lowest person in the societal hierarchy — in the mediaeval carnival a fool, in children’s books a child — is allowed to change places with the highest — a king, or an adult — and become strong, rich, and brave, to perform heroic deeds, to have power. The very idea of carnival, however, presupposes a temporal limitation. The child who has been allowed to leave the security of home and experience breathtaking adventures is finally brought back to square one, and the established order restored. This is what we sometimes call a happy ending. The time pattern of carnivalesque texts goes from kairos to chronos, and back again to kairos. The protagonist is returned to the cyclical state, and no further progress toward adulthood is allowed. In most quest stories for children, the protagonists, unlike the hero in myth (or a novice during initiation), are freed from the full consequences of their actions. What is described is not the real rite of passage, but merely play, a picnic, or, to follow Bakhtin’s notion, carnival. By allowing the protagonists a complete freedom from any responsibility for their actions during carnival, the authors somewhat diminish the impact of the deviation from paradisal innocence. Carnival, like idyll, goes across conventional genres of children’s fiction, encompassing, for instance, fantasy, adventure, and comedy of errors — the latter often involving disguises. To take fantasy, the carnivalesque pattern will start with a realistic setting in a recognizably everyday world, but then the protagonist, most
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often a collective protagonist consisting of a group of children, either siblings or friends, will be transported by magical means into a supernatural or mythical realm in which there is a task to perform — an evil creature to be got rid of, for instance. The innocent child is transformed into a hero, and furnished not only with appropriate material attributes (a sword and a horse, say), but with wisdom, courage and spiritual strength. When the task is completed, the character returns to the primary world of everyday. The pattern leaves room for many interpretations, including psychoanalytical ones, in which the evil forces of the secondary world are understood as projections of the hero’s dark side, in Jungian terms his Shadow. The transportation into the Otherworld is often seen as the result of some “lack” (Propp) or “split” (Jung) already operative within the protagonist while still in the real world. One quintessential case of the carnivalesque is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. From the wartime England of the 1940s, the four children find themselves conveyed by a magic wardrobe into another world, a mythical land of Narnia, ruled by a wicked White Witch who, on a once happy kingdom, has imposed eternal winter. Led by Aslan the Lion, Narnia’s protector, the children challenge the Witch to battle, and subsequently become kings and queens of Narnia. In the end, though, they go back through the wardrobe into their own world. In later books, they re-enter Narnia in different ways, perform various tasks there, and then return back home. The one exception is the final volume, The Last Battle, which for the first time introduces a clearly linear progression. In Narnia, death is reversible. Aslan is killed and resurrected, and he can also bring the enchanted stone figures to life again. One of the White Witch’s evil schemes is to stop the flow of time altogether by imposing the eternal winter, tantamount to non-being or death. But Aslan’s death and resurrection — a performance of the ritual of the returning god, with its pagan rather than Christian meaning — restores the cyclical time. Spring comes, as always, after winter, and the idyllic setting is recovered. Narnia returns to its prelapsarian state, as created by Aslan at the dawn of time. But then the circularity is brought abruptly to an end. The grown-up kings and queens of Narnia are brought safely back to their own world and become children again. The wonderful adventure has been merely a “time-out”, a picnic. As in computer games, when things become too scary or complicated, you are allowed to press the Escape button and play again. This is exactly what the children do in the sequels, starting over and over again from the same point, until they are too old to get involved. Another common pattern in fantasy involves time shift. In The Story of the Amulet the children are safely and conveniently transported to different countries and epochs. Some contemporary time-shift novels even allow their time travellers to take their overnight bag with them! That things are so comfortable and accommodating for them raises the crucial question about the carnivalesque as a whole.
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Do the protagonists, in any real sense, act and grow up? Or is it as if, when they come home from their magical there-and-back adventures, nothing has really happened? Does their temporary taste of liberation leave them wiser and more experienced? Or are they just as far as ever from taking a step towards adulthood? Jungian-inspired critics often choose to comment on texts in which the events are dreamlike, a submerging into something dark and frightening, a wandering in a forest or a cave(Divina Commedia, Alice in Wonderland). But the nature of a dream presupposes waking up and discovering with relief that the disturbing dream is gone, and that at least this time you do not have to take the decisive step. J. R. R. Tolkien’s scepticism towards Alice in Wonderland is based on the destruction of “secondary belief” when a rational explanation of magical adventures as a dream is offered (Tolkien, 1968). And conventional fantasy novels, whether they actually have an explanation of the adventure as a dream or not, let their protagonists remain totally unaffected by experience in the Otherworld. The adventure is nothing other than a Disneyland ride or a computer game. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the children who have gone through trials in Narnia, who have proved worthy to be crowned kings and queens, who have grown up and lived a whole life as wise and just rulers, subsequently return to their own reality as children, lose their dearly bought knowledge and insights, and therefore gain no lasting benefit from their Otherworld experiences. This is certainly regression rather than maturation. In other novels, magical helpers may actually erase the protagonists’ memory, as Merriman does at the end of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising suite. At best, what adventurers remember is a vague dream. Although many fantasy novels have been analyzed in terms of rite of passage, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe among others (e.g. Walker, 1985), what critics have tended to ignore is the “negation” of initiation in waking up, or the sheer loss of memory. Susan Cooper’s Seaward differs from her earlier The Dark is Rising in that the young protagonists are allowed the option of at least recognizing each other in their future life back in the real world. Even more strikingly, in Alan Garner’s Elidor, back in real life Roland pays a high price for having been involved in the magical realm. He goes insane. In Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time, similarly, the protagonist is permanently injured by her involvement with the past, which means that she cannot cope with her real life. These exceptions demonstrate that the pitfalls of happy endings are not necessarily the intrinsic features of children’s fiction, but the arbitrary choices of the authors. Yet they are definitely the intrinsic features of carnivalesque children’s literature. Even texts which are normally classified as realistic may still basically belong to the carnivalesque mode. In my study of fantasy, The magic code (1988), I show that there is in principle no difference between the Secondary World fantasy and timeshift fantasy — neither in the construction of the narrative nor in the function of time. And the concept of carnival also eliminates the generic distinction between
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magical and non-magical adventure. Running away from home, the central motif of adventure stories, is merely another narrative device which takes the protagonist away from an accustomed safety towards unusual sights, challenges and experiences, just like a fantasy story but without losing the realistic anchoring. Once again, the essence of carnival is the re-establishment of the original order, the return to normal life. Carnival is always a temporary, transitional phenomenon, like childhood itself. Child protagonists, thanks to magic or their own imagination or unpredictable adventures, can temporarily become, like the fool of carnival, strong, beautiful, and wise, can learn to fly, or trick the adults, and win over enemies. But the end of carnival means return to the everyday. Part of its purpose may be to rehearse a future moral and psychological transformation towards adulthood. Let’s take a classic text, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which at first glance is very different in its structure from a typical quest narrative. There is no discernible home-away-home pattern, and the plot is episodic rather than progressive, as in the Narnia Chronicles. On closer examination, there are at least two plots intertwined in the narrative. One is progressive (or linear), involving a struggle between hero and villain (Tom and Injun Joe), as well as treasure-seeking and a princess. The other is episodic after all, but within every episode it is possible to discern the circular home-away-home movement. In this episodic plot, Tom’s adventures take him, in concentric circles, further and further away from home, and into more and more perilous escapades: from Aunt Polly’s closet to the dangers of the cave. If the first chapters depict harmless “pranks” — pinching jam, playing hookey, getting other boys to do his work, blundering in Sunday school — then the murder in the graveyard is more serious. It not only initiates the second, linear plot, but also introduces violent death into what has seemed a harmless idyll. Running away to Jackson’s Island is an attempt to escape from civilization, which equals adulthood. Earlier, the boys go “grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss” (Twain, 1985, p.65). This may be a naive viewpoint, but it evokes the nostalgic feeling which the author is trying to stir in adults who are encouraged to recollect their childhood. The going back to nature is, despite its many joys, a failure. The young characters are not ready to leave their homes, even though they have clearly regarded both home and its two transformations, school and church, as prisons. The ambivalent status of home in adventure stories is especially clarified in comparison with its function in idyllic texts, where it is unequivocally positive. After the idyllic interlude, the linear plot takes over, bringing about considerable changes in Tom’s psychological evolution. Tom’s witnessing against Injun Joe is a sign of maturity, especially given the fact that he thereby breaks the childish “blood oath” he and Huck have sworn. But since the author, as he states in his
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Preface, is writing for “entertainment” of the young, he must give Tom a palpable material reward, in the form of the treasure. It is a tribute to the genre, but is also a ritual act. Like the hero of fairy tale, Tom gains riches and a princess. Becky’s part in the story is worth a separate study, with all the intricate tools of feminist criticism. Yet although her presence may contribute to the romantic air of the story, Tom shows no signs of sexual awakening, and Jerry Griswold (1996) sees this as a case of authorial self-censorship. So what about death, the other aspect of maturation? Tom is introduced to death in two widely different ways. The deaths of a peripheral character and a villain can hardly raise the issue of his own mortality. More important are the wild fantasies about it (which many readers apparently recognize). But let’s take another look at the island episode, this time from a mythical point of view. In a rite of passage, young boys are removed from their normal surroundings and placed in isolation, where they have to cope on their own. During this isolation, they are considered to be dead, and are often earnestly mourned by their relatives. Thus, on the island, Tom and his friends go through a ritual death; they are also believed to be dead, and come back to their own funeral: a farce in terms of a “realistic” novel, but a marvellous illustration of the hero’s symbolical death and rebirth. Without knowing it (and probably without the author knowing it), Tom re-stages the universal myth of the returning god. In this scene, death is presented as being reversible, as it is apprehended in myth. Although Tom is old enough to come to the important insight of his mortality, the author prefers him to remain as innocent in this respect as in sexuality. The novel’s “Conclusion” has been much quoted: “So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop — that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can” (Twain, 1985, p.221). That is, at the end of the novel Tom is just as young, naive and innocent a child as he was in the beginning. The linear development is again closed into a circle, the cycle is complete, and he is back to where he was — much like the Pevensie children. There is another character, however, whose quest, though somewhat eclipsed by Tom’s, is at least as interesting and totally different. Huck Finn’s initial situation, as compared to Tom’s, is one of lower social status but greater freedom. Twain is apparently ambivalent here. Societal rules demand that Huck be socialized, but all the other boys envy and admire him. It is perhaps worth mentioning that even Huck is homesick on the island — homesick for whatever hogshead he considers his “home”. Huck is the “most orphaned” of the three boys, which is what makes him the most free, but even he is not prepared to retreat from the little comfort he is used to. When, at the end of the novel, Huck finds refuge in Widow Douglas’s home, he regards it as a prison, because by this time he is ready to go further, as he indeed will
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in “his own” book. Tom capitulates and lets himself be socialized. Huck does not. Huckleberry Finn may seem to be a sequel to Tom Sawyer, and has maybe functioned so in children’s reading. Certainly, it continues the theme of the conflict between civilization and freedom, the eternal theme of children’s fiction. But it resolves this in a different way. In Tom Sawyer, home is a refuge and the little town is an idyll, even if troubled by murder. In Huckleberry Finn, home is to be left behind, and the town is cruel and hypocritical. In the beginning of the novel, Tom is still playing, while for Huck “real life” is about to start. While Tom stages his own death as a kind of joke, Huck repeats the trick because he is in mortal danger. It is no longer play. By the end of the novel, similarly, Tom still wants to play at “rescuing” Jim, while for Huck it is not a game. Huck knows that what they are doing is illegal, and there is no getting away from it. As many critics have pointed out, it is significant that Huck’s flight starts on the same Jackson’s Island which was the setting for the innocent Robinsonnade in Tom Sawyer. It begins as a re-staging of a ritual, but opens into a clearly linear progress. Although the novel does have a sort of a “happy ending”, it also suggests an aperture, because Huck is not going to stay with Aunt Sally and be “sivilized” once again. Huck has gained his passage into the adult world. As Roberta Seelinger Trites has observed, in a novel of adolescence, the central conflict is with parental authority. Therefore real or substitute parents have to be re-introduced, whereas in children’s novels they are comfortably removed (Trites, 2000, pp.54–83). We see this clearly in Huckleberry Finn as compared to Tom Sawyer. In Jungian terms, Tom is still at the stage of the primary unconscious, which keeps him happy and secure, whereas Huck has entered the second stage, the stage of the split, which produces anxiety and longing. The image of the river offers wide possibilities for Jungian interpretations, since, for unconsciousness, water is one of the most powerful symbols. The radical difference between the two novels is intensified by Huckleberry Finn’s use of a first-person narrator. It is generally believed that young readers prefer third-person narrators, which is why many adaptations of adult novels into children’s books have involved, among other things, a transposition from first to third person, not least Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. There are several reasons for this assumption. A first-person narrative makes for greater audience involvement, which can be perceived as too frightening and emotionally demanding for a small child. Then again, very small children have not yet developed a clear notion of an “I”. They have problems identifying themselves with the strange “I” of the text. Also, many children’s literature scholars have pointed out that young readers perceive “I” as a real person and may actually start believing in the role the “I” has in the story (see e.g. Lukens, 1990, p.129). In addition to all of which, there are considerations of tradition. Early children’s literature was written mostly for educational purposes, and third-person narrators were presumably felt to coincide
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with an author’s didactic role. As already noted, omniscient third-person narrators are most common in utopian texts. The transition to first person in Huckleberry Finn coincides with the more mature status of the protagonist.
5.
A female quest
Most of the quest stories portray either a collective protagonist or an individual male one. Apparently the reason for this is the predominantly male nature of the quest myth, which takes the hero away from home and into the wide world in order to conquer new hunting grounds, kill monsters or find treasures. Male initiation is constructed as a series of stations, where an adventure is offered at each: a task to perform, a test to pass. The pattern is linear and aimed at a goal (see Campbell, 1949). Female initiation is totally different and obviously connected with circularity (see Pratt, 1981). The female body follows the lunar cycle, which is closely associated with the idea of death and rebirth, the waning and waxing of the moon. The cardinal function of the female body is reproduction. The female initiation myths involve repetition, rebirth, the eternal life cycle. Actually, very few genuine female myths have been written down and incorporated into the civilized, male order of what Lacan calls the symbolic, and for several reasons. Connected with essential life mysteries such as menstruation and birth (both involving blood), female myths are more secret and sacred than male myths. They have mostly existed in oral form, as esoteric rituals. In Western civilization, they have been suppressed and muted by the dominant male culture. We can only discover traces and remnants of them, in the figures of the Progenitrix, the witch, the chthonic goddess. Writers who wish to describe a female initiation must therefore resort to various strategies. They depict girls in temporary, limited situations or “time-out” or carnival. In adult fiction, two well-established strategies are to describe the heroine either as mentally disturbed, the famous “madwoman in the attic” (Gilbert & Gubar, 1977), or as a witch. In both cases, the implication is that the woman does not constitute the object of a man’s desire. Two other strategies, equally applicable in books for adults and books for young readers, involve androgyny and fantasy. In a “realistic” children’s novel, a heroine’s running away, most often disguised as a boy, allows her to taste adventure before it is time to adjust to a traditional female role. By crossdressing and thus trading her female identity for male, the girl can feel more independent as an individual, and act on equal terms with men. The androgynous character often indulges in typically male occupations: war, sports, or risky nightly escapades. In most such novels, the girl is forced to return to her traditional female role, so emphasizing the temporary nature of carnival. Among the very few novels breaking this norm is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. Otherwise a strong, independent woman or girl is still a character more common in fantasy or
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science fiction, that is, in text types which more obviously rely on time-out. The carnival situation of both devices emphasizes the temporary, the passing, the inverted — the girl is allowed to be exceptionally strong and independent on certain conditions and for a limited time. Just as the fool during carnival is crowned and worshipped as a king, only to be dethroned and humiliated as soon as the carnival is over, the heroine can be temporarily superior to men, only to capitulate when the original order is restored — or to perish altogether, though Bakhtin (1968) argues that even the very depiction of carnival can have a subversive effect. Fantasy and science fiction offer writers considerable freedom from societal conventions. Fantasy allows a wishful thinking that would be impossible in socalled realistic fiction. But there are dangers here as well. A female protagonist does not automatically make the novel a depiction of female initiation. Some critics have seen Carroll’s Alice as Anima, the female principle (Bloomingdale, 1977). But in order to do so, they have had to apply the author-oriented approach of Jungian psychoanalysis, viewing Alice as the author’s projected female side. Keeping strictly to the text, there is actually nothing in the figure of Alice, or in the nature of her adventures, which is not possible with a male hero. As a character, Alice is obviously female, but as a textual function she is absolutely gender-neutral, and the same applies to L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy or George MacDonald’s Princess Irene, two of the most prominent individual female figures in fantasy. Lloyd Alexander has been praised for his strong and independent heroines: Eilonwy in the Prydain Chronicles, Mickle in the Westmark trilogy, Vesper Holly, and many more. Yet a close examination of the way these characters are constructed reveals a covert sexism. All these active, strong girls are one of a kind, and very often they despise their less lucky sisters. Instead of creating a genuinely female character, the writer has made a simple gender permutation, allowing a girl to appear in a masculine role. The function of these girls is similar to that of Pippi Longstocking — a one-of-a-kind. Ursula Le Guin has attempted to counterbalance the male pattern of the Earthsea trilogy in Tehanu. The result is a plot radically different from the dynamic, linear plots of the three first parts.
6. Postlapsarian texts Carnivalesque texts, then, allow the child a temporary empowerment, a certain restricted freedom. They interrogate most of the pastoral conventions of prelapsarian fiction: the safe and limited playgrounds, the security of home, the inexhaustible Cornucopia of Moominmamma’s handbag or Aunt Polly’s larder. But although they introduce the notion of death, they often present it as reversible, and although they may have a vaguely erotic subtone, they do not expose the protagonist to the issues of sexuality. Granted, some texts do come closer to breaking with the idyll. As
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already mentioned, after a series of circular adventures in Narnia, the characters finally abandon their own world once and for all and go further into the unknown. The characters of Mio, my Son and The Brothers Lionheart, similarly, never return to their own world when their quest is over. In such cases, death serves as a passage to linearity, and for the young protagonist of Bridge to Terabithia the death of his friend and spiritual guide opens the door into adulthood even more clearly. Death, whichever form it may take, is certainly pervasive in carnivalesque fiction, because a movement toward linearity, even a tentative one, presupposes growth, change, and consequently some insight about one’s own mortality. Yet on the whole, this is something carnivalesque writers fight shy of. By presenting death as reversible, by bringing their characters back into the safety of the home without disturbing insights into death, they convey the same comforting lies as the authors of prelapsarian texts. For a child reader, they can leave the impression that individuals need take no responsibility for their actions, and can encourage a false sense of security. If on the other hand the writer addresses adult co-readers at the child’s expense, the trick is no more fair than indulging in the description of childhood paradise. It is only by subverting notions of paradise and security, however minimally, that adult authors can be true to themselves. And exactly like the best Arcadian children’s novels, the best carnivalesque novels do offer just a glimpse of the opening towards adulthood, if not the opening itself. The next step in initiation takes the character out of circularity and makes the process irreversible. But as long as the character lingers on the threshold of adulthood, in the marginal state we call adolescence, we can still speak of an unaccomplished initiation. In Propp’s terms, we are still dealing with a stage prior to the enthronement; in Jungian terms, with a stage prior to the reunion of the conscious and the unconscious, the achievement of the Self. The young adult novel, basically originating as a contemporary phenomenon in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, portrays a person in this marginal situation. Childhood is over, and adulthood will begin any minute. This creates anxiety, the dominant emotion in young adult novels, because the protagonist realizes that there is no way back, that this is no longer a dream, a game, or a fancy-dress ball. It is no longer possible to wake up, shout “pax!”, or pull away the mask. The security of a childhood paradise is just about to be lost. The protagonist of the adolescent novel looks back at childhood as a carefree idyll, while often being very curious about the strange, previously forbidden adult life, which can seem more than a little threatening. With both excitement and sorrow, Holden Caulfield watches his younger sister riding on the merry-go-round, while he himself stands to one side, knowing that he has become too old to participate in the joys of childhood. But he does not dare to take the step into adulthood, to start a sexual relationship, or to adjust to the demands of adult society. The adult temptations, typically enough depicted as alcohol and sex, both allure and disgust.
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His adored dead brother becomes a powerful symbol of the happiness of not having to grow up (cf. Haviland, 1990). The cruel insight about the inevitability of adulthood brings Holden to a nervous breakdown. The novel’s open ending does not tell us whether or not Holden is now ready for initiation. His time of trials has just started. But he has definitely stepped off from the circular merry-go-round of childhood into linearity. In the last analysis, such novel can be said to be postlarsarian. In Scandinavian young adult novels, death, often violent death, and attempted or accomplished suicide, are now very common. The suicide motif can be seen as reflecting young people’s inability to come to terms with the idea of their own adulthood, and their desire to remain young forever. On a mimetic level, the trend may correspond to the growing rate of teenage suicides in the world. On a mythical level, what we see is adult writers’ anxiety about the younger generation, and this in its turn may be a retrospective anxiety about their own life and death. Writers choosing to let their young protagonists die or commit suicide do allow them to stay forever young. Or to put it another way, the suicide motif is the young adult novel’s alternative to Peter Pan’s escape or Pippi Longstocking’s magic pill. Thinking particularly of authors such as Robert Cormier, Anne Scott MacLeod proclaims “the end of innocence” in contemporary children’s literature: “Today’s authors … presuppose an adult society so chaotic and untrustworthy that no child could move toward it with confidence” (MacLeod, 1994, p.204). In young adult novels, it sometimes seems as if the only way to deal with growing up is either through death or through self-denial. Basically, these are the same options as those left to the “natural” child — to die or to learn her alphabet — or for a girl in disguise — to die or to put on her pink dress again. Authors of young adult fiction who depict suicide as a resolution of incompatible desires may not deliberately intend to encourage their readers to follow the example set. But even if their impact is infinitesimal, their authorial responsibility is global. Adult readers can perhaps detach themselves from the narrative and dismiss the characters’ painful experiences as typical teenage follies. But what about younger readers, whose own sense of identity is perhaps still unstable? Is there a risk of their sympathizing with the protagonists too much — to a fatal degree, in fact? Are the authors overestimating their readers’ emotional capacity here? One Swedish critic has coined the term idyllophobia (Svensson, 1996). She speaks of present-day authors’ fear of presenting the world of childhood as idyllic. Children’s and juvenile literature becomes more and more violent, not necessarily in actual depictions of violence, but in general perceptions of the nature of childhood. The transformation of cyclical patterns into linear ones necessarily involves a change in narrative discourse. While an archaic narrative presupposes a single subject in unity with the world, in “contemporary” linear narrative this unity is disturbed, resulting in polyphony (multivoicedness), intersubjectivity, unreliable narrators, multiple plots and plural endings. This narrative mode creates and
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endorses a chaotic view of the world which is very different from the ordered (structured) universe of the archaic mind, and the frequent use of an autodiegetic unreliable young narrator only magnifies the general impression of uncertainty and insecurity. In many novels, and most notably in Cormier’s I am the cheese, we see a total disintegration of character, narrative, and structure. The young adult novel, as a narrative which goes beyond the point of no return to idyll, also transgresses all the conventions which were traditionally ascribed to children’s fiction. The traditional or (as Bakhtin would say) epic novel for adults depicts an accomplished initiation. Tom Jones and Jane Eyre, the male and the female novice, find, each in their own way, an inner harmony after a long period of problems and trials. The fact that the epic novel can be read as the portrayal of a ritual explains why so many adult books of this kind are read by young people, albeit in adaptation, as with, for instance, Robinson Crusoe and Oliver Twist. For young readers, the accomplished rite becomes a guidebook to their own future travels, since they are still at an earlier stage of initiation than the protagonists. By contrast, the modern or (in Bakhtin’s terminology) polyphone, multivoiced adult novel most often depicts a failed initiation. The protagonist — or still more often the reader only, since the narrator is “unreliable” — comes to the tragic conclusion that emancipation is impossible, that the wrong path has been chosen, that the guides were treacherous, that the stage of split Self will be never followed by wholeness. The modern novel describes a never-ending quest that is doomed to fail, with motifs and characters which re-echo the stories of Faust, the Wandering Jew or Ulysses. The existential problems tormenting modern protagonists leave no room for positive answers. After thousands of years of human civilization, we still have no idea why we are here. The protagonists of modern novels interrogate their own existence, while the novels themselves examine their own boundaries and limits, with all the devices included in the notion of metafiction. Contemporary young adult novels, and even novels for younger readers, often come very close to adult fiction, both in their generally pessimistic world-view and in their complex narrative strategies (see Nikolajeva 1998b).
7.
“Except ye be converted, and become as little children…”
But when the rite of passage is still unaccomplished, and — even more so — when there is still the possibility of a return to circularity, if only though death, then we shall not speak of adult fiction but children’s fiction. The central theme of children’s fiction, I have been saying, is the irreversibility of time, and the high price to be paid by any individual who defies it. In adult fiction, the same theme is central to The Picture of Dorian Gray, and children’s fiction appears in a new light against such a background.
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To travel from prelapsarian, through carnivalesque, to postlapsarian texts is to see differences at all levels of narrative. The secluded, autonomous, rural setting gives way to an open and predominantly urban one. Collective protagonists are exchanged for individual ones. Omniscient, didactic narrators are replaced by narrators who are unreliable. Circular time opens into linearity, with singulative rather than iterative frequency. Awareness of linearity and, as a consequence, awareness of death becomes a central theme. Harmony gives way to chaos. The social, moral, political, and sexual innocence of the child is interrogated. As one of the many critics who question the essence of children’s literature, Jacqueline Rose has observed that “writing for children can contribute to prolonging or preserving — not only for the child but also for us — values which are constantly on the verge of collapse. The child, therefore, is innocent and can restore that innocence to us” (Rose, 1984, p.44). Yet the child Rose is speaking about is the child as imaged by adults — a myth of a child. Rose’s statement echoes Fred Inglis: “The best children’s books reawaken our innocence” (Inglis, 1981, p.8). The mythical, imaginary child of children’s fiction “restores” the adult to a more natural state. Is this the true purpose of children’s fiction? Or is it the other way round, as Malcolm Usrey proposes in his interpretation of Heidi? Must the innocent child sacrifice her innocence in order to bring back the erring adult from nature to civilization? In each case, the declared addressee is grossly abused. Support for such an account comes from Perry Nodelman’s essay, “Progressive utopia, or how to grow up without growing up”. While admitting that the assumption that children think, see and feel in their own way helps us, as adults, to think about them, Nodelman complains that it also separates us from our past selves and turns children into strangers. Childhood becomes “agonizingly enticing to us” and “forces us into a fruitless nostalgia” (Nodelman, 1980, p. 153, my emphasis). Nodelman speaks of “Progressive Utopia”. To me it seems regressive or conservative. Children who do not grow up are confined to their childhood, while a grown-up who goes back to the innocence of childhood is undoubtedly regressing, mentally and morally. If children’s fiction has as its main function the fulfilment of adults’ secret desires, why do we, as mediators, hypocritically call it “children’s fiction”? Or if children’s fiction is indeed intended for children, why should we deny that it is a powerful means of socialization, used, among other things, to make children believe that they are happier than adults? If we refuse to admit that we use children’s literature as a stick and a carrot we are surely lying. And if we simply disown all responsibility for the way children turn out, we are surely doing something even worse. Fortunately, children’s fiction is not as homogeneous as some scholars wish to see it. And by reading it as a displacement of myth we can clearly see that the different categories have different purposes. Utopian fiction introduces us to the sacred, which is probably most explicitly shown in The Secret Garden:
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“Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy, as if something were pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing … The Magic in the garden has made me stand up and now I’m going to be a man.” (Burnett, 1968, p.194)
Carnivalesque texts, taking children out of Arcadia, but ensuring a sense of security by bringing them back, allow an introduction to death, which inevitably follows the insight about the linearity of time. Postlapsarian texts, finally, take their protagonists, sometimes with much agonizing, beyond the point of no return, introducing them, and introducing young readers, to the inevitable Fall, which is a definite departure from innocence, and an entrance into adulthood, including as indispensible constituents sexuality and procreation. The three stages of initiation depicted by Mircea Eliade are tentatively achieved in these three main types of children’s fiction. When the initiation is complete, we are dealing with adult literature. Interestingly enough, most texts that are purely idyllic or purely carnivalesque, either preserving children in a state of innocence or bringing them successfully back to it, are treated in critical studies as “children’s fiction” quite unproblematically. It seems that the huge success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series can be accounted for by the skilful (or perhaps fortuitous?) combination of utopia (a school story, with its isolated space, its strict hierarchic rules, and its tame domestic adventures) and carnival (fantasy, and an empowering of the underprivileged child). The fact that Harry Potter novels have also been appropriated by adult readers suggests that in the age of postmodern confusion we have an obsessive need for the secure predictabilities of non-linear narrative (see Nikolajeva forthcoming). On the other hand, idyllic and carnivalesque texts which either interrogate or even deviate somewhat from the usual patterns are immediately labelled as “not really books for children”: Peter Pan, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Little Prince, The Mouse and his Child or Johnny, my Friend. These books, treated by Alison Lurie (1990) as subversive, disturb us as adult mediators, because they seem to be amazingly ignorant about their own messages. To young readers, they still suggest that childhood is a safe and secure place where it is possible to find eternal refuge. To adult co-readers, they still promise a nostalgic escape into a state lost forever. As adults we are most often fully aware of the fallacy of both promises, and the deception wrought on children makes us feel uncomfortable and guilty. As for books depicting the postlapsarian phase, the relatively new coinage “young adult fiction” is an attempt to circumvent such problems of author-reader relations. It is presumably taken for granted that the addressed audience is mature enough to handle the theme both intellectually and emotionally. But in point of fact, most international reader surveys (e.g. Pinsent, 1993) show that young adult novels are mainly read by girls in their lower teens. Whether the authors are aware
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of this or not, the books may convey messages that the audience is not ready for. In speaking of children’s fiction we are dealing with double set of codes. Unlike adult fiction, children’s fiction tends to have clearly delineated double narratees and double implied readers. An adult writer evoking an adult co-reader’s nostalgia is only one part of what goes on, and is obviously somewhat disingenuous. Hopefully, the child reader is targeted as well, although in a different manner. In the approach I have outlined here, the difference between children’s and adult fiction does not concern the superficial subject-matter or the stylistic readability or unreadability. It is a deeper question, concerning the stage of human initiation described. If a children’s novel seldom involves topics like sexuality, parenthood, or adultery, this is not so much because they are taboo, but because they are simply irrelevant to the stage of initiation depicted. For young adult novels, by contrast, sexual awakening is often the central motif. In idyllic fiction, sexuality has no place. At the stage of Arcadia’s collapse, it is all the more dominant, its centrality now further emphasized by the emergence of gay and lesbian fiction for young readers. Further, we can also explain why so many writers all round the world choose to write for children, even though children’s literature still has a low status and, with rare exceptions such as the Harry Potter books, brings low financial returns as well. Like the archaic returning god, a child exists out of linear time. Child protagonists have all their human potentiality still intact. They have not yet taken the decisive step. This means that in children’s fiction there is still the possibility of a hope for the future, which modern adult literature has so often lost. Although Christopher Robin experiences the same existential crisis as Stephen Dedalus, he is still mouldable — he can change. Unlike the protagonists of most contemporary novels for adults, he has not yet failed in his quest for identity. Unlike the authors of modern existential novels, children’s writers therefore have an inner freedom of expression. To me at least, this is a far more attractive idea than that of their simply indulging in adult nostalgia at their younger readers’ expense.
References Åhmansson, G. (1991). A life and its mirrors. A feminist reading of L. M. Montgomery’s fiction. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Åhmansson, G. (1994). Mayflowers grow in Sweden too: L. M. Montgomery, Astrid Lindgren and the Swedish literary consciousness. In M. Rubio (Ed.), Harvesting thistles: The textual garden of L. M. Montgomery (pp.14–22). Guelph: Canadian Children’s Press. Alcott, L. M. ([1868] 1988). Little Women. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Alexander, L. (1964). The Book of Three. New York: Holt [The first of the five chronicles of Prydain]. Alexander, L. (1981). Westmark. New York: Dutton [The first book in the Westmark trilogy]. Alexander, L. (1986). The Illyrian Adventure. New York: Dutton [The first book in the Vesper series].
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Avi ([1990] 1992). The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. New York: Avon. Bakhtin, M. (1968). Rabelais and his world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barrie, J. M. ([1911] 1951). Peter Pan and Wendy. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Baum, L. F. ([1900] 1968). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Random House. Bergstrand, U., & Nikolajeva, M. (1999). Läckergommarnas kungarike: Om matens funktion i barnlitteraturen. Stockholm: Centre for the Study of Childhood Culture. Bloomingdale, J. (1971). Alice as Anima: The image of the woman in Carroll’s classic. In R. Phillips (Ed.), Aspects of Alice (pp.378–390). New York: The Vanguard Press. Blyton, E. (1942). Five on a Treasure Island. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Burnett, F. H. ([1911] 1968). The Secret Garden. London: Heinemann. Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. New York: Pantheon. Carroll, L. ([1865] 1982). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In The Penguin Complete Lewis Carroll. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1982. Cooper, S. (1965). Over Sea, Under Stone. London: Cape [The first book in The Dark Is Rising suite]. Cooper, S. (1973). Seaward. London: Bodley Head. Cormier, R. (1977). I am the cheese. New York: Pantheon. Eliade, M. (1955). The myth of the eternal return. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Eliade, M. (1963). Myth and reality. New York: Harper & Row. Forster, E. M. ([1927] 1985). Aspects of the novel. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace. Frye, N. (1957). Anatomy of criticism. Four essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Garner, A. (1965). Elidor. London: Collins. Genette, G. (1980). Narrative discourse. An essay in method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gilbert, S., & Gubar, S. (1977). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grahame, K. ([1908] 1970). The Wind in the Willows. London: Methuen. Greimas, A. J. (1983). Structural semantics: An attempt at a method. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Haviland, E. M. (1990). In memoriam: Allie Caulfield. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Holden Caulfield (pp.132–43). New York: Chelsea. Hoban, R. (1967). The Mouse and his Child. New York: Harper. Hunt, P. (1994). The Wind in the Willows: A fragmented Arcadia. New York: Twayne. Inglis, F. (1981). The promise of happiness. The value and meaning in children’s fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jansson, T. ([1946] 1968). A Comet in Moominland. New York: Walck [The first of the Moomin novels]. Korczak, J. ([1923] 1986). King Matt the First. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Kuznets, L. (1994). When toys come alive: Narratives of animation, metamorphosis and development. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits: A selection. New York: Norton. Le Guin, U. (1968). A Wizard of Earthsea. New York: Parnassus [The first book in the Earthsea suite]. Le Guin, U. (1990). Tehanu. New York: Atheneum. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1994). Children’s literature: Criticism and the fictional child. Oxford: Clarendon. Lewis, C. S. (1950). The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Macmillan. Lewis, C. S. (1956). The Last Battle. New York: Macmillan. Lindgren, A. ([1945] 1950). Pippi Longstocking. New York: Viking. Lindgren, A. ([1948] 1959). Pippi in the South Seas. New York: Viking. Lindgren, A. ([1954] 1956). Mio, my Son. New York: Viking.
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Lindgren, A. ([1947] 1962). The Children of Noisy Village. New York: Viking. Lindgren, A. ([1973] 1975). The Brothers Lionheart. New York: Viking. Lukens, R. J. (1990). A critical handbook of children’s literature [4th ed.]. New York: HarperCollins. Lurie, A. (1990). Don’t tell the grownups: Subversive children’s literature. Boston: Little, Brown. MacDonald, G. ([1871] 1964). At the Back of the North Wind. New York: Macmillan. MacDonald, G. ([1872] 1964). The Princess and the Goblin. Harmondsworth: Penguin. MacDonald, G. ([1883] 1966). The Princess and Curdie. Harmondsworth: Penguin. MacLeod, A. S. (1994). American childhood: Essays on children’s literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Milne, A. A. ([1926] 1965). Winnie-the-Pooh. London: Methuen. Milne, A. A. ([1928] 1965). The House at Pooh Corner. London: Methuen. Montgomery, L. M. ([1908] 1964). Anne of Green Gables. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nesbit, E. ([1906] 1958). The Railway Children. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nesbit, E. ([1906] 1959). The Story of the Amulet. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nikolajeva, M. (1988). The magic code: The use of magical patterns in fantasy for children. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Nikolajeva, M. (1996). Children’s literature comes of age: Towards a new aesthetic. New York: Garland. Nikolajeva, M. (1998a). Barnbokens byggklossar. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Nikolajeva, M. (1998b). Exit children’s literature? The Lion and the Unicorn, 22, 221–236. Nikolajeva, M. (2000a). From mythic to linear: Time in children’s literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Nikolajeva, M. (2000b). Tamed imagination: A re-rereading of Heidi. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 25, 68–75. Nikolajeva, M. (forthcoming). Harry Potter — return to the romantic hero. In E. Heilman (Ed.), Harry Potter’s world: Multidisciplinary critical perspectives. New York, Routledge. Nodelman, P. (1980). Progressive utopia, or how to grow up without growing up. In P. A. Ord (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th annual conference of ChLA (pp.146–154). Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press. Nodelman, P. (1992). The pleasures of children’s literature. New York: Longman. Paterson, K. (1977). Bridge to Terabithia. New York: Crowell. Pearce, P. ([1958] 1976). Tom’s Midnight Garden. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pinsent, P. (Ed.) (1993). The power of the page: Children’s books and their readers. London: Fulton. Plotz, J. (1995). Literary ways of killing a child: The 19th century practice. In M. Nikolajeva (Ed.), Aspects and issues in the history of children’s literature (pp.1–24). Westport, CT: Greenwood. Pohl, P. ([1985] 1991). Johnny, my Friend. London: Turton & Chambers. Potter, B. (1902). The Tale of Peter Rabbit. London: Warne. Pratt, A. with White, B., Loewenstein, A., & Wyer, M. (1981). Archetypal patterns in women’s fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ransome, A. (1930). Swallows and Amazons. London: Cape. Rose, J. (1984). The case of Peter Pan, or the impossibility of children’s fiction. London: Macmillan. Rowling, J. K. (1997). Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbery [The first of the Harry Potter books]. Saint-Exupéry, A. de ([1943] 1962). The Little Prince. Harmonsworth: Penguin. Salinger, J. D. (1951). The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown. Sendak, M. (1963). Where the Wild Things are. New York: Harper. Shavit, Z. (1986). Poetics of children’s literature. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
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Smedman, M. S. (1988). Springs of hope: Recovery of primordeal time in “mythic” novels for young readers. Children’s Literature, 16, 91–107. Spyri, J. (1971). Heidi. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stanger, C. A. (1987). Winnie the Pooh through a feminist lens. The Lion and the Unicorn 11, 34–50. Stephens, J. (1992). Language and ideology in children’s fiction. London: Longman. Svensson, S. (1996). Dödspolare, skuggmän och förlorade fäder: Idyllfobin i ungdomsboken. In A. Banér (Ed.), Konsten att berätta för barn (pp.263–78). Stockholm: Centre for the Study of Childhood Culture. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937). The Hobbit. London: Allen & Unwin. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1968). On fairy stories. In his Tree and leaf (pp.11–70). London: Allen & Unwin. Trites, R. S. (2000). Disturbing the universe: Power and repression in adolescent literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Twain, M. ([1876] 1985). The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Twain, M. ([1884] 1966). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Usrey, M. (1985). Johanna Spyri’s Heidi: The conversion of a Byronic hero. In P. Nodelman (Ed.), Touchstones: Reflections on the best in children’s literature (pp.232–242). West Lafayette, IN: Children’s Literature Association 3. Uttley, A. ([1939] 1977). A Traveller in Time. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Walker, J. M. (1985). The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as rite of passage. Children’s Literature in Education, 16, 177–188. Wilder, L. I. ([1932] 1953). Little House in the Big Woods. New York: Harper & Row.
AUTHOR "Rosemary Ross Johnston"
TITLE "Childhood"
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Chapter 7
Childhood A narrative chronotope Rosemary Ross Johnston
1.
Chronotope as a term
The word chronotope (xronotop) was not Bakhtin’s own coinage, but his use of it has certainly led to new ways of considering relationships in narrative between people and events on the one hand and time and space on the other. The term itself (from chronos, time, and topos, space) was originally a mathematical one connected with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which re-described time not as the objective absolute of Newtonian physics, but as a subjective variable, dependent on the position of the observer. Bakhtin noted that he was using chronotope metaphorically, then added in a parenthesis, “almost, but not entirely” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.84). Be that as it may, as a literary concept chronotope is an important critical tool. In Michael Holquist’s words, it is “an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring” (in Bakhtin, 1981, pp.423–4). It can help us to read beyond the mechanics of “setting”, and to re-think depictions of narrative time-spaces in ideological terms, as subjective, changeable, and interwoven with the observer’s positionality. In seeing things this way, we need to relate chronotope to certain other aspects of Bakhtin’s thought. As Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson write, what emerges from the “thickening” of time as it “takes on flesh” and fuses with space to create the artistic chronotope is a “living impulse” (in Bakhtin, 1986, p.84). In Bakhtin’s work, this living impulse is soaked in his ideas about “outsideness” and the “superaddressee”, and about language. For Bakhtin, language is dialogical; is heteroglossic and polyphonic; is heterogeneous; is intonated with the richness and complexity of the ordinary and the everyday, which often pass unnoticed; is potentially marked by both “great time” (the perspectives of centuries (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.1–9)) and the “presentness” of each moment; is ultimately characterized by unfinalizability (nezavershennost); and most important of all, is inherently and immanently creative. In various ways all these ideas affect the concept of the artistic chronotope, and offer an analytical language for its discussion. They also highlight the fact that the organization of time-spaces in narrative is complex and multifarious, reflecting
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attitudes and beliefs which, whether explicit or implicit, are deeply rooted in historical phases of society. In what follows here, I shall not be linking the notion of chronotope to particular genres of children’s literature; I shall not be speaking of an “adventure” or “fantasy” chronotope, for instance (cf. Nikolajeva, 1996, p.134). Nor shall I use Bakhtin’s term as a way of examining some particular aspect of narrative — say, subjectivity (cf. McCallum, 1999). Altogether more broadly, my concern is with a major chronotope type: a chronotope of childhood in narrative. I shall be trying to suggest what is distinctive about such a chronotope, and why.
2.
Outsideness
Children’s literature can be thought of as an artistically mediated form of the communication which a society has with its young (Johnston, 2001, p.303). As such it involves an intersection of real and narrative time-spaces: at its simplest, the timespaces of the fiction, of the writer, and of the reader. This obviously applies to any other kind of book as well. But children’s literature is different in that it is almost always written by adults, but for children. This means that its chronotopes — its organization of people and events in relation to time and space — will tend to reflect some kind of negotiation — a dialogic interchange — between generations. In one sense, this will be inherently one-sided. It will favour the adult writers who write, and the adult publishers who choose what to publish. But in another sense, the imbalance will be counteracted, since the adult writer has no choice but to envisage the main addressees as children. Both the writer and the publisher will be hoping for children’s response. Given such dialogism between the two different cultural groups of adults and children, the use of the chronotope as a research optic may reveal, not only how a society feels about its children, but also how it feels about itself. In fact the chronotope can sharpen our focus in an area where criticism has perhaps been rather fuzzy. In the lives of grown-ups, childhood is a palimpsistic presence whose remembered time-space blurs comfortably into myth. Bakhtin’s ideas about outsideness warn us that as adults we cannot enter into the cultural time-space of childhood, and that we should not want to. Rather, we can create a more fruitful dialogue by remembering that, as members of an adult culture, we are now outsiders to childhood. In this way we can paradoxically learn more about ourselves. In Bakhtin’s words (1986, p.xiii), [a] pure projection of myself into the other, a move involving the loss of my own unique place outside the other, is, on the whole, hardly possible; in any event it is quite fruitless … Aesthetic activity proper actually begins at the point when we return into ourselves and to our place outside the other person.
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Here there are two related points with clear implications for children’s literature, both of them pertaining to the chronotope’s element of space. First, we can never really see from the other’s point of view anyway. Although we may be in exactly the same surroundings (okruzheniia), our field of vision (krugozor) will inevitably be different. You can see me in a way that I cannot possibly see myself. It is this very difference, however, which provides the potential for creative understanding. As Morson and Emerson (1990, p.185) outline Bakhtin’s ideas: The essential aesthetic act of creating such an image of another is most valuable when we seek not to merge or duplicate with each other, but rather to supplement each other, to take full advantage of our field of vision.
In other words, our fullest participation in the aesthetic act of creating images of childhood will be along the borders of our difference, precisely because we are not children but a creative other. This is where the second point comes in as a direct consequence. Our fullest view of ourselves becomes possible only when we see ourselves in relation to others; we need an other as a reference point. This is true for both adults and children. So what is particularly significant for a narrative chronotope of childhood is that, thanks to the creative other of the adult, and thanks to the images of the adult’s aesthetic act itself, children may come to see themselves, just as they are taken to see themselves as modelled in commercial advertizing. Another paradox concerns the chronotope’s time element. On the one hand, narrative time-space is a series of moments of presentness, each with its own meanings. They are meanings which are peculiar to precisely that conjunction of time and space, which are cultural, social, and historical, and which depend on who is speaking and listening, how they feel towards each other, what has just happened, the time of day, the weather, and so on. On the other hand, a story’s time-space also involves a dialogized heteroglossia: an accumulation of meanings that go far beyond specific presentness. Heteroglossia (raznorecˇie) refers to the way actual usages (the “talks” or languages of the everyday) play on established meanings of words, taking away their semblance of neutrality, and surrounding them with the great host of other utterances heretofore. Such heteroglossia is dialogized, because it can only emerge as part of communicative exchanges; it is inherent in the many dialogues of the everyday. This is a phenomenon of which writers take full advantage, by inserting into it their own voices and intentions. So here we can speak of the “double voice” of discourse: both the voice of a fictional character who speaks, and — behind and around and through that voice — the “refracted” voice of the author, working to achieve his or her narrative purposes. Bakhtin (1981, p.324) writes: Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms of its incorporation) is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special
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type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author.
As a result words become multi-voiced, polyphonic and polysemic. Take the word “space” itself. When we think about its contemporary usage in the expressions cyberspace and I need my own space, the openings for polysemy become rather obvious. Traditional notions of a novel’s “setting” generally referred to “place” rather than “space”. Bakhtin’s concept of “space”, by contrast, includes not just descriptions of place as a geographical location, but the perception of place. This overtly attributes a temporal frame, and means that a single objective place can be thought of as multiple subjective spaces, inner as well as outer. To adapt a suggestion made by John Shotter (1993, pp.21, 35), such perceptions tend to function as “extensions of ourselves” — Shotter stresses the “complex relation between people’s identities and their ‘hook-up’ to their surroundings”. This is a familiar tradition in the history of children’s literature, as even many titles tend to hint. There is Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery, 1908), for instance, or Hannah and the Tomorrow Room (Gleeson, 1999), a short chaptered novel about a child looking forward to moving into her own bedroom. The Australian text Do not go around the edges (Utemorrah and Torres, 1990) is in one sense about objective places of Daisy Utemmorah’s life, but is much more accurately described as being about space — her perceptions of place, of spaces where she belonged and did not belong, her yearning for spaces which do not include her, and her infilling of current space with dreaming. Many of the spaces in children’s books are imaginative spaces in much the same way — spaces of the mind. We think of Burningham’s Come away from the water, Shirley (1977) and Baillie and Tanner’s Drac and the Gremlin (1988). Gleeson and Greder’s The Great Bear (1999) is about metaphors of space. In generic terms its chronotope is that of a folk tale, “the fullness of time in it” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.52), though it plays on ideas of cosmic space as well.
3.
Ideologies and assumptions
Decisions about what to depict as part of the relationship between time-space and people and events reflect artistic and ideological assessments of worth. G. S. Morson and Caryl Emerson (1990, p.369) note that “because for Bakhtin all meaning involves evaluation, chronotopes also define parameters of value.” In Bakhtin’s own words (1981, p.250): chronotopes are the organizing centres for the fundamental narrative events of a novel. The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification that to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative.
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So in Peter Pohl’s Johnny, my Friend ([1985] 1991), the organizing centre of narrative events is an authentically geographical location in the Stockholm of the 1950s. And Pohl links maps of place with a mapping of that period’s youth culture, in this way providing a realism which works, from the opening lines, as an aesthetic validation of the characters as portrayed: Now then, lads, do you recognize this? says the cop, lifting out Johnny’s bicycle. We flash the whites of our eyes to each other, but nobody feels the urge to volunteer. The cop’s mate is still sitting there in the cop car, wittering into his mike. The corner of Swedenborgsgatan and Maria Prästgårdsgata. About ten young lads. I’ll get back to you. (Pohl, [1985] 1991, p.9)
Tove Jansson organizes her Moomin stories around the time-spaces of a valley which is removed from most specifics of time and place, where “the clocks stopped ticking” in winter, where fairytale isolation is clearly marked as beauty and space for adventure, and where any fear of such isolation is softened by favourite symbols of care and security: When they reached the top [of the hill] the March wind gambolled around them, and the blue distance lay at their feet. To the west was the sea, to the east the river looped around the Lonely Mountains; to the north the great forest spread its green carpet, and to the south the smoke rose from Moomintroll’s chimney, for Moominmamma was cooking the breakfast. (Jansson, [1948] 1961, p.18)
J. K. Rowling has chosen to organize her Harry Potter books around a centre in which the space element — the suburbs, attitudes and language of an ironically stereotypical English social class — is clearly defined from the first few lines but in which the time element is vague: Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange and mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense. (Rowling, 1997, p.7)
The first page of Dance on my Grave, by Aidan Chambers, overlays his description with ironic metaphor and clearly indicates the time-space of his teenage narrator: The beach, that first day, was a morgue of sweating bodies laid out on slabs of towels. Sea and sand at sunny Southend. We had lived in this Londoners’ playground at the mouth of the Thames for seventeen months, my father, my mother and me, and I was still not used
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to a town whose trade was trippers. There was talent about, bared to the imagination. (Chambers, 1982, p.9)
Consciously or unconsciously, all these writers have made decisions about what is valuable and significant in the organization of their narratives, and what will be most effective in communicating their chosen time-spaces to their readers. In each, we can perceive the double voice. In the excerpt from Johnny, my Friend, for example, the voice of the young narrator reporting the voice of the policeman clearly establishes the importance of peer solidarity in adolescence, and its “othering” of authority; this is part of Pohl’s narrative intent. In a further refraction, we first “see” the boys in a time-space described by the adult other, but reported by one of themselves. The chronotope, writes Bakhtin (1981, p.250), “provides the ground essential for the showing-forth, for the representability of events.” Note how quickly a few lines describing narrative time-space establish this ground in the examples quoted above. Or as an example of a different type of text, consider the first few lines of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678): As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where there was a Denn; And laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream. Bunyan, [1678] 1960, p.8
What are the impulses which lie behind that which society “shows forth ” to its young in children’s literature? Applying the idea of the chronotope in this way will not give all the answers, but it does gives us a point of departure. Three main considerations arise: one that is sociocultural, relating to theoretical understandings of the young; one that is pedagogical, relating to perceptions of teaching the young; and one that is literary, relating to the significance of story as pleasure. First, that a society seeks to show forth anything at all reflects a confidence in young people’s receptiveness. In a discussion of the adolescent novel, Julia Kristeva (1990, p.8), who in her early years was very much influenced by Bakhtin, says she understands the term “adolescent” less as an age category and more as “an open psychic structure.” She discusses adolescence in psychoanalytical terms, noting that it “opens itself to the repressed at the same time that it initiates a psychic reorganization of the individual”. This provides an obvious and immediate insight into many books for somewhat older children, including Johnny, my Friend, in which the protagonists are clearly involved in an organization-reorganization of identity initiated by the conflicts, paradoxes and tensions between new-found freedoms and pre-existing social and moral realities and constraints. It also suggests interesting possibilities for discussing adolescence in Bakhtinian terms of creative boundaries. Kristeva’s analogy of the “open systems” of living organisms, which “maintain a renewable identity through interaction with another” (Kristeva, 1990, p.8), is not
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only a particularly fruitful way to consider the culture of adolescence as represented in fiction; it also provides a metaphor for the chronotope in action. This clearly leads to the second consideration. Part of the organizing impulse of the chronotope of childhood in narrative is pedagogical. Historians of children’s literature have traditionally noted that children are taken to be, if not “open psychic structures” or tabulae rasae, then certainly receptive to influence and guidance, and acutely sensitive to interaction with each other. Books for children have been organized around conventions designed to “teach” and “socialize” and “acculturate”, in earlier times with respect to religious and moral concerns, in later times as a more general education, and most recently in connection with specific social issues. This organizing principle shaped both story and discourse. Thus the book usually described as “beginning” Australian children’s literature (Saxby, 1998, p.12), Charlotte Barton’s A Mother’s Offering to her Children: by a Lady long resident in New South Wales (1841), not only transparently teaches the child characters about such things as the botany and flora of the new colony. The highly contrived format within which Mamma (Mrs Saville) and her children interact also expresses a chronotope which is organized around ideas about the value of such information: Julius. – Mamma we ought not to overlook the Fig Tree. Mrs. S. – Indeed, we ought not, Julius. It is not only splendid, but a very remarkable tree. The stem or trunk of the tree appears to be enveloped in drapery. The Red Cedar is also a handsome tree, and so is the Sassafras. I think the smell of the bark very agreeable; and you know it is used medicinally. (Barton, 1841, p.17)
Children, such narratives imply, need to be taught, and books should teach. It is important to note, however, that from the beginning the very notion of teaching through a book supposedly being read for pleasure involved a particular type of teaching strategy, and a particular view of children. This leads to the third main consideration: the attraction of story. Apparently assuming that children may not want to sit and be taught, many authors have chosen to coat the pill with sugar. Their books seek to announce very publicly that they are neither formal school books, nor textbooks. Hence the use of illustrations and decorative prints and cover pictures, and most important of all, the pretence (or if that is too harsh a term, the layering) of story. It is just such a pretence of story that is the organizing centre of the otherwise bald explanations in books such as A Mother’s Offering to her Children. “Story”, then, is conceived as pleasure. This is part of a long multicultural tradition of societies communicating their histories and beliefs to themselves and to their children through story. The assumption that children can and should learn from the pleasure of story is still with us. Even a cursory survey of the last twenty years of at least Australian children’s literature reveals that the impulse to teach remains alive and well. While there is certainly a great variety of beautiful books, the ideological impulse of many
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of them is the advocacy of particular stances on social issues. Especially during the final years of the old millennium, these issues included the environment, indigenous cultures, multiculturalism, the changing shape of families, and gender and gender roles. To use Bakhtinian language (1981, pp.243, 253), the matrix of people and events, and time and space in these books is “shot through with chronotopic values of varying degree and scope” which reflect the concerns of “the world that creates the text”.
4. Paratexts and the addressee This world that creates the text is a provocative concept. At the very least, it clearly refers to an author and a publisher, and to the children, parents and teachers who represent market forces. In pragmatic terms, the author is doubtless mainly concerned to be published and successfully marketed. So although the author is the text’s creator and is writing for children, we can already glimpse the shadow of adult readers, whose presence is by convention not generally acknowledged. How much do children’s writers write for these other adults, and how much does this influence a chronotope of childhood in narrative? According to Shavit (1995), authors write in varying degrees for adult and/or child. Yet such a view is too simplistic. When we shift the focus from the reader to the created text, this is seen to be the product, not only of author and illustrator, but of forces at work in the sociocultural context. The significance of this context-world can be seen in what Genette (1987) calls paratexts, i.e. the material which is liminal to the text, in the zone between off-text and on-text — the “public” part of the book that includes blurbs, dedications, excerpts from reviews, afterwords and so on. This paratextual material is designed to communicate, but not always to the implied reader of the actual text, and it is not always written (or seen to be written) by the author of the actual text. For example, the Australian picturebook-maker, Jeannie Baker, includes at the end of her books, after the story and her beautifully-wrought pictures have come to an end, a serious message and explanation. That of her most recent publication, The Hidden Forest, gives information about kelp forests, and describes how she actually constructed the artwork. It reads in part: Jeannie Baker made a number of visits to Tasmania’s Tasman Peninsula where she went snorkelling and scuba-diving to explore at first hand the magic of its kelp forests. Jeannie constructed the artwork using a multitude of collected natural materials including seaweed, sponges and sands. The kelp was modelled with a translucent artist’s clay and the wet seawater with resin. (Baker, 2000)
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Compare the languages of text and afterword in an earlier book by Baker, Where the Forest meets the Sea. The first and second pages read: My father knows a place we can only reach by boat. Not many people go there, and you have to know the way through the reef. (Baker, 1987)
The text of the afterword reads: The place, the people, and the predicament are real. This forest is part of the wilderness between the Daintree River and Bloomfield in North Queensland, Australia. There remain at the making of this book only 296,000 acres of wet tropical rain forest wilderness that meet the ocean waters of the Great Barrier Reef. Small as it is, this is the largest pristine area of rain forest left in Australia. The artist made two extensive field trips to the Daintree Wilderness to research and collect materials. These relief collages are constructed from a multitude of materials, including modeling clay, papers, textured materials, preserved natural materials, and paints. The collages are mostly the same size as the reproductions. (Baker, 1987)
Such an afterword is clearly included so as to give authenticity to the text’s advocacy. But it also reflects a great deal about the world that creates the text, ideas of story as pleasure, and the desires of a culture to “show forth.” When an important issue is at stake, someone — perhaps the author, perhaps not — decides that story has to be explained, contextualized, authenticated, in some cases so that teachers and parents will be armed with more facts, in some cases to justify the stand being taken, and perhaps even to persuade these adult readers themselves. In Barbara Wall’s opinion, the marker of writing for children is actually writing to them. In developing this idea, she further suggests that the distinctive feature of a children’s book is less the relationship between the implied reader and the implied author than that between a narrator and a narratee. While the presence of the implied author pervades the text and colours and controls the reader’s response, at any and every given moment it is the narrator who “speaks.” And although the idea of the implied reader is being shaped by the gradual unfolding of the text as a whole, at any and every given moment it is the narratee to whom the narrator speaks. (Wall, 1991, pp.7–8)
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Wall describes this relationship as one of single address, with the writer addressing children without consciousness of the possible presence of adults, or of double address, with the writer consciously addressing both audiences in a variety of ways, or of dual address, which is “a fusion of the two”. She argues that children’s literature has broken away from some of the condescending practices of earlier times, such as talking to adults above the heads of children, and has developed a mode of address that is more genuinely and specifically a form of single address directed to children. There is certainly less condescension, but Wall’s claim does perhaps call for qualification. As we have seen, not only are there other implied readers of contemporary children’s books who exert a powerful influence on the organization of the text, but there are strong social forces that also have a great deal to do with its popular advocacies. Indeed, it is the growth of interest in children’s literature, both as an academic field and as an area of enhanced community awareness, which has in some quarters led to an exaggerated kind of political and literary correctness. I would not include Baker in this condemnation; she is a committed and gifted artist with a genuine passion for the environment. And in some ways the phenomenon has also had its positive sides. Writers and illustrators have become increasingly aware of postmodernist theory, and they deliberately experiment with multiple focalizations, metafictional devices, gaps, intertextuality and multiple time-spaces. Yet even so, all this does still involve the presence of multiple addressees who influence the telling of the tale. On the other hand, the children’s books now highlighting fashionable social themes and seeking the approval of academics and literary judges can also be considered in a gentler way, which is demeaning neither to the implied child reader nor to the writer. Bakhtin (1986, p.126) noted that as part of the organizing structure of any text there is a “higher” superaddressee who is “a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance”, and whose “absolutely just reponsive understanding” is simply taken for granted. It can of course be argued that this superaddressee ought to be the child, but sometimes is not, or perhaps ought to be “wise” adults, well equipped to re-iterate the text’s messages. In many children’s books, however, I think the superaddressee — the person who, deeply and inherently, is a constitutive part of the whole utterance — may be neither the child nor the adult as such, but rather the adult the child will become. For it seems to me that, if there is one particular distinctive characteristic of the chronotope of childhood in narrative, it is the creation of a present that has a forward thrust. This is not to deny the obvious: that the implied reader is the present child. But it is that child conceptualized as both present and potential, as unfinalizable and creatively alive, within a sense of “great time” — within a much larger perspective. Note that I am also implying here an idea of reading that reaches beyond an enclosed and finished meeting event of text and reader. As a physical and cognitive
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process, reading may end when the book is closed, but reading as a dialogue which draws in the reader’s own experience and worldview (past, present and yet to come), reading which, in Bakhtin’s words, involves the reader in “renewing the work” of art, may continue for a lifetime. Reading, as well as writing, can be seen as a creative process: The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing of the work through the creative perception of listeners and readers. (Bakhtin, 1981, p.254)
In fact the whole raison d’être of teaching is to prepare children for adulthood; the equipping for “now” is part of this process. Here, then, over and above the present child there hovers another presence, a sort of incipient otherness, in the forthcoming future of the child, who is caught up in a process of continual “recreation” (Johnston, 1998). This shadowy presence is the adult who will actually have the agency to care for the environment, to respect indigenous rights, to take a responsible social role. Again, this is not to play down the agency of children, who by caring for their own space — their home, their school, their community — can certainly do their bit. But their period of greatest agency will be as adults. This is why the chronotope is such a helpful term in the discussion of children’s literature. The time element in children’s books — represented as it is in multiple ways — takes on a different type of flesh, a thickening that is specific to itself, a thickening that is fluid and temporary and likely to change. Its present is sometimes unending, but even an unending present, and even a moment of presentness that is terrifying, is underwritten with future, and the possibility of change and transformation. If we consider “the process of the reading” to extend, as I have argued, beyond the immediate physical and cognitive act, this gives an interesting perspective to Eco’s words (1994, p.24): … [T]he model author and the model reader are entities that become clear to each other only in the process of reading, so that each one creates the other.
The forward thrust of children’s narratives implies possibilities and options. This potential to create circumstantial differences is not only the essence of the fairy tale, but is present in a text such as Dance on my Grave, which, among other things, is about coming to terms with death. Consider these lines which occur a page or so before the end: There’s something ahead for me; I can’t see what it is yet, but I know it is there, waiting. (Chambers, 1982, p.250)
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Perhaps we could say that the chronotope of childhood in narrative is a chronotope which inherently, and sometimes obviously, sometimes less obviously, focusses on change, growth and becoming. So when there are afterwords and other paratextual materials, they are written for the child to grow into, perhaps to be helped into, achronologically, sometimes in hindsight, sometimes very quickly. This represents part of the potential of childhood, part of the notion of children as open psychic structures, as well as clearly being another expression of pedagogical activity, which is similarly concerned with deliberate interventions in the processes of change and growth. Children’s books, then, imply a notion of what Bakhtin (1981) called “open wholeness” — the child reader who is wholly child at this moment, but who is open to change, for whom change is inevitable, and who will ultimately become wholly “other.” 5.
An ethics of hope
This insight may help to clarify the vexed discussion of what counts, and what does not count, as a children’s book. The texts most likely to be rejected as books for children are the ones which lack this forward thrust, texts enclosed and closed in time, and proposing no possibility of change. This rejection emphasizes the way that the social forces of the community outside the text, which is essentially looking back, wants to conceive of the future it projects in the time-spaces of children’s narrative. I believe that this forward thrust and this momentum towards another wholeness of present indicate that, while children’s books should be realistic as well as fantastic, should be diverse as well as particular, should present different versions of what it is to be, was to be, and can be, they should also be characterized, immanently, by the idea of an ethics of hope. The potential for this hope emerges from the fact that childhood, despite its inevitable relationship with some particular present, and perhaps because of it, is an unfinished state. Childhood has the space for time, and the time for space. As we have seen, we can link this to Bakhtin’s idea about unfinalizability, which accepts the world’s general chaos, mess and incompleteness, but perceives this as an open potential for freedom and creativity: Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future. (Bakhtin, 1984, p.166)
If, as suggested above, children do indeed see themselves through the aesthetic images that are created for them, then an ethics of hope is more than a philosophical nicety. It is surely a social imperative. In part it entails the presentation of many different images and possibilities of being, something which many picture
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books are already doing extremely well. Especially at a time when a globalized commerce is bombarding young people with images of similarity and conformity, urging them to admire just a certain narrow range of body shapes, clothing brands, food, and toys, and to speak certain languages, to act out only certain behaviours, we do need to consider the implications of the texts children read very seriously. Do their images of childhood and adolescence have an appropriately hopeful orientation, and is it towards a future that is appropriately varied? So with some notable exceptions, one of the features of a narrative chronotope of childhood is a present infused with a future, whereas what many books for adults offer is a present infused with a past. The orientation towards the future can even be seen in books where the time that is being constructed is a sentimental version of pastoral perfection — what Bakhtin (1981, p.103) called a “bucolic-pastoral-idyllic chronotope”. This time-space is like a cameo, or a Victorian miniature, tiny and perfect, framed and separated from the incursions of the real-time world. It is the “dream-time” or “idyllic time” of fairy tales, or of books such as The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, and the Moomin stories. It has been constructed as a retrospect by adults who would like it to remain sacrosanct, even though they know this is impossible. It, too, is time with a forward thrust, but the thrust does not come from an excitement and growth within, but is an inevitable, sorrowful propulsion by immutable forces without.
6. Future-in-the-present Any such future-in-the-present can bring to mind the principle of simultaneity applied in mediaeval art, when a number of events which must obviously have occupied different pockets of time are expressed in the same space. Maria Nikolajeva (1996, p.134) relates this to the depictions of story in the visual art of picturebooks. It can also be applied to considerations of the time-spaces of verbal narrative, helping us to clarify the distinctive chronotopical feature of a forward thrust in the midst of present concerns. A brief comparison of two books, one a book for older children and one a book for adults, may help to demonstrate this idea. Both these books have won honours, which signifies cultural endorsement for what they “show forth.” Brian Caswell and David Phu An Chiem’s Only the Heart was named as the Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book in 1998 and has also been set as a school text in at least one Australian state. Beloved is a Pulitzer Prize winner and its author, Toni Morrison, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. My point has nothing to do with whether the one book is more realistic than the other, nor with their relative merits as literature. As in earlier studies (e.g. Johnston, 2001), I am assuming that children’s literature is literature, and is part of a literature continuum. Its texts deal with kinds of issue which concern the entire continuum, and
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in different ways address similarly complex and abstract themes and ideas. In so doing, it trains a receptiveness to later encounters with more complex texts, extending young people’s conceptual horizons. The themes which attract older readers’ attention are viewed against the horizons of what they have read in earlier life. So Only the Heart and Beloved are different in scale, but do have a number of similarities: both are based on historical fact and overtly seek to confront the horrors of the past; both deal with the aftermath of war; both focus on displaced families which are isolated by time-events into spaces allowing little or no agency — the plight of Vietnamese boat people in Only the Heart and, in Beloved, the condition of Afro-Americans before and after the Civil War. Both books are chronotopically organized around legacies of wars and operate on a type of simultaneity principle, the composition circling in and out of time spaces that span a number of years and places. Both have child and adult characters who are sometimes assigned a narrative voice. In both, people die in terrible circumstances, and children grow into adults. The differences in the time-space organization of these two books begin with the paratexts. The dedication of Only the Heart begins “For all those who lived the Nightmare, in search of the Dream” and follows this up with expressions of personal thanks which suggest an element of collaboration and authenticity. Morrison’s dedication is cryptic and succinct: “Sixty Million and more.” Here is a glimpse of two different time inscriptions. Morrison’s is horrifying and complete, circumscribed and enclosed. Caswell and Chiem’s acknowledges the horror, but focusses on the possibility of escape. Equally revealing are the following passages from the texts proper: Paul D had only begun, what he was telling her was only the beginning when her fingers on his knee, soft and reassuring, stopped him. Just as well. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of its contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s [a rooster] comb beating in him. Sethe rubbed and rubbed, pressing the work cloth and the stony curves that made up his knee. She hoped it calmed him as it did her. Like kneading bread in the half-light of the restaurant kitchen. Before the cook arrived she stood in a space no wider than a bench is long, back behind and to the left of the milk cans. Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past. (Morrison, 1997, pp.72–3)
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Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out. Slave life; freed life — every day was a test and trial. (Morrison, 1997, p.256) But you grow out of everything, even despair. Sure, there’s a certain satisfaction to be got out of feeling bitter, but it hurts people, especially the people you love, and you can’t keep doing it. Either you let it destroy you, or you start doing drugs or booze, which is about the same thing. Or you shake the crap out and get on with what’s left of your life. (Caswell and Chiem, 1997, p.201) I don’t know why the gangs have to be part of a community which is almost obsessively law-abiding. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense. My grandmother would probably see it in terms of balance. Good and evil, light and dark, the yin and the yang. Me, I don’t think the universe is organized quite so neatly. (Caswell and Chiem, 1997, p.205) Then we make our way outside and the tin-can sound of a scooter rises above the noise of the crowd. It moves like a memory across my path and for a moment the years drop away [the protagonist is now an adult, a father himself]. But only for a moment. I am tired from the trip and I can feel the sweat on my hands. I grip the urn more lightly. Not long now. Soon she will lie next to my grandfather, and I will say the words to give her spirit rest. Though a medium of Quan Yin should have no need of words to give her peace. Thanh has written a poem of farewell, and he asks that I read it to her when she is at her final resting place. He’s printed it out for me; I’ve got it folded up in the pocket of my shirt. But it isn’t really necessary. I know it by heart. To Vo Kim Tuyet 1919–1996 Our years, like leaves, Drift and fall away; Piling up, memory upon memory, Joy upon sadness, Until the smile and the tear Become One. And the One becomes All. Our dreams, like children Grow from a song of the heart;
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We know the melody; But we cannot tie it down To sounds the ear can taste. And yet it lives within us Through our dreams, Through our children. And the words are like years, Drifting like leaves; And the rhythm is a pulse, The beat of life and death. For the song is a journey And the journey is a song That only the heart can sing … (Caswell and Chiem, 1997, pp.209–212)
It is of course impossible to generalize from only two texts, and there will be many exceptions to any rule. Nonetheless, I suspect that subsequent research may lead to more agreement than disagreement with the argument I am supporting through this comparison. Discourse lives, writes Bakhtin (1981, p. 292), in a living impulse (napravlennost) toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing about the social situation or the fate of a given word in life (cf. Johnston, 1997).
7.
Conceptualizing the visual chronotope
As the reference above makes clear, Bakhtin was referring to a chronotope expressed in the language of words — in the verbal text of the novel. However, the literary concept of the chronotope, and the idea of a chronotope of childhood in narrative, becomes even more interesting when we contemplate the idea of a visual chronotope, and consider its application to the text of picturebooks. A visual chronotope is the representation of time-space in picturebook art and illustration. Just as Bakhtin’s original concept of the chronotope recognizes ideological loadings, so will its extension into the idea of a visual chronotope. Whatever is selected to illustrate time-space will reflect personal and social values and attitudes. For example, a clock on the space of a wall is a clear time marker, but its repeated presence with different times (particularly short intervals), and as a central presence, may also reflect pressures and stress (Johnston, 2001). But the visual chronotope not only helps us discuss the way meaning emerges from picturebooks’ interplay of words pictures. It can also enlarge our sense of the
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chronotopical images themselves. A picturebook’s verbal and visual chronotopes may actually differ from each other, and this difference may account for meanings which as readers we perceive yet find difficult to pin down. In Bakhtin’s words (1981, p.252): Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex relationships.
It is in this spirit that Bakhtin speaks of an intervalic chronotope, where as part of the narrative two different constellations of time and space play out against each other, the action being perceived from two quite different chronotopical perspectives. One of these may be “hidden”. But the interaction between them means that “both of them take on metaphoric significance” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.165). Here is one way to describe, say, Burningham’s Come away from the water, Shirley (1977), or Baillie and Tanner’s Drac and the Gremlin (1997), or Jag såg, jag ser, by Håkan Jaensson and Gunna Grähs (1997). It describes particularly well the wonderful book by Thomas and Anna-Clara Tidholm, Resan till Ugri-La-Brek (1995), where the child protagonists go searching for their dead grandfather, across the football field, through the snowy forest, through the desert, across a beach, right to the other side of the world into an icy land, where they find and talk with him, and then return home. The hidden intervalic chronotope hints that all this has happened during play in their yard. Their parents on the balcony were glimpsed as the children made their campfire in the snowy forest, and are clearly seen having afternoon coffee on the children’s “return.” The link with my main point about the forward thrust of children’s literature is surely clear. A picturebook’s deliberate organization of two different time-spaces typifies the unboundedness of the narrative chronotope of childhood. It represents a setting free from adult perceptions by the adults themselves who are the creators of the text. Resan till Ugri-La-Brek could also be considered in terms of another type of chronotope identified by Bakhtin (1981, p.111): the adventure novel of everyday life, where time-space is organized as “a new type of adventure time” which is a “special sort of everyday time.” Here the emphasis is not on two perspectives of time and space being quite different, but on a perspective of time-space — and of life itself — as being simultaneously, within the single chronotope, both critically personal or individual and, just as critically, something which reaches beyond individual experience, so endowing individual experience with further significance. This is a notion of time which draws past and future into the experience of the present moment, but with an inclination towards change. The adventure novel of everyday life is a temporal sequence of “metamorphosis” or “transformation” which is linked with “identity” as part of an “idea of development”; it presents moments of “crisis” — that is, critical points of a development which “unfolds not so much in a straight
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line as spasmodically, a line with ‘knots’ in it” (Bakhtin 1981, p.113). In the early Christian “crisis hagiographies” which Bakhtin notes as belonging to this type, “there are as a rule only two images of an individual” — a sort of “before” and “after” that are both “separated and reunited through crisis and rebirth” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.115). He goes on to expand this idea: [A] novel of this type does not, strictly speaking, unfold in biographical time. It depicts only the exceptional, utterly unusual moments of a man’s life, moments that are very short compared to the whole length of a human life.
The novel used as a model for the discussion of this chronotope is Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and Bakhtin describes in great detail concomitant features that relate directly to this text, for example themes such as individual initiative, chance, guilt, and redemption. In themselves these are not relevant to my present argument. But once again, the overall type of chronotope Bakhtin distinguishes is certainly relevant to an ethics of hope. A chronotope of the “adventure novel of everyday life”, with its representation of critical incidents as “knots” of becoming can clearly express childhood with a sense of forward thrust. It can catch the paradox of childhood both as an intense presentness, acutely and vitally realized, and as a larger moment of “great time”. To take another example of visual chronotope, Jenni Overend and Julie Vivas’s Hello Baby (1999) tells the story of a home birth, which is focalized through the eyes of Jack, the third child and youngest sibling. The verbal text is clearly organized by the chronological time-space of the labour; time is part of the structure of events, which take place near a “town” more rural than urban — a neighbour drops off “a load of wood” as “a present for the baby” — and which are more or less contemporary: the midwife brings “oxygen” and “a special microphone for listening to the baby’s heart”, there is a “phone”, and the family has “sleeping bags”. The illustrations of the visual text depict clothes of an indeterminately modern period, and a similarly indeterminate house; the pictures of preparations for the birth imply rather than detail window, chair and table. The first of the two illustrations of the scene outside the house shows a water tank and a wind-blurred forest of tall trees, so reinforcing the rural impression; the second depicts part of a house and a woodheap, with Jack (the narrator) and his father collecting wood. All this is clearly a critical incident, “a knot”, in the life of the mother, the family, and the child about to be born, concentrated around the moment of birth, which becomes the threshold of the “before” and “after.” Nothing will be the same again for any of them — and cutting (and knotting) the cord is both end and beginning. However, it is also an everyday moment — babies are born, many of them at home, all the time. This example quintessentializes my argument: that the chronotope of childhood in narrative is forward-looking, is characterized by an ethics of hope, and most of all constructs childhood within a sense of time-space which, rather than
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dislocating the personal moment of the child or discounting the significance of the child’s present, extends personal moment and present into the spaces and perspectives of “the fullness of time”. True, unassisted by the research optic of the chronotope, traditional critics would still be able to say a great deal here. They could note that the wildness outside stands in a similar relation to the house within which the birth takes place as the macrocosm to the microcosm in Shakespeare; that the illustration of the forest, and of the tall (even phallic) trees which dwarf the figure of the pregnant woman walking into the pressure of the wind, connotes the forests of folk and fairytale — enchanted woods which keep out or keep in; and to pinpoint an Australian context, they could also catch a hint of the bush (or desert or other wild place) as a space of healing and redemption, of finding oneself, of gathering together physical and emotional resources. The visual chronotope — and the particular chronotope of the adventure time of everyday life — gives us a another way of discussing the richness of this book. The text begins in medias res: “We’ve been waiting a long time for this day, Mum, Dad, Bea, Janie and me.” Preparations have started. Although this sense of a long period of waiting refers both back and forward, the verbal text is telling a predictable story of a special but far from unusual occurrence. Yet right from the start the visual chronotope challenges any idea that the present can contain the entire story; it pushes time beyond the everyday into the realm of adventure time, and even of a folkloric “great time.” On the title page Jack, the previous baby, holds up the jumpsuit, inviting the reader-viewer to engage not only with the comparative smallness of the coming baby, and the transformational process of his own growing, but also with the sure knowledge that the new baby will similarly transform and outgrow the space of this moment. The swirl of preparations for birth becomes increasingly focussed on the human figures and their relationships, which are made visual in the representation of touch, overlap and interconnection. Most of the time, the space surrounding them is little more than a pinkish-red glow. After the baby’s birth this space becomes darker, and the family sleep in front of the golden light of the fire, in a visual image that is almost tribal. The paucity of space markers reaches its most extreme in the picture of the newly-born baby on just a white page, thrust into present, with the cord as its only connection to the moment before. In a sense, this baby has become Every Baby, just as the illustration immediately following is another version of the iconic Madonna and Child. The next double page spread places the baby in the world, within an aerial perspective which allows his face to become the central focus, and to gaze beyond the page. It also allows the reader-viewer to see the “beautiful” placenta, the life-giving sustenance that as life begins is no longer necessary. The visual chronotope of Hello Baby, and its organization of time-space as reaching beyond the sequential units of verbal text and thrusting towards future, is
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an example of what a chronotope of childhood in narrative looks like. In different ways, to different degrees, and with sometimes different outcomes, the same kind of chronotope is to be found in a huge range of books, including the Ahlbergs’ Each Peach Pear Plum (1989), Gleeson’s Eleanor Elizabeth and Where’s Mum? (1984, 1992), Paterson’s Bridge to Terabitha (1978), Marsden’s Tomorrow series (1994–1999), Hill and Barrett’s Beware, Beware (1993), Ottley’s Mrs Millie’s Painting (1998), Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), Isadora’s At the Crossroads (1991), Hutchins’ Rosie’s Walk (1968), Browne’s Piggybook (1986), Nodelman’s Alice falls apart (1996), and many others. There are also notable exceptions, where space- and timescape has what Bakhtin (1981, p.103) calls the “specific insular idyllic landscape” of a pastoral chronotope, and is structured more in terms of “a time saturated with its own strictly limited, sealed-off segment of nature’s space”. The accompanying sense of wistful nostalgia that characterizes many of these texts in its own way indicates that the future is always a consideration, and that the time they celebrate is already lost. By exploring children’s literature through the optic of the chronotope, we can better understand the impulses underlying this communication which society chooses to have with its young. Such impulses are likely to be characterized by the forward thrust and, generally speaking, the responsible carriage of an ethics of hope: a depiction of a future which may in fact be difficult and imperfect, but which nevertheless is open and has potential. The notion of a chronotope of childhood in narrative draws together literary and pedagogical ideas that emerge out of the common insight that childhood is not stasis, but growth and change. Kristeva (1989, p.8) notes that “each speaking subject is both the addresser and the addressee of his own message …” Is this a message, then, which we would also hope to give ourselves?
References Ahlberg, J., & A. (1978). Each Peach Pear Plum. London: Puffin. Baillie, A., & Tanner, J. (1988). Drac and the Gremlin. Melbourne: Penguin Books. Baker, J. (1987). Where the Forest meets the Sea. London: Walker Books. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. [Barton, C.] (1841). A Mother’s Offering to her Children: by a Lady long resident in New South Wales. Sydney: The Gazette Baum, F. ([1900] 1956). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Airmont Publishing Caswell, Paterson, K. (1982). Bridge to Terabithia. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Browne, A. (1986). Piggybook. London: Julia MacRae Books. Burningham, J. (1977). Come away from the water, Shirley. London: Red Fox.
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Bunyan, J. ([1678] 1960). The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Caswell, B., & Phu An Chiem, D. (1997). Only the Heart. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Chambers, A. (1982). Dance on my Grave. London: The Bodley Head. Eco, U. (1994). Six walks in the fictional woods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Genette, G. (1987). Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gleeson, L. (1999). Hannah and the Tomorrow Room. Ringwood: Penguin Australia. Gleeson, L., & Greder A. (1999). The Great Bear. Gosford, NSW: Scholastic Australia. Gleeson, L. (1984). Eleanor Elizabeth. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Hill, A., & Barrett, J. (1993). Beware beware. London: Walker Books. Hutchins, P. (1968). Rosie’s Walk. London: The Bodley Head. Isadora, R. (1991). At the Crossroads. London: Red Fox. Jaensson, H., & Grähs, G. (1997). Jag såg, jag ser. Stockholm: Alfabeta. Jansson, T. (1961) [1948]. The Finn Family Moomintroll. London: Penguin. Johnston, R. R. (1997). Reaching beyond the word: Religious themes as “deep structure” in the Anne books of L. M. Montgomery. Canadian Children’s Literature, 88, 25–35. Johnston, R. R. (1998). Thisness and everydayness in children’s literature: The “being-in-theworld” proposed by the text. Papers: Explorations into children’s literature, 8, 25–35. Johnston, R. R. (2001). Children’s literature. In G. Winch, R. R. Johnston, M. Holliday, L. Ljungdahl & P. March (Eds.). Literacy: Reading, writing and children’s literature (pp.287–437). Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Kristeva, J. (1990). The Adolescent Novel. In her Abjection, melancholia and love (pp.8–23). London: Routledge. Kristeva, J. (1989). Language the unknown: An initiation into linguistics. Trans.by Anne M. Menke. Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Marsden, J. (1994). Tomorrow when the War began. Sydney: PanMacmillan. McCallum, R.(1999). Ideologies of identity in adolescent fiction: The dialogic construction of subjectivity. New York: Garland. Montgomery, L. M. (1972) [1908]. Anne of Green Gables. London: Peacock Books. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. London: Random House. Morson, G. S., & Emerson, C. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a prosaics. Standford: Stanford University Press. Nikolajeva, M. (1996). Children’s literature comes of age: Towards a new aesthetic. New York: Garland. Nodelman, P. (1996). Alice falls apart. Winnipeg: Bain & Cox. Ottley, M. (1998). Mrs Millie’s Painting. Sydney: Hodder Headline. Overend, J., & Vivas, J. (1999). Hello Baby. Sydney: ABC Books. Paterson, K. ([1978] 1982). Bridge to Terabitha. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pohl, P. ([1985] 1991). Johnny, my Friend. Woochester Stroud: Turton & Chambers. Rowling, J. K. (1997). Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. Saxby, 1998. Offered to children. Gosford, NSW: Scholastic. Shotter, J. (1993). The cultural politics of everyday life. Buckingham: Open University Press. Shavit, Z. (1995). The historical model of the development of children’s literature. In M. Nikolajeva (Ed.), Aspects and issues in the history of children’s literature (pp.27–37). Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press. Tidholm, T., & Tidholm, A.-C. (1995). Resan till Ugri-La-Brek. Stockholm: Alfabeta. Utemorrah, D., & Torres, P. (1990). Do not go around the edges. Broome: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation. Wall, B. (1991). The narrator’s voice: The dilemma of children’s fiction. London: Macmillan.
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AUTHOR "Maria Lassén-Seger"
TITLE "Child-power?"
SUBJECT "Studies in Narrativity, Volume 2"
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SIZE HEIGHT "220"
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Chapter 8
Child-power? Adventures into the animal kingdom — The Animorphs series Maria Lassén-Seger
1.
Metamorphosis and the scope of adult control
Growing up and becoming a member of society is one of the most important things likely to be negotiated within children’s literature, and we might well expect stories involving metamorphosis to have a particular relevance here. After all, “[t]he very nature of childhood is metamorphic”, in Natalie Babbitt’s words (1988, p.588). Children themselves have to change, physically as well as mentally, so as to become, first, adolescents, and then adults, a process which involves a search for their own identity, and their own place in life. If, as John Stephens (1992, p.8) has argued, children’s literature as a whole inevitably belongs to “the domain of cultural practices which exist for the purpose of socializing their target audience”, then metamorphosis stories might even be the most central type. This does not mean that transformation stories for children need be regarded as mere lessons in growing up. As with all literatures, so with children’s literature, books can involve so much more than what can be narrowly defined as their socializing intent. Rosemary Johnston has said that “[c]hildren’s literature is a creative art. It is of course conceived creatively but it is just as importantly received by an audience which is itself in a continual state of flux and re-creation” (Johnston, 1998, p.34). Also, narratives of metamorphosis draw attention to language and to the fictitiousness of fiction. They celebrate the power of imagination, since the metamophic body can only exist within the text, as one of the text’s constructs. But metamophosis stories do problematize some of the fundamental issues connected with being human. Since the actual event of transformation is firmly located within the narrative plot, clearly indicating a beginning, a middle, and an end of the story, the causality of the metamorphosis invites interpretation. As readers, we want to “fill in the gaps” offered by the text, and here we are confronted by the ambiguity of literary metamophosis: the event points back to what you were, and forwards to what you may become. It can involve a release from the self, or the
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loss of the self; personal growth, or regression; an interrogation of identity, or the foundation of identity; socialization, or subversion; didacticism, or entertainment; reward, or punishment; and so on. As Leonard Barkan (1986, p.17) puts it: “[m]etamorphosis is a question mark, an experience outside the realm of real life that has nonetheless persistently captured the human imagination.” It fascinates us, not by answering the important questions, but by tantalizingly raising them. Now scholars such as James Kincaid (1992), Kimberley Reynolds (1994), and Perry Nodelman (1992) regard the adult image of the child (and childhood) as culturally and socially constructed. They see oppositions between adulthood and childhood as constructions which need to be deconstructed, in order to expose and possibly challenge existing power relationships. For Kincaid (1992, p.5), the notion of “the child” is in itself nothing but a concept which “changes to fit different situations and different needs.” For Reynolds (1994, pp.3–4), the myth of childhood, having evolved within Victorian society under the influence of Romanticism, resulted in “an exaggerated and unrealistic sense of difference between adult and child, which most of us experience as a sense of crisis and discontinuity in adolescence, when the difference needs to be traversed.” As far as children’s literature is concerned, this means that a child character in a fictional text is even further away from any reality there might be, since it is merely a narrative construction of what was already only a social construction, a mere image of an image. Seen this way, the adult authors of children’s books would already have depicted child characters as “the other” — as a reconstruction of the socially constructed non-adult —, and what we have in a metamorphosis story, a story where the fictional child tries out how it feels to become an animal, for example, would actually be an “other” playing with yet a further form of “otherness”. For Nodelman, the issues of power inherent in the adult-child dichotomy can be illuminated by the work of Edward Said; he sees a connection between, on the one hand, children’s literature and, on the other hand, orientalism and colonialism. This would mean that adults assign otherness to children in order to be able to control the field of representation. By marginalizing the child as powerless, they would be defining themselves as powerful, and children’s literature would be a means of dominating children, and of imposing on them adult assumptions about what “a child” is or ought to be. Along with Jacqueline Rose (1984), Nodelman (1992, p.30) suggests that adults “write books for children to provide them with values and with images of themselves we approve of or feel comfortable with”. Roderick McGillis (1997) continues this train of thought by drawing on Julia Kristeva. In his view, too, adults colonize and oppress children by positioning them as the “Other”. At the same time, McGillis does have a fundamental faith in our ability to bridge the gap between adults and children through story-telling (or perhaps in more general terms, through fiction). In his view, “we do not need to wipe out Otherness in order to experience Oneness because we have a constant
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reminder of the possibility of Oneness through our experience of story. Our experience of story is both communal and personal” (Mc Gillis, 1997, p.218). McGillis, then, seems to regard children’s literature as a possible mediator between adult and child. Perhaps stating the obvious, he confirms that all literature is in a sense heuristic: “to construct a character is to make an imaginative leap into the possibility of other lives. … Literature is not life. In short, each attempt at story is an attempt to understand what it is like to be an ‘Other’” (McGillis, 1997, p.220). McGillis’s idea of children’s fiction as mediating between child and adult is more encouraging than Nodelman’s, but both types of approach should, I think, be taken seriously. On the one hand, we must not underestimate the ideological or socializing aspect of children’s literature. But on the other hand, we can ask just how fruitful it is to regard children’s literature solely as a means of adult control over children. We can surely not ignore the purely literary potential of children’s literature, nor its ability to be subversive of adult-child power structures. In what follows here, then, I shall readily grant that children’s literature contains adult constructions of childhood, but I shall not go so far as to say that it is devoid of aesthetic qualities, nor that it is deterministically coercive. Unlike Jacqueline Rose (1984), I do believe that children’s literature (as a literature for and about children) is possible, simply because children as such do exist, quite regardless of whether they correspond with the image of the child in the book or not. Nor should the constructed child characters in the text — the images I shall be scrutinizing here — be confused with any real children who happen to be the current respondents in the process of communication, about whom we should not generalize too hastily. Child readers or listeners will always have particular historical positionalities and personal individualities, calling for careful consideration in their own right. The fact is that “children” can all too easily be impersonally lumped together, for example as a group characterized by some particular stage of development. This is pointed out by Mavis Reimer, in her discussion of the controversy surrounding the children’s television series The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. What she shows is that the conceptual category “children” is unquestioningly used to refer to “a stable, homogeneous, self-consistent group” (Reimer, 1998, p.9). In other words, the adult-child dichotomy is so deeply ingrained in the adult world-view that to scrutinize it from some “other” perspective is well nigh impossible. As Reynolds and her colleagues argue, however, the deconstruction of this binarism is certainly a central precondition for the criticism of children’s literature. This is not the first time I have addressed the issue of power raised by the adultchild dichotomy and the theme of metamophosis. In an article entitled “The Fictive Child in Disguise: Disempowering Transformations of the Child Character” (Lassén-Seger, 2000), I have examined three children’s texts, each of them exemplifying a different function of metamorphic change: as a punishment inflicted on the
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fictive child for didactic reasons; as a chance for the character to enjoy a wishfulfilling “time out” in carnival disguise; and as the character’s complete loss of identity. But despite these differences, the three books have one thing in common: owing to the metamorphosis, the fictive child is disempowered. In the present chapter, I offer my reflections on another group of texts, the Animorphs books by K. A. Applegate, and shall be linking the issue more explicitly to adult images of children. In this way I hope the possible scope of the adult marginalization of children will emerge more clearly.
2.
The Animorphs formula
As examples of children’s books dealing with metamorphosis, the immensely popular Animorphs series can hardly be ignored. One of the most important aspects of their formulaic plots is that the fictive children are able to change into animal form. The planet earth is being secretly invaded by hostile aliens called Yeerks, slug-like parasites who travel all over the universe in search of other species to enslave. Fortunately, five human children happen to run into an Andalite, a friendlier species of alien, who bestows on them the power to change or “morph” into the shapes of animals. This power is vaguely explained as a form of technology which enables the children to acquire the DNA pattern of the animal concerned. As a result, the children form a resistance movement whose action-filled enterprises have resulted in 54 novels. In addition, there have been spin-off series as well, telling “the same story” from the point of view of an Adalite or even a Yeerk, for instance. Obviously, this is formula fiction at its most extreme. Behind the pseudonym K.A. Applegate there is probably a syndicate of writers, and one marketing ploy for the entire series is to present each individual book as a desirable item to consume, to own, and to add to one’s collection. But as Winfred Fluck (1987, p.40) suggests, the function of popular culture (including fiction) is to stage “tensions and conflicts with existing values and meanings in such a way that the recipient is able to explain and to accommodate them within the social and cultural context in which he or she is living”. In other words, popular fiction is not necessarily just “trash”, but can comment on the culture within which it thrives. It may even reveal some of the presuppositions which the dominant ideology takes for granted. At the most straightforward level of the story, Applegate’s main child characters, collectively referred to as the Animorphs, are Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias, and Marco. Later on in the series, they are joined by an Andalite child called Ax. These characters are are what E. M. Forster (1927, pp.71–81) would have described as “flat”. Their traits are often defined in opposition to each other, as is especially evident in the characterization of the two girl characters, Rachel and Cassie. Whereas Rachel is confident, fashionable, and beautiful, loves shopping and
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fighting, Cassie is quietly sensible, diplomatic, nurturing, and dresses in casual clothes which do not emphasize her femininity. For the sake of political correctness, Cassie is also the token Black character. As for the boys, Jake is the obvious leader, who finds the role problematic; Tobias is the outsider, a sensitive and emotionally damaged orphan; Marco is the group’s immature comedian, short-statured and funny, but still hounded by the family he has left behind him (a widowed father, and a mother who returns from the grave as a nasty alien Controller); and Ax, the alien child, an “Other” who provides new and often humorous perspectives on the human. Despite their differences, however, the protagonists form a recognizable group, which is stongly contrasted with society at large. They frequently refer to themselves as “us” against “them”, and by “them” they mean not only the alien enemy but the rest of humanity, who are still unaware of the secret invasion. In fact they are designed as collective characters in the sense explained by Maria Nikolajeva (1997, p.46), who points out that the device can not only facilitate identification but can more palpably represent different aspects of human nature. There are also commercial implications here, which I think the producers of the Animorphs books have fully grasped. The use of collective characters makes it possible for all kinds of childreaders to identify with the heroes, and encourages this large audience to move on from one book to another in the same huge series, though at the same time adding at least some complexity to a characterization which was otherwise so flat. In each book the kernel events concern the children’s struggle against the Yeerks, and more particularly their main weapon against that enemy, their ability to morph. The narrative’s orientation towards action is the more marked, not only by the flatness of characterization, but by the general sparseness of description and the shifts of setting. Most of the action is staged in locations which for an American, or simply Western, child would belong to everyday life: at home, at school, at the mall, on a construction site, in the woods, at the beach. Specific place names are avoided, but each narrative builds up the illusion that what is going on in the stories might be going on in real life too. A typical characteristic of the Animorphs formula is thus to locate the events here and now and present them as “the truth”. The first book opens: My name is Jake. That’s my first name, obviously. I can’t tell you my last name. It would be too dangerous. … I won’t even tell you where I live. You’ll just have to trust me that it is a real place, a real town. It may even be your town. I’m writing this all down so that more people will learn the truth. (Applegate, 1996a, p.1)
And most of the other books do the same. Straight away, the narrator addresses the implied reader directly, and the telling assumes the tone of a conversation conducted in mutal confidence. Not only that, but in each book the narrator is one of the Animorphs. Each book deals with a separate adventure within the framework of the
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overall plot, as told in the voice of one of the main characters, which means that the author can, at least in a superficial way, present one and the same event from different points of view in different books. Since readers can pick up any book in the series, and the text will give them all the information needed about previous volumes, the shift in narrative perspective helps to make the numerous plot summaries less tedious. Playing around with the narrative voice is definitely an Animorphs trade-mark, and probably a deliberate part of its success formula. A similar device is used in the spin-off series, the Megamorphs, where there is a new child narrator for each new chapter. As for the claim that the stories are “the truth”, the intention is hardly to present the events as genuinely historical. No author would dare to assume that readers are so naive. Rather, this is an invitation to a game of make-believe. Vaguely recalling the “once upon a time” of fairy tales, Animorphs books begin with a formula that deliberately places its events in a setting so unspecified that it is both nowhere in particular and anywhere at all. I say “vaguely”, because fairy tales place their events beyond time and place, whereas the settings in the Animorphs could be anywhere in America or the Western world. This impresson is reinforced by numerous references to current TV-series, fashion, customs and so on.
3.
The individual and the corporate self
As it happens, the television series discussed by Mavis Reimer also involves child characters with the ability to undergo metamorphosis. In her words, The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers features “teenagers who regularly save the world from evil after metamorphosing first into ninja fighters and then into a robotic dinosaur”. Reimer perceives this as expressing “a fundamental anxiety about identity itself” (Reimer, 1998, pp.8, 12). The characters manage to leave behind their personal differences of gender and race, fusing with each other into a robotic dinosaur that is larger and more powerful. According to Reimer, this stages a tension between the sovereign and unitary self and a corporate self that is infinitely malleable and adaptable. As she puts it, the tension is “between the pull to corporate identity and the pull to expressive individuality”. The ideological ethos of this corporate identity she interprets in terms of a consumer culture, expressing “values which ensure that consumers continually will need to buy new props to support their re-creations of themselves” (Reimer, 1998, pp.12–13). In the Animorphs series, the situation is somewhat different, since metamorphosis here concerns individual shape shifting. Each child becomes some distinct other creature. But as in any traditional adventure story scenario, the tension between a unitary self and a corporate self is part of the plot. As I have argued earlier, the Animorphs are collective protagonists. There are repeated assertions that
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the group is more important than its separate members. The child characters are constantly struggling with their individual differences in order to benefit the wellbeing of the group as a whole, whose corporate character is defined in opposition to the corporatism of the enemy. The Yeerks are rarely depicted as individuals. They are mainly characterized as a species of uncompromisingly evil parasites, whose communal dynamics are channelled through “The Sharing”, an organization resembling an extremist religious sect. Behind a friendly facade, the true aim of The Sharing is to capture and enslave human beings, and there are repeated suggestions that the human beings most likely to fall for this are weak and dependent. [Chapman] thought I [Rachel] was suicidal! … Good grief. That’s why he was trying to recruit me for The Sharing. He thought I was depressed or whatever. A perfect recruit for his little Controller organization. (Applegate, 1997c, p.66)
By comparing and contrasting the Yeerk organization with the Animorphs group in this manner, Applegate emphasizes the importance ascribed to issues such as weakness, power, dependence and independence in relation to the individual and to the community.
4. “Time out” in animal disguise So what does becoming an animal really mean to the Animorphs? According to Marina Warner, modern Western myth reveals a radical change in attitude towards the human and the animal. Whereas “[m]etamorphosis out of human shape into another, beastly form used to express a fall from human grace” it has now become an attractive alternative, expressing the desire for closeness to animal power and providing “[t]he lone hero, the pattern of modern man”, with “an image of himself under threat of extinction” (Warner, 1994, p.72). Drawing on this, we might think that the ability to transform empowers the children in the Animorphs series, in the sense that they are ascribed agency and assigned a mission. The text actually seems to labour this point, since the word power comes up so often that more sophisticated readers will probably yearn for an occasional synonym. Here, for example, is how Jake narrates his metamorphosis into a tiger during an attack on a Yeerk base: I felt the morph begin. The hair grew from my face. The tail squirted out behind me. My arms bulged and rippled. They were massive! My shirt ripped. I fell forward on to my hands, now my front legs. The power! It was electric. It was like a slow-motion explosion. I could feel the power of the tiger growing inside me. I watched claws, long, wickedly curved, tearing, ripping, shredding claws, grow from my puny human hands. I could feel the teeth sprouting in my
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mouth. My eyes looked through the darkness like it was broad daylight. But most of all, the power! The sheer, incredible power. I was afraid of NOTHING! (Applegate, 1996a, pp.168–9, my italics)
Jake hardly sounds like a child marginalized or colonized as “the Other” — the subordinate opposite of the adults in control. The ability to morph certainly allows the child characters to play with their own identities by trying out non-human life forms in a manner which never threatens their subjectivity as humans. Their acquiring of non-human DNA patterns merely allows both author and readers to indulge in titillating fantasies of how it feels to fly as a bird, or to explore the depths of the ocean as a giant whale. Such thrills are especially emphasized, precisely because they are conveyed as first-person narrations by the protagonists themselves, for the benefit of an implied child reader who will find them no less fascinating. Christine Heppermann (1998) sees this as one of the major factors making the series so popular with children. True, literary metamophosis is a theme with many serious undertones. It can be interpreted as a most disturbing challenge to subjectivity, as a metaphorical rite of passage, or even as a victory over death itself. According to Sue Easun (1994, p.41), any supreme value inherently “possesses the power to metamorphose itself, to be reincarnated in variable, multiple and successive forms and in so doing defy annihilation”. In the Animorphs series, however, the darker undertones of metamorphosis are kept strictly at bay. First of all, physical injury inflicted while being in “a morph” automatically heals when the child changes back into human shape. Indeed, the Animorphs possess the quality usually ascribed to superheroes: they are almost completely impervious to damage, perhaps even immortal. With every book, they seem to grow more and more violent and reckless in their defiance of death. There comes a stage at which Rachel, for instance, while in elephant morph, does not hesitate to walk into gunfire, or as a rat, even chews off her own tail in order to escape the enemy (Applegate, 1998). Secondly, when shifting into animal shape the children do lose their power of speech, but not their ability to communicate with each other. They go on interacting through silent telepathy. In the text, their “thought-speak” is placed within special brackets (· Ò) and is thus typographically distinguishable from speech dialogue situated in between quotation marks. Thirdly, the process of morphing primarily involves a bodily change, not a mental one. As Rachel puts it, [W]e weren’t just raptors. We still had our human intelligence. There are times to let the animal take over. There are other times when that superior human intelligence comes in handy. (Applegate, 1996b, p.7)
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So animal instincts can take over. This usually happens when the children enter into a new shape, and it is mostly described as frightening. Still, they always manage to control the situation before it gets out of hand, and the danger can in fact be more thrilling than threatening. The passage in which Jake turns into a lizard and, against his human will, eats a big, hairy spider, is certainly described with as much sensational pleasure as horror (Applegate, 1996a, p.117), and his human will does eventually re-assert itself. Tobias is the exception which proves the rule. At the end of the first book, he has accidentally broken the first rule of morphing, by staying in morph too long. As a result, he is stuck in the shape of a hawk. This certainly is a bit unsettling, not least since it is doubtful whether his predicament was self-induced or not. Tobias’s friends, at least, seem more upset than he is. ·I guess this is me from now on,Ò Tobias said. I [Jake] knew there were tears falling down my cheeks, but I didn’t care any more. ·It’s OK, Jake. Like you said we’re alive.Ò (Applegate, 1996a, pp.183–4)
Given Tobias’s fragile, victimized character — he is an orphan neglected by his guardians, and bullied by his classmates —, his metamorphosis would not be difficult to interpret in terms of suicide. But the text also leaves room to hope that Tobias, at some time in the future, will return to humanity. The passage just quoted continues as follows: I [Jake] went to the window and looked up at the stars. Somewhere up there, around one of those cold, twinkling stars, was the Andalite home world. Somewhere up there was … hope. ·They’ll come,Ò Tobias said. ·The Andalites will come. And until then …Ò I nodded and wiped away my tears. “Yeah”, I said. “Until then, we fight.” (Applegate, 1996a, p.184)
This hope of the Andalites some day returning to put everything right is constantly repeated throughout the series. Thus not surprisingly, in book 13, entitled The Change, the Ellimist (an all-powerful, god-like being, who intervenes in the order of the universe in erratic and mysterious ways) restores Tobias’s morphing ability. At first, Tobias is deeply disappointed since he thought that he would simply be given back his own human body, and then allowed to continue morphing. But what the Ellimist does is to take Tobias-the-hawk back in time, to the night before the narrative in the first book begins. In this way Tobias meets his old human self, and is given a chance to acquire his own human DNA. The snag is that I [Tobias] had acquired my own human DNA. But it was just a morph. If I stayed in my old human body I would be trapped there forever. Never again to morph. Never again to be a hawk. Never again to fly. (Applegate, 1997d, p.160)
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Tobias is no longer doomed, however, to remain a hawk. His fate clearly emphasises the overall wish-fulfilling nature of the animal transformations. It is a playful “time out” in disguise, from which human identity can re-emerge unscathed, and it is also a promise of eternal life. The details of Tobias’s animal identity tend to confirm this. He refers to himself as a “freak of nature”, and is continuously depicted as being a mixture between a human and an animal. Even as a hawk he can still read and count (Applegate, 1996c, pp.2–3), and enjoys not only the benefits of the hawk’s wings and sharp senses, but the advantages of human intelligence as well. The only drawbacks seem to be the temptation to yield, as he finally does, to the animal hunting instinct, and his perception of his own isolation from the Animorphs group. I hated the way they all felt sorry for me. All they could see was that I was not what I used to be. All they saw was that I had no home. But they didn’t really understand. I hadn’t had a real home since my parents died. I was used to being alone. And I had the sky. (Applegate, 1996c, pp.18–19)
Tobias’s plight clearly implies two contradictory points of view. First, as an individual, he thoroughly enjoys being a hawk. To “fly up and away from all the stupid little problems of life” (Applegate, 1997d, p.18) was what he had always wanted. In this he resembles the boy protagonist in Roald Dahl’s The Witches (1983), whose metamorphosis into a mouse can be interpreted as a fulfilment of his regressive wish never to grow up (Lassén-Seger, 2000). But secondly, he suffers from being an outsider. When he does regret being a hawk, it is usually because he feels separated from the community of the Animorphs. Looking down on them from the sky after they have just managed to change back into human form at the very last minute, he has decidely mixed feelings: They were all laughing, all giggling with relief. “We’re okay”, Jake sighed. I was happy for them. Really I was. But suddenly I didn’t want to be there. Suddenly I desperately didn’t want to be there. I felt an awful, gaping black hole open up all around me. I was sick. Sick with the feeling of being trapped. (Applegate, 1996c, pp.65–6)
So Tobias’s dilemma can be interpreted in terms of the tension between the individual and the corporate self. When he is later driven to despair at having surrendered to his hawk’s instinct to kill and eat prey, Rachel saves him from committing suicide by reassuring him that he does still belong with the Animorphs. Gradually he comes to terms with his animal urges, sanctioned by the fact that he kills to eat, and not in order to control and dominate, which is what the Yeerks do (Applegate, 1996c,
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p.101). And when his ability to morph is restored to him in book 13, he is once more an equal member of the Animorphs: I had the power again. I wouldn’t have to sit on the beach when the others went into danger. I was back! (Applegate, 1997d, p.120)
5.
Control = power?
Taking metamorphosis, even for Tobias, as a harmlessly carnivalesque time-out, the question of whether it is also empowering seems not unreasonable. After all, metamorphosis is their one great weapon in their struggle against the Yeerks. But as Bakhtin (1984) emphasizes, carnival implies only a temporary liberation from, or opposition to, the reigning order. And although, within the reigning order of the Animorphs books, the ability to undergo metamophosis allows the child characters to become a physically powerful and violent “Other”, a “child” as such is ultimately defined as weak and incompetent. This does not mean that the child characters are incapable of exercising a certain measure of control. Control, in the Animorphs books, is just as prominent a word and concept as power, and control is something with which the Animorphs at first glance seem heavily endowed. For instance, an ability to control one’s own temper and emotions is always the prerequisite for successful morphing, while, during a morph, it is the animal’s instincts which have to be controlled. Nor is this just an individual matter. The Animorph group exercises corporate control on its members, which is precisely the condition for their corporate power, such as it is. In each book of the series, that power is threatened not only by the hostile aliens, but by representatives of adult authority such as the police, teachers, people in the government, and the newspapers and television (Applegate, 1996a, p.73). Parents or other family members, other children, and even a fellow Animorph, are also included among the potential and actual enemies, against whom the group’s only hope of success lies in group discipline. Rule number one is an absolute and almost paranoiac secrecy. Since the Animorphs’ only weapon is morphing, nobody else must get to know about it and the way it makes them different from other people. Rachel leaves no doubt about this: “We don’t do anything to attract attention. We have to be secret about everything. Especially morphing” (Applegate, 1996a, p.80). To use Reimer’s words (1998, p.14), the children’s very silence functions as a “trope of power”. Even their ability to communicate while in animal shape is silenced into thoughts, and they are always extremely careful not to be seen as a group (Applegate, 1997b, p.27). Secondly, their private desires, usually expressed while in animal morph, must
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be channelled for the common good. When Jake shifts shape into a dog, he is tempted by the “simple happiness of the dog” to escape from his own troubles. But thanks to his responsible superego, he forces himself “back into painful reality” (Applegate, 1996a, p.107). Self-indulgence is portrayed as not only selfish but positively dangerous to group security. When Cassie, morphed into a horse, is tempted to gallop exultantly out into the open, Rachel’s reminder about the need for a low profile is very firm (Applegate, 1996a). The children’s self-discipline and group solidarity emerge as an important part of the series’ appeal. According to Anne Scott MacLeod (1994), the success of the Nancy Drew series is partly attributable to the main characters’ portrayal as autonomous, serious, competent, disciplined and determined. The same applies to Enid Blyton’s child characters in The Famous Five books, which feature a group of children whom the Animorphs resemble even more obviously. In terms of seriousness, competence, discipline and determination, the Animorphs are indeed at one with these predecessors. Sometimes, it is true, they give in to doubts and worries, such as “[T]his is serious stuff … You shouldn’t be telling us. We’re just kids” (Applegate, 1996a, pp.17–18). But such hesitations are only temporary. When necessary, they do rise to the occasion, disciplining themselves as well as the others, with a gravity sometimes bordering on the ridiculous: [Tobias] just looked at me with those deep, troubled eyes — eyes I can now see only in my memory. “Yes, Jake, you are our leader. You are the one who can bring us all together and help us defeat the Controllers. We have the ability to be much more than we are … We’re going to need it all, if we have any hope of holding out against the Controllers.” (Applegate, 1996a, p.59)
At the same time, the young Animorphs are less idealized than the protagonists in either the Nancy Drew or Famous Five books, and they have a different kind of enemy as well: an evil which is completely “othered”. So whereas the Famous Five and Nancy Drew were able to rely on their brilliant sleuthing skills, these modern warriors endorse the necessity of violence. And although the Animorphs do not enjoy as much autonomy in relation to the adult world as Nancy, Julian, Dick, Anne and George do, the restrictions imposed on them by family life are not very severe. As a matter of fact, the whole series gets under way with the children disobeying parental orders: To get home from the mall we could either go a long way around, which is the safe way, or we could cut through this abandoned construction site and hope there weren’t any axe murderers hanging around there. My mum and dad have sworn to ground me until I’m twenty if they ever find out I’ve cut through the construction site. (Applegate, 1996a, p.5)
Child-power?
It is as a result of this unruliness that the children discover the secret invasion by the Yeerks, and once they have their sense of mission they dismiss parental authority even more lightly: “We were all looking at plenty of parental trouble, but we had no time. Better a week of being grounded compared to losing this battle” (Applegate, 1999, p.61). In other words, parental control is generally restricted to the not so frightening punishment of being grounded once the adventure is over. At the end of one book, the narrator even says, “We each told our separate lies to our various parents, and were each grounded. I don’t think anyone minded” (Applegate, 1999, p.152). On the other hand, this can also be taken as a reminder that the children’s metamophoses are nothing more than a temporary suspension of the restrictions imposed by the adult world. For read more closely, metamorphosis in this series is a time-out from which a return must always be made to a status quo where adults really are in control. Left to their own devices, the Animorphs children admittedly seem responsible and effectual, even when, unlike Nancy Drew or the Famous Five, they show themselves to be far from perfect, making mistakes or nourishing desires which seriously threaten their tight knit community. These human shortcomings they do manage to keep under control. In absence of adult guidance, they are left to socialize themselves, a task they undertake with great thoroughness. Yet despite all this, there is nothing to imply, on the part of adults, any real faith in the power of children to shape their own destiny. In point of fact, the tight knit community of the Animorphs is not so egalitarian after all. It has a hierarchy of its own, where Jake, the “natural” leader, is immediately singled out by the others to be the one in charge. Jake’s biggest decision, on which the entire series was to hang, comes at the very beginning. Shall they accept the dying Andalite’s offer of the power to morph? And although Jack would much prefer to have a group decision, the others will not hear of it. Neither can the Animorphs really be said to exercise free-will elsewhere. Even when they morph, the element of fun is subsidiary to the dictates of group endeavour. They must either morph, or see their entire mission fail. Not only that, but their very ability to morph is actually a gift, and a gift from a being who inspires feelings of security and confidence associated with parental care: [T]hen the Andalite’s voice was in my head again. ·Courage, my friends.Ò And this … this warm … this … I don’t have any words to explain it. It was just this warmth that spread all through me. It was like when you’re a little kid and you’ve had a terrible nightmare and you’ve woken up screaming. You know how you used to feel better when your mum or dad would turn on the light and come in and sit beside you in bed? That’s what it was like. (Applegate, 1999, p.33)
The Andalite’s decision to give up his own life in a Christ-like manner in order to save the lives of the children positions him as their ultimate authority. Not surprisingly
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it is Tobias, starving for adult guidance, for whom the Andalite means the most. Tobias is also the first of them to try out “morphing”, and it is he who is keenest to storm the barricades. Eventually, the others join him as missionaries in this “holy war”, the violence of which has been sanctioned by their hero and martyr, the adult-like Andalite, member of a warrior race which ranks Freedom as one of the highest values, but Freedom expressly in conjunction with Duty and Obedience (Applegate, 1997b, p.34). In view of all this, it is hardly surprising that the Animorphs themselves repeatedly define “a child” as somebody weak and innocent. When discussing an extinct race known as the Pemalites, they refer to them as the universe’s “spacegoing children”, naïve enough not to use their own powers, and only wanting to play, dream, and be happy (Applegate, 1999, p.132). To the Animorphs, obsessed as they are with power and control, the Pemalites seem merely pitiable. They were foolish to trust their enemies, and their extermination was only to be expected. Likewise, in situations where the Animorph narrators feel weak and vulnerable themselves, they often refer to themselves as children. Rachel’s reaction on secretly watching somebody being interrogated by Visser Three, the Yeerk’s supreme chief, is typical: In an instant I knew: I would never survive his questioning. I would tell him everything. His power was a million times greater than mine. His will was a vast, huge, irresistible thing. And what was I? Just some foolish little girl. A foolish, lost girl. Lost. (Applegate, 1996b, p.154)
While in animal disguise, the Animorphs are empowered to fight and kill their enemy. But in terms of being children, they depicted as potential victims, weak and vulnerable.
6. The threatening body The Animorphs’ libido is no less cramped in the sexual dimension. Sexuality is either silenced into a kind of symbolic subtext, or depicted as positively frightening. The child protagonists morph into fully grown animals — what chance would a puppy or a kitten have against a Yeerk? — but they never mature sexually. Although animal instincts sometimes threaten to take over, it is never that kind of instinct. Marco does grumble when, in order not to upset the balance of the wolf pack, which only allows one dominant male member, he has to morph into a she-wolf. But the episode is nothing more than a teasing flirt with gender-transgression. Once the metamorphosis has taken place, there is no more mention of his potentially frightening new body (Applegate, 1996c, pp.33–4). Animal disguise does sometimes allow the possibility of a kind of harmless play with physical sensuality and romance, as when Tobias-the-hawk perches on Rachel’s shoulder, or Jake-the-dog
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nuzzles Cassie’s hand. Sometimes the symbolism is far from subtle, as when Tobias is repeatedly tempted to fly off into the sunset with a mysteriously attractive female hawk. But such pleasurability seems mainly confined to situations when at least one of the child characters appears in animal shape. Such intimacies are only allowed as part of the safe metamorphic fantasy. Conversely, the return from a morph into the human body is always figured as a rather threatening experience. What the Animorphs seem to fear as much as the exposure of their true identities is the concept of their own bodies. Their earliest attempts at morphing leave them literally naked, and embarrassed. But this titillating play with nudity is never taken far. Propriety is duly observed, since such incidents never occur when any member of the opposite sex is present. The thrillingly forbidden possibility is merely hinted at. Finally Cassie, whose whole personality is built on self-control, learns and teaches the others the technique of morphing with at least a minimum of decency: Fortunately, after a few tries, we had all learned to morph some very minimal clothing. Usually nothing more than skintight workout clothes or leotards. Not enough to go walking around in, but enough to keep us all from dying of embarrassment when we morphed in front of each other. (Applegate, 1996b, pp.14–15)
Given the age of the protagonists and the age range towards which these books are targeted, these decorums clearly reflect one aspect of the child-adult dichotomy, namely the idea of the child as sexless until puberty. Instead, much attention is focussed on eating, and on the necessity of controlling unacceptable desires in that department, as when Jake-the-lizard gobbles up the spider, or when Rachel-theshrew is tempted to eat maggots (Applegate, 1996b, p.58), or when, morphed into giant squids, the Animorphs find themselves wanting to devour each other. But nowhere is eating, and the need to control your eating, more strongly foregrounded than when Ax, the young Andalite, becomes a human child and for the first time experiences the wonders of taste — Andalites are mouthless. As a result, he is constantly reprimanded by his new friends for not controlling his appetite. A kind of implicit connection between food and sex in children’s literature has been discussed by Maria Nikolajeva and Ulla Bergstrand (1999), and by Wendy R. Katz (1980), who all speak of it as metaphorical. This kind of reading certainly works for the Animorphs books, where the question of eating can be both disturbing and almost salacious. At one point Tobias says to Ax, “[Y]ou realize there’s this big mystery about you [as an Andalite]. …No one wants to ask you because they think maybe it’s rude. But everyone wants to know how you eat with no mouth” (Applegate, 1997b, p.38). For these children, any form of indulgence in bodily functions or desires is apparently unsettling. But the importance of controlling one’s body goes even futher, beyond the fear of being exposed in the nude and beyond control of one’s hunger. There is also the
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far more primitive fear that loss of bodily control may betoken a loss of something more fundamental — a loss of self, a loss of identity, a complete surrender to a-human forces that are spiritually disnaturing. One deep reason for being afraid of the Yeerks is that they “have no body”. Instead, they “live in the bodies of other species” (Applegate, 1996a, p.17). A Yeerk who has taken over the body of a human being is called a Controller, a term with profound ideological significance. Control of your body equals power. By the same token, to lose control of your own body, as when Jake falls into a Yeerk pool and for a short time becomes a Controller himself, represents a frightening disempowerment (Applegate, 1997a). Moreover, metamorphosis is repeatedly described as a repulsive process to watch. Although this partly stems from a prevailing fascination throughout the whole series with matters that are referred to as “gross”, the obsessively repeated depictions of how revolting morphing looks cannot be dismissed as merely tantalizing manifestations of the grotesque. Morphing looks repulsive precisely because the children are not able to control it. According to Rachel: Morphing is never pretty. And it’s never predictable. It happens in ways that don’t quite kill you, but sometimes come pretty close. Things come popping out or disappearing in bizarre sequence. (Applegate, 1999, p.38)
That is also precisely why Cassie’s morphing is so remarkable. Jack says it is “beautiful”, because she is “controlling the way she morphed” (Applegate, 1996a, p.76). For these fictive children, so terrified of not being in control of their own bodies, to win and keep the control over their physical form is a matter of life and death. But like the parasite Yeerks, who are “almost powerless without hosts”, the Animorphs are portrayed as totally powerless as individuals (Applegate, 1996a, p.17). They acquire power only when they suppress their subjectivity and become acceptable to the group. Even their own bodies, in a quite disturbing manner, are repeatedly depicted as either frighteningly weak and inadequate or threateningly difficult to control. Only in the borrowed form of an animal can they temporarily exert power over the enemy.
7.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have been discussing just one particular series of children’s books which use the metamorphosis motif. If I had spread my net wider, I might have come up with a different answer to the question I posed at the beginning. To repeat what I said there, children’s literature does not have to be deterministically coercive, and there certainly are texts for children which are positively subversive of the socialization of the young into existing power structures. So it could well be that
Child-power?
there are other children’s metamorphosis stories which do not marginalize child characters, and by implication do not marginalize child readers, to anything like the same extent, stories in which children are portrayed and addressed in a manner that is altogether more egalitarian and empowering. For the Animorphs books, however, the gloomy perspective of critics such as Nodelman and Rose does seem appropriate. What the producers of the Animorphs stories suggest is that being powerful amounts to having physical strength, plus physical and mental self-control. Metamorphosis offers the children a strong and powerful physique, and their own obsession with control concerns everything from individual bodily desires, such as the desire for food, to the process of morphing itself. The fear of their identities being exposed to the enemy feeds a paranoia which forces them into maintaining strict control of the group. The ability to undergo metamorphosis empowers them first and foremost as a group of collective child protagonists, which can only be held together through self-discipline and the suppression of individual desires. The text’s most strongly socializing message is that a community can survive only through this rigorous kind of self-denial and cooperation. But it also presupposes an adult image of the child as someone in great need of being socialized, tamed, and controlled in order to fit into civilized society. In the Animorphs books, this still wide-spread assumption is only thinly disguised by the children’s seeming to discipline themselves. Metamorphosis certainly seems to empower the Animorphs, giving them the muscular power that their immature human bodies lack. Consequently, it primarily involves a bodily change, which enables them to enjoy both the advantages of human intelligence and human communication skills, in combination with animal strength. When appearing in animal shape, they are more or less superheroes, impervious to almost any harm, and potentially — as the fate of Tobias finally suggests — immortal. Yet the empowerment is only temporary. Metamorphosis is a mere time-out in carnival disguise, and the thoughts and behaviour of the Animorphs themselves recapitulate the kind of power structuring and violence of the society in which they are being socialized. Most distressing of all, perhaps, is the implication that only through morphing, only by becoming something “other” than a child, can the main characters achieve power over their enemies. In these texts, a “child” is somebody weak, naïve, undisciplined and lacking control, whereas the contrasting traits of strength, power, suspicious cunning, and masterfulness are set up as the ideal characteristics. In other words, the ideal is not to be a child at all, or at least, not a child as children are defined in these narratives. It is as if the child-reader’s socialization were assumed to be best promoted by a strong dose of self-revulsion — which can hardly be regarded as empowering.
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References Applegate, K. A. (1996a). The Invasion [Animorphs 1]. London: Scholastic. Applegate, K. A. (1996b). The Visitor [Animorphs 2]. London: Scholastic. Applegate, K. A. (1996c). The Encounter [Animorphs 3]. New York: Scholastic. Applegate, K. A. (1997a). The Capture [Animorphs 6]. London: Scholastic. Applegate, K. A. (1997b). The Alien [Animorphs 8]. New York: Scholastic. Applegate, K. A. (1997c). The Reaction [Animorphs 12]. London: Scholastic. Applegate, K. A. (1997d). The Change [Animorphs 13]. New York: Scholastic. Applegate, K. A. (1998). The Solution [Animorphs 22]. New York: Scholastic. Applegate, K. A. (1999). The Exposed [Animorphs 27]. New York: Scholastics. Babbitt, N. (1988). Metamorphosis. The Horn Book, 5, 582–589. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barkan, L. (1986). The gods made flesh: Metamorphosis and the pursuit of paganism. New Haven: Yale U. P. Bergstrand, U., & Nikolajeva, M. (1999). Läckergommarnas kungarike: om matens roll i barnlitteraturen. Stockholm: Centrum för barnkulturforskning vid Stockholms universitet. Easun, S. (1994). From metaphor to metamorphosis. Canadian Children’s Literature, 20, 40–47. Fluck, W. (1987). Popular culture as a mode of socialization: A theory about the social functions of popular cultural forms. Journal of Popular Culture, 3, 31–46. Forster, E. M. (1927). Aspects of the novel. London: Arnold. Heppermann, C. (1998). Invasion of the Animorphs. The Horn Book, 74, 53–56. Johnston, R. R. (1998). Thisness and everydayness in children’s literature: The “being-in-theworld” proposed by the text. Papers: Explorations into children’s literature, 8, 25–35. Katz, W. R. (1980). Some uses of food in children’s literature. Children’s Literature in Education, 4, 192–199. Kincaid, J. R. (1992). Child-loving: The erotic child and Victorian culture. New York: Routledge. Lassén-Seger, M. (2000). The fictive child in disguise: Disempowering transformations of the child character. In J. Webb (Ed.), Text, culture and national identity in children’s literature: International seminar on children’s literature (pp.186–96). Helsinki: Nordinfo. MacLeod, A. S. (1994). American childhood: Essays on children’s literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. McGillis, R. (1997). Self, other, and other self: Recognizing the other in children’s literature. The Lion and the Unicorn, 21, 215–229. Nikolajeva, M. (1997). Introduction to the theory of children’s literature [Rev. ed.]. Tallinn: Tallinn Pedagogical University. Nodelman, P. (1992). The other: Orientalism, colonialism, and children’s literature. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17, 29–35. Reimer, M. (1998). Power and powerlessness: Reading the controversy over the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Canadian Children’s Literature, 24, 6–16. Reynolds, K. (1994). Children’s literature in the 1890s and the 1990s. Plymouth: Northcote House. Rose, J. (1984). The case of Peter Pan, or the impossibility of children’s fiction. London: Macmillan. Stephens, J. (1992). Language and ideology in children’s fiction. London: Longman. Warner, M. (1994). Six myths of our time: Little angels, little monsters, beautiful beasts, and more. New York: Vintage.
AUTHOR "Mia Österlund"
TITLE "Gender and beyond"
SUBJECT "Studies in Narrativity, Volume 2"
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Chapter 9
Gender and beyond Ulf Stark’s conservative rebellion Mia Österlund I [Simone] thought that perhaps it was so that boys had to play boys and girls play girls in an enormous play without end … (Stark, 1984, p.57, my translation)
1.
Cross-dressing heroines
One way to summarize Ulf Stark’s young adult novel Dårfinkar och Dönickar [Nutcases and Norms](1984) would be as follows. Simone, its 12-year-old protagonist, lives in Vällingby, a suburb of Stockholm, with her bohemian mother Olga Kroll, who is usually referred to as Morsan [Mum]. The story gets under way when the two of them move in with Morsan’s new boyfriend, Yngve Laurin. Two subsequent incidents are that Simone’s dog, Kilroy, runs away, and her maternal grandfather Ivan escapes from hospital, because he wants to die in peace. Basically, the grandfather has a rather happy-go-lucky view of life, and he explains this to Simone as the philosophy of “nutcases and norms”. Then in her new school, it so happens that her teacher, Ärlan, mistakes her for a boy. Simone plays along with this mix-up, which results in a power struggle with a boy called Isak. There is also an element of romance, one dimension of which is that Simone, now ostensibly a boy by the name of Simon, attracts the passionate interest of a girl called Katti. Finally, Simone reveals that she is a girl, and her grandfather dies happy in the knowledge that his philosophy of nutcases and norms has now carried on down to his young relative. As a literary motif, cross-dressing is very ancient, and especially from Shakespeare’s comedies of mistaken identity onwards, the line of descent is very clear. In earlier Swedish literature, for instance, the female characters posing as males include Tintomara in C. J. L. Almqvist’s Drottningens Juvelsmycke [The Queen’s Jewels] (1834), a figure who is enigmatic to men and women alike, and Katja Kock in Hjalmar Bergman’s Flickan i Frack [The Girl in Tails] (1925). By the 1980’s, an “androgynous” trend was visible in the popular literature of many different countries, and in Sweden there were a fair number of cross-dressing
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novels for teenagers. An immediate forerunner had been Harry Kullman’s Stridshästen [The Battle Horse](1977), which described the disguised girls Kossan and Rebecka from a class and gender perspective. Then between 1982 and 1988 came Maria Gripe’s Skugg [Shadow] tetralogy: Skuggan över Stenbänken [The Shadow over the Stone Bench] (1982), … och de Vita Skuggorna i Skogen [… and the White Shadows in the Forest] (1984), Skuggornas Barn [The Children of the Shadows] (1986), and Skugg-gömman [The Shadow Hiding Place] (1988), all of which tell somewhat Gothic stories of a girl disguised as a boy during the time of the First World War. In Cannie Möller’s Stortjuvens Pojke [The Great Thief ’s Son] (1985), female cross-dressing is a strategem by which to escape poverty. Nor is Stark’s Simone the only cross-dressing teenage heroine from a male author. In Peter Pohl’s Janne, min Vän [Johnny, my Friend] (1985), seen by some critics as a no less important new departure than the Pippi Longstocking books had been (Nikolajeva, 1996, p. 82), the disguised girl is Johnny, an adolescent of the 1950, while in Mats Wahl’s Anna-Carolinas Krig [Anna-Carolina’s War] (1986), the bold young AnnaCarolina takes her brother’s place in the Thirty Years’ War. Among such examples, Stark’s novel is slightly a-typical, in that its story is not set in the historical past but in the time of its own present. But its focus on crossdressing by a girl certainly is representative of the 1980s, and so are some of the uses to which the motif is put. In point of fact, there have also been young adult novels in which the cross-dresser is a boy. In 1977, for instance, by which time tranvestism among men was considered, in Toijer-Nilsson’s words (1978, p.127), as “a protest against strict gender roles”, there was Hans Eric Hellberg’s Love love love. But cross-dressing male characters have been far less common than female ones, and have raised gender issues in rather different ways.
2.
Scholarly approaches
Cross-dressing is now a major topic of research for students of culture, society, and anthropology. Within more specifically literary studies, noteworthy contributions include Elaine Showalter’s “Critical crossdressing: Male feminists and the woman of the year” (1987), Sandra M. Gilbert’s & Susan Gubar’s “Cross-dressing and redressing: Transvestism as metaphor” (1989), and Marjorie Garber’s “Vested Interests: Crossdressing and cultural anxiety” (1992), and within children’s literature research Stefanie Hlubeck’s “Das Motiv der Androgynie in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart” (1991), Gertrud Lehnert’s “Maskeraden und Metamorfosen: Als Männer verkleidete Frauen in der Literatur (1994), Victoria Flanagan’s “Crossdressing as transvestism in children’s literature: An analysis of a ‘gender performative’ model” (1999), Etusko Taketani’s “Spectacular child bodies: The sexual politics of cross-dressing and calisthenics in the writings of Eliza Leslie and
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Catherine Beecher” (1999), and Lisa Brocklebank’s “Rebellious voices: The unofficial discourse of cross-dressing in d’Aulnoy, de Murat, and Perrault” (2000). Particularly relevant to young adult fiction is the study by Lissa Paul (1987), who uses the term “hero in drag”. What all such analyses tend to emphasize is that cross-dressing characters provoke a category crisis, precisely because they seem to set the binary opposition aside. That especially female cross-dressing should be such a prominent theme in children’s literature reflects the influence of late-twentieth-century feminist thought, and so does the way it has come to be studied by literary scholars. As noted by Roberta Seelinger Trites (1997, p.5), “[n]o movement has influenced children’s literature so fundamentally as feminism but it is impossible to put a date to when feminist features first made their appearance in novels for young people since these features have existed in parallel with sexist characteristics since the very beginning of young adult fiction.” All the same, “[s]ince the 1960’s a host of works condemning gender stereotypes have been published. By reacting against the traditional repression of feminine power these novels have functioned as a corrective, sometimes consciously, sometimes less obviously, to the images of female compliancy found in literature before the present feminist movement” (ibid). According to Seelinger Trites, girl protagonists are now more active, expressive and loudmouthed than they used to be. They have a greater range of alternatives, they experience adventures outside the home, and they have more varied friendships. As a result, the stories about them have become more complex. Most novels about girls no longer concentrate on their conforming to a traditional female pattern. Girls can shape their own identity, and they know there are alternatives. For Seelinger Trites, the hallmark of feminist children’s novels is that girl characters who are curious about the world, and introspectively alert about their own place in it, tend to overcome some of the repression to which they are subjected (Seelinger Trites 1997, p.7). Ulf Stark’s Simone thinks that gender is something that can be “done” — that it is performative — and Stark’s own treatment of the issue is rather complex. Here I shall be discussing the ways previous scholars and critics have responded to this, and then proposing a reading of my own that is more subversively feminist. Among other things, I shall be following in the footsteps of Lissa Paul in her Reading otherways (1988). When examining a text’s portrayal of relationships, Paul suggests that some very particular questions are in order. Whose story is this? Who is the reader? When and where was the reading produced? Who is named? Who is not named? Who gets punished? Who gets praised? Who speaks? Who is silenced? Who acts? Who is acted upon? Who owns property? Who is dependent? Who sees? Who is seen? Who fights for honour? Who suffers? And how are value systems determined? Although I shall not be answering these questions one by one, my discussion of Stark’s text will certainly reflect their general drift. As Paul puts it, “feminist theory is one of the cluster of discursive practices that reshape the ways we read not
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only works of literature but also our past, present, and the way we imagine our futures” (Paul, 1998, p.15). Feminist theory looks anew at writing, re-reads it and revalues earlier interpretations. A resonant reading will present a number of voices that sometimes contradict each other. Oversimplification is in this way avoided. Also important here will be the theory of communicative co-adaptation as developed by Roger D. Sell (2000, pp.145–58). Social change is never absolute and over-night, but gradual, with successful communicators aiming to meet their readers or listeners half-way. They adapt to prevailing norms in the matter of both genre and ideology, but in the hope that prevailing norms will in return adapt to their own projects. To spell it out, real communication and change involve adaptation on both sides; the process is co-adaptive. According to Sell, Dickens, for instance, very much conformed to proprieties laid down by Mrs Grundy, but actually in the hope of de-throning her. His deference to her went hand in hand with his determination to convince readers that Victorian mores involved a great deal of hypocrisy, humbug and, worst of all, suffering. In Sell’s view, Dickens’s effectiveness as a communicator was a matter of moving towards the new but beginning with the old (Sell, 2001, pp.165–94). Stark’s Dårfinkar och Dönickar can be discussed in similar terms. Here, the received social structures of girlhood and gender are strongly present and even confirmed, but as a preliminary to their being scrutinized and even challenged. Paradoxically, if Stark had made fewer concessions to conservative values, he would have less social potential as a rebel. By which I do not mean that he is ambiguous or cowardly. Even a text which is less direct will contain gender values, and can transmit them, too. But it is impossible to know which gender constructs are conscious and which are unconscious. It is not even interesting to speculate about this. According to John Stephens (1996, p.17), contemporary children’s literature asks both implicit and explicit questions about sex or gender, and this involves gendering in terms of both plot and characterization. A text’s gender values will either be basically in harmony with a prevailing cultural norm, which will thereby be reinforced, or they will represent a socially disharmonious challenge to the status quo. And if we now define feminism as the assumption that all human beings should be treated equally, regardless of their sex, race, class or religion, then such a challenge was obviously going to arise from analyses of power relationships and gender constructs conducted within a feminist perspective. Nor will such a definition allow us to be surprised when a rebelliously feminist point of view is put forward by an author who is biologically male.
3.
Disguised by a female pseudonym
In 1984 the Swedish publishing house of Bonniers organized a competition for novels aimed at children between the ages of 10 and 14. Competitors were urged to
Gender and beyond
write a book which would give young readers hope and the joy of life. Ulf Stark’s Dårfinkar och Dönickar won first prize. So far, so good. But Stark had submitted his manuscript under the pseudonym “Joanna Swift” (Stark, 2000). This is clearly linked to Jonathan Swift, author of the satire “A modest proposal” (1729), in which Swift purports to recommend, as a sane and compassionate measure to ease the Irish famine, the slaughter of 100,000 Irish children, whose flesh would in England fetch a high price as meat. Still better known, of course, is Swift’s no less satirical Gulliver’s Travels (1726), not least for its account of the strange bodily changes which befell its hero. Swift’s ironical persona, and his fascination with metamorphosis, clearly holds a special attraction for Stark, providing subtexts to his own work. Nor is it difficult to guess why he should have opted for a female pseudonym in the first place. Whereas in the past women writers had often tried to win recognition by posing as men, before Pohl, Wahl and Stark burst upon the scene most Swedish books for children were by women (Lundqvist, 1994, p.96). The young triumvirate were entering a domain perceived as female. Also, Stark’s own “sex change” hints his interest in deconstructing all such gender boundaries once and for all. Yet for the distinguished jury, Stark’s text apparently did not break the usual mould. From the first, it was able to win the approval of readers who, though by no means antediluvian reactionaries, would not have regarded themselves as radicals or revolutionaries either. Their verdict was as follows: Dårfinkar och Dönickar is a living and drastic story, with many wise thoughts beneath a smiling surface, about 12-year-old Simone, her eccentric family and her temporary “transformation” into the crazy boy Simon. The plot is well constructed and exciting, the characters are consummate, and have many surprising facets. The description daringly and successfully walks a tightrope between deep seriousness and crazy humour. The narrative perspective, seen through Simone’s eyes, is effectively used, and the book provides many fine and finely used opportunities to create gender role models in early puberty. Dårfinkar och Dönickar is a generous book that gives a feeling for life and happiness. (Borén, 1984, my translation)
So the jury felt that Stark would stimulate young readers to a hopeful and courageous frame of mind by regaling them with gender role models. Unsurprisingly, the concept of gender models was still strongly coloured by discussions of gender during the 1970s. Today, a decade after Judith Butler’s (1990) writings on “gender trouble and performative gender”, Stark’s text reads very differently. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to see that, although he certainly set up the kind of gender role models by which a conservative reader might be re-assured, at several different levels he also throws them into question.
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4. Reading “otherways” An “otherways” reading of the kind recommended by Lissa Paul confirms that Stark is not always doing what he seems to be doing. For instance, he seems to be writing a story about a teenage girl who lives in Stockholm. But it is not just any teenage girl. She is tinged with a particular, immigrant ethnicity. A typical family meal is borsch soup with smetana, the grandfather’s name is Ivan, and the mother’s is Olga. In her fur coat, Morsan-Olga “looked like the female lead in a major Russian film. The dust whirled around her like a snow storm from the Siberian tundra” (Stark, 1984, p.7). The picture is further nuanced by subtle class distinctions, of a kind to which Stark’s other work is also sensitive. Just as his Låt isbjörnarna dansa [Let the polar bears dance] (1986) is a contemporary re-telling of the Pygmalion story, in which the boy Lasse corresponds to Eliza Doolittle, so Simone’s move from a flat to a detached house is a step up the social ladder. In fact, Dårfinkar och Dönickar, Låt isbjörnarna dansa and Karlavagnen [The Great Bear] form a trilogy whose plots of change and even metamorphosis suggest that the kind of categories imposed by society cannot be accepted essentialistically. Is Simone Swedish or Russian? Is s/he Simone or Simon? As regards this last question, a specifically feminist “otherways” reading will ask, “Whose story is this?” The story in Dårfinkar och Dönickar belongs to Simone. The girl is positioned in a traditionally male narrative structure, where the male element mainly consists of all the threats and challenges she offers to the masculinity of the boy Isak. As for female elements, they are conspicuous by their abscence. In particular, Simone’s former friends, Lollo and Ullis, are now completely squeezed out of her world. No new positive relationships with other girls arise. In fact other girls are described contemptuously as mere bodies to be looked at. An equally important “otherways” question concerns the reader. In order to be able to understand different readings, one needs to ask not only how the work itself came about, but also how the particular readings actually arose. Whose are they, and when and where? The first ones I shall be looking at are mostly reviews from 1984, when the book was first published (Toijer-Nilsson, 1984; Nettervik, 1984; Forsén, 1984; Alfvén-Eriksson, 1984). They tend to treat Stark’s text as more or less gender-neutral. What they offer is a traditional “gender role reading” which stresses the heterosexual and tones down any possible lesbianism, which detects romance patterns even where the romance element is mainly “between the lines”, and which draws attention to the Shakespearian tradition, to the mother-daughter relationship, and to the treatment of female adolescence. Next, my main focus shifts ten years further on, to the discussion by Ulla Lundqvist (1994), and as a final run-up to my own reading I discuss the gender-conscious reading by Boel Westin in 1999.
Gender and beyond
5.
Gender clichés and bickering about equality
The title of Ying Toijer-Nilsson’s review (1984) translates as “Sadness and madness in prize novel”. Above all, she is critical of Stark’s character descriptions. She says that the text is a collection of clichés, and that the situation comedy moves so fast that the novel has no time for any depth. […] the interjected profundity of thought is not sufficient for a deep characterization. The story reads well but does not penetrate below the surface as it is full of literary clichés. The bohemian mother, the awkward old man, the friendly crackpot, the gossiping neighbour, the girl who wants to be a boy — they are all well-known, taken live from literature. Ulf Stark can write. One sits and waits for him to write about real people (Toijer-Nilsson, 1984, my translation).
Toijer-Nilsson makes no mention at all of sex or gender. Any criticism the rest of her review suggests of specifically gender clichés is merely implicit. In an attempt to underline Ulf Stark’s humour, Ingrid Nettervik (1984) describes his novel as a wonderful book for nutcases, and herself makes fun of feminism and the struggle for equality — “There is too little comic relief in our country with its eternal bickering about equality”. Like Toijer-Nilsson, she draws attention to the comedy of mistaken identity. But she also stresses the relationship between mother and daughter, and sees the adolescent girl’s temporary deviation into boyhood as an important part of her development. Disappearance and return are also reflected in the figure of Simone through the age-old confusion motif. When Simone finds herself once more as a girl, she has matured into an independent individual beside her dominating mother, at the same time as she discovers in the mother the earlier maternal figure of her childhood. (Nettervik, 1984, my translation)
So Nettervik reads Dårfinkar och Dönickar as a girl’s Bildungsroman, in which Simone’s cross-dressing is open to two interpretations: either the nice little girl is disguised as a nasty boy, or the little girl has a nasty inner self, which finds expression in the male disguise. 6. The rules of romance: Hetero- and homosexuality Ulla Forsén’s review (1984), whose title translates as “Happiness and optimism”, concentrates on the romance aspect, but avoids all mention of gender. She reads the novel as an innocent game in which a girl becomes a boy:
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When she [Simone] moves and starts going to a new school, the “e” in her name gets lost. She becomes the boy Simon, a role which she adopts after a short period of thought and then plays out to the full. Naturally many complications arise but only when she falls in love does she finally cast off the mask. (Forsén, 1984, my translation)
After putting the book in a larger context, Forsén also draws attention to the mother figure and emphasizes the humour. She mainly stresses an enthusiasm for life and an element of heterosexual romance. Even much more recently, Kristin Hallberg seems to see heterosexuality as an unassailable norm. In an article whose title translates as “Angel princess and girl changeling: Some Swedish descriptions of girls” (Hallberg, 1998), she covers a lot of ground: what a girl is; the relationship between a girl and her mother; the girl who narrates; the girl as seen; and girlhood as a pendulum which swings between angel princess and monster. It is in connection with this wide range of possibilities that Hallberg mentions Stark: In the descriptions of girls given in children’s books, the dramatization of the girl role varies again and again, most of all perhaps in books by female authors, but also in male authors such as Ulf Stark. In the popular Dårfinkar och Dönickar the indistinctness and insecurity of the girl’s role are brought out. Whether or not Simone/Simon is seen as a girl or a boy entirely depends on her appearance, her clothes and the role she adopts. In other words, those she meets read her from the gender norms of society/the scene. In the end it is in an integration of sexuality that she is forced to be a girl with a definite sex. (Hallberg, 1998, p.105, my translation)
So in Hallberg’s reading sexuality is not problematized. Sexuality is simply heterosexuality. My own more “otherways” reading detects both hetero- and homosexual markers in Stark’s text. As always when cross-dressing is involved, the comedy of disguise can flirt with bisexuality, hinting at erotic attraction between representatives of the same biological sex. The character in disguise inspires interest in both sexes, even if he or she retains, despite any hints to the contrary, a personal orientation that is basically heterosexual. In Forsén and Hallberg’s interpretations such variations on the traditional girl’s romance story are ruled out. Yet one of the readings Stark’s novel lends itself to is certainly lesbian. The experience or, at least, the possibility of girl-girl attraction is not unexplored here. Simone tests more than one kind of relationship: not only boy-girl (without any disguise), but also boy boy (disguised girl), and, yes, girl - (disguised) girl.
Gender and beyond
7.
In dialogue with Shakespeare’s comedies
The title of Anne-Marie Alfvén-Eriksson’s review translates as “Madness in glad life fresco” (1984). She, too, stresses both the link with tradition and the motherdaughter relationship. In contrast with Toijer-Nilsson’s rather dim view of Stark’s characterization, Alfvén-Eriksson says that he shows originality. The story resembles a burlesque and glad life fresco, in sometimes light tones, sometimes dark. Much of it is familiar. For example, Simone’s Morsan is one of a line of silly parents in children’s literature. Many of the absurd situations in school also seem familiar, and the finally quite crazy teacher we have also seen in different guises before. Nonetheless, everything seems fresh, and the recognition of situations in a changed form gives the book an atmosphere of both innovation and tradition (Alfvén-Eriksson, 1984, my translation)
Alfvén-Eriksson also reads the book in accordance with the rules of romance. She mainly sees Simone as longing to get back to the ready-made girl role, since, deep inside, a girl is what she wants to be. The enforced boy’s role feels too restrictive: Simone — or Simon — who at times amuses, at times frightens her friends and drives her teacher out of her mind, really wants, with a large part of her ego, to be a proper, well-behaved girl whose talents will find their true place. (It does not turn out this way.) And she wants to have a completely ordinary mummy, and not the Morsa who is always dressed so fantastically, in a home that is just as fantastically upsidedown. (Alfvén-Eriksson, 1984, my translation)
Alfvén-Eriksson further notes that the basic plot in Dårfinkar och Dönickar is based on Shakespeare’s disguise comedies, though perhaps the first point to note here is that Shakespeare’s comedies, and the intertextualities with Stark, are not just a matter of the disguises leading to amatory misprision. The resultant situations can also place some characters under scrutiny that is fairly satirical. In Shakespeare, these butts tend to be vainglorious males. Shakespeare’s women usually come out on top as the clever ones. As for Dårfinkar och Dönickar, most of the men characters are reasonably unassuming. But the reactionary Axelsson is certainly rather full of himself, even if he, too, finally calms down when taken to the capacious bosom of Morsan. Then again, Shakespeare’s disguise comedies also contain one or two more thoughtful people, who contemplate all the confusion from the outside, as it were. Somebody like the melancholy Jacques in As You Like It is a completely unillusioned commentator, who sees through every kind of role-play. So is Simone’s grandfather, with his philosophy of nutcases and norms. He would never be fooled by her disguise, and becomes her trusted counsellor. Understandably enough, though,
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Alfvén-Eriksson’s main emphasis does fall on amatory complications, which structure entire plots in both Shakespeare and Stark. The girl who pretends to be a boy has even older traditions in the past. She plays her role so well that, like Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, she arouses desire in another girl. She turns out to be tougher than Viola, however: she bites her admirer’s tongue. Unfortunately this only serves to urge the loved one on. (Alfvén-Eriksson, 1984, my translation)
The conflict in Twelfth Night is that Viola loves Duke Orsino, who loves Olivia, who loves Viola, disguised as a man by the name of Cesario. The pattern is repeated in Dårfinkar och Dönickar, where Simon/e is in love with Isak, who loves Katti, who loves Simon/e. What Alfvén-Eriksson does not point out, however, is that in both Shakespeare and Stark the pattern is somewhat ambiguous. Orsino, though pining with love for Olivia, cannot help noticing that “Cesario” has a “smooth and rubious” lip (Shakespeare, 1985, p.31 (I v 31)). Simon/e, similarly, might also be able to feel for Katti; Katti’s feelings are certainly for both Simon/e and Isak; and Isak begins to be attracted by Simon/e when she starts behaving like a boy. Typical of such complications is a passage in which Simone express a girl’s point of view, only to shift, in the very next sentence, to an internalization of a boy’s view of a girl as “other”. Simone’s girl’s gaze, as one might put it, ends up as what would “normally” be a boy’s gaze, viewing Katti as a sexually attractive being, with whom companionship could have a strong erotic undercurrent. How do you dance like a boy? It is presumably in things such as this that the truth comes out. I tried to make my movements a bit awkward and imitated a stupid, half-frozen Travolta who had just been hit on the head with a table. I felt envious of Katti who moved here and there on soft feet so that her hair blew and her breasts bounced in that blouse that looked like a corset. She tried to look like that Jennifer Beals, who had a part in “Flashdance”, which I had not seen. But which she had seen with Isak. (Stark, 1984, p.98, my translation)
And the disguised Simon/e is anything but unmoved by Katti’s romantic feelings for her: If I were a boy, I’d love her, I thought. If I were a boy, I’d lie there in bed thinking about her each evening. If I were a boy, I’d long for her little pointed tongue and those yellow eyes. If I were a boy, like Isak, I thought and then trod awkwardly with my foot so that it hurt so much that tears came to my eyes. (Stark, 1984, p.98, my translation)
The anaphora creates the impression of an incantation, rousing suspicions that Simone’s daydream about Katti has a serious undertone. Since this is a comedy, the
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problem is easily resolved. But in Stark no less than in Shakespeare, comic solutions do not exclude less conventional ones. Either one says that lesbianism is indeed represented. Or one says that Stark’s portrayal of girlhood has simply lost touch with reality. Yet this second assessment might well fall into the trap pointed out by Marjorie Garber (1992, p.17): the tendency of readers to look straight through lesbian characters, as if they were transparent or invisible, or to force lesbianism into the mould of heterosexuality, by regarding it as a mere temporary digression from the path to “true” (= heterosexual) womanhood (Garber 1992: 17).
8. Lundqvist’s reading of the Tintomara figure So the early reviews assigned Dårfinkar och Dönickar to the category of the disguise tradition but without problematizing gender, and the same is even true of Kristin Hallberg’s much later study. In most research of the 1990s, by contrast, it was the issue of androgyny that attracted attention, as the new decade’s feminist theory would lead us to expect. In this connection Ulla Lundqvist’s Tradition och förnyelse [Tradition and renewal](1994) underlines the similarity with Almqvist’s Tintomara, while at the same time stressing Stark’s formidable originality. She specially praises him for narrating external events in such a way that they become an objective correlative for Simone’s inner state, so calling for a reading “between-the-lines”: “… the important things that happen are played out, as in all stories describing crises of identity, in the leading character’s confused soul.” (Lundqvist, 1994, p.235). No matter how absurd and farcical the story becomes, at its centre there is always Simone, almost a teenager, and faced with all the big questions in life. The winds of evil, the demons, the farcical tempo where absurd comedy and slapstick dance like uncontrollable clowns across the pages — this is one way to describe Simone’s story. The reader has to read Simone between the lines, always bearing in mind that she is fabricating, and knows that she is fabricating. When she claims that she throws flour and an iron at her mother, or that she catches fifteen ducks and takes them with her when she climbs into her classroom at night, she is not describing an external event but rather an internal one. (Lundqvist, 1994, p.239, my translation)
By reading external events as reflections of inner states, Lundqvist arrives at multiple meanings and problematizes the entire narrative, which can in fact be entirely read as Simone’s own daydreaming fantasies about her time in disguise. This impression is reinforced by Margareta Almqvist’s cover design for the book, in which a picture of Simone seems to fade into a picture of the other characters as if
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they were escaping from inside her head. In the book as a whole, the border between reality and imagination can be correspondingly fuzzy (Österlund, 2001). Lundqvist describes this mode as visionary realism, but without developing the concept (Lundqvist, 1994, p.239). In my own view, the exaggerations are flights of fancy within a kind of everyday realism. When Simone and Morsan move in with Yngve, they change address from the real Stockholm suburb of Vällingby to the fictitious Tjottaheiti, a name connoting infinite distance. This is certainly a move into fantasy, and Stark underlines the visionary dimension by having as one of the stage props a crystal ball. But such markers are themselves bi-directional: they point to fantasy, but can only do so by pointing away from a still assumed world of reality. Many readers will be quite capable of seeing that Simone, as narrator of the whole story, is not strictly reliable, as Lundqvist (1994, p.237) also recognizes. Inadvertently, her narration reveal’s Yngve’s warm-heartedness, for instance, while professing utter contempt for him. So one clue to interpretation is the quotation from Spinoza: “There are no such things as lies. There are only truths which are somewhat lame.” All we are given is Simone’s fibs, but precise truth values are in a way unimportant. After all, it is not as if Simone is the only fibber. Stark himself exercises a power of imaginative deception, and precisely by putting such a coherent and authentic-sounding story into the mouth of a 12-year-old. As Janne Lundström remarks, the narrative has more the nature of of an oral tradition than a written story. The choice of words “as I said” form part of an orally related story. … the authenticity is an illusion, one of Ulf Stark’s magical tricks. In reality twelveyear-olds cannot of course tell such a well structured story, so grammatically correct and so vivid as that told by Simone. The I form is an artificial construction, impossible and improbable. The girl voice lacks conviction but the readers have adapted to the construction. (Lundström, 1998, p.25, my translation)
In a present-day feminist reading, it seems to me, a further point here must be that one aspect of Stark’s feminist rebellion is that by “voicing” the young girl he has empowered her. Traditionally, growing girls were to be tamed by silence, like the lively Anne of Green Gables, who asked people to call her Cordelia because she thought the name was more romantic, but who thereby evoked memories of that Shakespearian tragic heroine, so different from some of her comic counterparts, whose father said of her, “Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman” (Shakespeare, 1961, p.215 (V iii 272–3)). When girls kept quiet, this was taken as a sign of maturity. For 12-year-old girls who were keen to win acceptance within society’s given gender system, the only alternative to silence was, precisely, to disguise themselves as a boy. Lundqvist, by contrast, still avoids the issue of gender. In making the connection with Tintomara and the androgynous tradition, she never really explains what
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she takes androgyny to mean. The androgynous motif is a key one. In fact it carries the entire story. … In the new school her [Simone’s] name is interpreted as Simon and to begin with Simone is amused by this role play. Naturally it creates complications — as with Tintomara she arouses tender feelings in both sexes. Her classmate Katti immediately falls in love with her since she is such a different kind of boy, and gradually the tough guy Isak also falls for her. At first, though, Isak and she are cold rivals in daring and inventiveness, an attitude which in both of them is in fact a form of disguised admiration and enchantment. (Lundqvist, 1994, p.235, my translation)
For Lundqvist, Isak’s falling for Simone is not a problem. But for a reading more alert to textual markers of both hetero- and homosexuality, a question definitely arises as to whether he falls for her boy persona or her girl persona. The competition and power struggle in which Simone and Isak engage can certainly be brought into line with heterosexual romance, since one standard construction of boyhood is the “rough diamond”, or, to use a different metaphor, the idea that a boy like Isak, though apparently very hard and unruly, has a soft inner core. But Lundqvist undervalues gender construction by making it an entirely individual matter. For her, what happens at the end is not that Simone becomes a girl again, but that she re-becomes Simone. After her dangerous adventure, Simone finally reveals all, and simply re-adopts her ego, which just happens to be a girl’s (Lundqvist, 1994, p.235), a reading which rather abstractly sees her as a human being: What she tells us is a condensed picture of the first hormone storm of early puberty in a young person’s life[…] (Lundqvist, 1994, p.238, my translation, my italics)
What this is blind to is the text’s specific markers of girlhood, which in a story about a Simon who had been mistaken for a Simone would have taken on still another significance. Again, Lundqvist does mention the strong mother: In Ulf Stark’s books it is the mothers who are the stronger and the men play second fiddle. (Lundqvist, 1994, p.242, my translation)
But she interprets the proper name Morsan as hinting a slight criticism, whereas I see it as suggesting that Morsan is not just any mother, but a representative of modern motherhood: a mother who is liberated, unconventional, a single parent, and pursuing a career (Österlund, 2000). In my reading, she is also a feminist, who named her daughter Simone after Simone de Beauvoir, since the entire novel can be read as modifying the thesis “One is not born to be a woman; it is something one becomes” into the form, “One is not born to, but rather becomes, a woman”.
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9. A gender-sensitive reading of the disguised girl Boel Westin presents a gender-conscious reading, which seeks to explain the renaissance and modernization of the age-old androgynous woman figure. She reads Dårfinkar och Dönickar mainly in the light of Judith Butler’s concept of gender trouble. But even she does not fully problematize androgyny in the contemporary feminist way. For her, the androgynous female represents a search for the fusion of male and female (Westin, 1999, p.97). In Stark’s novel, all she sees is a girl who dresses up as a boy, who deliberately adopts a disguise, and who is looked upon by others as a boy. Simone, that is to say, is mistaken for a boy: she has boyish looks and she lacks girl markers. Her main point is perhaps that the disguised girl’s acting like a boy can be read as a symbolic act that stages the girl’s freedom (Westin, 1999, p.98). The feminist discussion of androgyny achieved its heyday in the 1970’s, while research into disguise took off in the 1990’s. The first feminist theories about the androgynous woman describe a hybrid, whereas the second wave of feminists suggest that the androgynous can offer a single-sex personality, two in one, so to speak. The concept of the androgynous has its roots in the Greek andro, male, and gyn, female, and refers to a physical and psychological combination of traditionally male and female characteristics. In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf defined it as a spectrum along which people could select their place regardless of history and tradition. Some feminists maintain that androgyny is a static concept since it is blind to power relationships and difference. In literary interpretations in terms of fusion or subversion, the concept can in practice work either to undermine a sexual dichotomization or to preserve it. My own interpretation of androgyny is close to Virgina Woolf ’s. I do not regard the literary use of the the androgynous woman motif — or of the androgynous man motif, for that matter — as merely symbolizing the merger of male and female characteristics. Such readings are certainly possible, and are certainly very widespread. But the androgynous woman can also be a much more subversive character if she is read as not trying to combine male and female. For me, the androgynous person subversively questions the categories male and female by crossing the gender boundary, a phenomenon which can also be reconciled with Butler’s gender trouble.
10. The disguised girl as an anti-hero In comedies of disguise it is traditionally the disguised girl who, by becoming active, takes the role usually assumed by a male hero, a role discussed in Margery Hourihan’s Deconstructing the hero:
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In Western culture there is a story which has been told over and over again, in innumerable versions, from the earliest times. It is a story about superiority, dominance and success. It tells how white European men are the natural masters of the world because they are strong, brave, skilful, rational and dedicated. It tells how they overcome the dangers of nature, how other “inferior” races have been subdued by them, and how they spread civilization and order wherever they go. It tells how women are designed to serve them, and how those women who refuse to do so are threats to the natural order and must be controlled. It tells how their persistence means that they always eventually win the glittering prizes, the golden treasures, and how the gods — or the government — approve of their enterprises. It is our favorite story and it has been told so many times that we have come to believe that what it says about the world is true. (Hourihan, 1999, p.1)
This heroic narrative has dominated children’s and young adult fiction, handing down traditional values to each new generation (Hourihan, 1999, p.3). According to Hourihan, we have to understand it, in order to be able to re-write and deconstruct it. The hero’s search is always basically the same: conflicts are taken as natural and inevitable, and the hero is constantly confronted with opponents to be overcome, just as, in Dårfinkar och Dönickar, Simone assumes the role of hero and confronts Isak. The heroic narrative defines masculinity as bravery, courage, aggression, decisiveness, and dominance, and can be seen as a psychological allegory of the the transition from boy to man (Hourihan, 1999, p.3), a view not out of key with Ulla Lundqvist’s account of the inner drama underlying the story of Simone. The heroic narrative is exciting. It is a thriller, constantly inviting, as does Dårfinkar och Dönickar, the question, “What happened next?” Not that the reader expects the hero to fail. If that happened, he would become an anti-hero (Hourihan, 1999, p.9). And Hourihan describes a tradition of girls who rebel, precisely by becoming a temporary boy persona, since the alternative is silent submission. When books like Treasure Island and David Copperfield were all that was available for “young adults” the only possible stance of rebellion for girls was to wish to be a boy, for the idea of girls participating fully and freely in the action of life was barely conceivable. Girls who did not secretly wish to be boys adopted subservience as a virtue, defining themselves as existing only in relation to others, only in relation to the hero for whose coming they waited. (Hourihan, 1999, p.45)
Even during the 1970’s, there was still a widespread notion that women would prefer to accept the world of men and to succeed in it by becoming a kind of tomboy. In the 1980s, however, there was a change. The new ideal was one of
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solidarity between women, of sisterhood (Paul, 1998, p.53), which raises some difficult questions. If the heroic narrative basically involves a repressive view of women (Hourihan, 1999, p.45), what actually happens when a girl assumes the heroic role? Does she internalize that repressive view? Why should growth into girlhood be construed as incorporating a boyish parenthesis? Why does a girl have to go through a period of disguise in order to become a real woman, when the converse does not hold for a boy? Traditional gender roles are equally restrictive for both boys and girls. As Lissa Paul (1987) notes, novels that involve only a change of role are no more feminist than their sexist counterparts. Their characters become merely heroes in drag. Such superficial alterations hark back to the past. As Hourihan puts it (1999, p.206), stories in which a girl plays the hero imply that men are superior, since such a girl merely behaves like an incomplete man. But if she tries to achieve power by crossdressing, she is suddenly more than a hero in drag. Instead of a simplifying reversing the stereotype, she can use fantasy and deception in order to cross gender boundaries, or to embrace and foster traditional female values (Seelinger Trites, 1997, p.5). For Simone, these means lie very close to hand. When all that is involved is a simple gender reversal, an attempt to re-write the heroic narrative often falls flat. In Hourihan’s words, “inversion is not the same as subversion” (Hourihan, 1999, p.205). Fantasy and deception are so much more effective because they are so much closer to laughter, a laughter which refuses to take a hero’s gendered grandiosities seriously (Hourihan, 1999, p.212). Dårfinkar och Dönickar re-writes the heroic tale by means of a transgressive humour, which provides its heroine with a key to feminism. She does not just grow. She grows in power. Through her own subversive laughter she becomes an anti-hero.
11. Girls growing up in Mum’s shadow Mothers in books have long been problem mothers. Morsan in Dårfinkar och Dönickar is a creative woman whose life is chaotic, and a careless mother who shifts a lot of responsibility onto her daughter’s own shoulders. She is one of those mothers described by Toijer-Nilsson as so enthusiastically engaged with their own identity crisis that they neglect their daughters’ development (Toijer-Nilsson, 1978, p.203). Morsan is also ambiguous. To some extent she is seen by the male gaze as a sexualized male dream. At the same time, she is a feminist. Much of her behaviour implies a perception that the western world has repressed mothers, through institutionalizing motherhood itself. Other women have been taboo for them, not just sexually, but as friends as well. In young adult fiction, the mother-daughter relationship is problematized in numerous ways. In Dårfinkar och Dönickar Morsan is Stark’s re-writing of the
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mother figure as a sexualized giantess. Simone would much prefer to have a normal mother, with merely moderate sexuality. So different mother scripts to some extent collide, though Morsan is the only mother in the book. For a start, there is the sheer shock of the impact she makes on the senses of sight, smell and touch. She heaved herself out of bed and grabbed hold of me, pressing me against her huge body that smelt of perfume and stale tobacco (Stark, 1984, p.7)
Her presence in space is extremely noticeable. Metaphorically, too, she takes a huge role in Simone’s own life, in fact quite overshadowing her. In my reading, the book is about the young girl’s growing up in repulsive-attractive symbiosis with this hyperflamboyant feminist mother, whose very fatness was the “natural” form of protest for the 1980s, with all the theorization of the body (Johnsson, 1999). From the very beginning Morsan has an unconventional attitude to clothes. She lies and sleeps, not in her bed but in the living room, with an old silver fox fur as a blanket (Stark, 1984, p.5). A woman with a fur coat radiates well-being and traditional values, but a woman who uses a fur as a blanket is a bohemian with a mind of her own. Morsan is sexual, glamorous, vulgar — not the dream mother for a 12-year-old to have with her on her first day at a new school. She was dressed in a leopard-skin dress which revealed most of her legs and breasts. To accompany this she had chosen a pair of fire-engine-red shoes, black net stockings and a pair of fantastic sunglasses, their frames studded with small glistening stones. “Are you already up?” she asked. “I thought I’d come to school with you.” “I thought you were going to a fancy-dress ball”, I said surlily and as evilly as I could. … “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, offended. “I thought you said that you wanted to have an ordinary mum. An ordinary mum would certainly go with her daughter on the first day of her new school.” “An ordinary mum wouldn’t look like that … . You look like a mad jungle woman in some Tarzan film” … “My daughter doesn’t want me to come to school with her. She thinks I look like some kind of mad woman from the wilds. … Are you ashamed of your mother?” asked Mum. “Yes”, I said and my nastiness made me happy. (Stark, 1984, pp.28–9, my translation)
The confrontation is between Morsan’s appearance and Simone’s respectability. But Simone’s own time-out from her nice-little-girl role gradually changes her attitude towards Morsan. By the end, she, too, is liberated.
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To begin with, she thinks of herself as just a pale blotch, scarcely visible behind her mother’s loud colours reflected in a mirror (Stark, 1984, p.7). Simone is pallid, vague, small, undramatic, worthless. I looked like a ruffled little ghost animal, living in the artificial night of the moonshine hall at Skansen [the Stockholm cultural theme park]. I almost disappeared in the light from Morsan (Stark, 1984, p.7, my translation)
It is in order to become, in the filial relationship, a person in her own right that Simone takes to disguise. The symbiosis with her mother has to be broken in order for her to grow up. As long as she goes on feeling so indistinct and shrunken, this cannot happen. In her role as a girl she is invisible. Simone, conspicuously, does not have a mother who “looks after” her. Her response to the situation is reflected in some of her circumstantial descriptions. I rushed down the stairs so that they shook, dashed through the kitchen and pulled down a couple of dishes that were lying loose on my way. … I grabbed hold of something from a bag and threw it at her. It was a half-full bag of flower. It exploded against her skull and spread a white cloud of dust. “Why can’t you be like other people’s mums?” I shouted. … “Is that you, sweety dear?” coughed Morsan. … I got hold of a packet of macaroni and hurled it at her. … Then I heaved an iron at her. But now Morsan was prepared, and caught it in mid-air. … I’d got hold of a box with shoes and tubes of toothpaste and soap that I poured over her. High-heeled shoes, snake shoes and lizardskin shoes, pumps and sandals rained down on her. “Calm down!” she shouted. “What is it you want?” “I want a normal ordinary mum” I moaned. … “Little darling” … she said and stroked her gigantic hand across my wet cheeks. (Stark, 1984, pp.12–13, my translation)
Sometimes Simone bombards her mother with angry complains, sometimes, not less significantly, with food and household articles, associated with the kind of domesticity Morsan does not cultivate. In reply, Morsan addresses her in terms of over-precious affection, while inflicting a caress that could almost be frightening. As Janne Lundström (1998, p.25) comments, the relationship is described in terms reminiscent of the slapstick comedy in silent films — the hyperbolical verbs used are of rampaging, bulging, collapsing, pulling down, roaring like a tiger, throwing, exploding, screaming, haunting, and so on. When they go looking for Kilroy, the runaway dog, Morsan adopts a feminist pose that gives a clear enough idea of what she thinks about men:
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On the other side was a man in a green hunting coat and a long face which was burning red under his cap. “Let go of my dog, you wall-eyed pignose!” shouted Morsan and glared at the man with her mad yellow eyes. … “Are you threatening me, you fat-bellied so-and-so!” hissed Mum. “First you steal my dog and then it’s time to turn on innocent women. Is this your usual little Sunday amusement, eh?” … “I’m tired of this, little old man. Let go the dog and scoot.” (Stark, 1984, p.15, my translation)
Morsan consolidates her massive hold on space by verbal aggression. Given the chance to pick a fight with a middle-aged man, she is not one to say no. She is witch, goddess, and active woman all in one. She looked like a flaming goddess in the red evening dress she had grabbed for herself in haste as we left the house. The light material billowed in the wind that always blows across Gärdet [part of Stockholm], like the wings of a furious angel. The yellow eyes glittered and the black-dyed hair waved like a pennant. (Stark, 1984, p.16, my translation)
An angel. But not the angel of the house. More like the untameable madwoman in the attic (Gilbert & Gubar, 1979). In young adult fiction, bonds between women have always existed, but have often been less prominent than the element of heterosexual romance. In young adult fiction with a feminist orientation, the Freudian model is re-written. Women no longer compete for men’s attention. Instead, there are the many aspects of female relationships, with all the strength they afford women and girls through friendship, (surrogate) sisterhood, lesbian relationships, and the mother-daughter binarism (Seelinger Trites, 1997, 92). Stark, too, deconstructs the paradigm of the dependent woman in a heterosexual relationship. Morsan has had a steady stream of lovers, and with Yngve she can be large, can fill space, and has succeeded in creating a feminist life despite her lack of female friends. The weakest kind of “rebellious daughter” books portray an evil mother whom the daughter has to escape from in order to become herself. Simone’s mother is not evil. But she is very large and very strong. She quite overshadows Simone, who does have to escape in order to become visible. In the end, though, Simone works out what it is all about. With her return to a pink dress, she pieces together a female tradition. The pinkish glow of the standard romance appears relatively late, and not because she is dreaming of it. On the contrary, she sees it as a challenge to be outfaced.
12. Ulf Stark’s conservative rebellion Stark is one of many authors who have described new family patterns, quite different from those of the nuclear family. He portrays a single mother and her trial
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moving-in with a new boyfriend. As Sonja Svensson (1995) puts it, young adult fiction of the 1980s and 1990s was smitten with idyllophobia. Single parents and absentee fathers abound, while functioning nuclear families are very few and far between. Even in the 1970s, there actually was a search for a new kind of manliness. Jonnie, in Hans-Eric Hellberg’s Love love love, discovers that the grip of convention differs in its power, depending on whether it is a boy or a girl who is cross-dressing. The disguised girl looks like a boy and the disguise is accepted, but it does not work the other way round (Toijer-Nilsson, 1978, p.128). And although Hellberg wanted to suggest an integration of male and female characteristics, a cross-dressing boy is not nearly such a challenge to social norms, quite simply because the traditional power structure is what it is. From the historical point of view, clothing has over the centuries been regulated so as to mark class and sexual affiliation. For a girl, the more significant gesture is to dress to aspire to power. For a boy, dressing so as to renounce power is more significant. Hence, in Stark, there is Grandpa shod in women’s boots, and Yngve in a bridal dress: In the living room stood Yngve, flown up on to a black stool. He was dressed in some kind of wedding dress with a train that flowed down over the lino floor like a glisstening ski-slope. On his skull he had a white hat with a veil that partly obscured a pained expression — a mixture of constipation, giddiness and fear that Grandpa would come downstairs and once again catch him unappropriately dressed. One arm he held elegantly outstreched. In its hand, a white parasol … “Couldn’t you put on something more girlish”, he said when he saw me. … “Perhaps I could borrow a dress from you”, I said, smiling at him sweetly … which made him spin round on the stool like a desperate ice princess. (Stark, 1984, p.37, my translation)
Stark is playing with the manliness construction. Traditionally the father symbolizes calm, control, and security. This is what grandfather Ivan does. It is he who is the family patriarch, and at one point Simone helps to ensure that he is suitably clad: I succeeded in finding most of what he wanted: walking stick with silver knob in the form of a wolf ’s head, a cream-coloured felt hat with a soft brim, the summer suit of white linen, a shirt with detached collar and the wonderful boots in white leather with brown toes and small eyelets at the top […] Then I helped him on with the clothes. With solemn expression we donned one garment after the other. It felt like putting old grandfather together again; marvellous, big and strong like a bear he rose up out of the living room carpet! (Stark, 1984, p.87, my translation).
But then those woman’s boots! Ivan has been Simone’s mentor. His death represents the last death throe of the deconstructed patriarch. His name, Ivan Kroll,
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echoes that of Felix Krull in Thomas Mann’s Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954), a delightful swindler with a mythological predecessor in the god Hermes, patron saint of merchants and thieves. Ivan, too, has his links with the gods, being a character already halfway to heaven, who functions as a kind of mediator. Stark’s sympathy with Mann’s humorous irony and disrespect for patriarchal pomposity is clear enough throughout. Simone is a girl who causes gender confusion. The story of her mistaken identity draws attention to gender constructions and power hierarchies, which it tends to deconstruct. Above all, her final return to a kind of exaggerated girlishness implies a revolt. If this were a traditional disguise story, the ending would be the revelation of her biological sex, and admittedly, Simone does try to return to girldhood’s invisibility: Now I would be a nice calm girl whom nobody would notice, whom people would leave in peace, whose only oddity was the odd name Simone. I’d be able to sit and take it easy in class and give the right answers to most of the questions and never be accused of cheating or playing up or being dirty.
But something else intervenes here: No, it mustn’t be like that! (Stark, 1984, p.116, my translation)
A perfect return to the former girlishness is impossible, quite simply because the girl’s role now seems to be a matter of pretending, something she would have to engineer by exaggerating the girl markers: Finally I had decided to choose a pink frock with buttons in the form of small plastic strawberries, with puff sleeves and lace on the collar. Around my neck I hung a gold heart that I had got from Grandma and Grandpa when I was born. This was after all a kind of rebirth. On my feet I had a pair of white Peter Pan boots. And then I had sprinkled on myself a little of Morsan’s perfume, painted my lips in a pink shade that matched the frock, and put mascara on my eyelashes. […] And now it felt as if I had dressed up again, but as a girl this time. That girl with the newly washed hair, the newly brushed smile and the newly painted eyelids that looked back at me when I looked in the mirror felt just as frightening, unreal and beautiful as the mannequins in Morsan’s magazines. (Stark, 1984, p.113, my translation)
Stark stretches the gender construction in young adult fiction, but within a “safe” framework of sexism. True, the disguised girl topples the traditional gender affiliation and extends gender stereotypes, by exploiting codes that can be associated with both sexes. In novels for young people written for both sexes, it is usual to find protagonists of both genders. And the fact that Stark, who has often stressed that he
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wishes to reach a boy reader, portrays a disguised girl, Simone, who can be interpreted as a representative of both genders, makes it possible for both boys and girls reading the book to identify with her in a more intricate way than in a description where both sexes appear. But according to Seelinger Trites (1997, p.7), when a girl protagonist discovers her power, there is a kind of boundary-crossing triumph over the system, or over whatever it was that repressed her. The disguised girl becomes symbolically someone else in order to be herself, learns to switch subject position, conquers evil, successfully copes with a male task, begins to believe in herself. In Simone, there are certainly the beginnings of this. But her return to the exaggeratedly pink girlhood prevents its fuller development. The pink frock puts a damper on things. On the other hand, precisely because it is so exaggerated, it can also take on other meanings. The Peter Pan boots, similarly, can symbolize a questionable distaste for growing up. In other words, the exaggerated girlhood markers are both re-assuring and treacherous. Even very unradical readers may find Simone’s “No, it mustn’t be like that!” thought-provoking, for Stark never quite lets them off the hook. Even though his text constantly returns to familiar ground, it does not leave the familiar unexamined. His rebellion may not be total. But neither is his conservatism.
References Alfvén-Eriksson, A.-M. (1984). Tokenskaper i glad livsfresk. Dagens Nyheter, 12th November. Almqvist, C. J.L ([1834] 1978). Drottningens Juvelsmycke. Stockholm: Nordstedt. Beckett, S. L. (1999). Transcending boundaries: Writing for a dual audience of children and adults. New York: Garland. Bergman, Hjalmar (1925). Flickan i Frack. Stockholm: Bonniers. Borén, G.(1984). Juryns motivering. Dagens Nyheter, 27th March. Brocklebank, L. (2000). Rebellious voices: The unofficial discourse of cross-dressing in d’Aulnoy, de Murat, and Perrault. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 25, 127–36. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Flanagan, V. (1999). Cross-dressing as transvestism in children’s literaure: An analysis of a ‘gender-performative’ model. Papers, 9, 5–14. Forsén, U. (1984). Livsglädje och optimism. Svenska Dagbladet, 28th November. Garber, M.(1993). Vested interests: Cross-dressing and cultural anxiety. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (1979). The madwoman in the attic: The woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gilbert, S. M. & Gubar, S. (1989). Cross-dressing and re-dressing: Transvestism as metaphor. In S. M. Gilbert & S. Gubar (Eds.), No man’s land: The place of the woman writer in the twentieth century 2 Sexchanges (pp.324–76). New Haven: Yale University Press. Gripe, M. (1982). Skuggan över Stenbänken. Stockholm: BonnierCarlsen. Gripe, M. (1984). …och de Vita Skuggorna i Skogen. Stockholm: BonnierCarlsen. Gripe, M. (1986). Skuggornas Barn. Stockholm: BonnierCarlsen. Gripe, M. (1988). Skugg-gömman. Stockholm: BonnierCarlsen. Hallberg, K. (1998). Änglaprinsessa och flickbyting: Några svenska flickskildringar. In K. Hallberg (Ed.), Läs mig, sluka mig! (pp.99–150). Stockholm: Natur och Kultur.
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Hellberg, H. E. (1977). Love love love. Stockholm: Bonniers. Hlubeck, S. (1991). Das Motiv der Androgynie in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart. Abschlussarbeit zur Erlangung des Magister Artium im Fachbereich 10 der Jahann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main institut für Jugendbuchforschung. Hourihan, M. (1997). Deconstructing the hero: Literary theory and children’s literature. Routledge: London. Humm, M. (1995). The Dictionary of feminist theory [2nd ed.]. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Johansson, A. (1999). Elefant i nylonstrumpor: Om kvinnlighet, kropp och hunger. Göteborg: Annamma förlag. Kullman, H. (1977). Stridshästen. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. Lehnert, G. (1994). Maskeraden und Metamorfosen: Als Männer verkleidete Frauen in der Literatur. Wützburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Lundqvist, U. (1994). En sorg i rosenrött. Två absurdistiska romaner av Ulf Stark. In U. Lundqvist (Ed.) Tradition och förnyelse — svensk ungdomsbok från sextiotal till nittiotal (pp.233–46). Lundström, J. (1998). Stilgrepp nr 9. Barnboken 1, 24–25. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. Mann, Thomas (1965). Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Möller, C. (1985). Stortjuvens pojke. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. Nettervik, I. (1984). En härlig bok för dårfinkar. Göteborgsposten, 12th December. Nikolajeva, M. (1996). Children’s literature comes of age: Toward a new aesthetic. New York: Garland Paul, L. (1987). Enigma variations: What feminist theory knows about children’s literature. Signal, 54, 186–201. Paul, L. (1998). Reading otherways. Woodchester: Timble Press. Pohl, P. (1985). Janne, min Vän Stockholm: Alfabeta. Sell, R.D. (2000). Literature as communication: The foundations of mediating criticism. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sell, R. D. (2001). Mediating criticism: Literary education humanized. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Seelinger Trites, R. (1997). Waking sleeping beauty: Feminist voices in children’s novels. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. Shakespeare, W. (1985). Twelfth Night. Ed. by E. L. Donno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, W. (1961). King Lear. Ed. by K. Muir. London: Methuen. Showalter, E. (1987). Critical cross-dressing: Male feminists and the woman of the year. In A. Jardine & P. Smith (Eds.), Men in feminism (pp.116–35). New York: Methuen. Stark, U. (1984). Dårfinkar och Dönickar. Stockholm: Bonniers. Stark, U. (1986). Låt isbjörnarna dansa. Stockholm: Bonniers. Stark, U. (1989). Karlavagnen. Stockholm: Bonniers. Stark, U. (2000). Private letter, 12th March. Stephens, J. (1996). Gender, genre and children’s literature. Signal, 79, 17–30 Svensson, S. (1996). Dödspolare, skuggmän och förlorade fäder: Idyllfobin i 90-talets ungdomsbok. In A. Banér (Ed.), Konsten att berätta för barn (pp.263–78). Stockholm: Centrum för barnkulturforskning, Stockholms Universitet: Stockholm Taketani, E. (1999). Spectacular child bodies: The sexual politics of cross-dressing and calisthenics in the writing of Eliza Leslie and Catherine Beecher. The Lion and the Unicorn, 23, 355–72. Toijer-Nilsson, Y. (1984). Vemod och tokenskap i prisroman. Svenska Dagbladet, 10th December. Toijer-Nilsson, Y. (1978). Berättelser för fria barn: Könsroller i barnboken. Stockholm: Stegelands. Wahl, M. (1986). Anna-Carolinas Krig. Stockholm: Bonniers.
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Westin, B. (1999) The Androgynous female- (or Orlando inverted) examples from Gripe, Stark, Wahl, Pohl. Paper delivered at symposium on “Female/male gender in children’s literature”, Visby Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators. Österlund, M. (2000). Min feta feministiska morsa och jag: Flickfrigörelse i ungdomsromanen. Radar, 4, 25–35. Österlund, M. (2001). I textens tambur: En studie av omslagen till förklädnadsromaner. Horisont, 48, 30–39.
AUTHOR "Jenniliisa Salminen"
TITLE "Politics"
SUBJECT "Studies in Narrativity, Volume 2"
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Chapter 10
Politics Gubarev’s Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors Jenniliisa Salminen
1.
Fantasy and censorship
In every culture, some issues — political, religious or whatever — cannot be openly discussed. In some societies, the only channel for such taboo subjects may be creative literature. But in totalitarian states, even the scope of literature can be very restricted, by the institution of censorship. Under such circumstances, children’s fantasy literature offers a special means for dealing with themes which in mainstream adult literature would be impermissible. Here I shall try to demonstrate this through the example of a fantasy story by Vitaly Gubarev. Still untranslated into English, its Russian title is Korolevstvo krivyh zerkal, which I shall here be rendering literally, as “The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors”. Written in the Soviet Union in 1951, it contains layers of meaning which were subversive of the Soviet system. So among other things, my analysis will tend to suggest that children’s literature may involve dual address. Gubarev was conceivably directing his book towards both children and adults. By implication, I am also raising the question: What happens when a fantasy book’s original political message is no longer relevant? Gubarev’s story was popular enough in the former Soviet Union. But why are reprints of it still appearing in today’s Russia? In the Soviet Union, censorship worked at two different levels: official censorship prohibited the publication of undesirable literature; and self-censorship prevented authors from writing texts they knew would not be published, and from expressing opinions they knew might get them into trouble. In such a situation, children’s literature offered a channel even for opinions which were officially undesirable. This was because children’s literature, despite a wide recognition of its educational value, and despite occasional fierce disagreements as to what it should be like, is often regarded as more harmless and less important than main-stream adult literature. Certainly in the Soviet Union it was not as thoroughly supervised. Many talented authors who were unable to get their works published for adults began writing for children instead (Loseff, 1984, p.193; Nikolajeva, 1996, p.379).
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Children’s fantasy literature was particularly valuable here, because it can set the events of a story at an estranging distance from reality. This gives an author the chance to deal with real issues indirectly, in settings which are imaginary. In C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, for instance, this element of a different, secondary world offers a way to discuss religious issues. In Astrid Lindgren’s The Brothers Lionheart, it makes possible a treatment of death. In the Soviet Union, fantasy and fairy-tale were the main channel for subversive children’s literature (Nikolajeva, 1996, p.382), and fantasy stories involving secondary worlds were especially prominent. The opposition between a text’s primary and secondary worlds associated the primary world with reality and the secondary one with something entirely different — on the surface, at least. Usually the secondary worlds were allegories of reality, or tended to highlight at least some of its features. But their association with the textexternal world was not nearly as obvious as in more uniformly realistic texts, and their lack of such direct social documentation is what helped to excuse fantasy stories from censorship. Yet in contrast to utopian fantasies whose secondary world is portrayed as a paradise worth striving for, in Soviet children’s literature the utopian elements were mostly associated with the primary world of the here and now. In a Soviet children’s book, the idea of a better world somewhere beyond this one would not have been especially acceptable. Children’s writers were not supposed to let their readers dream of a better life awaiting them elsewhere, but rather to encourage them to do their bit towards a glorious future in the real world. As Felicity Ann O’Dell (1978, p.176) points out, the future was actually the major source of inspiration in Soviet children’s literature. The Christian idea of a heaven after death was replaced by the idea of a future heaven on earth. So in terms of Soviet propaganda, if a children’s book was going to include a fantastic secondary world, then it had better be a pretty dystopian one, which would thereby serve as a foil to the magnificence of the primary world’s everyday Soviet reality.
2.
The story and its ostensible moral
Gubarev’s main character is Olya, a young girl who belongs to the Pioneers — the ideologically oriented Soviet youth organization to which most other young people belonged as well. One day, she goes through a mirror hanging in the hall, to a strange place in which she meets Yalo, who is her own double or reflection, and travels with her to the fairy-tale world of the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors. This land is ruled by a foolish king and his cruel minister, who force the inhabitants to manufacture distorting mirrors, which reflect people who are thin and undernourished so that they look healthy and well fed. One young boy has rebelled against mirror-making, however, and Olya and Yalo help him to escape from the cruel
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minister’s prison, the Tower of Death, where he is awaiting execution. Then she helps to bring about not only the death of the evil minister, but a revolution, which will make Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors a much better place to live in, a place more like Olya’s description of her own land of birth, to which she finally returns. The message of the story seems to be that, as compared with a feudal or capitalist system, the Soviet Union is truly excellent. Also, the book apparently gives an optimistic account of a revolution, which can be seen as a re-telling of the revolution of 1917, or as a model for the socialistic revolutions which in future are supposed to take place all over the world. Gubarev’s book could also be seen as having a no less politically acceptable educational value. At the beginning of the story, Olya is portrayed as a person who has some minor faults of character. She is too careless, sometimes rude, afraid of the dark, too fond of her own appearance, and greedy for chocolate, all of which makes her just about ordinary enough to empathize with. For the purposes of Soviet socialist realism, however, by the end of a story the main character had to be pretty close to perfection. So it is with Olya. During her adventure, she learns how important it is to check even her slightest weaknesses, for she sees them, strongly exaggerated and underlined, reflected back to her in Yalo. This helps her to realize how dangerous and repulsive they are. Similarly, her own feats of bravery in the secondary world would seem to provide the best of possible models for Soviet children.
3.
The story between the lines
Since Soviet censorship made it virtually impossible to criticize the regime, authors wanting to write against the rules had two possibilities. Either they could write open criticism, not get their works published, and risk losing their own security, and even life itself. Or they could scramble their message so that it could be read only between the lines. But this second, more practical alternative was not just a simple game of cat and mouse, because the rules could always change without notice. Authors could never really be sure what would be safe, and the censors sometimes reacted against texts whose authors had not even intended subversion. Subversion, one might say, could be intended but not discovered, or discovered without being intended. With a text such as Gubarev’s, containing a secondary world in which everything seems to be awry, it was each indivual reader who finally decided which — if any — historical reality this described. If what was ostensibly a criticism of feudalism or capitalism was actually a disguised criticism of the Soviet system itself, would the censor notice? Still more to the point, perhaps, if the censor did notice, would the censor necessarily do anything about it?
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When it came to masking subversive content, Soviet literature could draw on a tradition of so-called Aesopian language (ezopov jazyk) dating back to Czarist times, when censorship had been no less of a reality. The disguises of Aesopian language were based on the use of allegory and irony (Parrot, 1977, p.39), and also involved fairy-tale elements and fantasy (see ezopov jazyk in Lingvisticheskij entciklopedicheskij slovar’). Through their hidden meanings, these could convey both political criticism and taboo opinions in general. In 1905 Czarist censorship was abolished, and in 1912 Lenin stressed that the time for Aesopian literature was definitely over (Tumanov, 1999, p.139). But old writerly habits die hard, especially if the historical situation still seems to call for them. Scholars researching Aesopian literature have used the terms “screen” and “marker”. Screens have the function of hiding the subversive content, and markers the function of nevertheless drawing attention to it (Loseff, 1984, pp.51–52; Tumanov, 1999, p.130). Some elements of the text work as screens, some as markers, and one and the same textual element can even have both functions. In addition to textual elements, screens and markers can also be non-textual (Tumanov, 1999, p.131). For example, the larger context of an author’s previous works, or of the forum in which the text is published, can have a function of either screen or marker. To this terminology I shall be making two straightforward additions: “official interpretation”, which refers to the surface meaning consisting of the screen elements, i.e. the meaning putatively perceived by children and censors, or at least by censors in their official capacity; and “subversive interpretation”, which refers to the meaning formed by the markers, and putatively perceived by adults, or some adults, perhaps even including off-duty censors. To read between the lines of Gubarev’s The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is a fascinating exercise, even if a rather complicated one. The book’s secondary world, the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors, can indeed be interpreted as an image of Soviet reality at the time when the book was published. Taken this way, it shows the Soviet Union as a land where the people are oppressed by fools and dictators, and are forced to do a lot of basically meaningless hard work, simply to help the authorities convince their subjects that they are living full and happy lives. Vincas Auryla (1997, p.178) points out that during the years of Stalin’s terror, officially accepted children’s literature was based on two oppositions: the opposition between capitalism and socialism, and the opposition between the Soviet system and bourgeois ones. Literature was meant to prove that the socialist system of Soviet Union was superior to the capitalist one. Yet the real opposition, according to Auryla, was between democracy and dictatorship. The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors seems to be a perfect example of the “self-conscious” children’s literature of the Stalin years. The official surface story seems to be based on the opposition between socialism and capitalism, and the story has a Soviet version of a happy ending, with socialism winning over capitalism. Yet it is also possible to interpret the book in another way,
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taking the defeat of the corrupt rulers in the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors as a triumph of democracy over dictatorship. In reading against the grain of the official interpretation, readers would specially note the motif of inversion, above all as associated with mirrors. As a motif, mirrors have two contradictory qualities: on the one hand, a mirror reflects reality as it is; on the other hand, a mirror shows reality inverted, with left apparently becoming right. In the story, there is the mirror hanging on the wall of Olya’s home, through which she enters the secondary world, and there are also the mirrors in the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors. The mirror separating the two different worlds has a parallel in in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. But since Carroll’s Alice-books were not widely known in the Soviet Union at the time Gubarev’s book was published, the motif was considered highly original (Nikolajeva, 1996, p.383). This doubtless made the apparent inversion of the story’s primary world in the secondary world of the mirror seem all the more striking. As for the mirrors in the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors, these seemed to involve a further inversion, of the reality within the secondary world itself, so that it appeared better than it actually was, converting ugliness into beauty and vice versa. In this, these mirrors were reminiscent of the devil’s mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Andersen’s story was well known in the Soviet Union, but given Gubarev’s skilful handling, the familiarity of the effect was unlikely to decrease its power. The inverse function of the Kingdom’s falsifying mirrors seems to promote the official interpretation of the story, by suggesting that in capitalist countries people do their best to hide a state of affairs that is blatantly unsatisfactory. However, if the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is seen as representation of the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union, the images reflected by distorting mirrors support the subversive interpretation, by attaching blame for the deception to the Soviet system. Everything depends on the mirror in Olya’s home. This is the fundamental ambiguity. If, like the crooked mirrors in the secondary world, it really does give an inverted image of reality, then one can settle for the official interpretation. The story’s secondary world will be the opposite of the Soviet reality, which suggests that everything which is unacceptable about the secondary world will, in the world of Soviet reality, be put right. But if the mirror on the wall’s inversion of reality is indeed only an apparent inversion, if the wall-mirror does offer a reflection of Soviet reality, and one which, though disguised as fairy tale, is essentially true, then we are dealing with the subversive interpretation, which would see the Soviet system as fundamentally faulty. One of the ironies here is that the officially recognized function of art was to show reality as it is; this theory of literature is itself known as the mirror theory (Nikolajeva, 1996, p.383). Soviet literature itself was supposed to be an honest mirror. Paradoxically, then, by reading Gubarev’s book according to the official theory, the interpretation one ended up with might be the unofficial one. Mirrors
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truthfully reflect. So does this text itself. So does the mirror on the wall in Olya’s home. Which means that the Soviet system is faulty. Conversely, the official interpretation of the book can only be arrived at by dropping the official theory of literature. If the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is not a reflection of the Soviet system, then mirrors must lie, or literature, at least, is not a truthful mirror. Under these circumstances, the likelihood that one and the same person could officially be a censor, yet also have a continuingly unofficial personality as well, seems all the more likely, though even so, authors could still never know how such an individual would react in the official capacity. After Olya, having entered the secondary world through the wall-mirror, has teamed up with Yalo, everything Olya does with her right hand Yalo does with her left hand and vice versa. Olya has a birthmark on her right cheek, Yalo on her left cheek, and when Olya hurts her right foot, Yalo hurts her left foot. Even more interesting — at least for an adult reader — are the differences of character. But here, rather than presenting the opposite of Olya’s weaknesses, Yalo exaggerates them — she is, as it were, less a looking-glass inversion than something examined through a magnifying-glass. The faults that are shown in Yalo are the faults of Olya in her own world, whereas behind the mirror, in the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors, Olya behaves with heroic nobility. So Yalo is the opposite of Olya behind the mirror, but not the opposite of the “real” Olya in her own everyday world. This again supports the subversive interpretation. That Yalo shows Olya’s character as it really is, and not its opposite, suggests that the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors as a whole, despite the fairy-tale elements, reflects the real world. Another type of inversion has to do with names. The names of the people in the story’s secondary world are actually real words spelled backwards. “Yalo”, for instance, is “Olya” spelled backward (at least in the original Cyrillic form). When read backwards, the names suggest the most important character traits. The ruler of the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is “Topsed”, which, in Russian no less than English, is “despot” back to front. The cruel minister is Nushrok, and a korshun is a bird of prey, “a kite”, which in Russian has connotations of violent attack. Similarly, the boy Olya and Yalo save from death is “Gurd”, and drug means “friend”. Apart from offering young readers amusing cryptograms to play with, these names support a metaphorical reading of the entire story. Reading backwards is really quite easy, yet the characters of the secondary world do not seem to be aware of the meaning of their own names. (The only apparent exception is Yalo. She, though, is not really a denizen of the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors but in a way a part of Olya.) When read as they are written, the names seem nonsensical. They can be deciphered only by the unconventional mode of reading. And a reader who has cottoned on to this may be prepared to be unconventional in other ways as well, and to find the subversive underlying the official.
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Then there is the matter of gender. When the girls want to release Gurd, the young mirror-maker, from prison, they disguise themselves as boys so that they can work in the royal palace as pages. There is no deeper, “magical” change here. They simply wear boys’ clothes and take boys’ names. Olya becomes Kolya, and Yalo becomes Yalok. The narrator continues to refer to them by the feminine personal pronoun, with other feminine grammatical forms to match, but the girls themselves obviously have to make a special point of using masculine forms when talking about themselves in public — sometimes they forget, and have to correct their mistakes. After saving Gurd from prison, Olya changes back her own clothes, and it is as a girl that she meets Nushrok in the final battle. But although both Olya and Yalo recover their own gender, the fact that they could successfully disguise themselves as boys lends further support to a subversive reading’s problematization of appearance and reality. Although the story’s various inversions do not come across as a single, coherently water-tight meaning, the presence of so many ambiguous details certainly can subvert the ostensible, official interpretation. True, the actual story does not change, quite regardless of whether one opts for the offical interpretation or the subversive. Either way, it is the story of good people winning a victory over the cruel rulers. The main difference lies in what or whom the reader takes the cruel rulers to stand for: capitalist dictators, or Soviet dictators. As readers, we cannot get inside the author’s mind to see whether his intention really was to write an Aesopian work with double meaning. He might just as well have intended to write a text about the terrible aspects of capitalism, even if the many ambiguous details do suggest that there might have been some ulterior motive. The final interpretation has always been a matter of pragmatics. It all depends on readers’ own personal way of seeing the text, and ultimately on whether subversiveness is something they are prepared to find in it.
4. Censors and screens So who is or was prepared in this sense? To find a hidden meaning in the text calls for a metaphorical way of reading it, while a superficial reading produces only the officially accepted meanings. Larissa Klein Tumanov (1999, pp.129–30) suggests that Aesopian children’s literature has three different types of implied reader: an insightful adult reader, a child reader, and an adult censor. According to her definition, the insightful adult is supposed to know the conventions of the Aesopian language and find hidden meanings below the surface text, while the function of the child reader is to naturalize the text as children’s literature, and the censor is supposed to read just like the child reader and not to perceive any ambiguity at all. Gubarev’s The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors was immediately successful with the public. It was also adapted for the stage in 1952, a year after its publication, and in 1963 it was adapted as a popular film as well (see e.g. Russkie detskie pisateli XX v. 143).
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Today, when the susbversive interpretation seems so obvious, it is at first not easy to understand how such a work, if once suspected of hidden meanings, could ever have been allowed to become so popular. After all, even if it does contain three implied readers, real-life censors did not in fact have the same mental age and experience as children. As adults, real censors were perfectly capable of the kind of insightful adult reading by which any subversion would be detected. Indeed, they were more likely to read this way than most other adult readers, since they were usually professional experts in the field of literature. Perhaps in Gubarev’s case, they refrained from clamping down because here was a text whose surface meaning endorsed Soviet values so fully. To have found dangerous matter in it might have raised doubts about the purity of the censors’ own minds. For loyal Soviet censors to imply that the frightful Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors could actually be taken as a representation of Soviet reality would obviously have been problematic. It might even have been seen as tantamount to openly criticizing the Soviet system themselves. Their inability, real or pretended, to see the book as a challenge is perhaps also related to the sheer effectiveness of its screen elements. As noted, some scholars have already argued that screens, in addition to being textual elements, can also be non-textual (Loseff, 1984, p.52; Tumanov, 1999), and this is where the task of censorship could become positively confusing. One kind of non-textual screen can be the reading context provided by the same author’s earlier work. In 1933, almost twenty years before the publication of The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors, Gubarev had written Pavlik Morozov, loosely based on the true story of a boy who exposed his father to the authorities for misusing his position in the community, and who died a martyr’s death at the hands of the angry villagers. Gubarev’s book became very famous, and the late Pavlik Morozov was held up as an idol for Soviet children and the Pioneer movement. An author who had received such official acclaim stood a much better chance of publishing an Aesopian work without its ambiguous character coming in for open disapproval. After the publication of something like Pavlik Morozov, Gubarev was simply not expected to write a parody of the Soviet regime, and The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors could the more readily be taken as brimming with Soviet optimism. Pavlik Morozov “ought” to have meant that its author could always be relied on for support. Perhaps the most effective screen in The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is the strong intertextuality between its surface level and run-of-the-mill Soviet propaganda and indoctrination. Soviet reality is on numerous occasions praised by Olya herself. When she is asked to stay on in the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors after the revolution, she replies: I can’t stay with you, dear friends, because in the whole world there is no place more beautiful or better than my homeland! I am sure, that you too will
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sometimes build the same kind of bright life as there is in my country. I believe in that, dear friends. (Gubarev, 1996, p.93, my own translation here and passim)
This exemplifies the kind of patriotism which Soviet children’s literature depicted as one of the cardinal virtues of the Soviet citizen (O’Dell, 1978, p.36). It also conveys the no less standard idea that the Soviet Union was a model for other nations willing to undergo revolution and build a new socialistic society. In Soviet children’s literature this theme was fairly frequent. For instance, in the young adult adaptation of Alexey Tolstoy’s Aelita (first written between 1922 and 1923 as a science fiction novel for adults), the protagonists are working for a socialistic revolution on Mars (Hellman, 1991, pp.40–41). Whether the revolution in the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is seen as a re-telling of the 1917 revolution or an invitation to spread revolutionary ideas to other countries, it in any case shows how much better everything is after the revolution than before it, and it also tends to justify some of revolution’s more cruel imperatives. The death of Nushrok, the evil minister, for instance, is presented as quite unavoidable. The supposedly good cause permits the execution of a tyrant without question, and even makes it a reason for thanksgiving. The Soviet Union’s official values were usually introduced to children under the auspices of the Pioneer movement. The Pioneer movement and the Pioneer virtues are also praised in Gubarev’s book. For example, when the friendly cook suggests that Olya and Yalo should disguise themselves as pages so to get into the king’s court, Olya finds it dishonest to pretend to be someone other than she is. It goes against everything she has learned as a Pioneer. When the cook tells her that the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is full of lies, and that even the king and his ministers are always lying, Olya says that lying is simply contrary to her moral code as a Pioneer, and the cook is duly impressed: “But I am not a king or a minister, Aunt Aksal. I am a Pioneer!” “I don’t know what that word means, child, but I can see that you have been brought up by very good people”, said the old woman deeply moved. (Gubarev, 1996, p.33)
In addition to emphasizing the value of the Pioneer virtues, this passage ranks Soviet Pioneers as superior to the ruling class of the Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors, and when Olya’s adventures get really difficult and frightening she cheers herself up by singing her Pioneer group’s flag song. The song is actually quoted in the text, and a few of its verses are even repeated as the story goes further. The first time Olya sings it to Yalo is when they are scared of the darkness surrounding the Tower of Death, where young Gurd the mirror-maker is awaiting execution. After singing it together, the girls are afraid no longer. The dreadful owl stops hooting, and the circling bats disappear, as if they themselves were now scared. For both Olya and
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Yalo, singing verses of the flag song works like a charm; every time, the terrors just vanish. But the last time they sing some of it is after the revolution, where it becomes a song of triumph, with all the children who hear them joining in as well — an omen of a gloriously better future. Nor is the flag song Olya’s only ideologically charged attribute. For one thing, there is the sheer intensity of her visionary gaze. For another, she has her red Pioneer scarf with her: “Who are you?” asked Nushrok breathing heavily. “I have never seen eyes like that…. And why am I scared of that red scarf? Where do you come from, girl? Oh, what bright eyes you have!… How scary! Don’t look, don’t look at me! I can’t breathe! Don’t look at me-e…” Nushrok took one more step back. It was his last step. He fell down from the Tower of Death and broke into thousands of pieces of glass. (Gubarev, 1996, p.92)
In addition, Gubarev lays on a further thick layer of didacticism. This, though less ideologically oriented, was just as politically correct, and is obvious from the start: I want to tell you about a girl called Olya, who suddenly saw herself from the outside. She saw herself like another girl — like a sister or a friend. That way, she looked at herself quite a long time, and this helped her to eliminate the drawbacks of her character that she had earlier not realized she had. (Gubarev, 1996, p.5)
This opening legitimizes the book as a didactic story using fantasy and fairy tale as a medium for general moral instruction. The secondary world gains part of its justification as a means of character education, promoting values that are not especially Soviet, but recommended by children’s literature everywhere. In other words, the story fell into line with much earlier children’s literature in Russian, such as Antony Pogorelsky’s Chernaja kurica, ili podzemnye zhiteli [“The Black Hen, Or the Underground People”] of 1829, a story about a schoolboy who, having found his way into a magical country underground, learns the importance of hard work and of keeping promises. Yalo’s reflection of Olya’s weaknesses are sometimes very exaggerated indeed. Whereas Olya sometimes absent-mindedly forgets her keys, which does not seem all that serious, Yalo loses the key to the chains which bind Gurd to the Tower of Death, so making his rescue extremely difficult. Even the youngest of readers would have got the socially valuable message here, even if insightful adult readers, including, perhaps, some official censors, might have wondered whether the exaggeration was not a little tongue-in-cheek.
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5.
A story for children or adults?
The children for whom Gubarev was purportedly writing were unlikely to see through the surface of a text which so conspicuously vaunted Soviet values and morality in general. The popularity of the book with children has probably always been due to features quite unrelated to its ideological or didactic qualities. It has an exciting adventure-story plot. The setting is fascinatingly fairy-tale. The goodies and baddies are relative easy to distinguish, and the main character to empathize with. And the back-to-front names would probably amuse children and inspire them to use similar “code language” in their own games. Even if they did recognize some of the propaganda elements, they would be unlikely to see through them and find subtle criticisms of the Soviet system. The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors lends itself to three levels of reading. The first is the simple basic level of the story: the adventure plot that includes Olya going through the mirror into a strange country, meeting Yalo, saving Gurd, conquering King Topsed and Nushrok, and coming safely back home. The second level involves the official interpretation: the book is read metaphorically, as a story of socialistic values triumphing over bourgeois capitalism. The third level is that of the subversive interpretation, which centres on the horrors of dictatorship and criticizes the Soviet system. The child reader could understand the first level of the story and was supposed to benefit from the second level. The censors were supposed to concentrate mainly on the second level promoting Soviet values. The third, subversive level would have been perceived only by sophisticated adult readers. Thus the subversive story is rather well hidden behind a kind of double mask. The censors could have been satisfied when they saw through the first level, to find behind the facade of a fantastic fairy tale an obviously metaphorical, and obviously optimistic account of the Soviet system. If they did also read as sophisticated adult readers, they were under no obligation to admit to finding the third level as well, and from their own point of view as officials of the Soviet state it was wiser not to. To recognize the criticism of the system would have been letting the cat out of the bag. In addition to child readers, who will have to be able to read the cryptic names for themselves if they are to get the fun of it, the book also implies an adult coreader. And an adult who reads the book aloud to children can find the subversive story more easily than child-readers. As far as children are concerned, the function of Aesopian children’s literature may be to make them Aesopian readers in the future (Loseff, 1984, p.213). Although they are unlikely to find a subversive meaning behind the screens at first, later on in life they may remember the story and come to see it in a new light. As I said at the outset, Gubarev’s Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors is still popular in today’s Russia, even though the story’s Soviet ideology has lost its meaning, and even though the subversion of the Soviet system is correspondingly less topical as
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well. The book is still an exciting adventure story; at least a fair part of its more general didacticism can still apply; and today it may even have a certain nostalgic charm, at least for people who once belonged to its first audience and are now reading it to their own children. But the book can still be more than this as well. The story can be read as a universal criticism of dictatorship, a theme that is unlikely to become outdated in the near future. And either now or at some later time, it may also carry a new subversive content, though in that case, the subversion will be of a new historical reality. As a communication’s context of initiation gets ever more distant from the current context of response, the precise terms of its interpersonal valency become different as well. Or to put this literary pragmatic fact the other way round, and somewhat more accurately, new readers are prepared to find new meanings.
References Auryla, V. (1997). Children s literature in totalitarian and post-totalitarian society. In S. L. Beckett (Ed.), Reflections of change: Children’s literature since 1945 (pp.177- 81). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Gubarev, Vitaly ([1951] 1996). Korolevstvo krivyh zerkal [The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors] Moscow: Rosmèn. Hellman, B. (1991). Barn- och ungdomsboken i Sovjetryssland: Från oktoberrevolutionen 1917 till perestrojkan 1986. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. Lingvisticheskij enciklopedicheskij slovar’ (1990). Moscow: Sovetskaja enciklopedija. Loseff, L. (1984).On the beneficence of censorship. Aesopian language in modern Russian literature. München: Sagner. Nikolajeva, M. (1996). The serendipity of censorship, Para-doxa, 2, 379–386. O Dell, F. A. (1978). Socialization through children s literature. The Soviet example. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parrot, R. J., Jr (1977). Aesopian language. In H. B. Weber (Ed.), The modern encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet literature. Vol. 1. Abaginskii — Avenarius (pp.39- 45). Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Russkie detskie pisateli XX veka: Biobibliograficheskij slovar’ (1997). Moscow: Flinta, Nauka. Tumanov, L. K. (1999). Writing for a dual audience in the former Soviet Union: The Aesopian children’s literature of Kornei Chukovskii, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Daniil Kharms. In S. L. Beckett (Ed.), Transcending boundaries: Writing for a dual audience of children and adults (pp.129–148). New York: Garland Publishing.
AUTHOR "Lydia Kokkola"
TITLE "The unspeakable"
SUBJECT "Studies in Narrativity, Volume 2"
KEYWORDS ""
SIZE HEIGHT "220"
WIDTH "150"
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Chapter 11
The unspeakable Children’s fiction and the Holocaust Lydia Kokkola How can a Jew speak of the Shoah in the language of his murderers? How can he speak of it in any other language? How can he speak of it at all? George Steiner (1988, p.170)
1.
Silences
To ask exactly what role writing has in representations of the Shoah (the Hebrew word for the Holocaust) may at first seem rather perverse — an evasion of the appalling historical reality. Yet by focussing on the act of representation rather than on the actual subject matter, we may be able to achieve a distance that is really necessary for an understanding of what is being communicated. As critics of historical novels, what we most need to resist are inadvertent misrepresentions of the events under negotiation. In the case of fiction dealing with the Holocaust, the problem has a special edge, in that its subject-matter seems positively to challenge its medium — its words. Here, it would appear, authors are trying to deal with the unspeakable. In his Tractatus logo-philosophicus ([1921] 1961) Wittgenstein claimed that the limits of our world are the limits of our language: that we cannot think beyond the limits of our language. But when discussing the holocaust, we are confronted with a phenomenon which we can apparently know about, for which no language seems adequate or appropriate. Not even a resort to metaphor will really work. Every metaphor finally breaks down, because its two parts, the a under discussion and the b by means of which something is said about the a, are simply not the same. We can certainly say “The king was a lion in battle”, for instance, but there can always come a point at which we are suddenly reminded that the king was not, in reality, a lion. In the case of the Holocaust, metaphorical collapse can be especially sudden and unsatisfactory. The concentration camps are often referred to as “hell”, for instance. At first, this may seem exactly appropriate. The reality concerned lies quite beyond normal human experience, and is therefore beyond menial comparisons. But strictly speaking, hell
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is a place intended for the punishment of sins, so that the metaphor inadvertently places blame upon the victims. Another drawback of “hell” is that this metaphor is so often used to describe situations which are merely inconvenient and irritating, and the same word can also be used as a merely casual swearword. The intertextualities with such everyday contexts of use tend to minimize the Holocaust’s enormity, and even an expression which is not currently being used metaphorically can be similarly undermined by metaphorical usages elsewhere. We can say “I’m starving” when it has been four hours since we had a decent meal. We can say “I’m exhausted” when our child wakes us up in the middle of the night. We can say “I’m afraid” when we mean that we are slightly sorry about something. Such quotidian hyperboles reduce our ability to communicate when the expressions are literally true. When referring to real starvation, exhaustion and fear, the use of these terms in a non-metaphorical sense can be hard to grasp. The experiences lie outside the limits of our normal experience. The inadequacy of language to describe, confront and contain the Holocaust has led a number of very serious critics, most notably George Steiner (1967), to suggest that silence is really the only appropriate response. Yet by 1988, Steiner was to retract this claim, and describe silence as a “suicidal” option (Steiner, 1988, p.156). As Leventhal (1999) observes, to choose silence is simply to “relegate the Holocaust to oblivion, to rob it of any articulation and thereby to continue, by other means, what the Nazi’s sought to do in the first place”. Through silence, we become complicit with the oppressor, we hush up the past. Somehow or other, the problematics of speaking the unspeakable have to be squarely faced. Silence would merely offer posterity an empty book, or a book filled at best with unreliable details, at worst with anti-Semitism. Since Steiner’s earlier, radical statement in the late sixties, scholars such as Ezrahi (1980), Rosenfeld (1980), Lang (1988) and Friedlander (1992) have studied the extent to which language actually can represent the Holocaust. And Kimmel (1977), Russell (1997), Gann (1993), Weil (1993), Bosmajian (2002) and Kertzer (2002) have already to some extent linked the issue to Holocaust fiction for children. Here the technical question, as one might call it, is precisely the same as for adult fiction, even if I shall suggest that the answer may be partly different. Always, the technical question is: How can the Holocaust be described? But the ethical question is clearly still more complex. Even if we accept that, in principle, the Holocaust must be talked about, we can nevertheless ask ourselves whether, by introducing an unexpurgated treatment of the topic to young children, we may not cause them spiritual damage. Silence would perhaps be preferable after all. But there is also a kind of compromise position. In point of fact, there is already a growing literature for children in which the Holocaust is a motif. But rather than examining how these books represent the Shoah through the medium of words, I shall be arguing that a certain absence of words — that silence itself — can some-
The unspeakable
times work as a kind of tactful communication. As Leona Toker reminds us: “In information processing theory, the absence of a message is a message in its own right” (Toker, 1993, p.1). And if the Holocaust places language under real strain, then by withholding information and drawing on readers’ background knowledge a writer may even be able to suggest why. A silence which hints at what cannot be expressed may at least provide readers with a sense of the unspeakable’s enormity. As the creators of cinematic thrillers have taught us, implied horror is often far more disturbing than coram populo violence. It is more frightening to hint at an unknown figure following the heroine through a darkened wood than to say openly who or what it is. Telling young readers that events are too frightening for them to be told is an effective means of engaging their curiosity. Starting to tell a story, and then pausing to say “I can’t tell you this, it’s too awful” invites the listener to enter the world of the narrative. Such devices have the potential to honour the scale of the Shoah, yet without burdening young readers with more information than they can cope with at one time. Toker’s point, then, is that silence can be a communicative act within the context of narrative. Withheld information can be of greater significance than what is actually said. In politics, reticence and omissions often carry a much clearer meaning than explicit factual statements. In poetry, silence communicates in the form of pauses, for instance. Narrative, too, Toker suggests, employs silence as a way of creating “manipulative informational gaps” (Toker, 1993, p.1). Although she is not particularly interested either in children’s fiction, or in communication with the young more generally, these insights into “eloquent reticence” do offer suggestive clues to interpreting children’s Holocaust fiction. As her word “manipulative” implies, informational gaps are never ethically neutral. The ethical dimension relates, in this case, not to the content of the work, nor to the author’s stated or implied attitudes. Instead, Toker argues that the ethical dimension involves readers’ degree of freedom to form an opinion of their own. And as I say, withholding information from children is an even more complex matter than withholding it from adults. The task of filling in the gaps of a reticent text is left to the reader’s own responsibility. But inexperienced readers are likely to lack the necessary contextual knowledge, so that children’s literature which is reticent is doubly reticent, and perhaps even dishonest. On the other hand, such indirection may also be an adult strategy to protect young minds which are not yet prepared for human history’s grimmest truth, while at the same time tacitly preparing them for it, and perhaps even tacitly communicating about it with youngsters whose initiation into reality is already deeper. The method of analysis by which Toker explores the “ethics of form” (Toker, 1993, p.2) combines Russian formalism, French structuralism, and American narratology with reader-response theories, drawing particularly on Iser, Fish and Rifaterre. She identifies four kinds of silence as especially effective:
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Chronological displacement. Here a large section of the fabula is first suppressed and later revealed in long narrative blocks. The informational delay is immediately recognized by readers, because the narrative progression is otherwise in chronological order. Diffusion of information. In this case a great number of separate pieces of information are suppressed, so creating numerous small gaps. Temporary suspension of information. This occurs when a crucial piece of information is first suppressed and later revealed analeptically. The information is not in itself part of the story, but is nevertheless essential if the story is to be properly understood as a whole. There may be a number of simultaneous gaps, but attention is usually only drawn to one at a time. Permanent suspension of information. A piece of information that seems crucially important is suppressed and never revealed. (Paraphrased from Toker, 1993, pp.15–16)
Toker apparently regards these four kinds of indirection as positioned on an ascending scale of reticence. But although children’s Holocaust fiction does employ all four kinds, I shall be discussing chronological displacement in close connection with the temporary suspension of information. Works in which either of these methods of suppression dominates tend to have much common. In general, the reason for withholding information does seem to be an ethical concern to protect child readers from knowing more than they are capable of dealing with (Bosmajian, 2002). But unlike the adult literature discussed by Toker, Holocaust fiction for children is often designed to appeal to a mixed readership of both children and adults. In such cases, the text will tend to withhold information from the child reader, while nevertheless presenting it in an implicit form which can be easily grasped by adult readers, who are apparently supposed to act as a kind of mediator. Elsewhere, I have suggested that texts relying on the presence of an adult mediator reading alongside the child may not be taking take full ethical responsibility. Perhaps they merely they pass the buck (Williams, 1999). In determining what constitutes withheld information, Toker distinguishes between “reader-response” and “audience-response”. Reader-response, she suggests, is a term that connotes reading against the grain, whereas audienceresponse assumes that there should be “a temporary submission to the sway of the text […] before one reasserts one’s freedom.” (Toker, 1993, p.3). Like Wayne C. Booth (1988), she suggests that the most responsible course for critics is to try to follow the flow of the text first, and to attempt a resistant reading only after the text has been tried on for size, as it were. This procedure is particularly valuable for analysing children’s fiction, since its intended readers themselves have less experience of reading resistantly. This form of analysis is also more likely to read texts as if they were being read for the first time, whereas resistant readings often depend on multiple readings.
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So my application of Toker’s methodology to Holocaust fiction for the young is somewhat paradoxical. As a critic of historical fiction I am resistantly on the alert for misrepresentation, but I cannot determine what the representation offered really is unless I also read like a more naive reader. In other words, I speak of a reader who has not read the novel or picturebook before, who has only a certain limited background knowledge to which the author can appeal, and who readily adopts the position suggested for the text’s implied reader. My concern is with what happens when these works are read non-resistantly.
2.
Chronological displacement
First, let’s consider works of fiction which withhold information only for a short time — narratives involving chronological displacement. This form of silence is the easiest for readers to identify. When the narrative is, for the most part, arranged in chronological order, a repressed event can be quite noticeable, and readers may try to supply the missing information for themselves. Rather than obscuring some relevant piece of background knowledge, chronological displacement tends to suppress part of the narrative itself. In Holocaust fiction, this is usually the story, or part of the story, of a survivor, and the set-up has much in common with a detective story. The protagonist is likely to question the survivor, in this way gleaning more and more information about the terrible secret. Somewhat more unusually, chronological displacement may employ time-slip techniques. Alternatively, a protagonist can attempt to recover the story of a survivor who has already died. Especially in a work which really is in the form of a detective story, the chronological displacement of part of the narrative can also be complemented with the temporary suspension of relevant background information. Usually, though, one or the other kind of silence tends to dominate. Not all stories in which a survivor is interviewed about his or her experiences involve chronological displacement. The Maus books by Art Spiegelman ([1986] 1987, 1990), for example, have two separate narratives — the story of Vladek and Anja Spiegelman in Poland and the story of Vladek and Art Spiegelman in Rego Park — but these stories are both arranged in chronological order. The shifting time scales alone do not create an information gap, although their juxtaposition adds greatly to the power of both narratives. Through the difficulties in Vladek and Art’s relationship, one can begin to see the long term effects of the Holocaust on its victims. Thus, far from suppressing information, the use of a double time-scale in Spiegelman’s Maus books provides more information in a compressed form than a single unbroken narrative could ever achieve. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1976), by contrast, another novel whose plot recovers the suppressed narrative of a survivor, cannot be fully understood until
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one has absorbed Sophie’s account of the terrible choice she had to make between her two children. Once this part of her narrative has been revealed, one can understand her acceptance of abuse from her lover Nathan as an expression of selfhatred. Sophie’s Choice is an adult book, of course, whereas children’s literature has generally avoided interrupting chronological sequencing, because texts with nonlinear sequencing are specially difficult for younger readers to comprehend (Williams, 1998, pp.239–246). Yet the past two decades have seen an upswing in non-chronological narratives for children, and one of the most sophisticated examples of analepsis and prolepsis in children’s Holocaust fiction is Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose. Briar Rose blends the story of Sleeping Beauty and the story of the Holocaust into something rather like a classic detective novel. This unusual combination is likely to succeed in communicating with the intended audience largely through its use of reticence. Becca, the protagonist, has grown up hearing stories told by her grandmother, Gemma. One story in particular, the story of Briar Rose or Sleeping Beauty, is told over and over again, but Gemma’s version differs markedly from the story’s standard versions. After Gemma’s death, Becca finds a number of documents indicating that, contrary to their earlier belief that she had escaped before the war, Gemma was caught up in the Holocaust. So Becca travels to Poland in search of her grandmother’s story. There she meets Josef, a gay man who was incarcerated in Sachenhausen, and who helps her re-build the story of her grandmother’s attempted gassing (in a van which fed exhaust fumes into the back), and of her rescue by a band of partisans near Chelmno. The book ends with Becca’s return to the United States to tell the story to her family, whose history it is. Finally there is a note from the author, stating: “This is a book of fiction. All the characters are made up. Happy-ever-after is a fairy tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive”(p. 202). Becca’s story is presented chronologically. It is not her tale that is displaced. Rather it is the story of the Holocaust victim, Gemma, which must be reconstructed from odd snippets of information: her odd version of Sleeping Beauty, a few documents and newspaper clippings and, finally, through Josef ’s narrative of his own life. The structure is not only highly intriguing and appealing to a reader joining in Becca’s detective work, but also honours Gemma’s inability to tell her own tale. Gemma so far recovers from her experiences that she is able to raise her daughter and care for three grandchildren. But she never becomes able to speak of her experiences. The only way she can explain what has happened to her is to recreate the story of Sleeping Beauty with alterations and metaphors, which only take on meaning within the context of her own life story. This use of silence to indicate the problems Gemma faces in integrating her past with her present, her loss of voice and therefore agency as a survivor passing on her tale to her community, is a powerful means to suggest the enormity of the events. Gemma’s lack of voice echoes Steiner’s claims that words have lost their power to contain experience.
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The novel opens with Gemma recounting the opening of Briar Rose to the three sisters, Becca being the youngest, and “not part of their magic circle” (Yolen, 1992, p.11); she is so young she can hardly speak. The scene establishes Sleeping Beauty as a story which is constantly retold throughout the girls’ lives, in a version which may not at first seem particularly deviant. Yet the opening, “Once upon a time, which is all times and no times but not the very best of times” does introduce a slightly sinister hint, and the expression “From your lips to God’s ears” establishes that Gemma’s story is, as Becca’s elder sister Sylvia puts it, “A goddamned fairy tale … [w]ith a Yiddish Accent”. The baby princess is born with untypically red-hair, and Gemma connects herself to the story by touching her own red hair at this point. Becca, herself a red-head, will inevitably come to feel interested. Although, throughout the retellings of the tale, Gemma has always referred to Briar Rose in the third person, she does finally state the affinity with herself. As she lies dying in the old people’s home, she tells Becca, “I was the princess in the castle in the sleeping woods. And there came a great dark mist and we all fell asleep. But the prince kissed me awake. Only me” (Yolen, 1992, p.19). She forces Becca to swear on her grave to find the castle, the prince, and the maker of the spells, adding the strange comment, “That castle is yours. It is all I have to leave you” (ibid.). By the end of the novel, the meaning of these words has become clear. Gemma was trying pass on her history to her grandchild, but could only express herself through the framework of a fairy tale. So the search for the missing information — the meaning behind the tale — constitutes a clearly signalled narrative gap, and one specific feature of the tale has been selected for special attention. Why was Gemma the only one who awoke after the prince’s kiss? In the standard form of Briar Rose, the whole castle re-awakes along with the princess. But not in Gemma’s version. The novel consists of 33 short chapters. The first 24 chapters, which take us up to the point at which Josef narrates his own story and his encounter with Gemma, alternate between flashbacks to Gemma narrating her version of Briar Rose to Becca as a child and descriptions of Becca’s search for the meaning behind the tale. The difference between the standard version in which everyone re-awakes and Gemma’s version is recalled in Chapter Five. In this retelling, a new character, Shirley, a schoolfriend of Becca’s, is introduced for the sole purpose of contrasting Gemma’s version of the story with the standard version. Shirley is so terrified by Gemma’s version, in which all the courtiers die except for a few who will sleep, that she decides to go home. Chapter Six presents the adult Becca sitting Shiva (the Jewish period of mourning) after Gemma’s death and recalling her grandmother’s tale. The problem with only the princess awakening and the rest remaining asleep, this segment reveals, is that “It’s not the sleeper who minds. It’s the ones left behind, awake” (Yolen, 1992, p.37). Gemma’s problem is that she was the only one whom the prince awoke with his kiss. By the end of the novel, the reader understands that this is a metaphor for the suffering of survivors who must carry on alone. Unlike
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Cormier in Tunes for bears to dance to or Adler in One Yellow Daffodil, Yolen does not start with the survivor’s story and then develop the associated feelings of loneliness. She presents presents the loneliness straight away, and leaves the reader to first guess, and later establish, its cause. The prince’s kiss is built up through Josef ’s story. Josef ’s cover name, given to him by his first partisan group, is “Prince”, chosen because of his manners and his aristocratic surname, Potocki. With the second band of partisans, Josef comes to the field where the corpses of the gassed victims are buried. Avenger, the leader of the group, pulls a woman’s body out of the grave when he recognizes signs of life in her. Josef performs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “And it was into Josef ’s mouth that she, at last, sputtered and coughed” (Yolen, 1992, p.174). The kiss of life and the last reference to Josef as “Prince” are separated by fourteen pages of action-filled text. Since Josef is openly homosexual, the kiss lacks all sexual connotations, but as Kertzer (2002, p.69) points out, it makes sense to think of this as a kind of pun playing on the notion of the good “fairy”. Quite possibly, an unsophisticated reader will not immediately connect the resuscitation with the kiss in the fairy tale. Perhaps in order to strengthen the link, the first time the woman who later becomes Gemma tries to say what her name is and where she has come from, she remarks that her only memories are of a fairy tale: I do not know its name. But in it I am a princess in a castle and a great mist comes over us. Only I am kissed awake. I know now that there is a castle and it is called “the schloss”. But I do not know if that is my castle. I only remember the fairy tale and it seems, somehow, that it is my story as well. (Yolen, 1992, p.177)
In her final farewell to Josef, Gemma promises never to forget “the dark prince who kissed me awake” (Yolen, 1992, p.185). As a result, the story of the kiss, literally the kiss of life, marks the beginning and end of Gemma’s hidden narrative. The reconstruction of Gemma’s story depends for its effect on the suppression of parts of the story, and also of information. Gemma’s presence in Chelmno is so totally suppressed that even her own daughter did not know she was there. The novel is never clear as to whether Gemma actually remembers her own life, or remembers but is unable to find a way to express it apart from the constant retelling of the fairy tale. Becca’s search for her grandmother’s life-story does not recreate this hidden narrative in chronological order, and much of the novel’s tension stems from the sheer absence of information. Even at the end, Gemma’s life prior to her gassing in Chelmno remains a complete mystery. The suppressed narrative segments and the suppressed information are often closely interwoven. The most obvious example is the biographical data sheet from the Fort Oswego shelter, to which Gemma was brought on her arrival in the United States. The contradictory or missing information provides clues as to what Becca
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must seek to re-create. Less obvious examples abound, including the kiss that woke only the princess. At first the kiss is presented as a loving, heterosexual kiss. By the end of Josef ’s narrative, Becca has to accept that “Gemma — her Gemma — had died and been resurrected by a kiss of life given by a man who had probably never kissed a woman before — or since” (Yolen, 1992, p.191). This already brings me to another of Toker’s categories of silence. The difference between the meaning of the actual kiss and the kiss in the fairy tale constitutes the type of narrative device she refers to as the temporary suspension of information.
3.
Temporary suspension of information
In Briar Rose, the suppression of a survivor’s narrative often involves the suppression of other types of information: clues to recovering the narrative. Crucial pieces of information are first suppressed to be revealed analeptically. Although a number of gaps may be simultaneously present in the text, attention is usually only drawn to one at a time. The missing information is not in itself part of the story, but is essential to an overall understanding of the story. When the novel as a whole involves a suppressed narrative — the narrative of a survivor — it is not easy to distinguish between information which is temporarily suspended and chronological displacement. Another work that reveals this blending of narrative devices is Could I love a Stranger? by Marilyn Taylor (1995). This is the second of a best-selling Irish romance series about Jackie and her “off on” boyfriend Kev. Despite parental disapproval, in the first book, Could this be Love, I wondered (1994), Jackie and Kev get together. Could I love a Stranger? is set a few months later, during the summer holidays, while Kev is away working in Germany. The stranger of the title is Daniel, the cousin of Jackie’s best friend Deirdre. Daniel comes to Ireland from England because his mother has died and his father has to go away to work on the oil-rigs. Even before they meet, an air of strangeness has been created, because Deirdre and Daniel have never met. When asked why not, Deirdre replies: “It’s all very mysterious”, … “Dad has this older brother he hasn’t seen for years. Apparently the brother went off to England and married someone the parents didn’t approve of. They lost touch and no-one heard anything from him until now.” “What was wrong with the woman he married?” I asked. Deirdre shrugged. “They’re all a bit vague about it.” (Taylor, 1995, p.9)
As the title indicates, the main tension of the story is actually concerned with the possibility of a romance between Daniel and Jackie, a romance that never actually
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begins. But embedded within this near-romance is the continuing mystery about Daniel’s mother, a Jewish refugee, as it turns out, who escaped to England as a young girl. Her story is recounted through Daniel’s aunt’s diaries, which his mother was beginning to translate shortly before her death. For an adult reader, it is hard not to wince at the blurb’s references to the diary as “thrilling”, “exciting” and “fascinating”, and the blurb compounds its tastelessness by asking, “But is it really Daniel who fascinates her, or is it the secret diary, telling the story of what happened to his family in Nazi Germany?” But although many young readers will presumably be mainly interested in the romance element, there is a didactic element as well. Taylor provides history lessons, plus a discussion of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Her way of weaving these incongruent narratives together temporarily suppresses information for the sake of tension. In fact a very regular pattern develops. A missing element is introduced as the main element, then a second piece of missing information, quickly followed by the resolution to the first missing information. Before the second element is explained, a third is introduced, and so on. The first element is the mother and the reason why the family disapproved of her. The second is a “battered old bag” which Daniel clutches as if someone “was going to steal it” (Taylor, 1995, p.14). Partial explanations of both “mysteries” are presented in quick succession: the mother was of a different faith, and the bag contains a diary. The final explanation of the mother’s mystery status — “She was a Jewish refugee from Germany who came to England during the Second World War” (Taylor, 1995, p.29) — is swiftly followed by the next piece of suppressed information, in Nana’s comment “Perhaps that’s why the boy doesn’t fit in” (ibid). The theme of “people not fitting in because of ethnic and/or religious differences” continues immediately, in that a bring-and-buy sale becomes a pretext for the discussion of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. The diary is explained and partly read in the following chapter. Could I love a Stranger? reached the best-seller lists for Irish teenage fiction. So its recipe of romance and suppressed horror, interspersed with mysteries posed and rapidly solved, is presumably very potent. A similar pattern of suppress-and-reveal marks the telling of the romance story between Jackie and Kev which frames the entire series. In every case, it is the informational gaps that create tension, just as the missing elements of Gemma’s life-story created the tension in Briar Rose. Both of these novels, however, do in the end supply all missing information. Even though Gemma’s childhood is never recovered, each of the elements of her version of Sleeping Beauty is explained. Daniel’s mother’s story, similarly, ends with a text the mother herself has written, in which she lists the fates of each of the family members mentioned in the diary. This provides a sense of closure, by satisfying a reader’s need for knowledge.
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4. Diffusion of information Toker regards such presentation of initially withheld information as ethically responsible narration. She considers only one of the four kinds of silence as inherently unethical: the permanent suspension of information. But with the third kind, the diffusion of information throughout an entire text, it is clearly easier for a reader to overlook vital elements or to make inappropriate connections. When so much of the responsibility for sense-making is shifted over to the reader, the potential for misinformation or historical misconceptions obviously increases. If information regarding the Holocaust is diffused in this way, we can expect to find many separate instances of suppressed information, creating numerous small gaps. The effect is to delay or suppress a recognition of patterns and connections, so that it becomes hard to create a coherent sense of the narrative as a whole. Toker divides such gaps into two types: the realistic and the rhetorical. The realistic ones are the gaps which are motivated by point of view, while the rhetorical ones are the gaps which are not so motivated and involve manipulation. The use of more than one narrator can create gaps because the missing information falls between the epistemological boundaries of the two narrators, or because events do not seem the same when perceived from the different viewpoints. A rhetorical gap is created when the text presents information from different viewpoints that did not need to be separated merely in order to get the story told. For example, a text that imitates a character’s stream of consciousness, slipping between different time periods, creates gaps that are not motivated by point of view. In Holocaust fiction, realistically motivated gaps seem to be few and far between. The best known examples of texts with multiple focalizers are the two time-travel novels, The Devil’s Arithmetic (Yolen, 1988) and If I should die before I wake (Nolan, 1996), neither of which can really be said to have realistic gaps in Toker’s sense. In The Devil’s Arithmetic the narrator is the same in both time periods, even though adopting a new name. As for If I should die before I wake, this does have two separate narrators, Hilary and Chana, but the novel’s fantastic premise rules out a literal reading. There certainly are gaps, but they are mostly at the emotional level, as Hilary’s attitudes change as a result of Chana’s narration of anti-Semitic violence. Interestingly, unrealistic though such gaps may be, they are not rhetorical either. They do not correspond to Toker’s ideas of informational gaps which are manipulative. True, realistic informational gaps can certainly arise when narrators compare their post-war knowledge with what they knew at the time. In Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe ([1968] 1981), Esther’s mother claims not to recognize her own brother, in an attempt to prevent him from being deported along with her and the rest of the family. As the war spreads into European Russia, the mother repeatedly wishes she had named him in order to keep him safe. Esther’s father writes a letter saying he has visited the graves of their relatives and the sites where they were killed,
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but we are never told how he knew they had died, or how he knew where to find their graves. This displacement of information reflects the gaps between what the child Esther was told and what her parents knew, and what Esther herself did not understand until later. These gaps are realistic and, in Toker’s terms, ethical, even if the blending of limited and more informed points of view can result in anomalies. On their arrival at a work camp in Siberia, Esther’s mother whispers: “At least we aren’t in a concentration camp” (Hautzig, [1968] 1981, p.43). At the point in time when she is supposed to have made this remark, the term “concentration camp” referred to a work camp of the type established by the British during the Boer War. Camps that were to become death camps had already been set up by the Third Reich. But Esther’s mother is made to speak as if she knew of the existence of the gas chambers. But even so, in children’s Holocaust fiction realistic informational gaps are far less frequent than rhetorical gaps. In an attempt to protect child-readers from knowing more than they can cope with, some authors suppress the Holocaust story almost completely. The Holocaust remains, but is, as I say, expressed in terms that will be picked up by an adult reading alongside the child, who can then act as mediator, a co-readerly role that critics such as Carole Scott (1999) may somewhat underestimate. This is particularly the case with works for the very young, such as Margaret Wild and Julie Vivas’s Let the celebrations begin! (1991). This picturebook is based on a small collection of soft toys that were made by Polish women in Belsen to celebrate the first children’s party held after the liberation. This information appears in the foreword, where it is attributed to Antique toys and their background by Gwen White. As Walter & March (1993, pp.43–4) comment, this “fact” does not bear the hallmark of historical accuracy. Upon their arrival at the camps, virtually all small children were killed immediately. Although there are accounts of children being over-looked, these are anomalous. According to Adrienne Kertzer (2002, p.198), only 0.5% of Polish Jewish children survived the war, and the majority of these were hidden in Gentile families. Walter & March (1993, p.44) speculate that “if the toys referred to in the foreword were actually made by the inmates at Belsen, they were made in hopeful anticipation of rejoining children who had been left in hiding on the outside”. However historically unlikely the event described may be, it does make the story accessible to a young audience. Set just before the liberation of the camp, Let the celebrations begin! presents an extremely softened view of camp life. Hunger and death are alluded to, but are not concretely mentioned. The positive-sounding title, the absolute certainty of the narrator that “The soldiers are coming soon — everyone says so!”, as well as references to the possibility of Old Jahoda getting rheumatism in the winter, provide child-readers with a strong sense of life continuing. The possibility that Old Jahoda might die before the camp is liberated escapes all notice. So does the possibility that rumours of the soldiers’ approach might be untrue.
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Miriam, the narrator, never actually states where the camp is, why she is there, or what it is like to be there. She opens with the bold statement, “We are planning a party, a very special party, the women and I”. She briefly recalls the food, toys, and home from the time before she was “here”; introduces the younger child characters who have no such memories; and then baldly announces that the party will be held “[w]hen the soldiers come to set us free”. The rest of the story describes the making of the toys and the arrival of the soldiers. As my summary reveals, Let the celebrations begin! leaves significant informational gaps throughout the text. More is left unsaid than said. In addition to not saying where she is, the narrator never explains why soldiers would be needed to set the women and children free, nor why there are no men with the women and children. This means that readers will naturally turn to the pictures to fill in the missing gaps. A review by Marjorie Gann explains why this is unsatisfactory: Unfortunately, the text’s softened reality is reinforced by Julie Vivas’s animated watercolours. Not that Vivas romanticizes the concentration camp: like the text, she faithfully records the suffering — the shorn heads, the rags, the bare, scrawny limbs. But the figures’ wide-eyed, puckish expressions as they sew toys and plan the party tell a different story. Bent over comically to examine each other’s ragged clothing for usable scraps, they resemble a line of children playing leap-frog. (Gann, 1993, p.35)
The humorous style of illustration stems from the adult concern to protect childreaders from knowing more than they are ready to deal with. In an interview, Vivas has stated that she did not want to take on the project at all. Once she had agreed, she produced a series of black and white illustrations, but these were rejected by the publishers. They felt that the rough-textured pencil sketches were too harsh and asked for Vivas’s usual water colours and rounded lines (Mappin, 1991). In its published form Let the celebrations begin! can be read by a child without an adult companion’s assistance and still not be upsetting. On the contrary, one can easily imagine children who lack the necessary background knowledge laughing at the pictures. This is precisely why critics like Toker find the diffusion of information and the creation of multiple gaps a potentially unethical form of narrative. The publisher’s insert for A time for toys (1991), the North American version of Let the celebrations begin!, states: “An adult reading A time for toys to a child can go beyond the story and provide whatever historical detail the child would like. The book is a starting point for discussion”. That children’s fiction can incorporate an implied adult reader is a point argued at length by Barbara Wall (1991), who suggests adult readers are often the main addressee, as the adult implied author communicates over the implied child-reader’s head. Her discussion, however, centres around jokes at the child’s expense. What we find in children’s Holocaust
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fiction, by contrast, is adult-adult communication between implied authors and readers for the purpose of transferring responsibility. In the opinion of Walter & March (1993, p.48), “authors should not be held accountable for all the information they did not present. No book could ever tell a child everything he or she should know about the Holocaust.” This view clearly has much to be said for it. Whilst most Holocaust fiction for children anticipates the presence of an adult mediator to fill in missing information, not all works do so unethically, and the events of the Holocaust are certainly too large to be intelligibly condensed into a single narrative. Yet the textual ethics of passing responsibility to an adult companion is sometimes decidedly dubious. As Walter & March themselves note, a child who reads books like Let the celebrations begin! without adult supervision is less likely to end up well informed than misinformed. When a book is so utterly dependent on the adult mediator that a child cannot really understand it, we can surely speak of irresponsibility. Another text which plants ideas dependent on background knowledge for their effect is Dorrith Sim’s In my pocket (1996). Unlike Let the celebrations begin!, however, In my pocket clearly guides the young reader to ask very specific questions. For example, the narrator explains that “In Germany, I couldn’t play with the children in our street, because I was Jewish. Now I played with my new Scottish friends”. This contrastive statement invites the child-reader to ask why German Jewish children could not play with the other children in their streets. The following and final page continue this “mysterious” vein of reference to historical context, as the narrator describes the arrival of a letter from her parents. She states: “I put Mutti and Vati’s letter in my pocket. I kept it and read it every day. Even after the War began”. For a sophisticated reader, the final line recalls the events of the Holocaust. The reader with background knowledge will be aware that the parents probably did not survive the war. The less sophisticated reader, the text’s implied pre-school reader, will lack the necessary information to interpret the remark. But at least this text says enough to let children realize that there are things they do not know. Children’s writers who treat the Holocaust in Sim’s way do rely on the presence of an adult sitting alongside the child-reader to fill in missing information in a way which suits the individual child. But while not going beyond a child’s likely understanding of what happened, they also plant seeds of concern. Although the responsibility for how much is revealed is passed over to an adult reader reading alongside the child, not having friends to play with, and being separated from one’s parents, are situations with which a young reader can empathize, and are likely to provoke questions. Sim’s book creates a sense of unease as the child-readers are shown gaps in their knowledge, gaps which adult mediators are supposed to resolve. This is surely a more responsible form of writing, in that it neither distorts historical facts nor leaves child-readers alone with their fears. Children coming across this book without adult supervision may well be left without vital keys to understanding.
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But unlike unsupervised young readers of Let the celebrations begin!, they will not walk away from the text with a distorted view of history. The problem with books like Let the celebrations begin! is that the reliance on background knowledge may result in a permanent suspension of information, which can be tantamount to Holocaust denial.
5.
Permanent suspension of information
The examples discussed so far have all been books for which the Holocaust is central. Even these, I have noted, can distort or even suppress the historical truth. But with fiction in which the Holocaust is only a subsidiary theme, or a mere aspect of some setting or character, the risk is still greater, in that readers’ attention is being focussed on something else. Not all such works are guilty. Although the focus of Could I love a Stranger?, for example, is on Jackie and her feelings of attraction towards Daniel and her worries about Kev, who is away in Germany, the use of the diary as a means of referring to the Holocaust is reasonably faithful to the events they mention. But in other works, there can indeed be a permanent suspension of information. In speaking of the permanent suspension of information, what Toker has in mind are “novels that do not satisfy the reader’s wish for what is deemed sufficient information about the story events” (Toker, 1993, p.129). She continues: The resulting gaps usually emphasize the unavailability of certain kinds of knowledge and express a sceptical attitude that is alien to the Socratic optimism of the previous century’s realistic fiction. The kinds of knowledge that the novels repudiate are different, as is the meaning of the repudiation. Permanent gaps can be different, as is the meaning of the repudiation. Permanent gaps can be read as expressions or explorations of the novelists’ ethical or epistemological beliefs; the question may then arise whether the experience through which, as rhetorical techniques, they lead the audience is consonant with these beliefs. (Ibid.)
Such texts lead readers to believe that the informational gaps will be satisfied, but by the end of the first reading, many hypotheses are neither confirmed nor denied. Rereading may result in interpretations that resolve some gaps, but others will remain ambiguous and unsatisfying. This is all the more likely when the reader lacks the necessary historical background. The second edition of Eve Bunting’s Terrible Things has a new subtitle, describing the book as an allegory of the Holocaust. It also has an author’s preface:
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In Europe, during World War II, many people looked the other way while terrible things happened. They pretended not to know that their neighbors were being taken away and locked in concentration camps. […] The Nazis killed millions of Jews and others in the Holocaust. If everyone had stood together at the first sign of evil would this have happened? (Bunting, 1980, p.5)
The story begins with a description of a clearing in which birds, squirrels, frogs, fish, porcupines and rabbits all live in harmony. Then one day the Terrible Things come with big nets and take away all the creatures with feathers. Then they take the creatures with bushy tails, those that swim, those with quills, and finally the white creatures. As each group is taken away, Little Rabbit asks Big Rabbit for an explanation. At first the remaining groups blame the victims (the birds have been too noisy, the squirrels too greedy), until Big Rabbit is forced to admit that “the Terrible Things don’t need a reason” (Bunting, 1980, p.6). At the end of the story, Little Rabbit goes off into the world on his own to “tell other forest creatures about the Terrible Things. He hoped someone would listen” (Bunting, 1980, p.21). The allegory is purely concerned with one aspect of the Holocaust: bystander apathy. It does not even touch upon how ordinary citizens become Terrible Things. And although it is refreshing to see a work that forcefully comments on the variety of different victim groups, by ignoring the special case of anti-Semitism the allegory distorts history. As a story in its own right, Terrible Things is certainly very frightening and disturbing. Without the history of anti-Semitism (or anti-feathers as it is expressed in this book), the arbitrary nature of the victimization is wholly unsettling. Of course, books that purport to deal with the Holocaust can hardly be expected to be anything other than unsettling. But this book presents children with two features not normally found in children’s Holocaust fiction. First, the child character is left to wander the world alone. Secondly, without the comfort of having the story set in the past, the child reader is left feeling that this could happen at any moment. The impact of these two frightening elements is slightly modified by the use of animals rather than humans as major characters. But even so, this is a book which is misleading without being protective. Still more problematic, I would suggest, is the very obvious fact that historical allegories assume that the reader is already familiar with what actually happened, in this case the Holocaust. Since Terrible Things is directed at a very young audience, such familiarity seems unlikely, which reduces the possibility of any kind of understanding of the Holocaust here, and the addition of the subtitle to the second edition tends to support this view. Without an adult companion reading alongside the child and placing the allegory in its historical context, the story cannot really be described as being “about the Holocaust”. When it comes to the actual events of the Holocaust, Terrible Things passes all the responsibility for the Holocaust narrative over to a mediator.
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Another case is Sendak’s We are all in the dumps with Jack and Guy (1993), in which the death camps act as a kind of backdrop. Once again, whether one can follow the “plot” without some prior knowledge of the Holocaust is a moot point. Part of All in the dumps is set on the streets of America’s major cities (there are allusions to both San Francisco and New York), and part of it is set in a death camp. Although it is a fantasy making no claim to represent the “facts” of the Holocaust, it does seek to communicate on this topic through the use of certain key images. This use of imagery protects less sophisticated readers by preventing them from knowing more than they want to know. In the illustrations of the first rhyme, the rats are depicted as carrying off their victims in a wagon which, as Neumeyer (1994, p.34) states, can remind us “of other cattle cars, box cars on German and Polish sidings, and filled with their horrible cargoes also going, perhaps they thought, to factories, to ‘orphanages’, fifty years ago”. The picture of the kittens in their bunks is only frightening if one has already seen photographs of victims in their bunks. The kittens are drawn in a stylized manner that links the shape of their heads with the Star of David. Whether or not this is picked up similarly depends on the reader’s prior experience and background knowledge. All in the dumps unquestionably withholds more information about the Holocaust than it reveals. Like Bunting’s allegory, the story of the Holocaust has to be unearthed here. Without an adult mediator, neither of these books are works of Holocaust fiction. Nevertheless, they do plant appropriate images. If the reader has no prior knowledge of the Holocaust, the smoke rising from the “bakery” chimneys will hold no sinister implications. But the oppressive mood of this illustration encourages a particular set of attitudes, which may be re-awakened when such an image is re-encountered at a later date. Even when readers lack background knowledge, the iconotext has the potential to communicate at a later date. Although All in the dumps is unquestionably successful as a picture book, it is not particularly successful as a means of communicating with young readers about the Holocaust. It fails to satisfy readers’ questions, and does not necessarily even lead them to realize that the events and scenes it does portray are real and not merely part of the fantasy. Toker would call it unethical, which suggests that texts that do not contain manipulative informational gaps are to be preferred. 6. The absence of informational gaps As the work of Iser, Fish and Rifaterre has shown, it is impossible to create a text without gaps. Far from problematic, these gaps are what motivate the reader to engage with the text: “What is missing … is what stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections. He is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said” (Iser, [1980] 1995, p.24). Iser only discusses the reading of literature, but his argument can be applied to the reading of any kind of
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text at all. If readers are inspired to continue reading by the desire to fill in the blanks from their own experience, we can expect that works of Holocaust fiction attempting to leave very few gaps will be rather uninteresting, even if not unethical. Jacqueline Jules’s The Grey Striped Shirt (1993) is narrated by nine-year-old Frannie, who recounts conversations with her grandparents in which they describe their experiences during the Holocaust. The prevalence of text over pictures, and the book’s whole tone, suggest that it is intended for children who are just learning to read independently, so that the implied adult mediator is much less dominant than in some of my earlier examples. The story begins with Frannie searching for a hat for her grandmother. During her search, she accidentally comes across a grey striped shirt which she finds inexplicably frightening. She rejoins her grandparents as they walk to the synagogue. On the way, Grandma Trudie tells Frannie about her evacuation from Germany to the Netherlands, a conversation which concludes with the comment: “It turned out that we were no safer in Holland than we had been in Germany” (Jules, 1993, p.14). This ambiguous remark is amplified with a series of conversations that take place over the course of a year. During these discussions, Frannie hears about round-ups, ghettos, smuggling, hiding, resistance, the camps, and the crematoria. Whilst The Grey Striped Shirt is one of the most historically accurate and complete of all the examples of Holocaust fiction discussed in this chapter, in many senses it also seems the least satisfactory. The main problems, as I see it, are that the text employs an erratic register, and that it shifts between genres. Although register often changes during the course of a book, the shifts in The Grey Striped Shirt leave the reader uncertain as to the book’s function. Is it a story? Or is it an information book? In her review of children’s information books, Bobbie Neate (1990) notes that this kind of dramatic shifting between genres and registers confuses many young readers. She even suggests that this is a major reason why children find it difficult to read information books. Naturally, the thinking behind books like The Grey Striped Shirt is by no means contemptible. The author wants to inform her readers what happened, and assumes that by presenting the information in the form of a narrative she will make it easier to digest. Yet this book is a false narrative, which not only underestimates children’s ability to understand and appreciate wellwritten information books, but which also fails to satisfy child-readers who seek a narrative form. Narrative form would usually presuppose a relationship between reader and author that is altogether more interactive. For The Grey Striped Shirt to be read as a true narrative, the characters would have to be believable. Unfortunately, Frannie’s grandparents — Grandma Trudie and Grandpa Herman — seem little more than mouthpieces for describing the Holocaust. Even the passages where they are supposed to be speaking directly are not convincing. Grandpa Herman is said to be Polish-speaking and Grandma Trudie German-speaking, yet they both speak English in exactly the same way —
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the same way that Frannie speaks — with no attempt made to indicate their accents or linguistic idiosyncrasies. When the fact that neither of them is speaking their native language is explicitly mentioned, Granma Trudie admits that learning another language “was hard. But we did it” (Jules, 1993, p.42) — a description that could hardly be more minimalist. The activities they undertake are no more revealing of character than their voices. Even though we are told that Grandma Trudie likes hats, that they both like gardening, that they will give their flowers away, that they miss dead family members and are both active members of their synagogue, these descriptions are not enough to make them credible as characters. Not only that, but the entire context in which the story of the Holocaust is told seems contrived. Frannie is given a series of lectures by her grandparents in response to her questions. Since very little else appears in the narrative, the questions are decontextualized and lack realism. The stories told are coherent and arranged in chronological sequence, and thereby totally lacking the fragmentary nature of the kind of true survivor accounts they purport to be. By way of contrast, the piecemeal account that Gemma provides in Briar Rose, or even the confused images remaining in the mind’s eye after a reading of All in the dumps, seem truer than Jules’s loquacious didacticism to the survivor’s own need for silence. So although a withholding of information may sometimes be unethical, an actual absence of gaps is likely to strain credibility. If Iser is right, readers’ urge to complete a story’s missing links is their main motivation for reading at all. Certainly, if a text offers no gaps of any significance, it will that much less thought-provoking. If for some reason readers are forced to continue reading it, they may still reject it intellectually, simply on the grounds that they cannot believe it. In The Grey Striped Shirt, Jules has created a text that is so complete that adult mediators are not required. Nor will its child-readers be misled. Yet its indeterminate position between the genres of novel and information book is decidedly awkward. Since the Holocaust always remains unspeakable anyway, to encourage readers — children or adults — to ask appropriate questions is probably as much as we can really expect of any text about it — fiction or non-fiction. Holocaust fiction that withholds information from child readers, but which simultaneously prompts them to ask questions, and even guides them as to what are the appropriate questions to ask, may in the end result in meaningful, not to say ethical, communication.
References Adler, D. A. (1995). One Yellow Daffodil: A Hanukkah story (illustrated by Lloyd Bloom). San Diego: Harcourt-Brace. Bosmajian, H. (2002). Sparing the Child: Grief and the unspeakable in youth literature about Nazism and the Holocaust. New York: Routledge.
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Booth, W. C. (1988). The company we keep: An ethics of fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bunting, E. (1980). Terrible things: An allegory of the Holocaust. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Cormier, R.(1992). Tunes for bears to dance to. New York: Delacorte Press. Ezrahi, S. de K. (1980). By words alone: The Holocaust in literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedlander, S. (Ed.). (1992). Probing the limits of representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gann, M.(1993). In the wake of the Holocaust. Canadian Children’s Literature, 69, 31–36. Hautzig, E. [1968] (1981). The Endless Steppe. London: Puffin. Jules, J. (1993). The Grey Striped Shirt: How Grandma and Grandpa survived the Holocaust. Los Angeles: Alef Design Group. Kertzer, A. (2002). My mother’s voice: Children, literature, and the Holocaust. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Kimmel, E. A. (1977) Confronting the ovens: The Holocaust and juvenile fiction. The Horn Book Magazine, 53, 84–91. Lang, B. (Ed.) (1988a). Writing and the Holocaust New York: Holmes and Meier. Leventhal, R. S. (1999). George Steiner, language and silence: Essays on language, literature and the inhuman. Available online: www.jefferson.village.virginia.edu/holocaust. Mappin, A. (1991). Creating a picture book: Let the celebrations begin! Magpies, 6, 14–15. Neate, B. (1990). The diversity of registers found in primary children’s information books. Reading, 24, 185–191. Nolan, H. (1996). If I should die before I wake. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. Rosenfeld, A. H (1980). A double dying: Reflections on Holocaust literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Russell, D. L. (1997). Reading the shards and fragments: Holocaust literature for young readers. The Lion and the Unicorn, 21, 267–280. Scott, C. (1999). Dual Audience in Picture Books. In S. Beckett (Ed.), Trascending boundaries: Writing for a dual audience of children and adults (pp.99–110). New York: Garland. Sendak, M. (1993). We are all in the dumps with Jack and Guy: Two nursery rhymes with pictures. New York: HarperCollins. Sim, D. M. (1996). In my pocket. London: The All Children’s Company Ltd. Spiegelman, A. ([1986] 1987). Maus I: A survivor’s tale. New York: Penguin. Spiegelman, A. (1990). Maus II: And here my troubles began. New York: Penguin. Steiner, G. (1967). Language and silence. London: Faber and Faber. Steiner, G. (1988). The long life of metaphor: An approach to the “Shoah”. In B. Lang (Ed.) Writing and the Holocaust (pp.154–174). New York: Holmes and Meier. Styron, W. (1976). Sophie’s Choice. London: Jonathan Cape. Taylor, M. ([1994] 2001). Could this be Love, I wondered? Dublin: O’Brien Press. Taylor, M.(1995). Could I love a Stranger? Dublin: The O’Brien Press. Toker, L. (1993). Eloquent reticence: Withholding information in fictional narrative. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Wall, B. (1991). The narrator’s voice: The dilemma of children’s fiction. London: Macmillan. Walter, V. A., & March, S. (1993). Juvenile picture books about the Holocaust: Extending the definitions of children’s literature. Publishing Research Quarterly, 9, 36–51 Weil, E. (1993). The door to Lilith’s cave: Memory and imagination in Jane Yolen’s Holocaust novels. Journal of the Fantastic Arts, 5, 90–104 Wild, M., & Vivas, J. ([1991] 1996). Let the celebrations begin! New York: Orchard Paperbacks.
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Williams, L. (1998). Young EFL readers and their books. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Williams, L. (1999). The etiquettes of horror: Holocaust fiction for the very young. Paper presented at conference on New approaches to reading narrative: Irony, ethics and resistance, University of Tampere Wittgenstein, L. ([1921] 1961). Tractatus logo-philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. McGuiness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Yolen, J. (1988). The Devil’s Arithmetic. New York: Penguin. Yolen, J. (1992). Briar Rose. New York: Tor.
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Part III
Responding Pragmatic variables
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Chapter 12
Early immersion reading The narrative mode and meaning-making Lydia Kokkola
1.
Plural readings
In any full discussion of children’s literature, all three apexes of the communicational triangle have to be taken into account. In various ways all the chapters in the present book do just that. But for clarity of exposition, Part I has mostly discussed how initiating writers can draw on the resources of tradition, language and image, while Part II has focussed on the way they negotiate major issues, and Part III will now be dealing mainly with the responses of readers. Nota bene! “The responses of readers”. Not “the response of the reader”. Communicative outcomes are never strictly predictable. One grouping of readers can read very differently from some other grouping, and as social individuals, readers can read in ways that are untypical or even quite maverick for their grouping. Individual differences are the most unpredictable of all, whereas differences between one reading group and another can be discussed in terms of pragmatic variables. In this and the following chapters, the two pragmatic variables receiving most attention are those of age and culture. My own work is with 9- to 10-yearolds; Charlotta Sell discusses 11- to 12-year-olds; Lilian Rönnqvist deals with 13- to 16-year-olds; and Roger D. Sell and Viv Edwards take up theoretical issues and practical possibilities applying to this entire age range. As for the variable of culture, all the child readers we shall be discussing are readers of texts for children in a language which is not their first language, and they read them within programmes for language education. This orientation, a natural follow-through to the research tradition from which the ChiLPA Project has arisen (cf. Sell, 1995), should bring pragmatic considerations into clear focus. A text is not one and the same text for all readers, or even for one and the same reader during different readings under different personal and other circumstances. To discuss the readings of young language learners is to make this point in a very sharp form.
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2.
Literacy — is children’s literature the answer?
Reading presupposes literacy skills. And not even the native speakers of a language have always sufficiently mastered these. “I would rather clean the mold round the bath than read a book.” (A junior high school student, quoted in Carter 1993)
This comment from a junior high school student can serve as a reminder that not everyone really discovers the joys of reading. So what can a teacher do? Carter (1993) argues that, if children are to become active readers, a wider variety of texts should be used, and that less time should be spent on texts which are too difficult and/or about uninteresting subjects. The research which Carter appeals to deals solely with the problems facing children as they learn to read in their native language (NL). Common sense suggests that children whose education is mostly conducted in a non-native language are likely to have an even worse time of it. Quite simply, constant exposure to texts which they find difficult and/or boring could surely reduce their levels of interest and motivation. In this chapter, therefore, I examine what actually happens when Finnish-speaking 9- to 10-year-olds belong to an English immersion programme. This forms the basis for discussing how such children make sense of texts, what factors contribute to the readability of a text, and how these two areas of concern are related. Common sense might suggest that some problems could be solved more easily if plenty of the chosen texts were age-appropriate stories. Whether or not common sense is supported by empirical evidence remains to be seen. With the world-wide spread of various forms of bilingual schooling, the age at which individuals are expected to read proficiently in a non-native language is coming down. In some educational systems, children are expected to learn to read in their second language before they learn to read in their first language. In other systems, children are introduced to two written languages simultaneously. In yet other systems, the gap between children’s starting to read in their own first language and their learning to read a second language may be less than a year (Johnson & Swain, 1997). In Finnish schools, although the growth of early second language reading programmes has been very rapid (Buss & Mård, 1999a, 1999b; Williams, 1998; Björklund, 1997), some basic questions concerning the relationship between reading in Finnish and reading in English have still to be addressed. Here I shall be paying special attention to transcripts of recordings made of two third-grade pupils reading aloud, in order to determine what actually happens when a young EFL (= English-as-a-foreign-language) learner learns to read within an English immersion programme in Finland. In the first recording, “Jenni” (not her real name) is reading a work of non-fiction, while in the second “Anders” (not his real name) is reading a section of Roald Dahl’s The Twits. Especially when the two samples are placed in the
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context of a larger study covering 59 recordings in all (Williams, 1998), it is certainly possible to draw tentative conclusions regarding the readability of different genres. In the larger study, I used an adapted form of miscue analysis. What I wanted to get at was the sources of difficulty in the text which most probably caused these particular readers to miscue. Miscue analysis was pioneered by Ken Goodman, who had become interested in what readers actually did when they read passages of connected prose aloud. He noted that even highly skilled readers do not always read exactly what is written on the page. In behaviourist terms, such differences are referred to as “mistakes” or “errors”. But Goodman thought that these “errors” were too frequent and too regular to be dismissed. Instead, he suggested that “whatever the readers do is not random but is the result of the reading process, whether successfully used or not” (Goodman, [1975] 1982, p.7; see also Goodman 1973). So miscue analysis is based on the assumption that readers are seeking meaning, and that the types of substitutions they make can be very informative for researchers trying to understand how they make sense of what they read, and what elements within the text cause problems. Formal miscue analysis is based on a detailed and complete examination of the grammatical proximity between what the child says and what appears in the text. But even though I have numbered all the miscues in my transcripts, my analysis in this chapter will only be very partial. My present aim is to point out certain key features of processability, particularly as they relate to differences between narrative and non-narrative texts.
3.
Reading in bilingual educational programmes
The texts children read in the early stages of their reading education influence the kinds of reading skills they develop. Texts which are linguistically simple are not necessarily easy to read. Nor, obviously, do they let children learn to tackle more complex constructions. Equally, children will not develop their reading competence if all the texts they read place too great a demand on their cognitive capacities. Even when unsimplified texts deal with subjects that children find interesting, they may encourage them to skim for the main points and thereby overlook important small details. In any plan for reading education, the choice of texts is indeed crucial. Texts need to be simple enough for novices to experience success and pleasure, yet challenging enough to push them on to greater fluency. Not that simplicity or challenge resides in the text alone. Although readability is often thought of as a textual property, a text actually has no inherent degree of readability because, as Puurtinen (1995, p.107) explains, “readability varies in accordance with the capabilities of readers and the features of reading situations”. Readability is a pragmatic variable, a property of both the text and the reader, and we need to know not only what textual features contribute to ease of comprehension, but also how
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particular kinds of readers in particular kinds of situation generally respond to them. Especial vigilance is called for when choosing texts for second language (L2) learners, who often receive little literacy support from their environment. Children in Finland typically begin their first foreign language when they are in the third grade, that is, when they are nine years old. Further languages are introduced in the fifth and eighth grades. Most Finnish-speaking children learn English as their first foreign language and do not start to learn Swedish, the other national language, until later. Finland is a bilingual country, which has been a major factor in promoting bilingual education in various forms (Helle, 1985, 1994; Björklund, 1997). Originally these programmes were mostly concerned with the two official languages, but in recent years the programmes have spread to include non-national languages, where there is now a very marked demand, and admission is often restricted by the use of language aptitude tests, which tend to favour children who are educationally advanced for their age. English is by far the most common nonnational language, although there are also programmes in French, Russian and German. According to a questionnaire survey of 3936 schools in Finland, 38 schools claim to offer full immersion programmes. Approximately two-thirds of these were designed to teach children the official language that was not their native language (Finnish for Swedish-speakers and Swedish for Finnish-speakers). A further 83 schools offered bilingual programmes which were less strictly defined, but in which most schooling took place in a non-national language, and an additional 162 schools were offering some kind of special language-emphasis programme, such as content teaching in English (Buss & Mård, 1999a). These figures are likely to be conservative, since the response percentage was quite low and new programmes are constantly being developed. Helle (1994, p.202) quotes a National Board of Education official as saying that content-in-English programmes “are numerous; we cannot count them anymore”. All these programmes are taught in ordinary Finnish schools and are subject to the same legal requirements as other classes. So clearly, these programmes are very popular with parents, who do not necessarily distinguish between the various different forms of bilingual education available. The programmes are variously referred to as “immersion”, “languagebath”, “language-shower” and “extensive English” programmes. The term “immersion” certainly indicates the most intensive type of programme, which is also the type most widely researched. In the Finnish context, the translated term, kielikylpy (language bath), has not developed in the same ways as the English term “immersion”, which makes international communication rather difficult at times. As the above classifications of the figures indicates, Finnish researchers draw a rigid distinction between programmes that can be referred to as “kielikylpy” and those which cannot. The programme discussed in this paper does not satisfy their rigid definition.
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Writing from a more international perspective, Swain & Johnson (1997, pp.6–8) list the following eight features of a prototypical immersion programme: 1. The L2 is a medium of instruction. 2. The immersion curriculum parallels the local L1 curriculum. 3. Overt support exists for the L1 [i.e. the learners are also taught their native language]. 4. The programme aims at additive bilingualism [i.e. learners are intended to gain a new language without negatively affecting their native language]. 5. Exposure to the L2 is largely confined to the classroom. 6. Students enter with similar (and limited) levels of L2 proficiency. 7. The teachers are bilingual. 8. The classroom culture is that of the local L1 community. According to these criteria, the programme in the study school I am about to describe can be considered an “immersion” programme. True, the teachers involved are not completely bilingual. But they are highly proficient speakers of English who have studied English at university. Swain & Johnson themselves say that the above eight features exist on a continuum; and as Ringbom (1993) observes, “bilingualism” is a highly controversial term. So far, no satisfactory method has been developed to determine when an individual has reached this level of proficiency. The school in which I conducted my research began an experimental project in bilingual schooling in 1990. In the first two grades, science, humanities and art are taught in English, amounting to thirteen out of twenty lessons each week. In the third grade, seventeen lessons out of a total of twenty-three hours a week are taught in English. Reading in English is not taught until after the children have learned to read in Finnish. As a result, when they start reading in English, they attempt to apply the skills they have already learned in their reading of Finnish. However, reading in Finnish and reading in English are taught very differently. The difference is usually accounted for by the fact that Finnish has a much closer correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. Yet whilst some of the pedagogical divergences may reflect the exact kinds of skill required, the wide variety of educational practices used in English-language literacy classes indicates that some considerations are not simply language-specific. The point is that, since the late sixties, there has been much debate as to the relative merits of different models of linear processing. For ease of reference, these can be divided into two types: “bottom-up” and “top-down” models. These terms need to be clarified to avoid later confusion. The bottom-up approach is based on the assumption that reading consists of many different skills which can be separated for teaching purposes. Emphasis is placed on children learning the rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC), after which they progress to whole words, phrases and sentences, gradually working their way up to reading books.
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A top-down approach holds that children need to approach learning to read with a knowledge and experience of the nature and uses of print, and with experience of stories and books. Children therefore start with books (usually stories) and gradually work down to the skills of word recognition and word building. (Gaines, 1993, p.143)
Top-down approaches emphasize prediction over word-recognition skills. Advocates argue that reading skills cannot be taught or studied in isolation from the reading process as a whole. When interpreted in terms of native English-speaking classroom environments, the division between top-down and bottom-up models is unclear; practising teachers rarely use one system exclusively, although there is generally a preference towards being either more “top-down” or more “bottom-up”. In contrast, the regular GPC patterns of Finnish have led to a long tradition of reading education that is bottom-up (Korkeamäki & Dreher 1993). This distinction between the ways in which reading in Finnish and reading in English are taught would appear to indicate that, on some level, reading in each of these languages is considered to be fundamentally different. This seems to contradict the reading universals hypothesis proposed by Goodman & Burke ([1973] 1982, p.12), who claimed that “the reading process will be much the same for all languages”. Elsewhere, I have argued that although mature reading skills may not differ greatly, novice readers are so uncoordinated in their use of cueing systems that educational practices need to be language specific (Williams, 1999). The fact that one can even ask whether reading in Finnish and reading in English are the same activity suggests a lack of clarity as to what is meant by the term “reading”. Reading is such a pervasive feature of Western life that it may seem surprising that little consensus has been reached as to what it entails. Researchers from differing schools of thought have different emphases, something which is not only healthy, but necessary. Although any theory of reading in principle needs to apply to all readers, little is to be gained from remaining at such a high level of generalization. Theories are far more valuable when they are brought down to more a specific context — in this case, the reading of children’s books in EFL immersion programmes in the third grade of a Finnish primary school. Within this context, I shall somewhat loosely define reading as the ability to understand a text to the extent that it satisfies the readers’ reason for reading. This definition is difficult to apply in a school setting where most reading tasks are more or less “imposed” by the teacher, quite simply because the readers’ reasons for reading may not be the same as the teacher’s. Nevertheless, other definitions have their drawbacks, too, not least when they fail to place questions of comprehension at the very heart of novice reading. Whilst we should not expect young foreign language learners to make very
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complex interpretations of the texts they read, even the most basic texts require children to draw inferences, to monitor their comprehension, to respond to parody, to remember relevant information as they read, and to make connections. These skills, despite their obvious importance in early FL reading, are rarely discussed. One of the key problems seems to be that we cannot state when an individual has understood a text, because “comprehension” and “understanding” have not been precisely defined. Texts can be understood at many different levels. Early bottomup theories of reading assumed that if readers could identify individual words, they could “understand” the text. This notion was criticized by top-down theorists, who argued that readers used “meaning” in order to identify words, a claim that implies that texts have one single meaning. Multiple levels of meaning do reduce text predictability, so that the rapid hypothesis-formation so necessary for fluent reading is unlikely to happen (Reid, 1993). And despite all the uncertainty as to what understanding really is, virtually all reading theory scholars agree that understanding is the goal of reading.
4. Theorizing the story-sense relationship Bruner (1986) suggests that understanding is of different kinds, an argument he applies to the comprehension of texts as well to understanding in other contexts. He criticizes researchers who restrict themselves to the examination of logical and systematic ways of knowing. There is obviously another type of human mental activity: a type Bruner calls “the narrative mode”. The narrative mode of thought leads people, in their search for meaning, to create stories, myths and rituals. Though starting from a different set of premises, Egan (1979, 1983, 1988a & 1988c) has developed a theory of education which emphasizes a similar view of learning as a kind of “mythic thought”. Myths structure complex ideas within the framework of a story. One slightly negative connotation of the term “myth” is that it is normally used to denote stories which are deemed “untrue”. For instance, other cultures’ creation stories are freely referred to as “myths”, but the creation story which belongs to one’s own belief (be it religious belief or the “big-bang” theory) is invariably thought to be more accurate. In the end, the “truth” aspect of the myth is not particularly relevant to Egan’s concept of mythic thought, however, since what he most stresses is only that complex ideas are structured as stories. Although neither Bruner nor Egan is particularly concerned with either reading education or with FL learning, both deal with the structures of human thought that promote ease of understanding. Specifically, they argue that the most powerful organizing structures include stories and narratives. The key difference between Egan’s mythic thought and Bruner’s narrative mode is that Egan suggests that mythic thought is a stage that children pass through. His
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theory of education outlines four phases in which different types of thinking predominate. Although stories continue to play an important role throughout all four stages, he seems to imply that educated individuals ought to move away from thinking through narratives. By way of contrast, Bruner shows how paradigmatic or discursive thought and narrative thought develop in tandem, complementing one another. Narrative thought remains the dominant means by which we make sense of events related to human intention. As far as young children’s reading is concerned, the distinction between the two accounts is not particularly relevant. Egan’s theory is more directly applicable to classroom situations, but Bruner’s descriptions of adult thought suggest that Egan’s claims regarding maturation and a movement away from narrative modes of thought are somewhat overstated. Both theorists, moreover, view understanding as a constructive process. Reading requires the reader to draw upon previous experience to fill in missing information. This is necessary because all texts contain “blanks”. Far from being problematic, these gaps are what motivate the reader to engage with a particular text in the first place. As Iser ([1980] 1995, p.24) states: “What is missing … is what stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections. He is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said”. Thus the virtual text is a blend of the actual text on the page and the reader’s background knowledge. This is the insight stressed by Davis (1989, 1992), who applies Iser’s theory to FL reading. As I say, readers fill in these blanks by creating a narrative link. This terminology merges two distinctly different concepts of story or narrative. The first relates to Bruner’s and Egan’s notions of story as a means of structuring thought, and the second to the stories children read or hear. Researchers like Fuller (1982) and Egan (1988a & b) claim that, for the purposes of both thinking about the world and communicating with others, stories are one of the earliest forms of organizing schemata. Other organizational patterns, such as hierarchical structures, tend to develop later. This concept of story as a form of cognition differs from the second, more common concept of story as an “account of real or fictitious events; narrative, tale, anecdote” (Oxford English Dictionary). But as Ewers (1992, p.176) explains, the two are nevertheless connected: “Children need stories […] because they ‘think’ in terms of stories and are able to discover the fundamental truths revealed by stories long before they are capable of thinking in abstract terms”. So the work of scholars such Bruner, Egan, Fuller and Iser suggests theoretical grounds for thinking that common sense may be right: that young learners are likely to get on better with narrative than non-narrative. This is the hypothesis I shall now be examining in the light of Jenni’s and Anders’s transcribed efforts.
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5.
Making sense of non-narrative
Here is the transcript of a reading interview with Jenni, who was slightly above the class average in terms of her reading ability. This transcript is taken from her reading of two pages of an information text: Wolves and wild dogs by N. Barrett. In order to make this easier for non-specialists to read, I have not used the phonetic alphabet for mispronounced words or non-words. Instead I have used standard spelling patterns in English to indicate where Jenni’s reading deviated from the anticipated response. “J” stands for “Jenni”, “L” for “Lydia”.
Transcript One: Wolves and wild dogs Jenni’s reading L: I’m not going to talk very much. I’d like you to just read what you can read about wolves and wild dogs J: Wolves are the large (1) members of [–] (2) dog family. They have long been fe-ored (3) by people, chife-ly (4) because of the stories that have groun grown (5) up about them. Many people be-live believe (6) that wolves howl hole (7) at the moon and travel around the (8) hou hage (9) packs that go cragy crazy (10) and (11) the sk-ent scent (12) the blewd (13). J: Most wolves (14) stories are ex-er-it gera-ted (15) L: Kysy jos sä haluat tietää jotain, mutta mä en auta jos sinä et kysy [Ask if you want to know something, but I won’t help if you don’t ask.] J: Mitä toi tarkoittaa? [What does that mean?] L: exaggerated siis ylisanottu [by which I mean liioittelua that is, “over-stated”] J: Jo [Yeah] ex (laughs) extrated. True wolves do kli kill (16) domestic animals such as dog (17) and seep, sheep (18), but (19) there have been fell fewl (20) cases of wolf (21) a-taking (22) human beings.
The Text
Wolves are the largest members of the dog family. They have long been feared by people, chiefly because of the stories that have grown up about them. Many people believe that wolves howl at the moon and travel around in huge packs that go crazy at the scent of blood
Most wolf stories are exaggerated.
True, wolves do kill domestic animals such as dogs and sheep. But there have been few cases of wolves attacking human beings.
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The wolf is thought to be [–] (23) ancestor of all the breed (24) of domestic dogs. Mitä toi tarkoittaa? [What does that mean?] L: Coyotes J: Coyotes, dingoes L: Tiedätkö mitä se on? [Do you know what it is?] J: Mitä? [What?] L: Kojootti [Coyote] J: Ah! Coyotes, dingoes and jackals are are (25) close relieves (26) of a wolf (27). J: Other members of the dog family indo includ (28) American (29) hunting dogs, dholes, mane (30) wolves, bus (31) dogs and the many kind (32) of foxes.
The wolf is thought to be the ancestor of all breeds of domestic dogs. Coyotes, dingoes and jackals are all close relatives of wolves.
J: Wild dog (33) [–] (34) be found a (35) in almost all part (36) of [–] (37) world. They hunt animals running (38) from moose to mice, (laughs) and may also live [–] (39) fruits such a (40) berries.
Wild dogs may be found in almost all parts of the world. They hunt animals ranging from moose to mice, and may also live on fruits such as berries.
Other members of the dog family include African hunting dogs, dholes, maned wolves, bush dogs and the many kinds of foxes.
My instructions to Jenni are deliberately vague: “I’d like you to just read what you can read about wolves and wild dogs”. This does not tell her whether I am expecting her to be able to answer detailed information questions after she has finished reading, whether I merely expect a reading that sounds good, or whether a general sense of the text would suffice. In other words, Jenni’s miscues should reveal what she herself assumes reading consists of in a classroom situation. As I later listened to the tape of Jenni reading, it was not difficult to determine when a miscue occurred. She cannot pronounce the word “exaggerate”, even when she has heard me say it and is simply repeating it back. Nor does she know what it means. But she does ask, which suggests a search for meaning. All the other instances were very clear. The first step in an analysis that assumes that readers attempt to make sense of the text is to see whether miscues are self-corrected. The idea behind this is that if readers do not bother to correct themselves, then they are not actually concerned with the text making sense. Jenni corrects herself at points 5, 6, 10, 12, 16 and 18. She attempts to correct miscues at points 9, 20 and 28, but is not successful. At point 7, an originally correct response is abandoned in favour of an incorrect one. Even if she does not manage to correct all her miscues, Jenni does seem to show signs of comprehension monitoring; she attempts to correct approximately a quarter of her miscues, which is slightly below average. (Taking the entire population of second and third graders in my original study, 28.7% of all miscues were either corrected (23.4%) or at least revised, albeit incorrectly (5.3%).) This would
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apparently indicate that Jenni is trying to make sense of the text — that as she reads aloud, she is listening to what she is saying and employing top-down strategies such as hypothesis formation, at least retrospectively. The six miscues Jenni corrects, however, are all misarticulations based on inappropriate GPC processing. In other words, Jenni is employing bottom-up skills, skills which have always stood her in good stead when reading in Finnish. Note that when Jenni was taught to read in Finnish, she will have spent much of her time reading nonsense syllables and isolated words in lists for which there was no expectation of sense, but merely an expectation of good pronunciation. Thus before we can conclude that correction in itself indicates a concern with meaning, we should explore the possibility that Jenni considers the whole art of reading to consist of good pronunciation. Although readers are more self-conscious of their pronunciation when they read aloud than when they read silently to themselves, considerable evidence exists suggesting that silent reading also draws on pronunciation and intonation skills. Adams (1990) reviews a significant body of research to support her view that, even when a reader is reading silently, phonological processing is essential for maintaining the speed and accuracy of on-going word-recognition, and also for expanding the memory available for the processing of individual words. The four occasions on which Jenni is unsuccessful in her correction are almost entirely a matter of misarticulation. (These miscues are: #7 howl/hole, #9 hou/hage, #20 few/fewl and #28 include/in-clud.) Quite possibly, Jenni did not know what the words “howl”, “huge”, “few” and “include” actually meant, nor how they are pronounced. They were non-words for her. Although she asks what “exaggerated” means, she may simply have been asking how to pronounce the word. Her acceptance of the meaningless phrases produced by some of her miscues suggests to me, at least, that she is not always concerned with making sense of what she reads. Two miscues which are clearly linked and which may not be a result of problematic GPC processing are #8 and #9. Here Jenni substitutes the definite article for a preposition. Since Jenni is still not certain as to how to use English pronouns and articles (Finnish uses case endings instead of articles and prepositions, and does not have gendered pronouns), this substitution reflects the way in which she speaks. At the end of the non-word “hou”, there is the faintest trace of a /s/ sound, and “Around the house” would be a perfectly acceptable construction. Although it is unlikely that wolves would travel around a house, Jenni has been distracted from the subject (wolves) during her previous miscue concerning the word “howl”. So given the limited space she has in her short term memory, the expression “around the house” may seem sensible. She pauses, recognizing that the word is not “house”, but not necessarily recognizing the word “huge”. Her acceptance of the non-word “hage”, which renders the phrase meaningless, indicates that concern for meaning is not the predominant feature of her reading.
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The next step in miscue analysis is to determine whether or not the reason for any miscues lies in the way Jenni speaks English normally, that is, in her interlanguage. If it does, then we can again assume that as a reader she is taking an active role in the reconstruction of the text. The child will be “translating” the text back into her own form of the language she is still learning. Although many of the children, unsurprisingly, had noticeable Finnish accents, these rarely disturbed the reading process. I considered the children’s readings to be influenced by their native language when they did one of the following things: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Replaced a definite article with an indefinite article or vice versa. Added an article where none was needed. Omitted a necessary article. Omitted a preposition. Added a preposition where none was needed. Changed an existing preposition. Used an alternative word (e.g. “shadow” instead of “shade”).
Eight miscues could indeed have arisen from Jenni’s interlanguage, six of which revolved around difficulties with articles. Since Finnish does not use articles, it is hardly surprising that at miscues 2, 23 and 37 Jenni omits the word “the”; she does not fully appreciate its significance. Even though she has very little understanding as to when articles are used, she does know they exist. Consequently she adds articles in miscues 8, 13, 24, 27, 35 and 40. These miscues reveal the active creation of the text as Jenni makes predictions. At miscue 35, Jenni adds an indefinite article. This suggests that Jenni is more familiar with the verb “to find” in its active form, i.e. in constructions such as “he found a mouse”. Presumably she did not fully understand the significance of the passive construction “wild dogs can be found”. Perhaps she was expecting the wild dogs to find something. In any case, she appears to be making sense of the text in her own way. The other type of miscue that I considered as being influenced by Jenni’s interlanguage is a case such as #39, where she omits the preposition “on”. In Finnish, the relationship between the verb for “live” (elää) and the noun for “fruit” (hedelma) would be indicated by a case suffix added to the noun’s basic form (elää hedelmillä = live on fruits). Thus Jenni’s omission of the word ‘on’ almost certainly results from negative transfer from the native language. That is, Jenni’s greater familiarity with Finnish resulted in a construction that is structurally closer to Finnish than standard English. Miscues that reflect the reader’s interlanguage indicate that the reader is simply reading aloud in the way he or she normally speaks. Jenni is actively constructing the text in her own language. Even though the results deviate from the standard rules for English grammar, they do not affect Jenni’s ability to understand. In fact, such alterations could be beneficial for Jenni’s ability to comprehend. Six miscues
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(miscues 14, 17, 21, 32, 33 and 36), 15% of the total number of miscues, are changes between plural and singular forms of the same word, which do not result in major changes in textual meaning either. Although these would not be classified as interlanguage miscues, the possibility that these arise from her inability to cope with plurals in the target language should not be overlooked. Several other miscues, although not formally describable as arising from Jenni’s interlanguage, do suggest that Jenni is recreating the text in her own version of English. For instance, miscue #22 suggests that Jenni does not know the verb “to attack”, she says “a-taking”. Yet this miscue can be understood as a blending of her knowledge of grapheme-phoneme relationships with an active recreation of the meaning of the text. When wolves attack, they do “take” other creatures. Technically this could be counted as a miscue, but I doubt that Jenni sees it that way. A similar kind of miscue occurs at the end of the text, miscue #38. Jenni replaces the word “ranging” (which she is unlikely to know) with the word “running” (which she does know). The result is slightly comical, she laughs, but it makes sense. Wolves do run when they hunt. And both these miscues begin and end in the same way as the word that appears in the text. Jenni’s substitution of “American” for “African” at miscue #29 also suggests a mixture of top-down and bottom-up processing. The beginnings and ends of both these words, the parts to which Jenni pays attention, are the same. Presumably “American” is a more familiar term to her, and since she does not know what an African hunting dog is, it makes no difference to her which continent she refers to. Syntactically, the construction remains the same. Semantically it changes, but not significantly to someone unfamiliar with the kinds of wild dogs listed. Two other minor semantic changes can be found at miscues #19 and #25. Miscue 25 is merely a repetition and does not indicate anything negative about Jenni’s reading ability. Miscue 19 involves a change of intonation. Jenni’s intonation suggested that she considered the sentence “But there have been few cases of wolves attacking human beings” to be a clause of a longer sentence on wolves’ hunting habits. In my opinion, Jenni’s reading improves the flow of the text making it less staccato. The first miscue is one of the more difficult ones to interpret. Here Jenni contracts the word “largest” to “large”. The problem could of course lie at the GPC level, but this strikes me as unlikely, since she tends to pay attention to ends as well as beginnings of words. Given that Jenni has not yet mastered the use of articles, she is likely not to have recognized the function of the definite article preceding the word “large”. If we re-read the phrase omitting the article — “wolves are large members of the dog family” — the phrase now makes perfect sense. Presumably, Jenni has not appreciated that “largest” is the superlative form of “large”. Her failure to recognize this leads her to produce a statement that, in her own interlanguage, is meaningful.
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So far, this transcript has revealed very positive patterns of miscues, which suggest that Jenni is actively recreating the text in her own interlanguage. She monitors what she says and frequently self-corrects. At this point, however, we should note that ten miscues in the transcript, miscues 3, 4, 9, 11, 13, 20, 26, 30, 31 and 34, offer a less positive picture of Jenni as an active meaning maker. Put another way, 25% of Jenni’s deviation from the written text would give cause for concern if she were reading the text aloud during her regular biology lessons. These problematic readings indicate that Jenni is sometimes not concerned with understanding the text, but only with sounding as if she can read. As I have already commented, Jenni’s acceptance of non-words and meaninglessness may reflect a desire to please me by producing a smooth reading. Entwistle (1987) discusses ways in which readers’ assumptions about the purpose of a task influence the ways in which they read. My instructions to Jenni can easily be interpreted as a request for a smooth reading rather than for comprehension. The presence of the tape-recorder would have given additional support to this view, as would the way in which she was taught to read in Finnish. Perhaps as a result of these expectations, Jenni produces many miscues which suggest that in an attempt to give a fluent reading she has relied on GPC processing, even when she does not know what she is saying. Five miscues, 12.5% of the total number of miscues, are non-words. In addition, the words “relieves” and “mane” are unlikely to be familiar to Jenni, so that they, too, are effectively non-words. Equally, although she probably does know the words “hole” and “bus” (miscues #7 and #31), her refraining from correction suggests that she is not searching for meaning. Although her most common reaction to a miscue is to attempt to correct it, the fact that she can accept a meaningless statement without correction indicates that at these particular points she is not very concerned with searching for meaning in the text. In Jenni’s reading we see signs of both top-down and bottom-up reading processes. That is, part of the time she pays attention to meaning by forming hypotheses about the text and part of the time she focusses on the letters and tries to produce a reading that sounds good even if she does not know what it is she is saying. Although I am impressed by this ten-year-old for her willingness to tackle such a complicated text, when a quarter of her miscues reveal quite serious problems with making sense, I cannot help wondering how this must be affecting her ability to follow the curriculum in other subjects. Since this type of immersion programme demands that students study subjects such as biology through texts written in a language other than their native one, we should take this level of difficulty very seriously. At the very least, more concern should surely be paid to children’s reading abilities, and the suitability of various types of texts. If an informational biology text can be difficult for young foreign readers to understand, the work of Bruner and Egan can be taken to suggest that narrative texts would be much easier. This possibility is supported by a number of early
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reading researchers including Fox, Martin & Evershed (1994, p.21), who state: “The real problem of textbook genres is that many writers have not learned, as the writers of children’s fiction have, how to engage readers in their texts for present purposes, for delight in the reading”. In order to collect my samples of children reading information books, I had to return to the study school on a separate occasion. Although information books had been included in the original selection of books the children could choose their reading material from, nobody had chosen them voluntarily. They were only chosen when there were no narratives available for them to select. Earlier I quoted Puurtinen (1995, p.107) as saying “readability varies in accordance with the capabilities of readers and the features of reading situations”. The children’s overwhelming preference for narratives suggest more than linguistic difficulty. Whilst not conclusive support for Bruner’s and Egan’s claims, intuitively there does seem to be a link between their theories and the children’s actual reading behaviour. An alternative explanation, compatible with Bruner’s and Egan’s work, and also empirically supported, is that children need to be taught how to read non-narrative texts. As Littlefair states: [P]upils do not develop their reading ability simply by becoming older. Young junior school pupils who have come to enjoy reading stories cannot necessarily transfer this reading ability into an ability to read for information. Yet we all too easily present these pupils with non-fiction books and ask them to search for information and then to write about it. (Littlefair, 1991, p.x)
This observation should be taken very seriously, especially since many textbooks for children fail to supply the necessary apparatus for gleaning information. As a result, many of these non-narrative books can only be read from the first page, and thereby encourage poor reading strategies. For instance, only 58% have an index and 29% lack headings: in other words, basic features which should enable the reader to locate the necessary information are frequently absent (Neate, 1990). No wonder many children have difficulties understanding non-narrative texts.
6. Making sense of narrative texts My original hypothesis was that narratives are easier to read than non-narratives. Jenni’s task may have been too demanding as it expected her to draw on logical, systematic ways of knowing and not on narrative ways. However, the fact that nonnarrative texts are difficult to read does not mean that narratives would automatically be easier. Before we can state that Jenni’s ability to read was adversely affected by the genre, we would be well-advised to consider what happens when EFL learners read narrative texts. Ideally, I would have compared the first transcript with
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another recording of Jenni reading a narrative text. However, because of the problems of persuading children to read non-narrative texts, my recordings of her reading narratives were taken when she was much less proficient in English. The transcript below is taken from a reading conference with Anders who was reading Roald Dahl’s The Twits. According to his teacher’s ranking of his academic and language abilities, he and Jenni are roughly on the same level. Once again, I have numbered all the miscues, but this time I have used two kinds of numbering. The distinction between them will be explained immediately after the transcript. The letter “A” stands “Anders”, “L” for me.
Transcript Two: The Twits Anders’s reading
The Text
A: Help!’ scream-ed (i) Mi Mrs (ii) Twit. ‘Save me! It’s all over my feet!’ It, I, it will (1) bite off your toes’, said Mr Twit. (laughs) Mrs Twit fainted. L: Do you know what fainting is? A: pyörtyä [to faint] Miss, Mr (2) Twit got out of bed and fetched (iii) a jug of cold water. (laughs) He pow-red? (3) the water over L: He poured A: He poured L: so he went (mimes pouring action) A: He poured, the water over Mrs Twit’s head to ride — re-ver-ed (pause) (4) her L: revive her, to wake her up. A: The frog (pause) croak (5a) L: craw… A: craw-flied (5b) up from under the sheets to get near the water. (laughter) It started jumping about on the pillow. Frogs love water. This one, this one (iv) was having a good time.
Help!’ screamed Mrs Twit. ‘Save me! It’s all over my feet!’ ‘It’ll bite off your toes’, said Mr Twit. Mrs Twit fainted.
Mr Twit got out of bed and fetched a jug of cold water. He poured the water over Mrs Twit’s head to revive her.
The frog crawled up from under the sheets to get near the water. It started jumping about on the pillow. Frogs love water. This one was having a good time.
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When Mrs Twit came to, the frog had just A: When Mrs Mrs (v) Twit come to, (6) jumped on to her face. (pause) L: came to means wake up A: the frog had just jump-ed (vi) on (laugh) on (vii) to her face. L: Horrible! Have you ever had a frog on your face? A: yes L: Have you? On your face? A: yes L: Hmm A: This is not a nice thing to happen to This is not a nice thing to happen to anyone anyone in bed at night. She scream-ed (viii) in bed at night. She screamed again. again.
It was far more difficult to determine when Anders had miscued than it was for Jenni. In the above transcript, I have italicized and used Roman numerals to identify eight instances which were problematic in this respect. Four of these — i, iii, vi and viii — were instances in which Anders stressed the “-ed” ending in verbs that do not require this stress. Placing too much stress on the “-ed” ending was the single most common misarticulation in the corpus of children reading. However, I did not regard this as a miscue because it did not affect comprehensibility. Some allowances had to be made for the children’s accents, and although they only occasionally stressed the ‘-ed’ ending in normal speech, it could be regarded as a feature of accent rather than a miscue. The other four instances I have marked in italics are cases in which Anders has repeated exactly the same word. Anders’s repetition of the word “on” (#vii) is almost certainly motivated by the fact that he interrupted his own reading by laughing and wants to pick up the text where he left off. The other two repetitions are both of the abbreviation “Mrs”, which is treated as an irregularly spelt word. He also produced a miscue when trying to read “Mr” at miscue #2. Thus it is possible that the irregular spelling almost caused Anders to miscue on both occasions that he produces a repetition. But this conclusion is purely speculative. It is equally likely that the repetition is a kind of stammer. In either case, these repetitions do not affect the comprehensibility of the passage and tell us little about how Anders made sense of the text. Anders’s concern for meaning is clearly revealed when we examine the significant number of self-corrections. Although he is successful on only one occasion, miscue #2, he tries to correct, or at least pauses and indicates confusion on all but one occasion (miscue #5). This suggests a much greater effort to search for meaning than could be found in Jenni’s reading of the information text. On two occasions, he indicated that he wanted help from me, which again suggests the search for
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meaning. But my intervention at miscue #5 was not successful. Anders still produces a non-word. This could be used as evidence to suggest that Anders was not concerned with meaning. Yet if the final result has been affected by my intervention, he may now think that he has produced a meaningful statement. I intervened because Anders paused before miscue #5a and looked at me rather than the book. Since I did not give him enough time to correct the miscue “croak”’ himself, I have no idea how Anders would have dealt with his confusion on his own. His first attempt — “croak” — could have resulted from his recognition of the word “frog”. Unfortunately, my untimely intervention has made it impossible for us to know how Anders was really reading. For this reason, miscues where I intervened in such a manner as to make it unclear how the child would have responded if left alone were not analysed. Undoubtedly a miscue was produced. But there is no way of knowing what the final miscue would have been. This leaves us with two miscues, numbered 1 and 6, which require further analysis. Miscue #1 reveals an interesting mixture of bottom-up and top-down processing. The text of The Twits is printed in a font that uses the same symbol for a capital ‘i’ and a lower-case ‘l’: ‘I’. Thus the word “It’ll” requires the reader to distinguish between “I” and “l”. Some of Anders’s confusion appears to arise from the difficulty at the GPC processing level. At first he did not recognize the contraction, and may have confused “ll” with “ii”. At least he attempted to correct what he considered to be a miscue. Then he tried again. He was confident that the first letter was a capital “I” and not a lower-case “l”, which suggests he was aware that sentences start with a capital letter, i.e., he could use punctuation as a cueing device. He recognized that this second attempt at correction was also wrong, and he tried again. His third attempt is the full form of the contraction that appears in print. This suggests that Anders has used top-down processing to understand the slightly confusing graphemes. In formal miscue analysis, there is a separate classification for expansions or contractions of the text that result in no change in meaning. For my purposes here, it is sufficient to note that Anders was able to resolve the problem without outside intervention. There are two types of miscue marked at point 6. The first is the substitution of “come” for “came” and the other is concerned with Anders’s intonation. In the total corpus, 11.4% of miscues were different forms of the verbs, which made it the third largest single category. Quite often the children only knew one form of the particular verb, and so their substitution of one verb form for another could be said to reflect the way in which they speak. The second miscue involves the use of familiar words used in a technical sense. Whilst Anders was familiar with the verb “to come to” in the sense of “to arrive”, he clearly did not know it could also mean “revive”. This was indicated through his intonation. Once I had explained what this expression meant, he was able to continue reading using appropriate intonation. (Note that Anders was not yet sufficiently sensitive to punctuation conventions to
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appreciate that in this instance the comma indicates a clausal boundary.) If readers are to produce appropriate intonation, they have to gather enough meaning from the text in order to predict some of the upcoming possibilities. Anders’ reading was unquestionably more fluent than Jenni’s reading. He produces 5.7 miscues per 100 running words whereas Jenni produces 26.5 miscues per 100 running words. To put this another way, almost 4½ times as many miscues were produced when the one child was reading a non-narrative text than when the other child was reading a narrative text. Of course, ability level would be the easiest means of explaining this difference. But as I say, both children had been ranked in the same ability group by their teachers. So there must be some other factor involved.
7.
Genre differences and readability
There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that many comprehension difficulties which seem to be cognitive may actually be linguistic (Christie, 1985; Littlefair, 1989, 1991). That is, problems which at first appear to be reader-specific may, in fact, be text-based. This is not to say that readability should once again be regarded solely as a feature of the text, but rather that certain textual features are easier to process than others. In my introductory remarks, I suggested that features of the text could also help readers to select appropriate reading strategies. If we consider textual features which engendered miscues for Jenni and Anders, we can only conclude that information texts usually contain a greater density of problematic constructions. This is not to say that such constructions should be avoided, but rather that it might be wise to build up fluency in reading skills through narrative texts before expecting children to learn their various school subjects through information texts in a language that is not their own. This is in line with my original hypothesis, that since the narrative mode of thought is dominant in children’s thinking, narrative texts will be more comprehensible. The link betweeen genre and comprehensibility has also been noted by Graesser, Golding and Long (1991, p.173), who start from a more formal linguistic perspective. Genre is a principal means of indicating how the text should be read, in that it helps to suggest an appropriate reading style. In the context of EFL reading, claims for the importance of narratives are wide-spread (e.g., Hester, 1983; Garvie, 1990; Williams, 1994; Ellis & Brewster, 1991), and no less common are claims for the importance of narrative texts in the development of NL literacy (e.g., Fox, 1989, 1990 & 1993; Poulson, 1991; Meek, 1988). Given the frequency with which such claims are made, there is a surprising lack of agreement as to what is meant by the term “narrative”. Graesser, Golding & Long’s discussion of this matter is illuminating:
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Scholars have offered precise definitions of narrative, but there is no prevailing consensus among the fields and individuals within each field … In psychology, there has been some debate over the necessary and sufficient features of storyhood (i.e., what makes discourse a story) and the features of an interesting story … In the fields of literature and literary criticism, there has been a neverending controversy over the proper category system for classifying narratives … As with most natural concepts (and categories), it is worthwhile to identify the typical features and the prototypical exemplars of concepts that are inherently fuzzy. It is probably futile to postulate necessary and sufficient features of each concept, with sharp boundaries among concepts. (Graesser, Golding & Long, 1991, p.174)
I myself use the term narrative in an “inherently fuzzy” manner as an umbrella term which includes the terms “story” and “anecdote”, but which is not synonymous with either. A rigid classification of narrative and argument could lead us to overlook potential affinity (Arnold, 1989). This becomes particularly pertinent when we discuss broader issues such as function. The functions of the two texts I am discussing — Wolves and wild dogs and The Twits — are very different. Whilst The Twits seeks solely to entertain, Wolves and wild dogs attempts to introduce new information. As a result, Jenni’s text was filled with terms that were unfamiliar — terms that could well be unfamiliar to a native speaker of the same age. Corpus linguists would describe Wolves and wild dogs as “lexically dense”, meaning that uncommon lexical items appear within it more frequently than usual (cf. Halliday, 1985, p.xxiv). Formally, uncommonness and usualness are defined in terms of a given corpus, but for my purposes here I would stretch the original concept to cover unfamilar words. Quite simply, there are so many unfamiliar words in this short text that Jenni has difficulties using contextual cues. Neate (1990 & 1991) has found that lexical density (in its formally defined sense) is a feature of information texts that causes problems for children even when reading in their native language. She also observes that young children are very confused when familiar words are used in a technical sense. For instance, a child may think that “bed” is a thing to sleep on, when the text is actually referring to a river bed, and “family” can be taken in the familiar sense of mother, father and child(ren) rather than the more technical meaning “a group of”, as in the text Jenni reads. Neate’s findings for native speaker readers are even more significant for nonnative readers, whose vocabulary will in any case be more restricted. The restricted vocabulary of FL readers has led some authorities to favour texts specially designed for the purpose of teaching foreign language reading. But here a degree of caution is in order. Although rapid word recognition is undeniably a major factor in L2 reading (Koda, 1996; Takala, 1984), unnaturally high levels of vocabulary repetition can be stultifying. Moreover, there may well be more complex long term problems. Tucker (1981) notes that a restricted vocabulary may convey
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the impression that a one-to-one correspondence exists between objects and words. World languages like English are particularly rich in puns (“flat” can be a synonym for both “puncture” and “apartment”) and in synonyms whose use depends on where they are used (e.g., “autumn” or “fall”), factors which make notions of oneto-one correspondence dangerously misleading. Another justification commonly offered for vocabulary repetition in beginnerreaders’ texts is that it is easier to process similar spelling patterns. As Jenni’s difficulties with pronunciation showed, Finnish child-readers are not always able to acknowledge differences between the ways in which GPC pattern rules operate in English and the more regular GPC of Finnish. “Eija” (another ten-year-old in the study school) had problems reading “heard their heartless laughter” which she read as “heard their hurtless luff luff [I intervene] laughter”. Her difficulties were caused by the switch between the two different ways of pronouncing “ea”. Practice with the regular spelling patterns of English increases rapid GPC processing fluency, as readers come to expect certain combinations of letters to be pronounced in a particular way. When I suggest that we provide children with opportunities to process words with similar spelling patterns, I am not advocating a return to the language of the older reading schemes (often affectionately referred to as the Janet and John or Peter and Jane series, after the characters in two more well-known schemes). As Adams (1990, p.322) comments, such language is “inordinately difficult to process”. Rather, my suggestion would be that if a book contains, say, the word reading, it will be more helpful if it also has words like leader and teacher than if it includes other “-ea-” words with a different pronunciation, such as head or great (Perera, 1993). Other features that distinguish prototypical narrative texts from prototypical information texts are the types of cohesive devices employed. Perera makes the point that [i]t is possible for young readers to understand individual sentences perfectly and yet not be able to gain an overall meaning from the whole discourse. This may be because they do not recognize the connections between the ideas in successive sentences for some reason, or it may be because they find the organization of the text as a whole rather difficult. (Perera, 1984, p.317)
Connectives can be marked and explicit, or they can be hidden. Both kinds can cause novice readers difficulty if they fail to recognize their import. Cohesion between sentences can be explicitly marked with adverbials, with conjunctions that function as sentence connectives, and with lexical items which serve as signposts in a text. For example, connections can be explicitly marked by the use of words such as “consequently”, “nevertheless”, “therefore” and “similarly”.
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In her discussion of connectives, Perera (1984) draws on the work of Rodgers (1974) to support the claim that the most common connectives used in primary school text books are: “but”, “if”, “because”, “then” and “and”. These are relatively simple and translate well into Finnish. Yet Perera has found that the accurate use of such connectives in writing and speaking is not common for native Englishspeakers until they are in their mid-teens. The following connectives are particularly likely to be misunderstood when reading: “consequently”, “hence”, “instead”, “moreover”, “similarly”, “that is”, and “thus”, all of which are connectives more common in scientific texts than in narratives (Perera, 1984, p.321). These studies were concerned with native-English speakers, and we should be very wary of expecting EFL readers to manage better than their native-speaker counterparts. The segment of Wolves and wild dogs read by Jenni does not contain a single construction of the types Perera mentions as being potentially confusing. If it had, she could well have experienced still greater difficulties. But both Jenni’s information text and the segment of The Twits read by Anders employ “hidden” cohesive devices, particularly the repetition of nouns and pronouns. Wolves are the largest members of the dog family. They have long been feared by people, chiefly because of the stories that have grown up about them. Many people believe that wolves howl at the moon and travel around in huge packs that go crazy at the scent of blood.
The frog crawled up from under the sheets to get near the water. It started jumping about on the pillow. Frogs love water. This one was having a good time.
Despite the apparent similarities between the way in which these two texts use repetition, the text that appears between the connectives is clearly far less demanding in the segment from The Twits than in that from Wolves and wild dogs. In the non-narrative text, the gaps between the connective words are considerably longer. The narrative text uses vocabulary familiar from a social context, whereas the informational text introduces unfamiliar items in between the key noun and pronoun repetitions that hold the text together. A considerable portion of the segment from The Twits takes the form of a dialogue between Mr and Mrs Twit. Given the improbability of the sequence of events, the text is not very predictable. Equally, since Wolves and wild dogs is introducing new information, it is not easily predictable either. In addition to the heavier lexical density, it uses passive constructions, noun phrases and relative clauses, all of which are features young children struggle with, even in their native language.
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8. Conclusion So far this discussion has focussed on the linguistic features of text-selection. This aspect of text-selection has been the subject of debate within education circles for more than a century. The importance of reader-text interaction came to the fore much later. Returning to the work of Bruner and Egan, we can now ask whether Jenni and Anders were indeed employing narrative modes of thought when they attempted to make sense of the text. The analysis of their miscues certainly showed that both children actively constructed the texts they read. It also showed that the child reading the narrative text had fewer problems. However, it has been possible to explain these differences in reading performance in terms of linguistic suitability. Although no evidence has been presented that rules out the possibility that the children were thinking narratively, no conclusive support has been offered either. The conclusions we can draw from this examination concern only the selection of texts. The findings do suggest that only narrative texts should be used in the early states of EFL reading education, but as Carter (1993, p.60) cautions, “[t]he profession’s infatuation with narrative, even narrative in non-fiction, may result in many outstanding works, but it may not be an unmitigated good”. Children need to learn to read other kinds of texts as well, particularly children in immersion programmes, who are expected to study their school subjects through the medium of information texts written in the target language. As I say, immersion and content teaching in foreign languages is rapidly increasing world-wide. Children in these programmes need to learn how to deal with a wide range of texts. A firm grounding in narrative texts would seem helpful for developing the flexible reading styles required for reading to learn, and if the curriculum prescribes texts that are too difficult for young EFL learners, we should perhaps reconsider the advisability of placing young children in such demanding programmes in the first place. Increasing the proportion of narrative texts in early EFL immersion programmes may temporarily fix a leak. But we should not be too surprised if the pipe were one day to burst well and truly.
References Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Andrews, R. (Ed.) (1989). Narrative and argument. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Barrett, N. (1991). Wolves and wild dogs. Franklin: Watts. Björklund, S. (1997). Immersion in Finland in the 1990s: A state of development and expansion. In R. K. Johnson M. & Swain (Eds.), Immersion education: International perspectives (pp.85–101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buss, M., & Mård M. (1999a). Missä menet, kielikylpy: Kartoitus peruskoulujen kielikouluopetuksesta. http://www.uwasa.fi/tiedotus/tiedotteet99/loka_2.html Buss, M. & Mård M. (1999b). Ruotsin ja suomen kielikylvyn kartoitus Suomen peruskouluissa lukuvuonna 1998–9. Vaasan Yliopisto julkaisuja. Selvityksiä ja rapportteja 46. Carter, B. (1993). Reviewing nonfiction books for children and young adults: Stance, scholarship, and structure. In B. Hearne & R. Sutton (Eds.), Evaluating children’s books: A critical look (pp.59–72). Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois. Christie, F. (1985). Language education. Victoria: Dekin University Press. Dahl, R. (1982). The Twits. London: Puffin Books. Davis, J. N. (1989). The act of reading in the foreign language: Pedagogical implications of Iser’s reader-response theory. Modern Language Journal, 73, 420–8. Davis, J. N. (1992). Reading literature in the foreign language: the comprehension/response connection. The French Review, 65, 359–70. Egan, K. (1979). Educational development. New York: Oxford University Press. Egan, K. (1983). Education and psychology: Plato, Piaget, and scientific psychology. New York: Teacher’s College Press. Egan, K. (1988a). Primary understanding: Education in early childhood. New York: Routledge. Egan, K. (1988b) Teaching as storytelling. London: Routledge. Ellis, G., & Brewster, J. (1991). The storytelling handbook for primary teachers. London: Penguin. Entwistle, N. (1987). Understanding classroom learning. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Ewers, H. H. (1992). Children’s literature and the traditional art of storytelling. Poetics Today, 13, 1, 169–178. Fox, C. (1989). Divine dialogues: The role of argument in the narrative discourse of a five-year-old storyteller. In R. Andrews (Ed.), Narrative and argument (pp.33–42). Milton Keynes, Open University Press. Fox, C. (1990). The genesis of argument in narrative discourse. English in Education, 24, 23–31. Fox, C. (1993). At the very edge of the forest. London: Cassell. Fox, C., Martin, W., & Evershed, J. (1994). Genres, anti-genres, and the art of subversion in children’s stories and play. English in Education, 28, 15–22. Fuller, R. (1982). The story as the engram: is it fundamental to thinking? Journal of Mind and Behaviour, 3, 127–142. Gaines, K. (1993). Teaching literacy and children with special needs. In Beard, R. (Ed.), Teaching literacy: Balancing perspectives (pp.140–51). London: Hodder & Stoughton. Garvie, E. (1990). Story as vehicle. Clevedon: Multi-lingual Matters. Goodman, K. S. ([1973] 1982). Miscues: Windows on the reading process. In K. S. Goodman, Language and literacy: The selected writings of Kenneth S. Goodman: Vol. 1, Process, Theory, Research (ed. by F. V. Gollasch) (pp.93–101). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Goodman, K.S. ([1975] 1982). The reading process. In K.S. Goodman, Language and literacy: The selected writings of Kenneth S. Goodman: Vol. 1, Process, Theory, Research (ed. by F. V. Gollasch) (pp.5–18). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Goodman, K.S., & Burke, C.L.([1973] 1982). Theoretically based studies of patterns of miscues in oral reading performance. In K. S. Goodman, Language and literacy: The selected writings of Kenneth S. Goodman: Vol. 1, Process, Theory, Research (ed. by F. V. Gollasch) (pp.215–302). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Graesser, A., Golding, J. M., & Long. D. L. (1991). Narrative representation and comprehension. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (pp.171–205). London: Longman.
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Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold. Helle, T. (1985). Bilingual education: A study of the French immersion program in Canada considering the possibilities of adaption to Finnish schools. In H. Ringbom (Ed.), Foreign language learning and bilingualism (pp.99–190). Åbo: Meddelanden Från Stiftelsens för Åbo Akademi Forskningsinstitut 105. Helle, T. (1994). Directions in bilingual education: Finnish comprehensive schools in perspective. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4, 197–219. Hester, H. (1983). Stories in the multilingual primary classroom: Supporting learning of English as a second language. London: Harcourt Brace Javanovich. Iser, W. ([1980] 1995). Interaction between text and reader. In A. Bennett (Ed.), Readers and reading (pp.20–31). London: Longman. Johnson, R. K., & Swain, M. (Eds.) (1997). Immersion education: International perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koda, K. (1996). L2 word recognition research: A critical review. Modern Language Journal, 80, 450–460. Korkeamäki, R.-L., & Dreher, M. J. (1993). Finland, phonics, and whole language: Beginning reading in a regular letter-sound correspondance language. Language Arts, 70, 475–482 Littlefair, A. B. (1989). Register awareness: An important factor in children’s continuing reading development. Reading, 23, 56–61. Littlefair, A. B. (1991). Reading all types of writing. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Meek, M. (1988). How texts teach what readers learn. Stroud: Thimble Press. Neate, B. (1990). The diversity of registers found in primary children’s information books. Reading, 24, 185–191. Neate, B. (1991). Narrative reading has been the celebrity, but informational reading is not on the defensive any more. In C. Harrison & E. Ashworth (Eds.), Celebrating Literacy: Defending Literacy (pp.190–96). Blackwell: Oxford. Perera, K. (1984). Children’s writing and reading: Analysing classroom language. Oxford: Blackwell. Perera, K. (1993). The ‘Good Book’: Linguistic aspects. In R. Beard (Ed.), Teaching literacy: Balancing perspectives (pp.95–113). London: Hodder & Stoughton. Poulson, L. (1991). Narrative in the infant classroom. English in Education, 25, 18–23. Puurtinen, T. (1995). Linguistic acceptability in translated children’s literature. Joensuu: University of Joensuu. Ringbom, H. (1993). Introduction: On near-native proficiency. In H. Ringbom (Ed.), Near-native proficiency in English [= English Department Papers 3] (pp.5–8). Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Sell, R. D. (ed.) (1995). Literature throughout foreign language education: The implications of pragmatics [= Review of English Language Teaching 5/1]. London: Modern English Publications & the British Council. Swain, M., & Johnson, R.K. (1997). Immersion education: A category within bilingual education.” In R. K. Johnson & M. Swain (Eds.), Immersion education: International perspectives (pp.1–15). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Takala, S. (1984). Evaluation of students’ knowledge of English vocabulary in the Finnish comprehensive school. Jyväskylä: Jyväskyla University Press. Tucker, N. (1981). The child and the book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, L. (1994). Language through story: The use of story with young EFL learners. Åbo Akademi University: Unpublished licentiate thesis. Williams, L. (1998). Young EFL readers and their books. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press.
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Williams, L. (1999). Reading in Finnish and reading in English: The same, different or none of the above? Lexitec Online Magazine International edition. http://www.lexitec.fi/magazineie1.html#Williams.
AUTHOR "Roger D. Sell"
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Chapter 13
Reader-learners Children’s novels and participatory pedagogy Roger D. Sell
1.
Children’s literature and the aims of foreign language education (FLE)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that people sleep in beds, or at least that lots of people sleep in beds. Certainly Mr and Mrs Twit do, in the story from which Anders is reading to Lydia Kokkola (Chapter 12 above), and Kokkola’s transcript (minus her cues to notes and commentary) reads as follows: Anders’s reading
The Text
A: Help!’ scream-ed Mi Mrs Twit. ‘Save me! It’s all over my feet!’ It, I, it will bite off your toes’, said Mr Twit. (laughs) Mrs Twit fainted. L: Do you know what fainting is? A: pyörtyä [to faint] Miss, Mr Twit got out of bed and fetch-ed a jug of cold water. (laughs) He pow-red? the water over L: He poured A: He poured L: so he went (mimes pouring action) A: He poured, the water over Mrs Twit’s head to ride — re-ver-ed (pause) her L: revive her, to wake her up.
Help!’ screamed Mrs Twit. ‘Save me! It’s all over my feet!’ ‘It’ll bite off your toes’, said Mr Twit. Mrs Twit fainted.
Mr Twit got out of bed and fetched a jug of cold water. He poured the water over Mrs Twit’s head to revive her.
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A: The frog (pause) croak L: craw… A: craw-flied up from under the sheets to get near the water. (laughter) It started jumping about on the pillow. Frogs love water. This one, this one was having a good time. A: When Mrs Mrs Twit come to, (pause) L: came to means wake up A: the frog had just jump-ed on (laugh) on to her face. L: Horrible! Have you ever had a frog on your face? A: yes L: Have you? On your face? A: yes L: Hmm
The frog crawled up from under the sheets to get near the water. It started jumping about on the pillow. Frogs love water. This one was having a good time.
When Mrs Twit came to, the frog had just jumped on to her face.
A: This is not a nice thing to happen to This is not a nice thing to happen to anyone anyone in bed at night. She scream-ed again. in bed at night. She screamed again.
Anders is not having an easy time here. But beds, it would seem, are perfectly familiar to him, and beds are not the only things he knows about. A frog, as such, is no surprise to him, even if Kokkola’s “Hmm” is somewhat sceptical of his claim to have had one on his face. He also seems quite at home with water, a jug, a pillow, a head, pouring, fainting. To know about all these things, he need never have travelled away from his home patch, either literally or imaginatively. That is one reason why, if Dahl’s The Twits is not an appropriate text for his stage of language development, then hardly any other English book will suit him either. Even though English is a foreign language to him, The Twits seldom expects him to interpret the relation of its signifier to its signified within a kind of context that he does not know. The same would be broadly true of the classic children’s fairy tales. The world of fairy tale, even if some of its “original” ingredients were once upon a time quite culture-specific, has long since been internationalized. The story of Lumikki which Anders is bound to know will have the same characters, story-line and setting, and imply much the same ideology, as the story which any British child will know as that of Snow White. If Anders were to read it in English, concepts like queen, daughter, mirror, apple, poison, dwarf, cottage and so on would not cause him any more trouble than frog, bed, or jug in The Twits. Architecturally and socioeconomically, Finland perhaps has no real equivalent of an English cottage. But Anders is likely to read either a Finnish or an English version of Snow White in an illustrated edition, which would probably show a building vaguely evocative of the Black Forest.
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Beds, water, frogs, jugs, pillows, princes, queens, dwarfs, apples and so on will go a very long way. Their narrative potential is truly huge. But there is narrative and narrative. The fact that Simone, in Ulf Stark’s young adult novel Dårfinkar och Dönickar, lives in a block of flats in the Stockholm suburb of Vällingby in the 1980s is part of a very different kind of fictional world. On a spectrum ranging from the universal to the particular, Roald Dahl’s infantile slapstick and a fairy-tale story of hate versus love would be at the universal end, whereas Stark is much closer to documentary realism, even if at times he also offers a crystal-ball flight of fantasy. His readers, in order to get the point, will often have to be familiar with the things he is being realistic about. His stories have meanings which are inseparable from a particular sociohistorical setting, and his very use of language will constantly involve assumptions, presuppositions, and even value judgements which depend upon a knowledge of it. To put this in linguistic terms, Stark’s readers need more than a sense of his language as just langue in the abstact. They also need to be able to interpret it as parole, i.e. as language actually in use, and within specific sociocultural contexts. How human beings learn to contextualize language in this way is something of a mystery. Even as regards the native speakers of a language, there is much that is not yet fully understood. Discussion has often centred on the difference between their deliberately learning their language as the result of somebody else’s explicit teaching, and their spontaneous acquisition of it through simply being exposed to it and just using it. Some of the controversies have stemmed from Chomsky’s suggestion that the human being is equipped with a language acquistion device (a LAD), and that there are linguistic universals which the LAD automatically homes in on (Chomsky, 1965 & 1975; Gregg, 1998; McLaughlin, Robbins & Wade, 1998; Ellis, 1994). As a result, many applied linguists have tended to concentrate on the learning or acquisition of syntax and vocabulary in the more formal sense of langue. When the pragmatics of parole’s form-context relationship does get a mention, this has sometimes been under the heading of language socialization, which is mainly said to be either a matter of language as itself a medium through which socialization can take place, or a matter of the processes by which people come to use different registers of language for different kinds of social setting (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986; Cazden, 1998). What receives less attention, therefore, is the way they become proficient at making interfaces between cultural knowledge and semantics. How language users start to understand and employ one and the same word in different ways in different contexts, for instance, or to apply cultural presuppositions in order to make inferences from the said to the unsaid, remains unclear. As for foreign languages, the situation is even more uncertain. For more than two decades now, scholars have tended to assume that the use of foreign languages can be not only learned but to some extent acquired (Lightbown, 1985). But the exact nature of what goes on here, not least as regards the langue - parole relationship, is still a
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topic of theoretical and empirical enquiry (Lightbown, 2000). All the same, there must obviously be a sense in which the readers of a novel by Ulf Stark have to participate in Stark’s own frame of reference. And when foreign language learners are graduating from texts such as The Twits or Snow White to books which, like Stark’s, are more novelistic, an empathetic participation in the target culture becomes ever more crucial. Some such mental self-projection is necessary, not only to learners’ ability to contextualize the linguistic sign in the basic effort of comprehension, but to their understanding of the issues, emotions and judgements being brought into play. They have to read “like a native”, as we sometimes say. This is not at all the same thing as actually “going” native. It is not a suspension of their own identity. On the contrary, their exploratory participation in the target culture may leave them with strong reservations about it. But at least they will understand it better, and will have developed a somewhat more flexible affective competence, which will have improved their chances of getting along with the culture’s representatives, and of themselves being able to act within its parameters. It is these benefits which are the basic goals of most foreign language education programmes. In fact the empathetic reading of children’s novels can be part of a larger participatory pedagogy running through an entire programme. Much of the groundwork for a participatory pedagogy has been laid out by the intercultural understanding movement, one of the dominant trends in FLE-theory from the mid-1980’s onwards. Earlier twentieth-century approaches to FLE had repeated the tendency of both structuralist linguistics and behaviouristic applied linguistics to concentrate on linguistic form or langue — basically on vocabulary and grammar. This had been somewhat at the expense of the pragmatics of language as used in context — or parole —, so that the classroom discussion of sociocultural issues had been rather limited and stereotyping. The intercultural understanding movement, by contrast, has spelled out very clearly the relevance of context to the working of the linguistic sign. By the same token, the movement has offered valuable insights into the need for a contrastive analysis of the learner culture and target culture side by side, which can help the language teacher to take on the role of mediator between the two. In the work reported on by Charlotta Sell and Lilian Rönnqvist in Chapters 14 and 15 below, the connection between the ChiLPA Project and the intercultural understanding movement will be unmistakable. Nor have ideas in this area been marking time. Some of the movement’s ground-breaking early work was still not quite explicit about the full scope for a participatory pedagogy, and consequently not for a pedagogical use of children’s literature either. In the present chapter, by examining the early work of Michael Byram and others I shall try to explain why this was. At the same time, I shall also be making suggestions in keeping with later developments — developments in which Byram, I hasten to add, continues to play
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a key role (see e.g. Byram & Fleming, 1998). Nowadays, the place of children’s literature within culturally sensitive FLE programmes is becoming much better understood.
2.
Language users as social individuals
Even before the intercultural understanding movement got under way, educationalists and language learning experts were already speaking of culture in a very broad sense, usually taking their lead from anthropologists, sociologists, semioticians, psychologists or political scientists. Brooks (1975), for instance, had listed over 50 “cultural nodes” or points of contact between the self and others. These included: authority; neatness and cleanliness; what to wear; mealtime; squabbles, insults, slaps, kicks, and blows; smoking, matches, and fire; chores and odd jobs; games; dates and going steady; crossing the street; bikes and skooters; choosing a career. At a higher level of abstraction Brooks had also listed about fifty parameters for cultural analysis, some of them more “personal” — e.g. presence (how we stand, walk etc.), language, gesture, time-concept, space-concept, bonding, learning, health, resilience, sex roles, taboo, rights and duties — and others more “institutional” — e.g. education, church, politics, government, military, medicine, literature, transportation, technology. By the 1980’s, some experts were rejecting this kind of detailed listing as an inevitably incomplete and rather sterile formalism. But alternative definitions could be no less capacious. Seelye (1985) said that culture is simply everything people learn to do. Others said much the same, but with still more emphasis on the semiotic dimension of culture as a system of meanings interwoven with power relationships and ideology. According to Rosseel (1982), culture is “the whole of human productions which in a given society are the result of creativity, and are transmissible in a non-genetic way”. Rosseel explicitly included ways of thinking, types of organization, attitudes, symbols, and interactions. Very typically of the late twentieth century, such accounts drew on structuralist insights which, originally stemming from de Saussure, were re-interpreted along lines suggested by Claude Lévi-Strauss. For the purposes of his own kind of cultural anthropology, Lévi-Strauss claimed to have pinpointed myths which “think themselves out in the men and without men’s knowledge” (Lévi-Strauss, [1964] 1970, p.46). The implication here was that human beings are culturally determined in a strong sense. Many cognitive psychologists, similarly, were arguing that the relation between the human being and culture was so tight that acculturation could only be thought of as always already a fact of life. In their view, any account of human nature in terms of a culture-nature binarism was misleading, in that it gave the impression that the human being had mental dispositions that were genetically prior to culture, and in principle still separable. As far as they were concerned,
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human capacities were not simply the amplification or extension by cultural means of a pre-cultural mind. At the very least, homo sapiens was, in Midgley’s words (1980), “innately programmed in such a way that he needs a culture to complete him, and culture is not an alternative or replacement for instinct, but its outgrowth and supplement”. Or as Geertz (1975, pp.82–83) put it: The … fact that the final stages of the biological evolution of man occurred after the initial stages of the growth of culture implies that “basic”, “pure”, or “unconditional” human nature, in the sense of the innnate constitution of man, is so functionally incomplete as to be unworkable. Tools, hunting, family organization, and later, art, religion, and “science” moulded man somatically; and they are, therefore, necessary not merely to his survival but to his existential realization.
In developing the intercultural understanding movement within FLE-theory, Michael Byram’s early work sought to explain how the phylogenetic cultural potential described by Midgley and Geertz might be ontogenetically realized in individual children, a task in which he drew on Vygotsky (1971), Rumelhart (1980), and Schank & Abelson (1977) (Byram, 1989, pp.102–19). Vygotsky had argued that children become aware of the culture by which they are surrounded through their interaction with others, and particularly with adults, who are always some steps ahead, so to speak. Children recognize, register, and themselves use cultural features, so internalizing the culture within themselves. Rumelhart’s schema theory suggested a possible form for the mental organization and storage this involves, a schema being a data structure which represents the generic concepts in memory, and which contains as part of its specification the network of interrelations normally taken to hold among the constituents of the concept in question. With this as his starting-point, Rumelhart further suggested three ways in which learning can take place: 1) by accretion, the most common procedure, whereby traces of experience, i.e. information processed by schemata, are laid down in memory; 2) by tuning, whereby existing schemata are themselves modified so as to bring them more into line with experience and make them more comprehensive; and 3) by creating entirely new schemata, either through patterned generation, i.e. by modifying an existing schema more radically than by tuning, or through schema induction as the result of observing repeated patterns. As it happens, Rumelhart himself had some reservations about schema induction, but Byram pointed out that some such process is in any case necessary, in order to explain how the child’s cultural potential is realized by exposure to recurrent cultural configurations. As for Schank & Abelson, lastly, Byram valued their account of scripts, plans and goals — many of them reminiscent of Nelson Brooks’s “cultural nodes” — because this complemented Rumelhart’s essentially static conceptual schemata with frameworks for action — for instance, the script for what to do in a restaurant.
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But there’s the rub: what to do in some given situation. In the early stages of the intercultural understanding movement, the shades of cultural determinism were still fairly strong. The culturally specific frameworks Byram was interested in very much restricted human individuals to “the done thing”. Even if he credited the child with enough mind-power to make inductions, the basic impression arising from his account was that culture is simply “there”, and that the human individual simply learns it and slots in with it. So conceived, acculturation was passivizing, for what was conspicuously absent was any suggestion that the individual might have the imaginative, intellectual and moral capacity to stand back from the culture, as it were, or to criticize and change it. By the same token, no obvious explanation emerged of how an individual could make the necessary mental leap into some other culture in order to understand what happens there, and even to become an agent there. For a theory of communication to be complete, there does need to be, not only a sense of the human being’s strongly cultural formation, but also a clear recognition of the relative autonomy by which people empathize with different life-worlds and sometimes modify a status quo (Sell, 2000 & 2001). Pragmatic theory needs to be profoundly historical, but without becoming deterministic. Although language users are very much social beings, they are actually social individuals, with a certain amount of imagination, intelligence, and will-power. The necessary philosophical underpinning to such a theory is to be found in the work of Raymond Tallis (1997). What Tallis clearly pinpoints is Lévi-Stauss’s distortion of de Saussure. For de Saussure (1974 [1916], p 14), whereas language (langue) was not actually a function of the speaker but a product that is passively assimilated by the individual, “speech [parole], on the contrary, is an individual act. It is wilful and intellectual”. This basic structuralist insight can be generalized to other areas. As Tallis puts it, no matter whether the structured system be that of language, the psyche, society or culture, human beings can to some extent operate the system, and are not to be simply conflated with it. Without re-instating the sovereign independence of the human subject as seen in traditional liberal humanism, Tallis (1997, p.228) nevertheless asserts the centrality of individual consciousness, of undeceived deliberateness, in the daily life of human beings. We are not absolutely transparent to ourselves but we are not utterly opaque either; we are not totally self-present in all our actions but nor are we absent from them; we are not complete masters of our fates, shaping our lives according to our utterly unique and original wishes, but neither are we the empty playthings of historical, political, social, semiological or instinctual forces.
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3.
Cultures, behaviours, language use
The grip of a particular culture on the way an individual behaves can be less than complete in other senses as well. To continue with the restaurant script, for instance, this will clearly be subject to local variation, but will still be pretty much the same in many different parts of the world — just like beds, pillows, jugs, and so on. By no means all cultural phenomena are peculiar to specific geographical regions or language communities. Anthropologists now argue that culture should not be thought of as a system of shared values and customs that is strictly bounded. In some ways the lifestyle of the Finnish capital city is less like that of the Finnish countryside than that of London, New York or Tokyo. As well as multinational companies, there are multinational cultural features. Similar points apply to links between culture and more exclusively linguistic activity. Admittedly, it is difficult to think of a culture which is not partly realized through language, and although Rumelhart did not discuss the role of language in schema theory, there would clearly be close psychological relationships between, on the one hand, schemata and, on the other hand, genre potential, semantic fields, and vocabulary structure. That is why Lee, Whitburn & Winter (1982) pleaded for foreign language dictionaries which would be contrastively based and pay attention to the element of shared knowledge inherent in membership of the cultural community, so bringing out a fuller range of cultural overtones. In point of fact, however, language is only one of the media by which culture is carried, and culture can furthermore be carried by more than one language at a time. At a certain level of generality this is true of Finnish culture, for instance, which is reflected in certain aspects of even two languages as different from each other as Finnish and Swedish. Vice versa, one and the same language, albeit with a greater or lesser degree of social and regional variation, can carry more than one culture. Most obviously, this is the case with international languages. Even to the extent that a language does carry a culture, moreover, a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, to the effect that each particular language and its cultural context rigidly determine what can be communicated or experienced through it, is also unacceptable. As Yvonne Bertills illustrates in Chapter 4 above, texts produced within a particular culture, and written or spoken in a language normally associated with that culture, are difficult to translate into other languages without losing some of their cultural charge. But often some kind of working equivalent can be found, and what takes place here can to some extent be seen as a kind of social or regional variation of the target language in order to meet particular cultural circumstances. The English spoken by people in Finland, similarly, long ago included Finnish and Swedish words like sisu and smörgåsbord, and can even defer to Finnish conversational styles, with relatively infrequent buttings-in, and relatively frequent and longish pauses.
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4. Language proficiency and cultural proficiency Given that particular languages and particular cultures are not completely inseparable from each other, it seems both theoretically correct and practically useful to maintain a certain distinction between language proficiency and a more general cultural proficiency. Among other things, this will mean that the highly suggestive account of language learning put forward by Acton & de Felix (1986) must be somewhat qualified, since it merged the internalization of both language and culture under the single heading of acculturation. According to Acton & de Felix, acculturation had four main phases. The Tourist phase was that of the novice learner, who has an infantalizing pidgeon language of basic interpersonal communicative skills, who is still exploring the culture, whose motivation may still be instrumental rather than integrative, whose main concern is with physical security and anxiety management, who is essentially a receiver, who retains a mother tongue identity, and who remains dependent on a teacher or a group. Secondly came the Survivor stage of the advanced beginner, who is starting to manipulate situations, developing the new identity of a target culture ego, responding as well as receiving, and generally beginning to manage interaction. Between this second phase and the third phase there was what Acton & de Felix called an acculturation threshold, after which identification with the new language and culture is altogether more complete. The third phase was the Immigrant phase, in which the person becomes aware of a clash of consciousnesses, more competent linguistically, more knowledgeable, proud of his or her increasing accomplishment, able to organize a new value system entailing a distinct target culture ego, competently self-monitoring, and independent of the teacher or group. Finally there was the phase of Citizen, which brings full competence in cognitive academic language proficiency, ego enhancement, entirely integretative motivation, self-actualization within the new value system, with the target culture ego as completely assimilated as the original learner culture ego, and with the ability to function as a teacher of the new language learned. In its day, Acton & de Felix’s account was especially valuable because it moved the discussion on from cognitive pyschology to affective psychology — to attitudes, feelings, personality —, which in a participatory pedagogy will be very important. But their elegant synthesis of language and culture did represent a rather abstract norm, and had normative implications for teaching. Puristic normativeness in foreign language teaching was already being criticized, not surprisingly, by sociolinguists. Loveday (1982), for instance, argued that even the foreign learner’s own version of the target language should be tolerated. But even if there were to be widespread agreement as to what version or versions of the target language shall actually be taught, there would still be further considerations. Not even all native speakers of a language are equally competent in it, or equally competent in the
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associated culture, and neither languages nor cultures are static and unchanging. So in practice, everybody is learning all the time, and language development and cultural development can even be out of step with each other, for native speakers and foreign learners alike. As Brown (1980) had pointed out, an adult who has a less than complete mastery of a society’s language may nevertheless be able to cope quite satisfactorily. Such a person’s language, though fossilized at a rudimentary stage, may still perform a sufficient number of functions, and the person may have a kind of social intelligence which more than compensates for purely linguistic shortcomings. Schmidt (1983) reported on a 33-year-old Japanese learner of English in the United States who did not care about formal grammar and did not acquire it, but whose extrovert personality soon enabled him to interact and integrate freely. Conversely, and paradoxical though it may sound, Brown argued that a person may acquire linguistic mastery so early that it makes acculturation difficult. Even in its early stages, the intercultural understanding movement did distinguish between different kinds of proficiency, and as its name suggests, placed special emphasis on cultural proficiency. According to Michael Byram and Veronica Estarte-Sarries (1991, pp.200–203), foreign language teaching should result in a critical intercultural understanding which could also be turned to a critique of the learner’s own society and culture. But this admirable aspiration, so obviously attuned to considerations of peace and human rights, so sensible in the era of advanced military technology and the global village, and so relevant to the likely interests of intelligent older pupils, was in itself most likely to be achieved without the teaching of a single foreign language. Teaching and learning foreign languages takes a great amount of time and energy, which, if the main goal is maximal intercultural understanding, would be much better spent on a very wide range of different cultures, studied on the basis of course materials translated into the student’s own mother tongue. And sure enough, in Byram’s seminal model (1989) for foreign language education, no less than a quarter of the total imput was made up of comparative cultural awareness training which did take place in the learner’s own mother tongue. In keeping with the deterministic account of human nature on which the model was based, the proficiencies which Byram emphasized were not the active ones but the passive. He usually spoke of the student as somebody trying to understand what foreigners say, write or do, and forming attitudes towards foreigners on the basis of that understanding. The only educational aims which were at all specific to language learning were apparently an understanding of the nature of language itself, and the development of analytical ability. As for, say, a British pupil’s own proficiency in written or spoken French, Byram’s early work sometimes gave the impression that he was relatively unconcerned with this. Compared with the language-for-communicative-competence approach, the intercultural understanding movement was in fact much closer to the nineteenth century style of language
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teaching, where the main goal had been the reading of target language texts. Byram (1989, pp.10–13) strongly attacked the communicative competence approach for having the narrowly consumeristic goals associated with language for tourism, goals allegedly so specific and one-sided that failure to achieve them would be frequent, very conspicuous, and therefore very dermoralizing to teachers and pupils alike. Yet Byram and his colleagues did not recommend that foreign language learning should actually be dropped (cf. Buttjes & Bryram, 1991), and another quarter of the imput into his model for foreign language teaching had to do with the training of skills, with the target language as the medium. Why he still retained productive proficiency training was not explained, but it was presumably because he realized that even an enriched intercultural understanding of the kind he was recommending is insufficient for adequate international relations. People of culture x not only need to understand people of culture y, but to make themselves understood within culture y. At its crassest level, the point is that you can buy things in any language or no language at all, whereas in order to sell something you sometimes have to speak the language of the prospective buyer. More generally, foreigners can have just as much reason for wishing to make an impact on the target culture, and even to change it, as its own denizens. Foreigners also have just as much imaginative, intellectual and moral power to actually make some such impact. Byram’s early deterministic outlook prevented him from making this point, and his stance may also have reflected a very British form of political correctness, with a mandatory guilty conscience about his own country’s imperialistic record of selfassertiveness. If so, this would tie up with his otherwise excellent suggestion that language studies ought to result in a critique of the learner’s own culture. And his own field work certainly did suggest that some such critique would not come amiss in the British population as a whole. The attitudes he elicited from English schoolchildren were dismayingly ethnocentric, even after their foreign language education had been going on for several years (Byram, Esarte-Sarries & Taylor, 1991). But his own belief in the likelihood of a young Brit developing the will and the capability to make an impact in, say, France was arguably too weak to start with. That we need intercultural understanding of the kind Byram was advocating is perfectly true (see also Morgan, 1995; Hinkel, 1999). But communicative proficiency, though not of the narrow kind he so effectively criticized, is just as necessary. One of the reasons why we learn languages, both our mother tongue and foreign languages, is that we want to be optimally independent. We do not always want to rely on other people to do our understanding and our talking for us. And although it is a great oversimplification to think of particular languages and particular cultures as rigidly tied to each other, or of linguistic competence and cultural competence as necessarily developing pari passu, certain reciprocities between language and culture are nevertheless clear enough. So a programme for language learning probably does have to allow for a kind
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of psychological circularity. We need to know about culture, in order to understand what people say and to be able to project our own meanings. But we need to know language, in order to be able to understand other people’s culture, to mediate our own culture, and to make our mark, as it were, which may even involve resisting a current cultural norm.
5.
Conscious study versus acquisition
Byram’s early work emphasized that we have to study culture and study language. Language teachers, he said, need a training in linguistics, sociology and anthropology, and a quarter of the total imput into the language classroom should be an explicit training in sociolinguistically oriented, comparatively focussed language awareness, and another quarter would be an explicit training in knowledgeoriented, comparatively focussed cultural awareness. Both these types of awareness would be trained in the child’s own language, and the pedagogy would presumably be very teacher-centred, with the teacher selecting not only the points for discussion but the materials to illustrate the points, and generally conveying a lot of information in straight transmissive form. As for the pupils, Byram described them as ethnographers, sociologists, and critics of ideology. They should explicitly register, articulate and debate alien cultural phenomena, and learn to apply contrastive intercultural analysis to their own society as well. Before the class excursion to France, British pupils should carefully draw up a list of the things they are going to investigate, always bearing in mind the corresponding features of British culture, and when in France, they should go around with a notebook, writing down their observations, and conducting carefully planned interviews with local inhabitants. Now teachers, for their own purposes, certainly do need to perform critical intercultural analysis and, on the basis of this, to form a judgement about what their pupils need to know. Obviously, too, the element of teacher-centred discussion in class is indispensible. Some things will always have to be deliberately explained. Nor is there any reason why at least the more mature pupils should not find ethnographical research and socio-ideological criticism interesting in its own right. But certain things can be dealt with in ways that are less laboured and explicit. If learners, in addition to being taught, and in addition to deliberately studying, also partly acquire language use, then this must by definition mean that they partly acquire cultural sensitivity as well. This assumption is still being further explored (Lightbrown, 2000), but already has much to recommend it. Let’s take an example of the kind to be found in Sperber & Wilson’s relevancetheory account (1986) of communicative pragmatics. Suppose Peter says to Mary, “Would you like some coffee?” and Mary says, “I want to sleep tonight.” Assuming that Peter has sufficient language proficiency to recognize the words of Mary’s
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reply, and sufficient encyclopaedic knowledge and cultural proficiency to know that coffee is a stimulant and that many people therefore refrain from drinking it before going to bed, he will immediately understand what she means. Even without thinking, he will see that she is politely saying “no”, by omitting the “no” itself and giving him a reason for her refusal instead. But now let’s put ourselves in the position of Charley, a four-year-old child who is watching and listening to Peter and Mary. Charley knows that coffee is a hot drink which grown-ups like, and that it is sometimes black and sometimes brown — or white, as grown-ups say. But that is all. This is the first time he has heard somebody replying to Peter’s kind of question in Mary’s kind of way. Usually people have said something like “Yes please” or “No thank you”. So Charley’s first conclusion is that Mary is talking nonsense or violently changing the subject. Then he notices that Peter nevertheless seems completely unsurprised, as if he understands Mary perfectly. He also notices that Peter does not in fact give her a cup of coffee. When Charley has been exposed to this sequence of events a sufficient number of times, he will perhaps put two and two together and attach to the item coffee a note to the effect: “Keeps you awake at night”. In Rumelhart’s terminology, this would be a case of simple accretion. How many times Charley needs to be exposed to the sequence is an open question, and will presumably vary in accordance with IQ, degree of alertness, focus of attention, and perhaps other factors as well. But the point is, Charley does not really need anybody to tell him that coffee keeps you awake at night, though in fact that is probably the way many people do happen to learn it. As we grow up within a culture, a wealth of information is certainly communicated to us as the result of other people’s didactic designs upon us. At the very least, we usually attend school lessons on national history, geography, literature, politics and so on. But all of us become street-wise as well, apparently absorbing sociocultural savoir faire through the pores of our skin. If there is something that particularly puzzles us, we can even ask somebody about it, and the kind of information we ourselves select in this way is the information we most urgently want, and is therefore the most likely to be fully integrated. Acquisition can be thought of as a perpetual autodidacticism, self-steering and often unreflecting. The child’s mind is less a tabula rasa or a container to be filled, than a positive force of acquisitive energy in process, which a teacher can try at once to liberate and channel. The pedagogical ramifications of this insight will be crucial. But the more immediate point again has to do with the psychological circularity in the languageculture relationship. What the case of Charley and the coffee suggests is a kind of reciprocity between language and culture in the way people actually acquire their knowledge and skills. Our pragmatic contextualization of language utterances is a process that is far more bi-directional than often realized. For an understanding of language in use, immediate contextual knowledge and more general cultural
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knowledge are certainly important. That was what Peter needed in order to understand Mary straight away. But also, cultural and contextual types of knowledge may themselves be acquired, as Charley no doubt sometimes acquires them, from language used in a normal way, and without specific didactic intent. It so happens that coffee-drinking — like beds, jugs, restaurant routines and so on — is a widely international cultural phenomenon of the kind which weakens links between particular cultures and particular languages. A 15-year-old French learner of English who already understands about coffee would have no problems with what Mary said to Peter. Yet given that the hold of an individual’s own native culture is not completely determining, the French teenager can also acquire knowledge of Charley’s culture that is far more culture-specific, and in basically the same way as Charley himself will. For foreign learners and native speakers alike, sociocultural learning can result from sheer exposure to the language in use, and such an exposure is simultaneously a training for language use itself. Not only that, but repeated experience of the same cultural feature and language use also reinforces and keeps them fresh in the mind. To expect a progressive and sustained linguistic or cultural acquisition without a continuity of experience would be a contradiction in terms.
6. Curiosity and pleasure Byram’s early work did recognize this. As noted, in his model of foreign language education a quarter of the total imput was skill-oriented language learning with a target language focus and mainly using the target language as the medium; a quarter was sociolinguistically oriented and comparatively focussed language awareness with the learner language as the medium; and a quarter was knowledge-oriented and compratively focussed cultural awareness, also done with the learner language as the medium. But the whole of the remaining quarter was devoted to cultural experience. This experiential imput was knowledge oriented, was focussed on the foreign culture, and used the target language as the medium. Among the ways in which this part of the programme was to be concretized were: the visits to the foreign country; classroom decor drawing on foreign culture items; the reading of foreign newspapers; and the classroom use of the foreign language itself. Many practical suggestions were given as to how these resources could be drawn upon to maximal effect. What Byram and his colleagues were proposing here was already a kind of participatory pedagogy, and their approach would in principle work with any kind of authentic materials at all — i.e. with any written or spoken texts which are produced in the normal course of events, and for any sort of reason, within the target culture itself. To take written texts in general, for instance, although these are
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normally intended for the writer’s own fellow-nationals and contemporaries, they are sometimes also read by people living in later times and/or different places. But readers, quite irrespective of their own historical circumstances, will usually try to get at the writer’s original meaning within his or her own immediate context. So with a text in a foreign language, the process of interpretation does indeed involve a movement of imaginative empathy into the foreign cultural tradition within which it is written. Otherwise, the reader will sometimes be unable to supply appropriate contextualizations of the language as used, so that what results will be nonsense, or the wrong sense. Granted, much of the presupposed knowledge can be as non-culture-specific as knowledge about beds, restaurant behaviour, and coffeeinduced insomnia. But every once in a while, the writer will doubtless have appealed to presuppositions that really are culture-specific — what it meant in the 1980s to live in a block of flats in Vällingby, Stockholm, for instance. So through reading a foreign text in hand, the reader’s understanding of the associated culture may be not only exercised and confirmed, but positively extended. If so, this can happen partly because unfamiliar cultural information is explicitly stated, but also partly because the reader can infer from the stated and known to the unstated and the hitherto unknown. But even if Byram did not deny this, he did not dwell on it. As much as anything, the point at issue here is a delicate question of feelings and motivation. Not to mince words, Byram’s early work did not convey much of an impression that language learning is fun. Not that he was a kill-joy, exactly. But his description of language learning did make things sound very unspontaneous and self-conscious. The teacher had a training in linguistics, sociology and anthropology. The child learner was to be trained to be an ethnographer and intercultural social critic. The class visit to the foreign country was a piece of fieldwork. And one underlying assumption may even have been that, if children have an ethnocentric attitude, then this will be so deep-dyed that their feelings about what goes on in the language classroom will always be profoundly negative. Some of the questions the British children in Byram’s survey were asked to answer already implied the strangeness or unpleasantness of French people. This may have prompted the respondents to express xenophobic attitudes which they would not have volunteered. If learners’ participation in the foreign culture remains fairly superficial, the persistence of a certain ethnocentric reluctance is not all that surprising. The question is: Were Byram’s early proposals likely to change things here? Certainly a point he did not much stress was that teachers can sometimes find ways to make acculturation in a foreign culture seem positively attractive, as a whole new sphere within which enjoyment and activity are possible. At this stage in his work, Byram seemed to assume that children will have no hidden aspiration towards such opportunities in the first place. And admittedly, much does depend on the milieu in which they are growing up. If they are never confronted with role-models who
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have a high valuation of foreign languages the situation is indeed discouraging. Yet some of the videos, films and television programmes they are watching may actually be of foreign origin, so that an interest in foreign cultures may be already latent. This is not to say that the only type of motivation for language learning is integrative — a type of motivation which is in any case difficult to pin down. Nor is it to say that some kind of positive feelings about the target culture should be foisted on learners who resist it. The participatory type of empathy which is needed for understanding does not necessarily develop into sympathy. On the contrary, the human mind is quite complex and flexible enough for a movement of interpretative empathy to be accompanied by a strong element of critical self-distancing. After all, there are bound to be cases in which the language being taught and learned is associated with a culture which both teacher and pupils would positively not wish to identify with. Finns, for instance, have always had obvious geographical and commercial reasons for acquiring a good command of Russian, but this has sometimes been very strongly qualified by considerations of political history. When speakers of the target language are perceived as an actual threat, integrative motivation is unlikely to be immediate and straightforward. And even with languages which do not arouse such sensitivities, teachers have no choice but to respect the individual pupil’s own sense of self. For some learners, non-integrative types of motivation may be pretty strong. When Gardner & Lambert (1959) first developed their ideas about integrative motivation, they drew a contrast with what they saw as motivation of a very different but also powerful type: instrumental motivation, which stimulates the learning of a language as a means to get a better job or a promotion, or to pass a required examination, for instance. Somewhat more recently, Crookes & Schmidt (1991) have argued that language learners’ motivation can also be thought of, less as some such matter of social psychology, than in educational terms. For instance, a learner may experience language learning as a kind of challenge that is compelling in and of itself. As Deci (1975, p.68) pointed out, this kind of intrinsic motivation can be explained along Piagetian lines: “The overriding motivational principle in Piaget’s theory seems to be that a human organism is by nature motivated toward the development of increasingly accurate and complex cognitive structures, which manifest themselves in terms of rational thought processes and consistent structures.” Or as Aristotle said, human beings learn because they are naturally curious and it is pleasurable to have one’s curiosity satisfied. The subtleties of language-learning motivation are still under investigation (see e.g. Dornyei, 1998; Lier, 1996), and curiosity and pleasure can obviously take many different forms. In particular, a lot can depend on the learner’s age. In planning a programme of foreign language education for young people, the starting-point can hardly be the linguistic, sociological, anthropological and political interests of a teacher-trainer in a university education department, nor of a well-informed and
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socially responsible schoolteacher. Such mature analysis may be an attractive goal for the most advanced students, and from time to time the pursuit of ethnography and social criticsm may even be stimulating for an entire class. But there will be sharp differences between a top-stream class and an unstreamed mixed-ability class, and what most teachers have to start from are the pleasures and interests of the average child. The risk inherent in Byram’s highly teacher-centred scheme was that the teacher would be for ever shouting across a yawning generation gap, and be ignored. So a key aspect of a participatory pedagogy will be to teach a variety of the language, and to use authentic materials, which are suited the particular learners’ own age-group. For one thing, there needs to be a clear recognition of the importance of child language, including even children’s and teenage slang. It was absurd to expect Finnish children learning English to ape English-speaking adults as they were so often represented in the old-fashioned textbooks. “How do you do, Mary?” “How do you do, John?” (Cf. Hurst, 1991.) A strong emphasis on the pupil’s personal idiom and response is essential if language education is not to remain a purely passive experience. Similarly, there could also be a strong concentration on those types of film, television and popular culture in which young people tend to be interested anyway. Still more to the point, here is another reason for taking full advantage of children’s literature. In this way the language classroom can become a kind of satellite of the target culture society, to which the pupils’ own responses, attitudes and feelings are a major contribution. An enterprising teacher will also find other ways to enable pupils to channel their natural desire that participation should be two-way (Egan, 1992). Sometimes it may be possible to arrange a visit to a place where the target culture is indigenous. As for a longer continuity of genuine cultural participation, one way to achieve this is by bringing pupils into touch with native speakers of their own age by means of e-mail (Sundholm & Finne, 1994). Nowadays such contacts may develop quite spontaneously.
7.
Target culture loyalties
Within a well functioning participatory pedagogy a need may even arise for a policy on target-culture loyalties. No less than native speakers, non-native speakers of a language may tend to associate themselves with one particular community which speaks it. An obvious symptom is that they themselves speak it, or aim at speaking it, with the appropriate accent. This will be a crucial part of the way they present themselves in the foreign langauge. Foreign language education which overgeneralizes the target cultures actually goes against the instincts and motivational patterns of many learners. It has long been known that learners are often more successful when the language studied in
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class represents a particular ethnic or other grouping in which they can become interested (Loveday, 1982, p.22). Both foreign-language learners and native speakers usually get to know one particular range of cultural experience first, rooting themselves within one particular community, and then gradually building up an ability to operate within others as well. This may mean that teachers have to make a decision, for which national educational goals may have some bearing. In some countries, there may be precise stipulations about which varieties of foreign languages are to be taught. But in Finland, for instance, teachers are free to teach, and to accept, different varieties. To take the case of English, in Finnish schools the varieties of English most commonly heard are still British and American. Politically speaking, no particular variety, and certainly neither a British nor an American variety, seems more strongly motivated in Finland than any other. True, there are those who argue that Finland’s general orientation has become more European, and at a time when the United States is tending to see-saw between isolationism and the roles of international policeman and international trend-setter. This, it is sometimes claimed, provides sufficient grounds for giving a British variety of English and culture a higher priority in English language teaching than American varieties. Yet even today, there are also other ways of assessing the geopolitical situation, which would call for a different target-culture loyalty for Finnish learners of English. And the geopolitical situation is always liable to change. As it happens, young Finnish learners of English are sometimes switched from a teacher whose own cultural loyalty is, say, decidedly American to another teacher whose cultural loyalty may be just as clearly English or Irish or Australian. And quite regardless of who happens to be teaching them, an increasing percentage of Finnish learners speak English with some genuine variety of English accent in any case. Having absorbed English-language popular culture since their earliest childhood (Sjöholm, 2001), some of them have also been exchange students in English-speaking countries. Some young Finns are beginning to sound like Texans, Cockneys or Australians. A few of them may actually speak a more natural-sounding English than the older generation of Finnish English teachers, and their feelings of cultural loyalty towards the particular English-language community can be fairly strong. Educationally speaking, this is an encouraging development, because it suggests that they have already begun to achieve a kind of affective competence. Even if learners receive their initial instruction in English within one particular cultural frame, at some later stage they may well find that some different cultural frame is more relevant to their own interests and needs. Non-native speakers of a language, just like native speakers, do sometimes shift their cultural loyalties. This is a profoundly personal matter, which in my own view is best left well beyond the reach of institutional regulation. By the same token, I also think it would be unethical — and not just counter-
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productive — to try and force upon learners some cultural loyalty which they did not want. English, in particular, increasingly serves, not only as a lingua franca more or less stripped of any particular cultural identity, but, at least in continental Europe, as a language which allows many regional pronounciations and even dialects over and above those occurring in countries where it is the first language (Graddol, 1999 & 2001; House, 2000; Seidlhofer 2001a & b). Especially in a world where nonnative speakers of English now outnumber native speakers, there is a strong chance than young Finnish learners, for instance, will prefer to speak English with a recognizably Finnish accent, and the same thing obviously applies for their teachers. But teachers who do happen to have some target-culture loyalty or other can certainly let their work be coloured by it. In fact the one particular target community can valuably function as a kind of home base. Both cognitively and affectively, it is easiest for their pupils to get to grips with one new cultural reality at a time. It is important, too, that the new reality be penetrated in enough depth for them to grasp, not only that it is different, but that it makes sense within its own terms. To expose them to a wide range of English-language cultures is merely counterproductive if all of these are treated superficially. Teachers who base their teaching on their own target-culture loyalties stand a good chance of being enthusiastic, inspiring and effective. Without becoming too coercive a champion of some particular cultural loyalty, they can serve as a kind of role model for affective competence. As a result, their pupils’ intercultural understanding will be on firmer ground.
8. Participatory excitement Even when target-culture loyalties do not develop, even in cases where both teacher and students would have strong reservations about the target culture, participatory pedagogy is nevertheless going to involve the excitement of trying on that “otherness” for size. In its own way this represents a kind of pleasure, on which a teacher can try to capitalize. Exactly what degree of pleasure in FLE is possible and constructive has been much debated. The consensus now is that the hedonism of “French-without-tears”, as for instance in Krashen & Terrell’s (1983) “Natural Approach”, can certainly go too far. The main argument for the Natural Approach was that learners sometimes acquire new vocabulary, structures and types of language use with little apparent effort. Furthermore, they often do so from the imput provided by various kinds of authentic cultural materials. So far so good. On the other hand, we still know fairly little about how this works in in detail. Natural Approach enthusiasts sometimes tended to suggest that self-conscious learning and explicit teaching are not much use, a line of thought which is parallel with Chomsky’s ideas about an inbuilt language acquisition device whoes workings are more or less automatic. But even if
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learners can indeed draw spontaneous inferences, much research already seems to confirm what language teachers have traditionally taken for granted: that spontaneous acquisition does need to be complemented by deliberate effort on the part of the learner, and that this needs to be reinforced in the classroom with explicit error correction and explanations of vocabulary and grammar (cf. Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991, pp.302–322). Appropriate forms of linguistic expression, even though they vary very much according to the precise cultural context, must still be definitely and precisely learned. By the same token, the target language imput need not always be immediately and fully comprehensible. No teacher is going to select materials that will be utterly baffling. But learners’ powers of inference and understanding are sometimes best developed by being stretched. That is why some caution is advisable in the use of texts which have been abridged and simplified. For some pupils at a particular stage, they may be just what is needed. For other pupils, the reading experience they offer may be in certain respects unsatisfying and insufficiently challenging (Rönnqvist & Sell, 1995). A participatory pedagogy does not mean that language learning becomes delightfully effortless. If anything, it will reveal some of effort’s own delights. But the fact remains: what the “Natural Approach” aimed at turning to advantage was precisely the pupil’s innate capacity for acquiring knowledge and abilities which seem interesting and pleasurable. There is absolutely no reason why the classroom atmosphere should be unpleasant, or why the learner should be given excessively difficult tasks, or why language errors should be regarded as scandalous. And insofar as a programme seeks to encourage the acquisition of cultural knowledge and language use by empathetic participation, the pleasure principle is probably even more important. Imagining one’s way into an alternative life-world can be a most fascinating process, even in cases where it does end with a kind of agreement to dis-agree.
9. Children’s novels in FLE Somewhat in the spirit of the Natural Approach, one reason traditionally given for using literary texts in FLE was that, in addition to whatever other benefits they offer, they were enjoyable. The pleasure factor in literary experience is of course difficult to pin down, and may vary from reader to reader. Also, there are some literary texts for which the words “enjoyment” and “pleasure” perhaps give the wrong impression, and may even seem belittling. It might be better to say that literary texts are, for many different kinds of reasons, compellingly interesting. At all events, one thing which speaks for the use of children’s and teenage novels in FLE is that they are one of the types of authentic materials which young learners are most likely to respond to. Byram, in keeping with his early a-hedonistic orientation in general, was silent
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here. As already noted, his approach resembled the nineteenth century language education, in that it conceived of the learner as essentially passive. But where it differed was in placing no emphasis on reading literature of any kind at all. In point of fact, in this phase of his work he regarded literature with deep suspicion, as a canon of texts which have been officially designated as the great texts, and which all and sundry are forced to read, whether they like it or not. To this extent he was in postmodern sympathy with post-colonial, Marxist and feminist challenges to the traditional legitimacy of a white middle-class Anglo-Saxon patriarchy. So once again, we may have to speak of his political correctness. But the stance may also have reflected unhappy personal memories of an uninspiring literary education. If Byram himself had been turned off literature at a tender age, he would clearly have found it that much harder to understand that anyone else can get much out of it. In that case, he would in a sense have been acknowledging the pleasure principle after all. Today, such antipathy to literature could already seem a little dated. Postmodern cultural commentary is moving away from its initial, more critical ethos towards a more creative one. The so-called culture wars fought over the literary canon in the 1980s and early 1990s are giving place to a much more pluralistic conception of literature, in which the canons of many different communal groupings all have a place, and distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow have become much less marked. The economic base of cultural elitism is itself disappearing, and many different sorts of people are enjoying each and every sort of cultural production, whether literate, oral, visual, or hybrid (Sell 2000, pp.253–79). Since literary texts are so central to this development, language teachers should have little difficulty in recognizing their interest, or in seeing their potentiality for FLE. Admittedly, Byram (1989, pp.100) did all along speak of “the well-founded assumption that literary texts embody the relationships of all linguistic texts to cultural meanings”, and he even said that they do so “in a more concentrated and therefore more accessible and rewarding form”. But then he complained that the classroom discussion of literary texts too often ends up as literary-critical analysis and appreciation. In his view, this was an unwarranted deviation from sociology and anthropology. As always, he thought that everything needed to be explained and commented on by an expert on intercultural relations: A [realist] novelist writes with the language of his own world and that of his reader. He may comment on and explain the people he describes, but he does so within the traditions to which both he and his reader belong. If the reader is from another culture, whether simply another section of society or from a radically different society, then there is need for translation, transfer of meanings in one culture to make them comprehensible to a reader living within a different system of meanings. But who is to mediate this transfer, who is to translate the system of meanings? The answer has to be someone who understands the culture of the writer and of the reader, but that is not enough.
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He must also understand the process by which the reader can be helped to place himself within the cultural meanings of the writer, abandonning temporarily, where necessary, those of his own cultural meanings which clash with and prevent him seeing the meanings of the other culture. This is the work of the literary critic who writes about foreign literature for readers in his own culture. It is, however, also the work of the social anthropologist who explains a foreign culture to those who have not experienced it. (Byram, 1989, p.88)
Explicit classroom explanations will remain a necessity, and language teachers can be described as mediators in more or less Byram’s own terms. Mediation is very much part of the teacher’s role as taken on by Charlotta Sell and Lilian Rönnqvist, for instance (see Chapters 14 and 15 below). But what Byram’s account left out of the picture was that literary and language education can gradually internalize the process of mediation within the learner. Also, he seemed to have forgotten that people have always read realist novels, including realist novels written within their own culture, as a way of finding out how the other half lives and thereby extending their own cultural proficiency. As readers of literature, whether native-language literature or foreign, we are often in a position similar to that of the four-year-old Charley vis à vis the connection between coffee and insomnia. Literature frequently exposes us to cultural phenomena for the first time. What we then do is to try and put two and two together, working from the familiar to the unfamiliar, so that, as Rumelhart would say, our schemata are gradually altered by accretion, tuning, patterned generation or even schema induction. Because Byram’s early view of the relationship between individuals and their native cultures was so deterministic, he simply put mother-tongue readers and foreign readers in different categories, failing to see that both these kinds of individual are capable of making empathetic inferences, quite irrespective of whether the new cultural realities they are confronting belong to their own culture or to some different culture. Another mistake, though not one made by Byram himself, would be to regard literature too exclusively as mimesis. This could result in an assumption that if anything at all is to be learnt about culture from literary texts, it would be because literature shows or represents or portrays cultural phenomena. Although literature certainly is mimetic, a still more important point is that to read literature, whether native-language or foreign, is to have first-hand experience of the language and culture in action, from which knowledge can be naturally acquired. This is because, while we read, our mind is for ever moving backwards and forwards between the language used and possible contexts within which to make sense of it. What we try to do is to associate ourselves with the reading community implied by the text as it is written. Our understanding is the result of a type of cultural participation, which, with a foreign culture, is not only cheaper and easier to arrange than a class visit to the foreign country, but can also be sustained over any length of time, and is a lot
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more genuine as well. During a class visit to the foreign country, young learners still behave as a group speaking their mother tongue, and their hotel or hostel becomes a kind of outpost or ghetto for their own culture. Each and every reader of a foreign literary text, by contrast, has to make a personal switch to the foreign language and culture, and can carry on reading text after text. To illustrate this relationship I am theorizing between language use, culture, language learning and the literary component of FLE, I return to an imaginary example I have used elsewhere (Sell, 1995, pp.11–13). Suppose that an English family is sitting round the fire after lunch on Christmas Day. At about ten minutes to three little Johnny suddenly says, “I’m going out to play football with Simon”. Mother gives him a pained look, at which Johnny’s older sister says, “Oh come on, Mum! Don’t be such an old royalist!” To somebody who does not know that at three o’clock on Christmas Day the Queen makes her annual televised speech, this little incident will be incomprehensible. So what would happen if it were part of the story of an English novel being read by Finnish schoolchildren within their English programme? To bring a target-language teenage novel into the classroom and ask learners to read it is virtually to import the target culture and to create a target-culture community. Simply in order to read the book, the learners have to draw on their existing knowledge of the target culture so as to make sense of the words as used. To repeat, without going native, they have to read like a native. When there is something they do not understand, their curiosity may goad them into making inferences, just as we all put two and two together and become streetwise within our native cultures as well. In reading the Christmas Day episode in a novel, they might well be puzzled by what big sister’s exclamation, “Oh come on, Mum! Don’t be such an old royalist!” But as they read on, they will perhaps come to a point in the story where somebody turns on the television and the Queen begins her speech. Then, one can hope, the penny would drop. Nor is comprehension just a matter of factual knowledge.There is also the question of differences of value judgement, many of which may be presupposed rather than explicitly stated. So is the mother’s attitude, described by big sister as royalistic, typical of British society in general? Or is big sister’s own attitude more typical? Or are both these attitudes fairly common? A British author writing a novel for British teenagers would be unlikely to offer any guidance on norms here, not even if the issues involved were central to the novel’s theme. A British readership will already have their own sense of things, which they will automatically apply in relating to the story’s meaning and point. A reader who lacks this kind of first-hand cultural knowledge, by contrast, would not always be sure how the author expects the narrative to be taken. But here, too, one can hope that it would gradually be possible to make inferences. Most obviously, the reader would particularly note the attitudes of the other characters in the same novel.
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In these ways, a language learner would be picking up new details about the British way of life and thought, would be immediately applying this knowledge in order to understand the text in hand, and would thereby be reinforcing it and making its use still easier next time. As a way of learning language use in cultural context, this would be quick, relatively painless, and naturalistic. What happened would be that language use and sociocultural knowledge, and the bi-directional connection between them, would be learned all in one go, and by actual interpretative practice.
10. Caveats, retrospect, prospect A participatory pedagogy must not get out of control. The greatest challenge lies in trying to reconcile the acquisitive drive of the pleasure principle in the pupil with the teacher’s own need to know and influence what is going on. On the one hand, it might be unwise, especially in the early stages, to expect learners to discuss literary texts unless they felt like it, and they should certainly get the chance to read books of their own choice, to which they think they will be able to relate (cf. Harrison, 1990). If they start to skip the passages they find boring, similarly, the teacher should probably turn a blind eye. The expectation is not that they should read like a scholar or a literary critic, but as much as possible like an ordinary reader. For the same reason, compulsory examination questions on literary texts are possibly not a good idea. On the other hand, teachers will still have their own sense of the linguistic and cultural competences their pupils need, and will therefore still want to introduce some kind of monitoring. One possibililty would perhaps be the socalled cultural assimilators described by of Seelye (1985, Chapter 7): i.e. multiplechoice tests based on literary (or other) texts involving cultural knowledge, where each of the possible answers cues pupils in to commentary which either confirms or modifies their view of the target culture. More generally, teachers must actively listen to what each and every pupil is saying, for there is no guarantee that all the learners in a class will spontaneously acquire exactly the same things at exactly the same time. This is another reason why foreign language teaching cannot be too teacher-centred. Indeed, the best hope of combining pupil pleasure, spontaneous acquisition, and teacher control rests on the simple fact pointed out earlier: that children can actually ask about what they most urgently want and need to learn, and that learning achieved in this way probably becomes deeply integrated. Teachers will want to create an atmosphere in which every pupil feels free to bring his or her own line of enquiry out into the open. That is where the teacher can observe it, and perhaps enhance it. But in order to avoid misunderstanding, I must also re-emphasize three main
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points. First, a participatory pedagogy involving the use of children’s literature would not be so predominantly literary or hedonistic as to eliminate the use of many other kinds of authentic materials, or to ignore the importance of a careful and even quite separate concentration on learners’ mastery of linguistic form. Secondly, although it would maximize the opportunities for spontaneous acquisition, the pedagogy could by no means dispense with explicit discussion and deliberate study. Thirdly, empathetic participation does not necessarily become sympathy, and people do not always learn a foreign language simply in order to become passive recipients. The new language opens up new spheres in which to exercise personal judgement, and to be an individual agent. Then again, I am bound to point out that this present chapter has been entirely theoretical, and its examples purely imaginary. Claims for children’s novels within a participatory pedagogy need to be tested in practice, through day-to-day teaching activities with particular children and particular children’s books, as discussed in the next two chapters. But with all due reservations, the point I have been trying to make is one with deep roots in the history of foreign language education, and one which can help to suggest future directions as well. These connections between language, culture, pleasure, curiosity, experience, and literature would not have surprised pedagogues in the grammar schools in Tudor England. One of the things they saw to was that their pupils read, acted and imitated the comedies of Plautus, for instance, so equipping themselves for international scholarly debate and polite conversation in Latin. It was only during the eighteenth century, as the European vernaculars themselves began to develop an academic register, that some of the empathetic and affective dimensions of language learning were lost sight of (see Hawkins, 1987, pp.97–116). Educational practice today is at last rediscovering the older insight: that linguistic and cultural proficiency can be greatly promoted by reading literature, because this activity is itself a genuine and enjoyable form of linguistic and cultural participation. And especially if learners themselves can understand this, the likelihood of spontaneous acquisition will be all the greater. If they are self-conscious about the process, they themselves may be able to promote it. If, by contrast, they assume that the only things they have to learn are those which their teacher or their coursebook explicitly mentions, then a huge potential will almost certainly be wasted. Even if they get a good way beyond the level of beds and frogs and jugs and queens and apples, they will not be developing their own powers of inference and imagination. As a result, their intellectual, affective and practical competence in milieus other than their home patch will be unecessarily limited. They will be uncomprehending, and unempowered for action, in ways that an empathetic reading of children’s novels might have helped to prevent.
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References Acton, W. R., & de Felix, J. W. (1986). Acculturation and mind. In J. M. Valdes (Ed.), Culturebound: Bridging the cultural gap in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, N. (1975). The analysis of foreign and familiar cultures. In R. C. Lafayette (Ed.), The culture revolution in foreign language teaching. Skokie, IL: National Textbook Company. Brown, H. D. (1980). Principles of language learning and teaching. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Buttjes, D., & Byram, M. (Eds.) (1991). Mediating languages and cultures: Towards an intercultural theory of foreign language education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M. (1989). Cultural studies in foreign language education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., & Esarte-Sarries, V. (1991). Investigating cultural studies in foreign language teaching: A book for teachers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., Esarte-Sarries, V., & Taylor, S. (1991). Cultural studies and language learning: A research report. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M. & Fleming. M. (Eds.) (1998). Language learning in intercultural perspective: Approaches through drama and ethnography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cazden, C.B. (1998) Socialization. In J.L. Mey (Ed.), Concise encylopedia of pragmatics (pp.890–2). Amsterdam: Elsevier Mey. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon. Crookes, G., & Schmidt, R. W. (1991). Motivation: Reopening the research agenda. Language Learning, 41, 469–52. Deci, E. L. (1975). Intrinsic motivation. New York: Plenum. Dornyei, Z. (1998). Conceptualizing willingness to communicate in a L2: A situational model of L2 confidence and affiliation. Modern Language Journal, 82, 4, 545–62 Egan, K. (1992). Imagination in teaching and learning: Ages 8–15. London: Routledge. Ellis, R. (1994). The study of second language acquistion. London: Oxford University Press. Gardner, R. C.& Lambert, W. E. (1959). Motivational variables in second language acquisition. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 13, 266–72. Geertz, C. (1975). The interpretation of culture. London: Hutchinson. Graddol, D. (1999). The decline of the native speaker. AILA Review, 13, 57–68. Graddol, D. (2001).The future of English as a European language. The European Messenger, 10/2, 47–55. Gregg, K. R. (1998). Second language acquisition: History and theory. In J. L. Mey (Ed.), Concise encylopedia of pragmatics (pp.808–16). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Harrison, B. (1990). Culture, literature and the language classroom. In B. Harrison (Ed), Culture and the language classroom. London: Modern English Publications and British Council. Hawkins, E. W. (1987). Modern languages in the curriculum, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hinkel, E. (1999). Culture in second language teaching and learning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. House, J. (2000). A “stateless” language that Europe should embrace. Guardian Weekly, April 19th-25th. Learning English Supplement, pp.1–3. Hurst, R. (1991). Teaching children adult language. In C. Kennedy & J. Jarvis (Eds.), Ideas and issues in primary ELT (pp.131–8). Hong Kong: Nelson
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Krashen, S. D., & Terrell, T. D. (1983). The Natural Approach: Language acquisition in the classroom. Oxford: Pergammon. Lee, E., Whitburn, M., & Winter, F. (1982). Culture and semantic opacity in foreign language learning. In J. Nivette (Ed.), Cultural aspects of foreign language teaching. Brussels: ABLA Papers (6). Lévi-Strauss, C. ([1964] 1970). Overture to Le Cru et le Cuit. In J. Ehrmann (Ed.), Structuralism (pp.31–55). Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday. Lier, L. van (1996). Interaction in the language curriculum: Awareness, autonomy and authenticity. London: Longman. Lightbown, P.M. (1985). Great expectations: Second-language acquisition research and classroom teaching. Applied Linguistics, 6, 173–89. Lightbown, P. M. (2000). Anniversary article: Classroom SLA research and second language teaching. Applied Linguistics, 21, 431–62. Loveday, L.(1982). The sociolinguistics of learning and using a non-native language. Oxford: Pergammon. McLaughlin, B., Robbins S., & Wade, J. A. B. T. (1998). Second language learning and teaching, Theory of. In J. L. Mey, Concise encylopedia of pragmatics (pp.816–28). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Midgley, M. (1980). Beast and man: The roots of human nature. London: Methuen. Morgan, C. (1995). Cultural awareness and the national curriculum. Language Learning Journal, 2, 9–12. Rönnqvist, L., & Sell, R. D. (1995). Teenage books in foreign language education for the middle school. In R. D. Sell (Ed.), Literature throughout foreign language education: The implications of pragmatics [= Review of English Language Teaching 5/1](pp.40–73). London: Modern English Publications and the British Council. Rosseel, E. (1982). Needs, cultural identity and foreign language learning. In R. T. Nasr, S. Odunuga, E. Rosseel & C. Y. Silva (Eds.), Foreign language teaching and cultural Identity. São Paulo: Instituto de Idiomas Yázigi-Aimav. Rumelhart, D. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cognition. In R. J. Spiro, J. Rand, B. C. Bruce & W. F. Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension (pp.33–58). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schiefflin, B. & Ochs, E. (1986). Language socializaton. Annual Review of Anthropology, 15, 163–91. Schmidt, R. W. (1983). Interaction, acculturation, and the acquisition of communicative competence: A case study of an adult. In N. Wolfson (Ed.), Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition (pp.137–74). Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Seelye, H. N. (1985). Teaching culture: Strategies for intercultural communication, 2nd ed. Lincolnwood, IL.: National Textbook Company. Seidlhofer, B. (2001a). Brave new English. The European Messenger, 10/1, 42–48. Seidlhofer, B. (2001b). Towards making “Euro-English” a linguistic reality. English Today, 17/4, 14–16. Sell, R. D. (Ed.). (1995). Literature throughout foreign language education: The implications of pragmatics [= Review of English Language Teaching 5/1]. London: Modern English Publications and the British Council. Sell, R.D. (2000). Literature as communication: The foundations of mediating criticism. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sell, R. D. (2001). A historical but non-determinist pragmatics of literary communication. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2, 1–32
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Sjöholm, K. (2001). Incidental learning of English by Swedish learners in Finland. In M. Gill, A. J. Johnson, L. M. Koski, R. D. Sell, & B. Wårvik (Eds.), Language, learning, literature: Studies presented to Håkan Ringbom [= English Department Publications 4] (pp.77–89). Åbo: Åbo Akademi University. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sundholm, M., & Finne L. (1994). Det globala klassrummet. Vasa: Pedagogiska fakulteten vid Åbo Akademi. Tallis, R. (1997). Enemies of hope: A critique of contemporary pessimism, irrationalism, antihumanism and counter-enlightenment. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Vygotsky, L. S. (1971). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
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Chapter 14
Primary-level EFL Planning a multicultural fiction project Charlotta Sell
1.
Towards a Finnish field study
Finland is an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous nation, with two state churches (Greek Orthodox and Evangelical Lutheran), with a minority Sami population in Lapland, with two official languages, Finnish and Swedish, and with a long history of minorities speaking other languages as well. But even so, it is a markedly “all-white” society. The influx of immigrants, and especially of refugees, is constantly increasing, but is still small compared with other European countries. And despite the continuing processes of internationalization and globalization, many Finnish people are still isolated from close experience of visible minorities. Whereas large religious or ethnic minories have been part British, American, Canadian and Australian history for a long time, Finnish history is different. Nor is there a long tradition of dealing with issues of multiculturalism and antiracism within the Finnish educational system. The most recent version of the Finnish National Curriculum (Grunderna för grundskolans läroplan, 1994) does stress the overarching goals of promoting European, international and multicultural awareness, and of fostering tolerance and respect for diversity. Nor are the specific needs of children from ethnic, linguistic or religious minories by any means overlooked. What is missing is practical savoir faire about how to implement multicultural objectives within mainstream teaching. Teachers hoping to develop their own practice can find few guidelines or helpful local examples. On the other hand, Finland can certainly benefit from the practical wisdom of countries whose histories are different. In planning for the future, we can try to adapt the lessons learned elsewhere to our own situation. More particularly, one increasingly common aim in Britain, the US, Canada, and Australia is simply to familiarize children with the various kinds of human diversity. My suggestion is that in Finland, by importing multicultural books, and by using them appropriately, we might be able to familiarize our own pupils with issues of diversity and multiculturalism in somewhat the same way. Hence my current undertaking: a field
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study exploring a multiculturally oriented programme for English as a foreign language (EFL) in a Finnish primary school, with special emphasis on the role of multicultural children’s novels. The particular school is a Swedish-language school. The children involved are 11- to 12- year-olds. And the children’s novels are the central element of the entire programme. In speaking of a multicultural orientation, I have in mind the kind of multicultural and anti-racist objectives and initiatives which can be implemented in teaching throughout the school curriculum — what some of the pioneers called multicultural education inclusive of anti-racism (Hessari & Hill, 1989; King & Reiss, 1993). This approach to education has shown itself to be ideologically very sensitive, and particular programmes have come in for heavy criticism from across the entire political spectrum. At the same time, the basic need for careful thought and sensible strategies in this area is widely accepted. To put it simply, teaching which embraces a multicultural dimension aims to prepare children for life in a multicultural society and world, within which, ideally speaking, different groupings (linguistic, religious, cultural, ethnic) would respect each other’s cultures and values, even if a strong emphasis is also placed on finding similarities between groupings. In practice, part of what this means is the inclusion of knowledge about minority groups and their perspectives throughout the mainstream school curriculum. In educational districts with a heterogeneous population, a real effort is made to provide equality of educational opportunity and outcome, regardless of race, class, ethnicity, gender, or culture (Deegan, 1996; Epstein, 1993; Gould, 1993). In “white” districts, the multicultural dimension aims to counteract the kind of prejudice, stereotyping and myth which can arise when members of different groupings do not mix with each other on a daily basis and know each other as friends (De Genova, 1995; Gaine 2000; Keats, 1996). In schools and colleges in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, multicultural content has to some extent become part of core courses, although detailed policies vis à vis multiculturalism do differ from one country to another. In my own work, the multicultural dimension is restricted to the possibilities within the one particular school subject: EFL. To acquire a new language requires a significant jump from one world-view to another. The learner’s pre-existing modes of thought and action have to be modified. But tolerance, and an insight into the foreign culture, will not necessarily develop from an intense concentration on communication skills. Even FLE pedagogies encouraging the maximum element of empathetic participation in the target culture will never eliminate the need for a lot of explicit discussion and explanation on the part of the teacher. This is the side of FLE which has been specially well developed by the intercultural understanding movement. Byram (1992), in particular, has argued that multicultural goals need to be openly incorporated, and call for separate measures. And as Byram & Morgan (1994) have emphasized, there may well be a place for comparative methods, leading to
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contrastive analysis of the target culture and the students’ own culture side by side. Looking at one’s own culture through the eyes of other people, and looking at foreign cultures through the eyes of their own denizens, are important steps in developing intercultural competence (see also Byram & Esarte-Sarries, 1991, and Risager, 1998). The two societies mainly emphasized by Finnish teachers of English, Britain and the United States, are themselves multicultural, so that the scope for a multicultural dimension is especially promising here. Byram (1993) says that teachers should draw attention to minorities in the target language society, and make comparisons with minority issues within the learners’own society. Within my own EFL-project, I shall see whether it is possible to link British minorities to my pupils’ own position as part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, and to other minority positions in Finland as well. The literature project will provide the basis for an ethnographic case study, in which I myself will be acting as both teacher and researcher. When the study has been carried out and analysed, I hope to offer a holistic picture of the most significant issues involved. I would expect to say something, not only about the practicality of using longer texts in the primary school foreign language classroom, and not only about how the pragmatic values of youth and non-nativeness have affected these particular readers of these particular children’s books, but above all about whether or not their reading has been a process involving empathetic understanding. But this is an area in which little of any value is likely to be discovered without careful planning. A chapter on somewhat more preliminary matters should therefore have its own kind of interest. In what follows here, I shall first outline a few of the non-Finnish precedents — theoretical and practical — for the kind of work I have in view. Then at greater length, I shall describe the actual nitty-gritty of organizing the teaching.
2.
Non-Finnish precedents
From the late 1960s and early 1970s onwards, multicultural perspectives and antiracist assumptions became increasingly common in children’s books, in both Britain, Canada, Australia, and the US. A main feature was the inclusion and positive representation of characters representing minority groupings (Stones, 1999). This can be seen as a response to developments within the spheres of equal rights, empowerment, and national multicultural policies. By the 1990s, a positive and multi-faceted representation of sociocultural difference was a hallmark of many of the new children’s novels, picturebooks, Big Books, information books, dual language books, and CD-Roms.
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Meanwhile, there were language teaching experts in the fields of EFL, English as a second language (ESL) and first language teaching who, further developing the kind of approach put forward by Byram (1989), began to discuss the classroom potentialities of literary texts. Collie and Slater (1987), Sell (1995), Schewe (1998), and Silberstein (1994) all suggested that reading literature can postively promote cultural awareness and understanding. This was over and above the potential of literature as a means to learn an actual target language (Hill, 1986). As for multicultural children’s literature, two important reasons given for its use are: to develop all students’ knowledge of, and respect for religious, racial, and ethnic diversity; and to familiarize them with the literary traditions of other peoples and countries around the world (Stotsky, 1994). As Naidoo (1999) points out, in the world of today we need young people who can cope with ambiguity, understand alternatives, recognize different perspectives, and feel committed to the idea of a common humanity of richly manifold formations. The curriculum needs to combine literacy aims with this training for a larger citizenship. Here literature can have a key role, because it offers imagined worlds which seem real enough to engage us, but which at the same time help us consider ourselves and others in what may be a new light (Rosenthal, 1995). In Naidoo’s words: Fiction can be a starting point for exploring questions about one’s own identity as well as that of others, for exploring commonalities as well as conflict and clashing perspectives. The great strength of fiction is that it offers a realm removed from immediate reality and yet it can provide a prism through which we can see ourselves and others. (Naidoo, 1999, p.11)
— though Naidoo is very careful to stress that multicultural books can also be works of writerly art, to be enjoyed and discussed for their literary qualities. In planning my own primary school EFL-literature project, I have noted MacPhee’s (1997) report of her own use of multicultural literature with American first-graders of European-American descent. The books she used were: Judith Vigna’s Black like Kyra, White like me (1992), Mary Hoffman’s Amazing Grace (1991), Faith Ringgold’s Aunt Harriet’s Railroad in the Sky (1992), and Francene Sabin’s Jackie Robinson (1985). Throughout an entire school year, MacPhee read to the children from these novels, all of them featuring African-Americans as central characters. As a way of confronting social issues and getting to grips with unfamiliar cultural contexts, she got her pupils to enter into dialogue. This helped them to empathize with “otherness” and to understand the nature of racial discrimination, which they described as unjust. MacPhee also found that her pupils used their own personal experiences as a way of affirming the ideas in the stories. Although she emphasizes the need for further research, these responses alone led her to hope that more teachers will come to use multicultural children’s literature in a similarly catalytic role.
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I have also considered the work of Samway and Whang (1996), who describe how groups of English-speaking children were able to learn about different cultures through Literature Study Circles. During the course of this project, the pupils often expressed views on the subject of racism, and sometimes told each other about their own experiences of it. Among other things, they explored misconceptions which can lie behind judgements about unfamiliar cultures. They also discussed a number of children’s books such as Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry (1987), The Gold Cadillac (1987), The Friendship (1989) and Mississippi Bridge (1990), and Linda Crew’s Children of the River (1989). As a result, they improved their understanding of particular cultural milieus, and of the people living within them. In this process, an important role was played by the open-ended discussions of controversial issues. Then again, an influential one-year literature project was conducted by Naidoo (1992). This involved an attempt to develop anti-racist awareness among 13–14-year-old white students in England. More specifically, the goals were: to investigate the likelihood that certain children’s books would extend white students’ empathy with otherness; to challenge ethnocentric and racist assumptions; and to develop critical thinking about the nature of British society. The selected texts were Nigel Hinton’s Buddy (1982), Hans Peter Reichter’s Friedrich (1987), Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, and Sheila Gordon’s Waiting for the Rain (1987), and these books did seem to work in the way Naidoo had hoped. In some of them, racism was not a central focus, but there were “gaps” in their narrative which nevertheless invited exploration in these terms. At the same time, Naidoo stresses that even literature written from a strongly anti-racist perspective is unlikely to challenge racist assumptions, unless the pupils are to some extent receptive already. She also makes the point that in addressing racism with white students, the teacher may sometimes be expecting them to undertake a fair degree of self-criticism. Lastly, there is a British project which, although it has not directly influenced my own work, is somewhat similar. The “Heartstone Odyssey project” (1999–2000) was designed for participants in the age-range 8–18, and was networked both nationally and internationally. It was one of several recent attempts to explore multiculturalism with children and young people all over Europe. Specific features included: the use of materials which will stimulate discussion of racism and xenophobia; the discussion of certain specific types of relevant experience; and the creation of a piece of expressive art or written work, for display in one of a series of exhibitions.
3.
Organizing the teaching
So when young EFL-pupils are coping with target-language children’s fiction, how can a teacher most fruitfully help them make meanings and extend their understanding? In the rest of this chapter, I shall survey nine aspects of my own planning
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as teacher-researcher, ranging from the initial choice of books to questions of vocabulary development and reading for meaning. 3.1 Choosing the books In selecting books for the literature project, I have borne in mind that books in themselves can be motivating for pupils. Over and above this general interest factor, my two main considerations have been: that the books should actually be physically available in the school; and that their content should be relevant to the issue of multiculturalism in present-day Britain, the society about which pupils will already have been learning from EFL teaching. In order to let my 11- to 12-year-olds engage in more extensive reading than hitherto, I shall be using not only short stories but novels. And as extra reading materials, there will also be picturebooks and information books, also chosen on the basis of content suitability. As for more detailed criteria, I have derived these from various sources: from my own previous experience of using literature in a language classroom; from published guidelines and recommendations; and from observations by Bishop (1992), Bond (1994), Day & Bamford (1998), Hill (1986), Pinsent (1997), Stones (1999), Spangenberg-Urbschat & Pritchard (1994), Silberstein (1994), Stotsky (1994), and Swarbrick (1998). Some of these other criteria have to do with: –
layout and format, e.g. the number of pages; the line-spacing; the size and clarity of font; the length of paragraphs and chapters; the relationship between the illustrations and the text; and the illustrations’ multicultural inclusiveness and degree of stereotyping;
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language and discourse, e.g. difficulty of vocabulary; degree of specialized or subject-related vocabulary; syntactical complexity; the implications of colloquialisms and slang for the book’s comprehensibility; overall clarity; ratio of description to action; tagging of dialogue; amount of figurative or otherwise ambiguous language; complexity of discourse; point(s) of view; reliability and coherence of plot;
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plot and storyline, e.g. appeal to the age group, simplicity/complexity, possibility of prediction;
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characters and character roles, e.g. inclusion and positive representation of members from minority populations; portrayal of a variety of people — men, women, black, white etc. — in a variety of different roles;
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and practical considerations, e.g. availability of teaching guides, learning materials, video and audio recordings.
Books which meet most of these criteria would in principle be more suitable for the project than those which do not.
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At the time when I was making my choices, I was based at the Reading and Language Information Centre (RALIC) of the University of Reading, England. There, I had access to a wide collection of multicultural children’s books, from which I first picked out some 100 books which were likely to meet some of my criteria. From these, I next selected those which matched the largest number of criteria, and then considered them more closely. The last stage of selection involved putting together a collection through which different kinds of readers — both girls and boys, and both stronger and weaker readers — would be able to find their own paths. Another aim was to ensure that the collection included both the positive and the more problematic aspects of multicultural diversity, i.e. books in which diversity is pictured as enriching, and books in which minority characters might be experiencing difficulties. Also, I wanted to include some books in which diversity is in itself not an issue, but which are nonetheless inclusive of minority members in important roles. As far as the novels were concerned, it was not easy to find authentically tagetculture fiction in which both the language and the content were suitable for young EFL-pupils. Such pupils are actually very diverse in their reading habits and interests, and in their levels of general social and intellectual development as well. This means that any criterion of content suitability, and especially of content suitability for both sexes, was very difficult to apply. Because of language considerations, I also had to leave aside many delightful books whose portrayal of minority cultures was exemplary. Multicultural books which did have a suitable level of language and discourse sometimes had content which would appeal to a distinctly younger age group. As a result, my final selection had to be something of a compromise between the various factors I have mentioned. Storybooks can support anti-bias objectives and promote respect for human diversity in several ways: by talking about human differences, so helping children to understand their own backgrounds and special qualities; by talking through human differences, focussing on commonalities without so much emphasis on diversity; and by talking about various issues arising, in particular about learning to live side by side with other people (Marshall, 1998). In the books I finally chose, cultural differences were sometimes a main point, but sometimes not, and some of them had an explicitly multicultural or anti-racist dimension, but others did not. The one feature they did all have in common was the portrayal of members of minority groupings in important roles. Jamila Gavin’s I want to be an angel, and other stories (1991) and Grandpa Chatterji (1993), and also Elisabeth Laird’s Secret Friends (1996), include the experience, both positive and negative, of being a member of an ethnic minority group in Britain. Secret Friends, Paul May’s Troublemakers, and to some extent I want to be an angel have a more or less explicitly anti-racist and antibullying dimension. Judy Allen’s Seven Weird Days at Number 31(1998) and Malorie Blackman’s Operation Gadgetman (1993) portray members of minorities in
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important roles, and show characters from different groups successfully getting on with each other, though without specific reference to their ethnicity or heritage. In Grandpa Chatterji and Secret Friends, by contrast, the sense of different cultures coming together is very strong. In Secret Friends it never becomes quite clear what the “other” culture is, or which country the “different” character comes from — even if the continent is hinted —, but in Grandpa Chatterjii the grandfather from India explicitly experiences both England and his grandchildren, who live in England, for the first time. 3.2 Focus and overarching structure At the beginning of the term, the children will learn about the structure of the project and about what is expected of them. They will also explore useful reading strategies (see below), appropriate uses of a dictionary, and various methods of vocabulary learning (see below) in relation to the books being read. The literature project proper will consist of two main phases. During Phase 1, the focus will be on group work with one of the following novels: Jamila Gavin’s Grandpa Chatterji, Judy Allen’s Seven Weird Days at Number 31, and Malorie Blackman’s Operation Gadgetman. The children will be divided into groups by their choice of book. This allows for re-grouping within lessons, so that children reading different books come together and share their readings with each other, offering valuable practice for story-re-telling. During Phase 2, groups of pupils will again be formed on the basis of the books they choose to read. This time, they will be asked to choose between Jamila Gavin’s I want to be and angel, Paul May’s Troublemakers, and Elisabeth Laird’s Secret Friends. In both Phases, there will be a deadline by which the work with each book should be finished. During Phase 1, the emphasis will be on understanding the texts, on open and closed text-comprehension questions, and vocabulary learning, with the teacher monitoring what is happening and serving as a model. When the children begin to respond to texts independently, the focus will gradually move towards more openended independent and inferential questioning (see below) within the reading groups, and towards pupils-initiated independent and personal responses (see below; cf. Cooper, 2000). 3.3 The basic structure of lessons Lessons will include some of the following items: – – –
Discussing the chapter which has been read for homework Sharing thoughts and responses in groups Sharing thoughts in whole class about – issues raised by the pupils
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– – –
– –
– –
issues which might have been raised during previous lessons teacher-suggested topics and questions issues related to sociocultural knowledge, other aspects of culture, antiracism, or other issues central to the novel or chapter – other relevant issues Going through the homework within groups When appropriate, working on the chapter with – further tasks and activities – dramatizing – writing in reading diaries – other individual writing – shared writing – additional material, such as information books on related themes, or videos – an over-arching group-project or end-product – an over-arching individual end-product (essay, book review, recommendation, or other writing task etc.) – the teacher reading aloud to the children Setting new home work for the group (the children agreeing on how much to read, bearing in mind individual abilities and needs) Looking at the following chapter, predicting events, dealing with new vocabulary.
3.4 Collaboration and individualization in EFL literacy instruction There are some basic differences between the settings of second language (SL) learning and foreign language (FL) learning. SL acquisition generally takes place in a society in which the SL plays an important role, and the SL learner is exposed to the target language in his/her own environment. FL learning, on the other hand, takes place in a setting in which the foreign language does not usually have a major societal role, and in which the language is primarily learned in a classroom (Buttjes, 1990; Ellis, 1994). At the same time, Ellis (1994) chooses to distinguish between language learning which takes place in educational establishments and is instructed, and acquisition which takes place in natural settings and is naturalistic. SL learning in schools and FL learning in schools both occur in instructional settings. As for the EFL-pupils involved in the present literature project, they are learning English in a language classroom, and within a society where English is not spoken as an official language. On the other hand, they have long been exposed to English language youth culture, to computer language and -literacy, and to various forms of media influences in English, making them more familiar with English than with other foreign languages, and making English a highly motivating language to learn (Sjöholm, 2001). In developing my strategy for literacy instruction, therefore,
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I have not made a very strong distinction between SL and FL learning. Research into the initial stages of reading in an SL or FL is not directly relevant to the present project, since the pupils involved are already fluent readers in two languages (Swedish and Finnish), and some are learning German as well. Still more to the point, for two to three years they will all have been reading short texts in English. This is not to say that there are no significant differences between reading in a first language (L1) and a SL or FL (Williams, 1998). SL/FL readers are often confronted with words they do not know (Chamot & O’Malley, 1994), and may be unfamiliar with some of the topics and rhetorical devices as well (Day & Bamford, 1998). They need to make inferences about a text’s message, and about its metaphors, its ordering of information, its “gaps”, its cultural reference, and its narrative point of view (Swaffar, Arens & Byrnes, 1991), all of which can be dealt with within an instructional framework. Although the SL/FL reader may be disadvantaged as regards language proficiency in the narrow sense, some research suggests that, given appropriate support, learners who are already fluent readers of one language may have a head-strart when it comes to reading some other language (Edwards, 1997a). Their existing mental frameworks, factual knowledge, and experience of the world can positively help them (Swarbrick, 1998). Among other things, they will understand the significance of genre, and have a basic understanding of print, plus an awareness of their own culture, and of story structure, too. Also, they may have knowledge of punctuation, and be aware that many European languages share similar words, and that it is possible to read in different ways depending on the circumstances and purpose. Above all, their prior reading may have usefully developed their guessing strategies (Chamot & O’Malley, 1994), and their ability to cope with uncertainty and ambiguity (Aeberdold & Field, 1997). Even though SL and FL reading are not exactly the same, some resource books for teachers describe activities which are valuable in both SL and FL settings. Such is the case with Aebersold & Field (1997), who equate SL and FL reading throughout, both in methods of vocabulary learning and in comprehension exercises. For reasons already explained, this kind of material is relevant to my planned project. At the same time, my approach to literacy instruction involves other considerations as well. It is a holistic approach, putting meaning construction at the very centre, with a strong emphasis on reader response and on the learner’s own activity, but within a framework of collaborative and shared reading. Interactive reading is a combination of extensive and intensive reading, i.e. a combination of top-down and bottom-up strategies, with an emphasis on both reading for meaning and on work at the sentence- and vocabulary level (Aebersold & Field, 1997; Silberstein, 1994; Swaffar, Arens & Byrnes, 1991). All this allows for various kinds of reading strategy and various methods of vocabulary learning (see below), and can turn the pupils’ prior experience of L1 and other reading to positive advantage (Carrell, 1991;
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Swaffar, Arens & Byrnes, 1991). Indeed, the creation of new literacy activities is not my project’s aim. Instead, reading activities already known to L1 and SL/FL teachers will be adapted to the primary school EFL-setting. The literature project will similarly try to maximize the benefits of collaborative interaction between students. They will be encouraged to share their thoughts, and to work in small groups. A lot of the time, they will be working in reading groups that also function as reader response groups. The idea is that they will get a firm grasp of the texts by relating them to their own previous experience (Cooper, 2000; Moore & Wade, 1995), and that tasks and activities should promote multicultural awareness by taking up particular issues. One aspect of my own role as teacher here will be, wherever possible, to use the target language, while among themselves the children will be encouraged to help each other when using English. But in both oral and written work they will be free to make their own choice of language. Before presenting their thoughts to the whole class, they will have a chance to practise what they want to say in small groups. The element of collaboration will not rule out an element of individualization. Although pupils will mostly be working together on reading and reading activities (cf. Day & Bamford, 1998; Samway & Whang, 1996), those who need extra support for reading at home will be able to borrow tape recordings of the stories (cf. Day & Bamford, 1998; Moore & Wade, 1995; Samway & Whang, 1996; Swarbrick, 1990). Children will not be forced to read aloud in groups unless they want to, and when they do read aloud they will not have to manage more than they are comfortable with. Weaker readers may prefer to listen to the others reading, and in this way may grasp the meaning and develop their understanding of the text, without having to focus their energy on the decoding of difficult words, for instance (cf. Moore & Wade, 1995). Another opportunity for individual choice is in the matter of the actual reading material. From the six books on which teaching will be mainly based, each student will select two for special attention. This, though, is only the beginning. In addition to the six main books, one or two copies of a number of other books will also be available. These will be for the use of pupils who complete their tasks and readings before the deadline, or who just want to do extra reading anyway. These extra books include children’s information books on ethnic and religious groups in Britain, multicultural picture books, and multicultural novels on a variety of different themes, with language and content that are in some cases more challenging than those of the obligatory books, and in other cases less so. The authors include Bernard Ashley, Lisa Bruce, Rachna Gilmore, Mary Hoffman, Julia Jarman, and Jacqueline Roy. Pupils who have chosen Jamila Gavin’s Grandpa Chatterji will also have the chance to read the sequel, Granpa’s Indian Summer (1995), and there will be more books by Malorie Blackman as well.
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3.5 Reading strategies and activities Thorough comprehension of a text requires that pupils not only understand individual details but that they can relate one idea to another (Silberstein, 1994). They need to engage with the text in a critical and creative way, trying to connect the meaning represented in the text with what is going on in their own mind (Wells, 1991). Various pre-, during-, and post-reading strategies and activities can enhance this process, helping students to evaluate texts in terms of their own belief systems (Baumann, Hooten & White, 1999). Comprehension is also affected by pupils’ general styles of learning and cognition. As already noted, it is often the case that skilled L1 readers can use the strategies they have already acquired as a way of improving their SL/FL reading (Aebersold & Field, 1997). 3.5.1 Pre-reading There are three main reasons for preparing students to read: (1) to establish a purpose in reading a given text, (2) to make reading more effective by establishing realistic expectations about what the text contains, and (3) to enrich the reading experience by consolidating existing knowledge about the topic (Aebersold & Field, 1997; Collie & Slater, 1987; Hill, 1986). This last point is by far the most important. The teacher tries to activate and develop what students know already, and to build bridges to what they are expected to learn. This prepares their mental schemata or structures of expectation so that they will have a real chance to understand the text. Further aims are to sensitize them more specifically to the experiences thematized in the text (Kramsch, 1993), and to introduce relevant vocabulary (Aebersold & Field, 1997). Within the planned project, pre-reading activities might include: –
– – – –
pre-reading discussions – discussions in pairs or groups about the title of the books, then a sharing of thoughts with the whole class – discussions about expectations and predictions brainstorming familiarization with the social context and setting of the books before reading role play vocabulary learning activities (see below).
To take as an example the first chapter of Secret Friends, it would be appropriate to begin with pre-reading discussions about the title, the blurb, the pictures, and the author, letting the children predict what the story might be about. From the blurb and the pictures it might be clear that the book is about the experience of starting in a new school. This and other predictions could be written down on slips of paper and saved, to be returned to when the entire book has been read. The children could then discuss, first in their groups and then with the teacher, what starting in
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a new school might actually be like, what feelings one might have, what questions to ask. Then they could try to imagine how they themselves will feel when, in a year’s time, they move on to the secondary school, something they could represent in a semantic map (see below) based on the expression “beginning secondary school”. After this, the teacher could pick out a few key expressions from the first chapter as the basis for brainstorming: for instance, secondary school, ears, and stood up for her. The pupils could also play a vocabulary game in their groups, in which they try to pair the right word in English with the right translation into Swedish. The words could be some of those which are important to the chapter’s story-line or to the portrayal of the characters, such as bumped into each other, brown frizzy hair, pale brown skin, freckles, nervousness, bursting into laughter, tears had sprouted, awkwardly, overheard, nudge, got things back on the right track, flushed. After the game, the pupils could be asked to predict what might happen in the first chapter, and then to begin reading in their groups. 3.5.2 During reading During-reading activities and strategies are used to monitor comprehension, to keep the pupil-readers going, and to help them organize and evaluate the text’s ideas. Making students aware of explicit monitoring strategies, and of the possible need to adjust their interpretation, is an important part of reading education (Aebersold & Field, 1997). Within the planned project, the work could include: – – – – –
prediction and re-reading, perhaps with reference to links between the pupils’ own lives and the lives of the characters activities designed to promote critical thinking (see below) extending reading into discussion and other oral activities (see below) extending reading and discussions into writing (note-taking whilst reading, and writing in reader-response journals or diaries (see below)) vocabulary learning (see below)
So as they start to work on the first chapter of Secret Friends, pupils will be invited to take turns reading aloud, with each child reading as much or as little as he or she wishes to. They will be asked to stop each time someone wants to know the meaning of the word. When this happens, they should first re-read that sentence, then read the whole paragraph and try to guess the meaning from the context. They should share their ideas and try to construct meaning together. If they are still unsure, they might want to think about what was said earlier in the chapter, or read ahead to see if things become clear later on. If they do not understand even then, they might want to turn to a dictionary, after which they write down the word in English, its translation into Swedish, and their personal understanding of the word, in their notebooks (see below).
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3.5.3 Post-reading Post-reading strategies are used to reconstruct important ideas, to organize them, and to relate them to the structure of the text (Johnson, 1998). This helps pupils evaluate and reflect on their own learning, and to integrate information obtained from text with what they already know. It also gives them a chance to apply their newly acquired insights to the real world. Post-reading activities include text comprehension questions, which can be either oral or written, and which can be answered individually, in groups, or by the whole class. These questions focus on language, content, or both, and can be either literal — i.e. questions about information contained in the text — or inferential — i.e. questions about points which are not explicit (see below). Questions that focus on language or on lower-level cognitive skills help build literal comprehension of texts, whereas questions that focus on analysis, synthesis or evaluation are less text bound, and demand higherlevel comprehension skills (Aebersold & Field, 1997). In instructional settings within SL/FL education, post-reading comprehension activities and discussions need to engage students in all levels of comprehension. Not least, activities involving drama can focus children’s attention on specific questions, events, issues, and concepts, so helping them gain a deeper understanding of the text and encouraging active involvement and an understanding of cultural issues (Hendy, 1994; Schmidt, 1998; Heathcote & Bolton, 1998). Within the proposed project, post-reading strategies and activities might include: – – – – – – –
text comprehension questions with a focus on language and content (see below) inferential questioning and discussions (see below) reader response in small groups and whole class (see below) reader response individually in written tasks (see below) various types of process writing individually (see below) presentations end products in groups and in whole class drama activities.
Having read Chapter One of Secret Friends, pupils will engage in group discussion about the content of the chapter (see below), and in various language activities. The content discussion will focus on both closed-text comprehension questions, on questions about main characters, the plot, time, place and setting, and on more open-ended, inferential questions which include the pupils’ own thoughts and responses. The content activities and questions could include the following: Write down a few words in your notebook about the first things that came to your mind when you read the chapter. Then, discuss your thoughts with your partner, and then share your thoughts with the others in your group. Very briefly, re-tell the events of the chapter. One person in your group starts talking and then passes on the turn to the next person, and so on.
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Further activities can be: Discuss the following questions in your group. Remember that all views and thoughts in your groups need to be respected! Through who’s eyes are we seeing things? Who is telling the story? Where did Rafaella and Lucy first meet? When was this? Tell each other about Rafaella. What do we know about her from the text? How about Lucy? What do we know about her? Why did Lucy laugh at Rafaella? Did you have any questions when you finished reading the chapter? How did you feel when Lucy talked about Rafaella’s ears? Tell each other how you think Rafaella felt. Why do you think Lucy said, “I’m going to regret that moment till the day I die?” Tell each other about how Lucy is feeling now. Why is she feeling that way? What do you think will happen next in the story?
At the end of the lesson, and continuing as homework for the following lesson, the pupils can be asked to write personal responses in their reading diaries. If they have difficulties getting started, they can answer some of the following questions (see below): How did you feel when you read the chapter? What were you thinking? Have you ever been in Rafaella’s situation? How do you think Rafaella felt? What do you think Lucy should do now? Imagine that you are Rafaella. What would Rafaella write in her private diary today? Write a short diary entry for Rafaella in your notebook.
3.6 Inferential questions and reader response The types of group- and whole class discussions which might occur around literature perhaps call for further discussion. The teaching I am planning will have much in common with that described by Jewell & Pratt (1999), even though their study involved mainly native English speaking students. What they found was that by moving away from “right-or-wrong” questions they could improve the way students conducted discussions, made inferences, stated opinions, made connections with each other’s interpretations, expressed agreement and disagreement, and used supporting evidence. Also, there was an overall improvement in student motivation. Discussion with peers and interested adults gives children the opportunity to reflect on what they have read. For many of them, this kind of conversation is crucial, if they are to sort out a book’s ideas and story. When their literary experiences are linked to their own and other people’s personal life, abstract issues become more concrete (Moore & Wade, 1995), and by sharing their responses they
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can broaden their perspective and come to see where they stand in relation to other people (Ali, 1994). It is when texts are in this way contextualized and re-contextualized that meaning and understanding develop, and the same process also allows for different voices to be heard (Hade, 1991). Discussion in groups or pairs is sometimes the best way to fill in gaps and solve problems (Maybin & Moss, 1993; Moore & Wade, 1995). Given such a strong emphasis on reader response, I am hoping to promote both students’ own self-knowledge and their involvement with the texts (cf. Spiegel, 1996). Inevitably, the point of view of the text will trigger different responses in different readers, and so will the grammar used, the point of departure, the spatial and temporal frames of reference, the relation between text time and story time, the characterization, and the dialogue, all of which features help to establish the narrator-reader relationship (Kramsch, 1993). Reading is thus constituted by interaction between the text and the reader. The meaning and significance which a reader derives from the text might not be exactly the same as that initially expressed by the writer, and may also differ from that of other readers who come to a text with different backgrounds, beliefs, and assumptions, which can also make responses very personal (Aebersold & Field, 1997; Kramsch 1993; Meek, 1988). Children need models of how to respond to fiction, and opportunities to explore responses (Reid & Bentley, 1996; Wray, 1994). As part of the literature project, I shall use questioning and prediction strategies before, during, and after reading, by suggesting various types of questions which the pupils might want to ask each other or themselves. These open-ended questions will cover thoughts about the text, the plot, the time and setting, the characters, and pupils’ general attitude towards the book (Reid & Bentley, 1996), plus their more detailed interpretation and response. There will also be questions about their own personal experiences of issues arising from the texts. All this will take a fair amount of time, since it will be their first introduction to this kind of enquiry. During whole class discussion, I shall adopt a modified form of Chambers’s (1993, pp.87–92) “Tell Me” approach. The “Tell Me” approach is a way of asking particular types of questions, whereby the readers are given an opportunity for three types of sharing: sharing enthusiasms, sharing puzzles (i.e. difficulties), and sharing connections (i.e. discovering patterns). “Tell Me booktalk” builds on an ordinary conversational mode. The pupils merely need to understand that there is no right answer, and that the teacher does not have a perfect solution to all problems. The teacher’s role within the “Tell Me” approach is that of a chairperson, who takes the readers back to the text, sums up what has been said, and works collaboratively towards an interpretative understanding. Issues and questions will sometimes be discussed in whole class settings, and sometimes in pairs and groups (see below). Once the children start responding to the books by themselves, they will raise issues they would like to talk about, and be
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more explicit about their own reactions, interpretations, and meaning-making. From that point onwards the teacher can gradually hand over the responsibility for posing and answering questions to the children themselves (Soderman, Gregory & O’Neill, 1999; Wells, 1990). The teacher’s role becomes that of a facilitator, with the students setting the agenda for discussion, and the teacher helping them refine their responses (Spiegel, 1996). The teacher needs to be open-minded, and the children’s responses should be accepted as honest and meaningful. At the same time, children should also be asked to consider other possibilities and perspectives, and to sharpen, clarify, or justify their own suggestions. 3.7 Group activities The children will be sitting in small groups, with their desks forming a table. Group activities will involve reading, collaborative work on vocabulary and language, sharing of responses, and writing. While reading together, the groups will be working with the types of the pre-reading, during-reading and post-reading strategies and activities mentioned above. They will be encouraged to help each other as desired. If, at the start of the project, the children seem unfamiliar with responding to literature and collaborating in groups, I plan to give the members of each group specific roles. The types of role could be similar to those suggested by Soderman, Gregory and O’Neill (1999): the discussion director, who takes responsibility of thinking up good discussion questions; the literary passage master, who takes the readers back to important sections of the text; the connector, who directs the discussion from the text into the “real world”; the summarizer, who prepares a summary of the day’s reading, conveying the key points; and the vocabulary enricher, who is on the lookout for important new words. Other roles might include: group leader, who sees to it that people stay on task; secretary, who writes down the group’s important decisions; and reporter, who reports to the teacher or the rest of the class. 3.8 Extending reading into writing In order to know what children learn from texts, a teacher needs to look at what they write (Meek, 1988). For any reader, writing and reading can actually support each other (Farnan, Flood & Lapp, 1994). When reading, one may well see a connection between things one already knows, or even achieve insights which go beyond the already known. But the mental representations this involves may quickly fade. Even re-reading may be unable to recapture them. An immediate response in writing, by contrast, can be a powerful tool. It is something which can be re-visited and reconsidered, and from the start engages the reader-who-writes in
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a still deeper understanding, thanks to the range of different mental processes brought into play (Wells, 1991). This is why writing can help children to think about what they have read more self-consciously, and about the way their reading has affected them. Here it is worth mentioning that one way to improve children’s SL or FL productive proficiency is through creative writing and process writing. Children can produce drafts, revise, and edit, but without having to produce a text that is “perfect”. They can take risks, and can try out ideas without having to be anxious about the teacher’s response (Edwards, 1997b). Within my planned project, the opportunities for writing will vary, depending on the particular novel in hand and the nature of the current lesson. But there will certainly be scope for some of the assignments most commonly used in the reading classroom and in FL-settings, such as: – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
book reviews, or a poster advertizing a book book recommendations to classmates plot-summaries story-retellings a newspaper report about an event in the plot an interview with a character a letter to/from a character letters between the characters after the story has ended a conversation between two characters in the book a diary entry or biography for one of the characters a new incident an alternative ending a chapter which follows upon the last one a letter to the author saying what was best or worst about the book.
In addition, pupils will keep a reading diary (Swarbrick, 1998), which will function as a diary, a reader response log, and a dialogue journal. A dialogue journal is an interchange between the individual pupil and the teacher which is written, private, and at regular intervals, with the teacher sending back written responses, without correcting or grading the pupils’ own text (Peyton & Reed, 1990). This can help pupils gain an in-depth understanding of what they are learning and of how they are learning (metacognition), and the teacher, too, can assess ongoing learning at a conceptual level (Soderman, Gregory & O’Neill, 1999). In their reading diary I shall be asking pupils to list the things they read and give the dates of reading, and I shall also encourage them to express their own thoughts, feelings and judgements. They will be able to jot down anything that passes through their mind while reading, plus their reactions after reading to the end, and any reflections which arise after comparing notes with their colleagues in group- or whole class discussions. Their journal will be a private document, to be read only by themselves and the teacher,
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and they will be welcome to write in it in either Swedish or English, depending on how they feel. The main aim is to get their thoughts down on paper. If they feel their English is not good enough to say what they want to say, then it is better that they use Swedish. 3.9 Vocabulary learning and reading for meaning The new vocabulary to be learned will be associated with the chosen texts, and will be selected both by me as the teacher and by the pupils themselves. I shall pick out words from the texts which I think pupils will need, either in order to make sense of their current reading assignment, or in order to be able to cope in the target language at some time in the future (Aebersold & Field, 1997). Vocabulary which is discussed for current comprehension purposes will not have to be learned, but will be dealt with in during-reading activities as an aid to reading, whereas vocabulary selected for future relevance will be worked on in both pre- and post-reading language exercises. Pupils themselves will be asked to pick out vocabulary which they feel they would like to learn or know in order to comprehend the text. This will be part of their during-reading exercises and activities. Despite the focus on vocabulary, the students will need to appreciate that comprehension is possible without their understanding every single word, and that they may also stumble on difficult words when reading in their mother tongue. They will be encouraged to read for meaning, and to learn how to cope with words they do do not know (Aebersold & Field, 1997). This is one of the areas where they can draw strength from their pre-existent reading strategies for L1 (Day & Bamford, 1998). For instance, one procedure I shall encourage is the prediction of meanings from contexts, predictions which can then be discussed in groupwork. But there will also be occasions when pupils make no headway here, in which case they can refer to dictionaries.When using dictionaries, they will first be asked to read a chapter or paragraph without looking up the difficult words, and then go back to look up the words afterwards (Day & Bamford, 1998). Here my shaping of the instructional milieu will partly draw on Silberstein (1994), who offers a complete model for learning significant vocabulary, i.e. difficult words which occur frequently and upon which comprehension rests. But sometimes as part of either during- or post-reading, I shall also be using modified versions of semantic mapping (Schifini, 1994) and the Semantic Approach (Swaffar, Arens and Byrnes, 1991; Byram & Morgan, 1994), so as to consolidate students’ grasp of semantic fields, of synonymic and polysemic relationships, and of connotations. All in all, then, there will be a balance between promoting reading for meaning, and giving the pupils enough help and encouragement with difficult vocabulary to keep them going. As the project evolves, it might be that the children will need either less, or more help with difficult vocabulary, in which case the teaching style can be adjusted accordingly.
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4. In conclusion In planning this project, I am trying to bring together multicultural children’s fiction, certain teaching methods, and certain learning activities, so as to incorporate a multicultural dimension within EFL-teaching, while at the same time enhancing pupils’ general proficiency- and more specific literacy skills. I am working in full awareness of programmes for multicultural education in English-speaking countries, and one underlying principle has made explicit by the intercultural understanding movement: that any instance of FLE takes place at an interface between two particular cultures, which must be carefully defined by the teacher, made visible for the students, and constantly held in view as a topic of objective classroom scrutiny. Hence most of my preparations for discussion topics and activities. Another underlying principle is that of participatory pedagogy, which has to do with a more subjective dimension in education. As will have been clear from many of the questions I shall encourage learners to ask themselves, the foreign culture will not be simply held at arm’s length. The attempt at intellectual understanding will be complemented by an effort of heuristic empathy — of trying out how things “feel”, and thereby arriving at a less purely cerebral kind of comprehension. This is not a matter of learners having to surrender their own individual or cultural identity. It is more a question of their developing a flexible affective competence which, far from leading to a merely passive understanding, will ultimately empower them as agents within new sociocultural frameworks. In reading English children’s novels, they are already exercising this affective competence for real. What remains to be seen is whether or not this project will be suggestive for the planning of future multicultural- and/or EFL-literature projects in Finland. To repeat, we do need to prepare our children for a life in an increasingly multicultural world and society. And the kind of practice I have outlined here could conceivably turn out to be one among other ways in which this can be achieved within the context of primary schools in Finland. If so, this will be a case of English-language children’s books initiating a genuine process of communication with respondents whose age is roughly what their authors had in mind, but whose cultural formation is probably not. Children’s literature, like communication in general, constantly tends to extend the circle of human beings in dialogue. If it engages its readers’ own empathetic powers of intellect and imagination, it may in effect be crossing perceived lines of sociocultural division, and may even bring about change.
References Aebersold. J.A., & Field, M.L. (1997). From reader to reading teacher: Issues and strategies for second language classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Allen, D. (1998). Seven Weird Days at Number 31. London: Walker Books. Ali, S. (1994). The reader-response approach: An alternative for teaching literature in a second language. Journal of Reading, 37, 288–296. Baumann, J., Hooten, H., & White, P. (1999). Teaching comprehension through literature: A teacher-research project to develop fifth graders’ reading strategies. The Reading Teacher, 53, 38–51. Bishop, R. (1992). Children’s books in a multicultural world: A view from the USA. In E. Evans (Ed.), Reading against racism (pp.19–38). Buckingham: Open University Press. Blackman, M. (1993). Operation Gadgetman. Yearling: Doubleday. Bond, G. (1994). Honesty and hope: Presenting human rights issues to teenagers through fiction. Children’s Literature in Education, 25, 1, 41–53. Buttjes, D. (1990). Teaching foreign languages and culture: Social impact and political significance. Language Learning Journal, 4, 53–57. Byram, M. (1992). Foreign language learning for European citizenship. Language Learning Journal, 6, 10–12. Byram, M. (1993). Foreign language teaching and multicultural education. In A. S. King & M. Reiss (Eds.), The multicultural dimension of the national curriculum (pp.173–86). London: Falmer Press. Byram, M., & Esarte-Sarries, V. (1991). Investigating cultural studies in foreign language teaching. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M., & Fleming, M. (Eds.) (1998). Language learning in intercultural perspective: Approaches through drama and ethnography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byram, M., & Morgan, C. (Eds.) (1994). Teaching-and-learning language-and-culture. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Carrell, P. (1991). Second language reading: Reading ability or language proficiency? Applied Linguistics, 12, 159–179. Chambers, A. (1993). Tell Me: Children, reading and talk. Glocester: Thimble Press. Chamot, A., & O’Malley, J. (1994). Instructional approaches and teaching procedures. In R. Spangenberg-Urbschat. & R. Pritchard (Eds.), Kids come in all languages: Reading instruction for ESL students (pp.82–107). Delaware, USA: International Reading Association (IRA). Collie, J., & Slater, S. (1987). Literature in the language classroom. A resource book of ideas and activities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, J. D. (2000). Literacy: Helping children to construct meaning, 4th edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Day, R., & Bamford, J. (1998). Extensive reading in the second language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deegan, J. (1996). Children’s friendships in culturally diverse classrooms. London: Falmer Press. De Genova, M. K. (1995). Changing racist behaviour through multicultural education. Multicultural teaching: To combat racism in schools and community, 12, 21–23. Edwards, V. (1997a). Reading in multilingual classrooms. In V. Edwards & D. Corson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education (pp.47–56). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Edwards, V. (1997b). Writing in multilingual classrooms. In V. Edwards & D. Corson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education (pp.107–115). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ellis, R. (1994). The study of second language: Acquisition and research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Epstein, D. (1993). Changing classroom cultures: Anti-racism, politics and schools. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.
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Farnan, N., Flood, J., & Lapp, D. (1994). Comprehending through reading and writing: Six research-based instructional strategies. In R. Spangenberg-Urbschat & R. Pritchard (Eds.), Kids come in all languages: Reading instruction for ESL students (pp.135–57). Delaware, USA: International Reading Association (IRA). Gaine, C. (2000). Anti-racist education in “White” areas: The limits and possibilities of change. Race and Ethnicity in Education, 3, 65–81. Gavin, J. (1991). I want to be an angel, and other stories. London: Mammoth. Gavin, J. (1993). Grandpa Chatterji. London: Mammoth. Gould, D. (1993). Whole school issues. In A. S. King & M. Reiss (Eds.), The multicultural dimension of the national curriculum (pp.202–11). London: Falmer Press. Hade, D. (1991). Being literary in a literature-based classroom. Children’s Literature in Education, 22, 1, 1–17. Heathcote, D., & Bolton, G. (1998). Teaching culture through drama. In M. Byram & M. Fleming (Eds.), Language learning in intercultural perspective: Approaches through drama and ethnography (pp.158–77). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hendy, L. (1994). From drama into story: Strategies for investigating texts. In M. Styles, E. Bearne & V. Watson (Eds.), The prose and the passion (pp.106–113). London: Cassell. Hessari, R., & Hillis, D. (1989). Practical ideas for multicultural learning and teaching in the primary classroom. London: Routledge. Hill. J. (1986). Using literature in language teaching. London: Macmillan. Jewell, T., & Pratt, D. (1999). Literature discussions in the primary grades: Children’s thoughtful discourse about books and what teachers can do to make it happen. The Reading Teacher, 52, 842–850. Johnson, A. (1998). What exactly are comprehension skills and how do I teach them? Reading, Literacy and Language, 32, 22–26. Keats, D. M. (1996). Culture and the child: A guide for professionals in child care and development. Chichester: John Wiley. King, A. S., & Reiss, M. (Eds.) (1993). The multicultural dimension of the national curriculum. London: Falmer Press. Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laird, E. (1996). Secret Friends. London: Hodder Children’s Books. MacPhee, J. (1997). “That’s not fair!”: A white teacher reports on white first graders’ responses to multicultural literature. Language Arts, 74, 33–40. Marshall, C. (1998). Using children’s storybooks to encourage discussions among diverse populations. Childhood Education, 74, 194–98. May, P. (1999). Troublemakers. London: Corgi Yearling. Maybin, J., & Moss, J. (1993). Talk about texts: Reading as a social event. Journal of Research in Reading, 16, 138–47. Meek, M. (1988). How texts teach what readers learn. Exeter: Thimble Press. Moore, M., & Wade, B. (1995). Supporting readers: School and classroom strategies. London: David Fulton. Naidoo, B. (1992). Through whose eyes? Exploring racism: Reader, text and context. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Naidoo, B. (1999). Heritage or multiculturalism? In. R. Stones (Ed.), A multicultural guide to children’s books, 0–16+ (pp.10–11). Books for Keeps & Reading and Language Centre. Reading: University of Reading. Peyton, J., & Reed, L. (1990). Dialogue journal writing with non-native English speakers: A handbook for teachers. Virginia (USA): TESOL. Pinsent, P. (1997). Children’s literature and the politics of equality. London: David Fulton.
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Reid, D., & Bentley D. (Eds.). (1996). Reading on! Developing reading at Key Stage 2. Leamington Spa: Scholastic. Rosenthal, I. (1995). Education through literature: Flying lessons from Maniac Magee. Language Arts, 72, 113–19 Samway, K., & Whang, G. (1996). Literature study circles in a multicultural classroom. York, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers. Schewe, M. (1998). Culture through literature through drama. In M. Byram, & M. Fleming (Eds.), Language learning in intercultural perspective: Approaches through drama and ethnography (pp.204–22). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schifini, A. (1994). Language, literacy, and content instruction: Strategies for teachers. In R. Spangenberg-Urbschat & R. Pritchard (Eds.), Kids come in all languages: Reading instruction for ESL students (pp.158–79). Delaware, USA: International Reading Association (IRA). Schmidt, P. (1998). Intercultural theatre through a foreign language. In M. Byram & M. Fleming (Eds.) (1998). Language learning in intercultural perspective: Approaches through drama and ethnography (pp.193–221). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sell, R. D. (Ed.). 1995. Literature throughout foreign language education: The implications of pragmatics [= Review of English Language Teaching 5/1]. London: Modern English Publications and the British Council. Silberstein, S. (1994). Techniques and resources in teaching reading: Teaching techniques in English as a foreign language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sjöholm, K. (2001). Incidental learning of English by Swedish learners in Finland. In M. Gill, A. J. Johnson, L. M. Koski, R. D. Sell & B. Wårvik (Eds.), Language, Learning, Literature: Studies Presented to Håkan Ringbom. [= English Department Publications 4] (pp.77–89). Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Soderman, A., Gregory, K., & O’Neill, L. (1999). Scaffolding emergent literacy. A child-centred approach for pre-school through grade 5. Needham Heights: Allyn & Bacon. Spangenberg-Urbschat, R. & Pritchard, R. (Eds.) (1994). Kids come in all languages: Reading instruction for ESL students. Delaware, USA: International Reading Association (IRA). Spiegel, D. (1996). The role of trust in reader-response groups. Language Arts, 73, 332–39. Stones, R. (Ed.) (1999). A multicultural guide to children’s books, 0–16+. Books for Keeps and The Reading and Language Information Centre, University of Reading. Stotsky, S. (1994). Academic guidelines for selecting multiethnic and multicultural literature. English Journal, 83, 27–34. Swaffar, J., Arens, K., & Byrnes, H. (1991). Reading for meaning. An integrated approach to language learning. London: Prentice-Hall International. Swarbrick, A. (1998). More reading for pleasure in a foreign language [= Pathfinder 36]. London: Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CiLT). Utbildningsstyrelsen (1994). Grunderna för grundskolans läroplan. Wells, G. (1991). Talk about text: Where literacy is learned and taught. In D. Booth and C. Thornley-Hall (Eds.), Classroom Talk (pp.46–88). Ontario: Pembroke. Williams, L. (1998). Young EFL readers and their books. Learning to read in English immersion programmes. Åbo, Finland: Åbo Akademi Press. Wray, D. (1994). Literacy and awareness. London: Hodder & Stoughton in association with the United Kingdom Reading Association.
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AUTHOR "Lilian Rönnqvist"
TITLE "Secondary-level EFL"
SUBJECT "Studies in Narrativity, Volume 2"
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SIZE HEIGHT "220"
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Chapter 15
Secondary-level EFL Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi Lilian Rönnqvist
1.
Cultural interfaces
Learning a new language is like setting out on a journey to unfamiliar places. Various means of conveyance may be used, and the one most commonly used in the language classroom is a language textbook. But although the language teacher, like a tour guide, can help the learners on their way, textbooks are never able to give more than a superficial overview of a culture’s significant features. In order for learners to get a deeper understanding of the words, concepts and cultural phenomena encountered on their journey, supplementary vehicles are needed. One of these is works of fiction written in the target language. What is it we want learners to experience, then? Following guidelines offered by the 1994 Finnish National Syllabuses for Foreign Languages (Utbildningsstyrelsen, 1994), I see culture in a very broad perspective, as covering both the arts and sciences, and people’s life-styles, customs and attitudes. But like Roland Posner (1989), I have also found it useful to distinguish between three different cultural levels: the social, the material, and the mental. The social level includes social processes, behaviour, and institutions, plus their institutional rituals, one example being religious institutions such as the Christian church. The material level comprises a system of concrete objects or artifacts, and the skills involved in producing and using them. Within the institution of the Christian church, for example, the material level includes crosses, rosaries, and church music. The mental level is manifested in what Posner refers to as “mentifacts”, i.e. ideas and values, and the conventions governing their use and expression. Examples of Christian “mentifacts” would be the classification of sins, and the gestural codes of priests. Posner links these three cultural levels with the semiotic notions of, respectively, sign users (as the individuals within a society), texts (as material artifacts which have both a function and a coded meaning), and codes (as mentifacts). His claim is that the semiotic framework provides a non-arbitrary way of seeing the three levels of culture as intimitately interconnected. Certainly for a teacher of English as a
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foreign language (EFL), it is impossible to discuss the cultural dimensions of, say, a young adult (YA) novel without placing such interconnections between the social, the material and the mental at the very centre. In Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi, for instance, there is a lot more to driving around in a Volvo than just driving a car: We grew up in the midst of the snobs of St Martha’s and discovered that somehow brains didn’t count that much. Money, prestige and what your father did for a living counted. If your hair wasn’t in a bob or if your mother didn’t drive a Volvo you were a nobody. (Marchetta, 1992, p.21)
In one short passage here, we confront the social (the St Martha’s subcommunity), the material (the Volvo motor car), and its mentifactual valorization (the snobbery), each of them calling for analytical notice, yet all inseparable as a larger cultural meaning. From my own point of view, the value of the Posnerian trichotomy stems precisely from the fact that it cannot be rigidly sustained. It makes for a stronger sense of a culture’s complexity and dynamism, and by implication makes it easier to conceptualize one of the central learning tasks posed by EFL. The significance within the St Martha’s subcommunity of a mother’s having a Volvo to drive is very clear from Marchetta’s words themselves. But within the same novel, other sociocultural significances are less explicitly stated. This is where the young EFL-reader will have to learn to deal with “textual gaps” and “culture bumps”. Any text assumes that its readers know certain things in advance and will be able to interpret its words in such a way as to make inferences from the known to the unknown. Instead of everything being exhaustively stated, there will be gaps for the reader to “fill in”. This process has been much discussed in connection with the reading of literature, especially by Wolfgang Iser (1974, 1978; cf. Stephens 1992), who says that a literary text posits an implied reader who will fill in the gaps in the way required. As for culture bumps, the term is Carol M. Archer’s (1986), who says that a culture bump occurs when an individual is expecting one kind of behaviour but is then confronted with a norm that is somehow different. Unlike culture shock, which continues over an extended period of time, culture bumps are ususally very brief in themselves, though the effect may be long-lasting. Here I shall be using the term to refer to those moments during reading when readers are jolted by a cultural feature with which they are unfamiliar. They pause for an instant, and then will generally read on. Since the implied reader of YA novels is in the first instance a native speaker, their gaps will be problematic for a foreign reader. They may take a lot of sociocultural knowledge for granted. This does not in itself make them unsuitable for EFL teaching. On the contrary, by allowing learners to meet the alien culture headon, such a novel may arouse curiosity, so stimulating powers of deduction and
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participatory empathy in ways which will consolidate their cultural awareness and sensitivity. But teachers will obviously not want to overstretch their pupils, and, especially in the earlier stages of foreign language education, familiarization should probably be allowed to take place gently. Here, too, English YA fiction has much to offer, sometimes in the form of helpful explanations. The plain fact is that nonnatives are not the only readers who may need some cultural initiation. English is spoken as a first language by people all over the world, whose cultural backgrounds vary enormously. Especially when a novel is strongly linked to some particular subculture of a more general anglophone culture, it is very likely to include some explicit negotiation of cultural norms. In this chapter, I shall continue to discuss Looking for Alibrandi (1992) by Melina Marchetta, who is a third generation Italian-Australian, and wrote the book when she was less than ten years older than her Italian-Australian protagonist, the seventeen-year-old Josephine. The story is a first-person narrative about Josephine growing up within the two worlds of the Italian-Australian community and the Australian mainstream. As pointed out by Rhonda Bunbury (1996), the “other” here is not the other represented by a member of an ethnic minority, since the main protagonist is Josephine herself. Rather, the other is that of the Anglo-Australian majority. As for the novel’s implied reader, this is a somewhat ambiguous construct, involving presuppositions and attitudes belonging both to the the Australian minority grouping and to the Australian mainstream. In writing the novel, Machetta would have been able to assume that if mainstream readers were going to grasp the story, she might have to educate them somewhat. In turn, this tends to mean that young EFL-readers in Finland can more easily learn something, too, and get a chance to relate to more than one category of English-speaking readers. Needless to say, young EFL-readers in Finland are also of more than one kind. In what follows here, I shall be thinking of secondary school students of EFL who live in Finland and have Swedish as their first language. They are Finnish nationals, and their native language is one of the country’s two official languages. But it is not the majority language. Of the country’s total population, the minority to which they belong is a mere six percent, and in the city of Turku, where I myself am based, many Swedish-speaking Finns are actually bilingual. Marchetta’s treatment of gender, sexuality, personal identity, and life at school will probably interest any teenager anywhere in the world. But for my own pedagogical purposes, Looking for Alibrandi is in fact especially appropriate. Not only will its Australian orientation make a welcome change from Finnish EFL teachers’ more usual emphasis on the cultures of Britain and the United States. For adolescent Swedish-speaking Finns, Josephine’s dilemma, torn as she is between minority and mainstream, will have a special ring. It will be alien, but by no means beyond the reach of imaginative empathy. Sometimes young foreign readers’ imaginative empathy with Josephine may even lead them to draw conclusions about Australian society which are not quite
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accurate. At one point, for instance, Josephine thinks that her own family is rather unusual, because they want to be introduced to the boy she is dating. She feels sure that in a mainstream family the ordeal of this review process would be avoided. According to a mainstream Australian informant of mine, however, most mainstream families would operate in exactly the same way as Josephine’s here. And as a matter of fact, this custom is common in many other places around the world as well, including the United States — it sometimes comes up in American films, many of them with a world-wide distribution. My own students in Finland, by contrast, already resemble Josephine in thinking of this custom as somewhat unusual. The only difference is that whereas some of them would agree with her in finding it unusual in an unpleasant sense (or as one 15-year-old boy put it, “It’s oldfashioned… I would not appreciate it, if my date’s parent asked me a lot of nosy questions…”), others feel rather drawn to it (or as a 15-year-old girl put it, “It would be nice if we had this custom here in Finland”). In a case like this, then, the teacher should perhaps point out the possibility that a novel’s main character is not always the most reliable source of information, especially when, as in this case, the character narrates her own story. One of the tasks for any teacher using YA novels is to make students aware of a narrator’s potential fallibility. This is very important in the EFL-classroom, because otherwise students may accept as authentic and culturally typical something which a narrator is saying from a merely personal perspective. Here, too, the teacher’s role becomes something more than that of the tour guide leading the students on their journey. She must now become the slightly more experienced traveller, accompanying her students on a journey by public transport. She may have a map or two about her person, but she is just as reliant on the textual clues as any of her younger travelling companions. Her job, as I see it, is not to explain each and every cultural detail they encounter on their way through the novel, but to serve as a living model for the processes by which readers can read between the lines and negotiate its gaps and bumps, so as to arrive at a more nuanced and coherent experience of the culture with which it offers an interface. The exact cultural interfaces at which foreign language education takes place are infinite in number. English teachers anywhere in the world might use Marchetta’s book, valuing it for the chance it gives their students to participate in a cultural milieu so enlighteningly ambiguous between the Italian minority and the Australian mainstream. Anywhere in the world, teachers will have to facilitate the interface of the very specific target culture with the no less specific, and in all probability no less ambiguous culture of the learner-readers being taught. Here, I shall be working at the particular interface between Josephine’s culture and my own pupils’ culture as Swedish-speaking Finns. In particular, what differences might there be in the understanding of school and education, of friendship and dating, and of food, personal names and place names? If, following in my footsteps, teachers elsewhere
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did want to use the same book, they could well do so, by substituting my underlying comparative cultural analysis with one which takes account of their own pupils’ positionality.
2.
School and education
Any discussion of school and education is bound to involve all three of Posner’s levels of culture. At the social level, a school represents an institution; at the material level, it is the building in which teaching takes place; and mentifactually, it involves knowledge, skills and values which are transmitted from generation to generation. In addition, school and education are topics in which my own pupils will obviously have their own kind of personal interest. But when they read Marchetta, what is the exact cultural interface here? The older they are, the more likely they are to be able to bring to the text the knowledge needed to interpret it. Much of this knowledge is a matter of linguistic proficiency, but linguistic proficiency is for ever shading off into knowledge of other kinds. For instance, when Josephine is talking about the photocopying work she does for her father’s law firm, she says that if they were handing out degrees for photocopying, she would get honours. Here the lexical meaning honour will help EFL readers get part of the point. But they would get so much more out of the text if they also knew that the word has a specific use within the educational system. As an assignment here, a teacher could perhaps compare and contrast their own grading system with that of Australia. For example: “Is there any grade in our education system equivalent to ‘honours’? If you got ‘honours’ for something in our school, how do you think that would be expressed here?” A task like this would help prevent a culturally specific detail from passing unnoticed, and bring home the point that the associations attached to a word are closely connected with the context in which it is used. In Looking for Alibrandi, it so happens that questions to do with school life and education in general have a central place, mainly because Josephine, who is spending her last year at high school, thinks so much about them herself. For a start, the text mentions a fair number of different schools by name. These schools are in themselves fictional, I have discovered, but the mention of their names is in a sense “truthful”, in that it does capture something of Australian education’s sociocultural range. Certainly most Australian readers will guess that schools named after a saint — St Martha’s, St Anthony’s, St Francis — are Catholic private schools, whereas Cook High and Glebe High are state schools, the one presumably named after Captain Cook, the other presumably in Glebe, the suburb of Sydney. For my own EFL pupils, however, the school names will not speak in the same way. The school which they themselves attend is named after Saint Olof. But this is in allusion to
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pre-Reformation times, when a monastery named after him stood on the same site. St Olofsskolan is just an ordinary state comprehensive school for the Swedishspeaking minority. In Finland generally, there is no such thing as a Catholic school, and private schools are very few and far between, most of them receiving a state subsidy. Here, then, is something for me as teacher to check up on. Are my pupils picking up enough clues to realize that there is a cultural difference here? Apart from Catholic schools, there are also other kinds of Australian private school, some of them with Protestant affiliations. Marchetta mentions a private Presbyterian co-ed, for instance. References to Catholic, Presbyterian or state schools would probably cause no problem for Australian readers, whereas readers within other cultures would have to learn what these kinds of schools stand for. As for the term “co-ed”, my own pupils might well wonder why it should even be necessary. Since in Finland all schools are co-ed nowadays, the idea of having separate schools for boys and girls could strike them as rather odd, even though their own parents may have attended such a school only thirty years ago. A school system is always historical and culture-specific. In England, for instance, a “public school” is still not at all the same kind of institution as a public school in other countries, including even other English-speaking countries — say, Australia and Scotland. The British public school is not a state school but a private school, usually a boarding school, often with very high fees. As an EFL teacher in Finland, I may again have to do some explaining here. Otherwise, when my pupils read Looking for Alibrandi they may all too easily transfer something they have already learned about Eton and Harrow to Glebe High. Josephine, as the daughter of an Italian Catholic family, goes to a Catholic school, where education is strongly influenced by Catholic Christian tradition. The teachers are nuns, who often remind their students to be “a good Christian” (Marchetta, 1992, p.3) and to behave “in the Christian way” (Marchetta, 1992, p.93), and once a term there is confession, which takes place in accordance with the ancient ritual. As regards the symbolism of the rosary, for instance, the book’s nonCatholic readers may need some help, quite irrespective of their own native language. Catholic readers who are not native speakers of English may immediately get the point, whereas most of my own students, as Lutherans, would be in much the same boat as Australian Anglicans or Baptists here. On the other hand, when we learn something new about somebody else’s culture, we may also start to think about our own. In point of fact, Finnish state schools do have a connection with a church: the Lutheran church, which is one of Finland’s two state churches (the much smaller one being the Greek Orthodox). This means that Lutheran priests have the right to come into school and give talks at morning assembly, for example. Many schools also start their school year with a visit to church, a custom which is more or less taken for granted. It is only when we encounter some different custom, like school confession, that we perhaps realize
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that our practices, whether religious or secular, are no more “natural” than anybody else’s. This kind of issue provides fruitful points for discussion. My pupils will probably find it quite interesting enough to sustain some lengthy conversations in the target language. Another point about the different kinds of Australian school is the link to social class. St Martha’s, a private high school in Sydney run by the Catholic Education Office, has some scholarship places for girls from less affluent backgrounds. Josephine worked hard to win one of these, but says “it backfired on me because I ended up going to a school I didn’t like” (Marchetta, 1992, p.7). She feels she does not really belong because the school is “dominated by rich people” with rich parents and grandparents, “mostly Anglo-Saxon Australians, who I can’t see having a problem in the world”, and “rich Europeans”. The rich Europeans are “the ones who haven’t had a holiday for twenty years just so their children can go to expensive schools and get the proper education which they missed out on. These people might have money, but they’re grocers or builders, mainly labourers” (Marchetta, 1992, p.6). Josephine would rather be the daughter of a rich labourer than a scholarship student. But most of all she wants to belong to “the world of sleek haircuts and upper-class privileges” (Marchetta, 1992, p.32), at which point I as teacher may have to suggest that a preoccupation with class and an aspiration to upward social mobility need not necessarily be typical of Australians or Italian Australians in general. Here again, pupils may need to be alerted to the ironies which can come with unreliable narrators. But even so, class certainly is a dimension of this story, and in order to grasp it, EFL readers will need to understand the Australian class distinctions. Or if they pick up enough clues to be able to grasp the story on their own, their understanding of Australian class distinctions may improve as a result. As always, a teacher must try to monitor what is happening. Sometimes pupils need help. Sometimes they put two and two together for themselves. St Martha’s is situated in the eastern suburbs, which according to several textual clues belong to the middle-class and upper-class parts of Sydney. Josephine had wanted to go to a school in the “inner west”, to which all her friends from primary school had gone. What she says about the difference this would have made for her is very revealing of Australian society. As a pupil of the inner west school, she would have been with people on her own level, people she could have related to, people who, having had the same strict Italian upbringing as she herself, “knew what it meant not to be allowed to do something” (Marchetta, 1992, p.7). At one point Jacob Coote, a boy at Cook High, takes Josephine home from a school dance. This, too, is revealing. Cook High is socially on the wrong side of the tracks, but Jacob tells Josephine that he thinks that he and she are very alike. “You’re middle-class and I’m middle-class, except you’re a middle-class snob who goes to an upper-class school” (Marchetta, 1992, p.62). When Josephine tells him that she has a scholarship place there, he guesses that she would otherwise be at
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Cook High. But no, of course not, she says. Since she is of Italian origin, she would be at a Catholic school in any case. And since there are class distinctions between different Catholic schools as well, she would be at “a middle-class Catholic school equivalent to Cook High”. As she insists, “I wouldn’t be ashamed of it either” (Marchetta, 1992, p.62). So episodes like these are replete with socio-cultural implications, and once again the question is: Will my own students get the message? In order to pick up the clues, they may need to have a conscious method, which I as teacher ought to help them develop. Rather than relying on the penny to drop of its own accord, or on my own explanations, I should perhaps get my class to compare themselves with Sherlock Holmes. This is an idea suggested by Arthur Asa Berger (1999, pp.18–20), who points out that Holmes is “a master semiotician, who understands signs and what they can tell to the one who knows how to ‘read’ them”. In “The Blue Carbuncle”, for instance, Dr Watson was incapable of arriving at the same conclusions as Holmes, because he thought that what he saw was merely unimportant. What Watson lacked was a systematic way of looking for the underlying significance of the seemingly trivial, though as Berger also says, interpreting signs does involve a good deal of skill. Also, the way one interprets a sign is closely connected to conventions and expectations within some particular historical phase of a particular culture. In John Stephen’s words (1992, p.13), “all speakers can share a sense of what a signifier denotes, but some speakers may be unfamiliar with particular connotations or implications”. This explains why culturally specific signs which are unfamiliar to the reader of a particular novel may be interpreted according to the reader’s own cultural key. Foreign language students need to be alerted to this possibility, so that they will catch themselves in the act, as it were, and begin to wonder whether some other set of norms may apply. If they are to become truly familiar with the alien, then they must regularly, and as a matter of course, “denaturalize” the way of life with which they are most familiar already. Without this kind of self-consciousness, some of the Australian connections between education and class would probably pass my students by, quite simply because class differences are not so overtly expressed in Finland. Once the necessary kind of openness to unfamiliar signals has started to develop, however, the teacher has the further responsibility of warning against the risk of premature generalizations. To prevent students from drawing over-hasty conclusions from the story as told by Josephine, there could be assignments which would highlight the fact that, quite irrespective of their culture’s specific value system, all individuals have their own private aspirations, which can also undergo change. An assignment about Josephine could ask questions such as: Is she a flat or a round character? What are her goals in life? Do they change? How much is she affected by the society around her?
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This kind of question can encourage EFL-readers to locate the fictive character in a larger context, which in some ways may be like their own daily context, and in other ways different. They recognize that the character is a human being like themselves, but begin to understand that the conditions of human life can very much vary. When they are asked to substantiate their impressions of Josephine from the text, I as teacher can thereby monitor their responses to specific issues raised by the novel as a whole, and where necessary encourage them to be a bit more Holmesian: systematically to search for codes of interpretation which are different from the ones they know best. An obvious difference, such as the fact that in Australia schoolchildren wear school uniforms whereas in Finland school uniforms are quite unknown, is seldom a problem. But other things, though very significant, may simply escape notice. For instance, even the kind of schoolwork Australian children do may be very un-Finnish. But my students may not reflect on this, precisely because they were not expecting a difference here. Until they have learnt to de-naturalize their own cultural preconceptions, a school is a school and that is that, regardless of where it is. Being in her last year at high school, Josephine is studying for her final exam, which is called the Higher School Certificate (the HSC). A British reader would probably associate this exam with A-levels, an American with graduation from high school, and students in Finland with our studentexamen (the matriculation exam). From the point of view of my EFL readers, it might seem that the important thing to grasp is simply that the final year at high school is rounded off by exams. Yet there is also much to be learned from what the exams actually include. What subjects does the society consider important enough to be covered at this stage? If mathematics has priority over, let’s say, art and humanistic subjects, this may be a representative value judgement. Within the Anglo-Saxon world, one central element in the curriculum is usually Shakespeare, and this is certainly the case in Australia. When talking about the HSC-exam, Josephine’s friend John Barton asks her what she thinks of the texts set for English. Josephine replies: “Macbeth is all right. … [T]hey are going to play the Zifferelli [sic] version at the cinema just for all the HSC students” (Marchetta, 1992, p.48). What inferences would the likely native readers draw from this? Most of them would probably know that Shakespeare is referred to, and would recognize the allusion to the Zeffirelli film version of the play — as opposed to a stage performance or some other film version. For an EFL reader, too, there are enough clues in the text to make it clear that the location is a cinema and not a theatre. But Shakespeare is not mentioned by name, and some of my own students may not know that he is the author of Macbeth. Those who are curious enough will ask me or their classmates about it, but many of them will just read through the book without problematizing issues that they cannot relate to. Especially if they also fail to notice that Josephine, despite her Italian extraction, is mispronouncing the name
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Zeffirelli, they will hardly start to wonder whether Marchetta means her to come across as more clued up on Shakespeare than on a distinguished Italian film-maker of her own time. This is clearly the kind of case where the teacher needs to be very alert. Not even native speakers of English will necessarily pick up the mispronounciation of an Italian name, and for all we know Marchetta herself may simply have made a spelling mistake. Yet the text’s references can certainly be rather subtle, and sometimes do have a direct bearing on the entire theme of Josephine’s wrestling with her ambiguous cultural identity. By the time EFL students, with or without their teacher’s direct help, can process such a passage, it is hardly too much to say that their participation in the target culture is becoming real.
3.
Friendship and dating
Another of the areas of Australian life into which Looking for Alibrandi can offer them this gradual kind of immersion is social ritual connected with friendship and dating. This will inevitably be a key to understanding the social level of culture, and is another of the topics in which any teenage reader is likely to have a personal interest. The different stages of courtship within the Italian-Australian community is clearly suggested in the section of the book where Josephine talks about the way the family spent Easter. I didn’t even get any Easter eggs. Just stuff for my glory box. It’s so exciting receiving table-cloths and crocheted doilies while everyone else is eating chocolate bunnies. I thought about the glory box while I was sitting on the verandah on Wednesday night. The way my mother’s relatives had looked at me pointedly when they told her how grown-up I was now. If life was a silent movie I’d be able to see the captions under the faces. “A boyfriend next”, Cousin Mary’s pointed look would say. “Yes, then a threeyear courtship”, Cousin Camela would indicate by nodding her head. “On her twenty-first she could have her engagement party as well”, Zia Patrizia would display with a proud smile. (Marchetta, 1992, p.73)
As this passage expresses the expectations traditionally held of young Italian women in Australia, it is something that non-Italian Australian readers (and present-day Italians resident in Italy, for that matter) may not be able to relate to, even if they understood the concept as such. What comes across is in any case Josephine’s own sense of cultural alienation. The fact that they are in Australia seems to be quite irrelevant to the older generation of her family. This, basically, is why she is so much at odds with them. And as for Finland-Swedish EFL readers, the chances of
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their knowing of families in which the generation gap gives rise to conflict in quite this form are very small indeed. They would also have a specific problem with glory box, which relates, of course, to the material level of culture. In British English the same concept is referred to as dowry chest or, more colloquially, bottom drawer, and in American English as hope chest (the term substituted in the first American edition of Looking for Alibrandi (Orchard Books, 1999)). Irrespective of what kind of English is used, the concept will be difficult for my pupils, and for several reasons. If we stick to the Australian expression, the lexical words it contains may be confusing. The literal meaning of glory connotates happiness, praise and honour, whereas the literal meaning of box is simply a place where you keep things. And for most teenagers, including Josephine herself, the connection of table cloths and crocheted doilies with glory and happiness is far from obvious. In itself the concept has a historical interest, reflecting what used to be a conventional view of marriage as the foremost goal in a young girl’s life. But times have changed, and with them, not only ideology but customs. Within the social mainstream of both Australia and Finland, marriageability is now altogether less valorized than it used to be, and teenage girls have long since given up collecting things in a bottom draw. In the EFL classrom, this offers a good starting-point for a comparison between culture-specific customs not only in different countries but in different historical periods. Among other things, this can cover the three stages of courtship mentioned by Josephine (boyfriend–courtship– engagement). What EFL-readers may apprehend here as “strange because it is Australian” may to an Australian reader be “strange because it is non-Australian”. From the perspective of cultural learning, this is a very valuable kind of case. It brings home that there may be nothing that is “universally Australian”, and nothing that is “universally not Australian”, just as there is probably nothing “universally Finnish” or “universally Finland-Swedish”.
4. Food When it comes to food, particular dishes are often labelled as specific to a certain culture, as when we say “as American as apple pie”. Because so much of Marchetta’s book is about people of Italian descent, lasagna, pan fried pizza, spaghetti, garlic bread and cappuccino all function as symbols of cultural identity. Yet whilst most of the items mentioned will be easily recognized by EFL-readers, the context in which they occur may make them seem somewhat strange. This is often due to factors which Posner assigns to the mental level of culture. Spaghetti on Boxing Day, for example, is something that does not belong to the Finnish tradition. But then neither does it belong to mainstream Australian tradition, as clearly emerges
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from another of Josephine’s conversations with Jacob. Geographical conditions can also make for differences. For most of my pupils, the idea of a beach party on Boxing Day will certainly be a novelty. In contrasting Italian-Australian eating habits with those of the mainstream Australians, the author manages to illustrate the close connection between food and ethnic origin. “We used to go to the beach every Boxing Day with my grandmother’s relatives”, I [Josephine] told him [Jacob], laughing at the memory. “Ever seen those big Italian families at a beach picnic? It’s not your typical sausage on the barbecue. It’s the spaghetti leftovers from the day before, schnitzel, eggplant and all these other fancy things. I used to envy the Aussie kids who had a piece of meat between their bread.” (Marchetta, 1992, p.150)
For the EFL teacher, a passage like this can cue in a discussion about eating habits and traditional food, which can alert pupils to the fact that the dishes they themselves take for granted do not represent a universal norm. And eating is more than a matter of just nourishing the body. Eating something in particular, or preparing or eating it in some particular way, carries cultural meaning. In Josephine’s home, eating spaghetti out of the can, having pineapple on a pizza, or eating spaghetti with a knife and spoon is regarded as un-Italian and wrong. This is what any reader learns from the book, because it is so explicitly expressed in the context. In this way, the differences between the Australian “food-culture” and the Italian are emphasized. One culturally marked food tradition is “Tomato Day”, which involves squeezing and boiling ripe tomatoes for a spaghetti sauce, to be “bottled in beer bottles and stored in Nonna’s cellar” (Marchetta, 1992, p.171). Once again, this is not just a part of the material level of culture (tomato sauce), but implies both the social level (tradition) and the mental level (attitudes to ready-made tomato sauce as expressed by Josephine’s grandmother). Food and culture go hand in hand, though the amount of effort put into preparing and cooking food differs from culture to culture. For Josephine’s family, “Tomato Day” strengthens their Italian identity, which is why Josephine herself feels characteristically ambivalent about it. She and her cousin Robert call this tradition “Wog Day” or “National Wog Day” — so using a word whose meaning and racist history an EFL teacher will probably need to explain. She also says to her mother that she cannot understand why they “can’t go to Franklin’s and buy Leggo’s or Paul Newman’s special sauce”. Her grandmother is appalled. “‘ Where is the culture?’ she asked in dismay. ‘She’s going to grow up, marry an Australian and her children will eat fish and chips’” (Marchetta, 1992, p.171).
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This quotation suggests just how consistently the text expands upon cultural differences. Usually my own pupils will easily get the right idea. Drinking Milo on a balcony, eating Cheezels at a party, or Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies at Easter must have roughly the same cultural significance for Finns as for Australians. Scotch Finger biscuits, Tim Tams, and fairy bread will be more puzzling. But here there are also textual clues, and what such biscuits really taste like is of no importance to the story. Presumably Finnish readers will think, “Oh yes, they have something called fairy bread at their birthday parties, like we have gâteau, or ice cream”. By relating fairy bread to something in their own culture, they themselves familiarize the alien concept.
5.
Personal names
Personal names identify their bearers, and most of them are strongly connected to specific languages. The use of one and the same name differs from language to language and culture to culture. The personal names Jan and Kim, for example, are used differently in English and Swedish. In Swedish, Jan denotes a male person, and Kim is mostly a male name, whereas in English Jan mostly denotes a female while Kim can refer to either a male or a female. Also, personal names can suggest an association with some quite specific culture or sub-culture. So Melina Marchetta’s own name suggests an Italian origin, and throughout her novel she gives her characters names which work in the same kind of way. Those who belong to the Italian community in Sydney all have Italian names, such as the protagonist Josephine Alibrandi (or Guiseppina, as some of the older Italian women prefer to call her), Michael Andretti, and Angelo Pezzini. The Anglo-Australian characters have English-sounding names like Lee Taylor, Carly Bishop, and John Barton. Anna Selicic, however, is of Croatian descent, a fact which is partly revealed through her surname. Native speakers of English, as well as fairly advanced EFL-students, would probably have no difficulty in distinguishing “typically” English names from nonEnglish names. More problematic could be the non-English names’ origin. Much depends here on the reader’s experience and knowledge of the world. An informed adult reader may well guess that somebody called Selicic or Valavic is of some kind of Slavic descent. But an observant younger reader can also make headway, since there may again be further clues within the context. At one point, for instance, when Josephine and her friends are in a café, some boys start fooling around with Anna Selicic’s scarf. Then Anna tells them that her grandmother has sent it to her from Croatia. Some language teaching methods, including suggestopedic ones, encourage the use of names common within the target culture. That is to say, the learners are all given “new” names in order to enable them to identify with native speakers. In a
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multicultural society, however, where the same main language is spoken by representatives of several different cultures or sub-cultures, names can denote not only a “belonging” or a “not-belonging”, but also a “double belonging”. In Looking for Alibrandi this is very clearly marked, and can be used by an EFL teacher to sensitize pupils to the postmodern heterogeneities of Austalian society. For young Swedishspeaking readers in Finland, their growing sense of Australian kinds of double belonging would be accompanied by a curious sense of déjà vu. In the same connection they would also note that Josephine continues to speak Italian with her father’s relatives, and that her grandmother still finds English a bit of a struggle. As a young immigrant, she had been forbidden to learn it by her husband. With her sister’s help, she has picked it up mainly in secret. In terms of names, Finnish teenagers will be used to guessing whether an individual is Swedish- or Finnish-speaking. But the “rules” they would apply are slightly different from those that appear in Looking for Alibrandi. Whereas many Finnish-speakers have Swedish surnames, and whereas many Swedish-speakers have Finnish surnames, the first name is often more indicative of the person’s native language. In Looking for Alibrandi, by contrast, it is the surname which hints at cultural identity. Josephine Alibrandi and her father Michael Andretti both have first names that could be English, a blending which reflects their double belonging. They are both Australians, but “with Italian blood flowing rapidly through … [their] veins” (Marchetta, 1992, p.259). All through the book, the relationship between name and identity is emphasized. Josephine Alibrandi is trying to work out who she really is or wants to be. At one point she wonders whether her life would have been different if she had had her father’s name, or even her mother’s real father’s name (which turned out to be English). In the end, however, Josephine concludes that it really does not matter whether she is an Alibrandi, an Andretti, a Sandford or a Coote. “It matters who I feel like I am” (p.261). In a Swedish-speaking context in Finland, Josephine’s realization would be in key with the aim of foreign language teaching as a means of enhancing an understanding of other cultures. But it would also chime with the more general aims of a curriculum emphasizing the importance of developing children’s feeling of identity.
6. Place names As I noted earlier in the discussion of Glebe High, names of places, regions, cities, suburbs, and streets not only denote a location but carry sociocultural associations. Take a well-known place like Harlem in New York City. From a denotative point of view, it is a part of Manhattan in New York City. But connotatively the concept includes social injustice, racism, poverty, plus black literature, music, and dance styles.
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Any user of English gradually gains more and more insight into the particular semantic loadings of place names, and non-native users have to go through the same learning process as anyone else, just as they do within their own native languages and cultures. As previously noted, Marchetta uses the authentic place names to anchor her story in reality. From my own point of view as an EFL-teacher, the risk this involves is that pupils will assume that all the places mentioned really exist. My experience suggests that if novels contain well-known places such as Birmingham and Bournemouth in England intermixed with fictive places such as Barfax (as in Robert Swindell’s Staying up (1986)), then student readers do tend to fall into this trap. The teacher’s task here, I think, is to introduce a discussion about why authors are both specific and non-specific in the naming of places, a discussion that could develop into one about the reliability of a reality constructed through written texts. The fact that Looking for Alibrandi is set in Sydney does give readers at least some chance to construct a mental picture of that city. But only readers who are themselves familiar with Sydney will be able to decide whether Marchetta’s place names are “real” or not. Others, like me, would have to rely on maps and other sources, and for those of us who encounter the names for the first time, they may be free of connotations, at least to start with. As we read on, we learn more and more about certain locations as compared with others, and gradually we are able to form our own understanding of their socio-cultural significance. In other words, not only personal names, but also place names are connected to the development of the plot and the characterization of the fictive characters, and for places such as North Shore and Bondi Junction, which are not explicitly described, readers have to draw their own inferences, relying on contextual clues. From the context we can learn, for instance, that Josephine’s friend John Barton, whose father is a Member of Parliament, and her school friend Ivy Lloyd, whose father is a famous surgeon, both live on the North Shore, where “the fathers all try to outdo each other” (Marchetta, 1992, p.48). Josephine’s middle-class boyfriend, Jacob Coote, on the other hand, lives in Redfern, an area that Josephine immediately associates with Aborigines: “Redfern? Do you know that I’ve been in this country all my life and I’ve never spoken to an Aboriginal person” (Marchetta, 1992, p.62). No further descriptions of these places should be needed in order for EFL-readers to understand the relevant social differences, and if they were to consult a reference work it would merely confirm what they have already guessed: that Redfern, for instance, is an inner-city suburb with a very high population of Aboriginal people. Martin Place, by contrast, is explicitly described as “a walkway in the middle of the city where people sit and have lunch” (Marchetta, 1992, p.25). This explanation is not in itself essential for an understanding of the novel as a whole. It merely suggests a certain milieu or atmosphere and belongs to the kind of redundant reference which as John Stephens (1992, p.21) says is “frequently used in realistic
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fiction to create the illusion of reality”. It may also, he adds, function to define the characters in terms of social stereotypes, which is what some descriptions do in Looking for Alibrandi. Moreover, this information may help readers to learn something about the way of life in Sydney in the eighties, and about various local buildings and places.
7.
Towards greater understanding
As Louise Rosenblatt (1970) puts it, books are a means of getting outside the limited cultural groups into which the individual is born. In undertaking the journey into foreign parts that is offered by a work of literature, both teacher and students need to remember that a single text is unlikely to be an adequate basis for generalizations about an entire society. And as Roger D. Sell and I have said before (1995), no single novel will completely cover the whole range of a culture’s sub-cultures. Even within their own native cultures, human beings can often find themselves in situations which make them “outsiders”. But EFL pupils, by thinking about their own “difference” vis à vis a mainstream, and by intelligently exploring a novel about some other difference vis à vis some other mainstream, can certainly learn a great deal. As for EFL teachers, they have to be realistic. With a clear sense of the precise cultural interface at which they are working, they will also have some sense of degrees of difficulty. For reading a novel, the question is always: What are these particular students likely to find transparent or opaque or simply incognizable in this particular book? This is a pragmatic question. It has to do with the way particular readers are likely to operate their own stores of knowledge at the interface between their own and the “other” cultural life-world, both of which are highly specific. And although at first glance, at least the material level of culture may seem pretty easy, its inevitable association with the social or the mentifactual may actually be very difficult to grasp. For my own students, the most literal reading of glory box can only result in confusions or nonsense. From their point of view, the expression is simply incognizable, and much the same would go for some of the names denoting specific kinds of schools. Whether a concept is transparent, opaque or incognizable is determined both by the context in which it appears and by the reader’s prior knowledge. Sometimes language pupils will pick up contextual clues and get the point. Sometimes they will not. So to repeat, the teacher can simply monitor, be prepared to explain where necessary, and recommend a sytematically Holmsian de-naturalization of the familiar. Even with books whose implied reader does not seem to include an adult co-reader, that is the role which a teacher will have to take. At some points in their lives, some people are fortunate enough to have sudden flashes of illumination. But in principle, understanding is a process which goes on
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all the time and never comes to an end. Even a sudden flash of illumination happens within a certain context, and represents a particular stage of an individual’s ongoing experience. Reading a novel, similarly, takes time. And in fiction, just as in real life, mental representations of culture emerge gradually, alongside social representations. The attitudes and values lying behind peoples’ behaviour can only be “unmasked” after closer contact with them, quite regardless of whether they are people in real life or characters in a novel. So what we learn about an alien culture through reading literature really can be compared to what we learn about a foreign culture when we travel, except that travellers can sometimes be rather passive observers, and there are passive readers, too. It is the EFL teacher’s task, in the combined role of co-traveller, guide and cultural mediator, to inititiate assignments, tasks and discussions that activate the readers, prompting them to draw inferences and think for themselves, and generally supporting them in their progress towards the point at which their participation in the alien can be fully functional and active. An intelligently empathetic reading of a novel can be a crucial step in that direction.
References Archer, M.C. (1986). Culture bump and beyond. In J.M. Valdes (Ed.), Culture bound: Bridging the cultural gap in language teaching (pp.170–178). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, A. A. (1999). Signs in contemporary culture: An introduction to semiotics (2nd ed.). Salem, WI: Sheffield Publishing Company. Bunbury, R. (1996). Writing about ‘Others’ from the inside. In M. Machet, S. Olen, & T. van der Walt (Eds.), Other worlds, other lives 3 (pp.240–252). Pretoria: Unisa Press. Iser, W. (1974). The implied reader: Patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Marchetta, M. (1992). Looking for Alibrandi. Ringwood, Australia: Penguin Books. Posner, R. (1989). What is culture? Toward a semiotic explication of anthropological concepts. In W. A. Koch (Ed.), The nature of culture (pp.240–295). Bochum, Germany: Brochmeyer. Rosenblatt, L. (1970). Literature as exploration (2nd ed.). London: Heinemann. Rönnqvist, L., & Sell, R. D. (1995). Teenage books in foreign language education for the middle school. In R. D. Sell (Ed.), Literature throughout foreign language education: The implications of pragmatics [= Review of English Language Teaching 5/1](pp.40–73). London: Modern English Publication in association with the British Council. Sell, R. D. (2000). Literature as communication: The foundations of mediating criticism. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Stephens, J. (1992). Reading the signs: Sense and significance in written texts. Kenthurst, Australia: Kangaroo Press. Swindells, R. (1986). Staying up. London: Oxford University Press. Utbildningsstyrelsen (1994). Grunderna för grundskolans läroplan. Helsingfors, Finland: Utbildningsstyrelsen.
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332 Lilian Rönnqvist
AUTHOR "Viv Edwards"
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Chapter 16
Bilingualism, stories, new technology The Fabula Project Viv Edwards
1.
Background and aims
In this final chapter, two new elements are introduced. First, the response of the child readers to a story can take the form of a story which they themselves compose “in reply”, as it were. Secondly, the physical form in which the story comes to them is not that of a book. Instead, the resources of computer technology are brought into play. The children read the story at a computer work-station, and type in their own stories as well. As compared with the previous two chapters, the values of the pragmatic variables youth and culture are also of a somewhat different kind. The readers involved here are still young learners between the ages of six and ten, and they are still learners of a language which is not their first language. However, this language is not a foreign language spoken in some other part of the world. It is another language spoken in the milieu where the learners themselves live, and they may well end up as more or less bilingual. Several such language pairs are involved, and in every case one language is the first language of a very large number of speakers while the other language is a regional and/or minority language. Regional and minority languages are not, of course, an unusual phenomenon. It is estimated that there are some 50 million speakers of forty-five lesser used languages within the European Union alone. These languages fall into several different categories. Some, including Breton in France, Welsh in Wales and Friulan in Italy, are limited to a single member state. Others, such as Catalan (spoken in France and Spain) are distributed across two or more member states. Languages such as Romani and Yiddish are also distributed across states but, in this case, are identified with a particular ethnic group rather than a territorial base. Finally, the same language can have different status in different countries. So Swedish is the majority language of Sweden, but as spoken by the pupils of Charlotta Sell and Lilian Rönnqvist in Finland is a minority language.
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Minority languages in Europe are the casualties of struggles for nation states where one language took precedence over all others. In more recent times, however, European integration is providing many of the political and economic conditions necessary for their revitalization. There is a growing consensus that a united Europe can be achieved only by learning to accommodate linguistic and cultural diversity, and that the protection and promotion of minority and regional languages is an essential element in this process. Various European institutions have played an important role in language revival from the 1980s onwards, including the Council of Europe and the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages. European funding was also responsible for the Fabula Project, sponsored through the European Commission (EC) Educational Multimedia and Culture 2000 programmes. Fabula is multidisciplinary and multinational. In its two year development phase, it involved teachers, children, software engineers, information designers and translators, together with academic researchers in linguistics, education, humancomputer interaction, and typography. Partners in England, the Basque country, Catalonia, Friesland, Ireland and Wales set out to produce a simple-to-use program for making bilingual multimedia story books in the lesser used languages of Europe. The aims were twofold: to help ensure that minority languages were not excluded from the “Information Age”; and to improve the perceived status of lesser-used languages by the association with the new technologies. To date, the language pairs included have been Basque and French, Catalan and Spanish, Frisian and Dutch, Irish and English, and Welsh and English. It is hoped that the use of the Fabula software will in future be extended to many other language pairs as well. In what follows I shall explain how an existing picturebook was re-purposed as a bilingual multimedia story in order to demonstrate to teachers and children the potential of interactive multimedia (IMM). I shall examine the relationship of the two languages on the page, and argue that it is less appropriate to think in terms of “translating” from the one to the other than in terms of “parallel authoring”. I shall also try to suggest how the creation of a bilingual multimedia story encourages a high level of collaboration which, in turn, can greatly enhance the quality of the final product.
2.
From page to computer screen
“Paper” bilingual — or dual language — stories have been a focus for study in multilingual classrooms throughout the English-speaking world. Writers such as Feuverger (1994) and the members of the MCR (= Multilingual Resources for Children) project (1995) draw attention to their usefulness in, on the one hand, supporting children’s literacy development in two languages and, on the other hand, raising cultural and linguistic awareness. However, dual language books also
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give rise to a range of technical, sociolinguistic and economic problems, which can be neatly side-stepped by using electronic media. One problem concerns the difficulty of accommodating two languages on the same page. Because the market for bilingual books is limited, print runs are small and the unit price is high. Increasingly, publishers are choosing to adapt existing good quality picture books rather than originating new titles, for obvious economic reasons. However, the number of books with the potential to be adapted as dual texts is very limited. The need to display two languages on the page automatically excludes many if not most books. It also often results in a finished product which is cramped, or difficult to read because the second language has been printed over a coloured background. Although the amount of text is also an important consideration for electronic stories, multimedia solutions are a good deal more flexible. It is possible, for instance, to divide in two the text on the paper page, so that the first part is accompanied by the original illustration, while the second uses a separate illustration created by zooming in on an aspect of the original. This technique allows the author to overcome many problems associated with lengthy texts. Electronic books are also more flexible in their overall length. While the pages of paper books are usually in multiples of eight, there is no comparable restriction on the number of pages in an electronic story. Another recurrent problem in the production of paper dual texts is the choice of language. Dual texts are usually aimed at speakers of minority languages living overseas. In many cases, the language selected by publishers is not the home language of the intended readership (MRC, 1995). So expatriate Italians may speak a regional dialect rather than standard Italian; children whose families come from Cyprus will speak the Cypriot dialect rather than Standard Modern Greek. In the home country, where education takes place through the medium of the official or standard language, the choice of language is less problematic. In an overseas setting, however, children’s main exposure to the standard or official language is through voluntary classes outside mainstream schooling (Edwards, 2001). There is therefore a certain tension between the pedagogical imperative to build on what children know already and the sociocultural imperative to use the variety with the highest status in the home country. In the context of a paper book, the “high” variety is almost invariably selected. In a multimedia setting, by contrast, it is possible to use either or both languages. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the two varieties opens up interesting pedagogical possibilities, by inviting children to focus on both similarities and differences (Edwards, Monaghan & Knight, 2000). Electronic books have yet another important advantage over their paper counterparts, in that they can make use of sound. The usefulness of sound is recognized, for instance, in the story-cassette packs found in many classrooms. Here the paper book is accompanied by a taped version of the story so that children can
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follow the text as they listen to the tape. In bilingual story-cassette packs, the tape invariably follows the “script” provided by the book: a Greek text, for instance, will be heard in Modern Standard Greek rather than the Cypriot dialect. In other situations, the problem relates to different accents rather than different dialects. In Wales, for instance, there are important differences in pronunciation between the north and south. But IMM offers far greater flexibility and can accommodate many different languages, dialects and accents. It can also introduce an element of fun. Children can listen to the text or hear dialogue and sound effects by clicking on different parts of the screen. It was decided to create a specimen bilingual multimedia story at the outset of the project, in order to demonstrate to teachers and children the potential of bilingual multimedia. We believed that the opportunity to see at first hand a range of features associated with IMM would act as a catalyst for their own ideas. Equally important, this process would allow us to establish the relative difficulties and merits of the different features that we hoped to implement in the final version of the program. The choice of material for this purpose provided some interesting challenges. Although “living books” — or interactive stories — are a well-established genre (Barker, 1996), IMM is perhaps more often associated with non-fiction topics. Our focus, though, was primary schools. Given the relative inexperience of teachers in IMM, we felt it was important to prioritize the authoring of stories, thus recognizing the central role of narrative in children’s development as authors (Chambers, 1991; Rosen, 1988). The creation of a purpose-made story was beyond the budget of a small-scale, short-term project. So we needed to identify a suitable paper book already in print. For reasons of copyright, we sought permission to select a title from the list of the leading British publisher, Walker Books, a sponsoring partner for the project, and our choice was further restricted by whether or not Walker held the multimedia rights. Picturebooks are a particular strength of Walker Books. Although often associated with very young children, their appeal has broadened considerably in recent years (Evans, 1998). In the UK, at least, they are now targeted at a wide range of ages, and author-illustrators such as Raymond Briggs even attract adult readers. Although some picturebooks are clearly targeted at the very young, various attributes such as the use of humour, the style of illustration, and choice of themes, ensure that this genre will be of interest to a wide range of readers. A good quality picturebook was thus the ideal starting point for a multimedia story to engage the interest and attention of children throughout the primary age range, and of their teachers as well. A growing body of research on both first and second language learners (e.g. Edwards, 1995; Silberstein, 1994) focusses on features which support the reading process. These include a good match between illustration and text, which helps learners cue what comes next when they are reading; and the use of a strong
Bilingualism, stories, new technology 337
predictable story line which exploits repetition both in the structure of the story and in the language used. An additional consideration, specific to bilingual stories, is the need to display two languages on the screen simultaneously. Although IMM is much more flexible, any book with a large amount of text is unlikely to be a good candidate for re-purposing as a bilingual multimedia story. A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts (Reader, 1989) proved eminently suitable for repurposing on all counts. It has a strong story line with universal appeal: it explores the subject of human greed and the triumph of the underdog, drawing skilfully on both visual and verbal humour; it makes extensive use of repetition; and it has relatively little text on each page. It was therefore an excellent exemplar multimedia story for use across Europe. Finally, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the status implications of IMM for minority languages. Whereas “major” languages like English, Spanish and French feature prominently in commercial applications, minority languages such as Frisian, Basque and Welsh are poorly served. It is therefore not surprising that the few electronic resources that do exist in minority language are greeted with enthusiasm. Chana et al. (1998), for instance, describe how attendance at Urdu club in a multilingual primary school increased from six to 22 (including six monolingual English speakers) when an Urdu word-processing programme was introduced. The high status associated with the new technologies seems to have been transferred to the minority language. The reactions of children taking part in the Fabula Project were very similar. Many commented spontaneously — and with enthusiasm — on the fact that the interface was in the minority language. Many also expressed approval of the fact that the sound functions allowed them to practice the minority language independently of the teacher.
3.
Translation or “parallel authoring”?
For the purposes of the Fabula software development, the most important audience for the storybook viewer was second language (L2) learners. It soon became apparent, however, that while the translations of A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts were suitable for first language (L1) speakers, they were far too difficult for use with second language learners. We therefore commissioned simplified versions of the Welsh translation and the original English text — and used this experience as the starting point for a workshop for translators of the other languages. While there was some concern that these new versions might sound stilted, consensus none the less emerged that the use of naturally occurring features, such as the refrains, formulae and repetitions associated with oral story-telling, would minimize the negative effects of simplification. But what rapidly became apparent was the need for a distinction between translation and parallel authoring (Edwards,
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Monaghan & Hartley, 2001). Translation can be regarded as a process of transforming an existing source text in one language into an equivalent text in another language. Parallel authoring is seen as an iterative process in which the author creates two texts, focussing on the language of both and making strong and intentional links between them. Teachers are, we believe, far more likely to be involved in parallel authoring than in translation when using the Fabula software. When dealing with translation, there is a sense in which each text has independent status; in the case of parallel authored texts designed specifically for second language learners, the first language (L1) text is constrained by the limitations of the children’s knowledge of the second language (L2). An example of the Fabula program in use will help me to make this point very clearly. St Illtyd’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Swansea, South Wales was one of the schools involved in the initial development of the Fabula program (Monaghan, 2000). In Wales, both English and Welsh have equal status for official purposes. Small but growing numbers of children are educated through the medium of both Welsh and English in ysgolion Gymraeg or designated Welsh schools. Yet even in English medium schools, Welsh forms part of the National Curriculum, and by 1999 almost all pupils between the ages of 5 and 16 were studying it either as a joint or a second language (Peate et al., 1998). St Illtyd’s is an English medium school where children learn Welsh as a second language. The children at St Illtyd’s were centrally involved in the planning and creation of a bilingual, multimedia story. The class had been working on a school drama project developing their own play based on the ancient Welsh myth of Branwen, and a group of children from the school had also been involved in performing the play in the Millennium Dome in London. The children had all written their own English version of the story and it was decided that this would form the basis for a bilingual digital story using the Fabula software. Agreement was reached on which were the key scenes in the story. The children divided into groups with each group taking responsibility for a scene. They also discussed the layout of the page, the sounds they could use and how they would produce them — battle raging, cauldrons cracking, waves breaking, gossips whispering and so forth. The realization that they would need to produce a Welsh version had the effect of refocussing their minds on the English text. At the outset they were only thinking in terms of vocabulary. They saw their task as finding any unfamiliar words in a Welsh-English dictionary. As things progressed, however, they realized that they needed to find equivalents not only for individual words but also for idioms and grammatical structures, and that in many cases they lacked the requisite linguistic resources. This led them to find other solutions. They realized that the task was more a process of parallel authoring than translation, where the English text needed to be driven by their existing knowledge of Welsh. This process can be illustrated by
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Figure 1.A page from The Story of Branwen by children from St Illtyd’s Roman Catholic Primary School, Swansea, Wales.
looking at the first and second drafts of an episode in the story. Bran went to the battlefield with 500 men. You would be able only to hear “For Wales!” and screaming. Mofuloch waited with 500 men also. Wales were behind because Ireland had the cauldron of rebirth so Nisien tried to smash it, but he died. The battle was tiring, long. Blood stained the grass and bodies scattered the battlefield.
This early draft is the product of native speakers of English with little sensitivity to the main structural differences between English and Welsh. The final version embodies a much more realistic view on the children’s own part of what they could achieve as learners of Welsh as a second language at their current stage of development. The battle had begun. Ireland had the advantage because of the cauldron. The battle was long, tiring, and bloody.
Interestingly, it is possible to argue that the final draft of the English version is more focussed and has a more coherent structure. In this sense, the exercise of producing a bilingual story is also, incidentally, providing support for writing in the children’s first language.
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The children, then, were involved in parallel authoring rather than translation, and it is likely that most users of the program will work in a similar way. This realization led us to revisit some of the assumptions we had held at the outset of the project. We had discussed, for instance, the feasibility of developing a library of storybooks, available from the Fabula web site, which teachers across Europe (and beyond) would be able access and adapt at will. Thus a French teacher of English might want to juxtapose the French and English versions of A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts. In the current bank of stories, however, the French version is “driven” by Basque and the English versions by either Welsh or Irish. Complications of this kind can best be illustrated by examining Figure 2 below, which sets out the original versions of some sample pages of A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts alongside the parallel authored Irish-English and Welsh-English versions, simplified for second language learners.1 A brief comparison of the Irish English and Welsh English texts will show that here we have two independent versions of the same story, each of which reflects the structures, vocabulary and the story-telling formulae of the target language. These are not, however, literal translations; rather they capitalize on the natural rhythms of Irish and Welsh which are in any case reflected in the varieties of English in common currency in Ireland and Wales (Edwards, Weltens & Trudgill, 1984; Milroy & Milroy, 1993). As such, they offer invaluable scaffolding for language learning. The Irish-English version can only stand alongside the accompanying Irish story; the Welsh-English version only works alongside Welsh. Neither could be used successfully with other languages.
4. Children as writers The creation of bilingual digital books encourages the development of skills which benefit writing both in the first and second languages. The advantages of bookmaking have already been well documented for “paper” books (Johnson, 1995). Children develop a range of social and organizational skills which help consolidate their progress as writers. The organizational and planning aspects of electronic stories are even more complex. As a result they offer children many opportunities for collaboration and the development of project management skills, as well as deepening their understanding of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Indeed, children who author their own multimedia stories will be developing relatively high levels of ICT skills, and actually making decisions about multimedia design. In this way they become not just consumers of software but also creators. One of the things that became apparent in the evaluation of the Fabula software is the very wide range of ways in which this tool can be used in the classroom. Most possibilities involve collaboration between, on the one hand, children, teachers and parents who speak the minority language and, on the other hand, children, teachers
Bilingualism, stories, new technology 341
Original version
Irish English simplified version
Welsh English simplified version
Once, on a little island, shaded by a single coconut palm, there lived a happy man. Across the water lived a greedy king who was always looking at the little island through his binoculars. The king wanted the man’s little island for himself.
There once was a man and a happy man was he. He lived on a little island where nothing grew but a coconut tree. Across from him lived a king. The king often looked out to the island.
Once upon a time a happy man lived under a coconut tree on a little island. The king lived across the water. The king looked at the little man every day through his binoculars.
“Why do you want his little island?” asked the queen. “Because I want that lovely bunch of coconuts”, said the king. “That’s all he’s got”, said the queen. “That’s all I want”, said the king.
“Ah, I’d love to have that island!” “Why?” said the queen. “It’s the coconuts I want”, said the king. “That’s all he’s got”, said the queen. “That’s all I want”, said the king.
“I want that island!” said the king “Why do you want the island?” asked the queen. “Because I want the coconuts”, said the king. “There’s nothing but coconuts on the island”, said the queen. “There’s nothing I want but coconuts”, said the king.
The more the king stared at the little island, the more he wanted it.
He stared and he stared and he stared at the little island.
The king wanted the island!
Figure 2.Irish-English and Welsh-English versions of pages from A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts (Reader, 1989).
and parents keen to acquire it. Such collaboration also offers opportunities to write for real audiences for a real reason, a feature which has frequently been identified as fundamental to the successful development of writing skills (Hall & Robinson, 1994). I have already touched on the children’s collobative work in their creation of The Story of Branwen. Collaboration emerged as an even more important feature in the making of the story of The Cat that Barked. Those involved here were the teachers and children of Errobi Ikastola, a four-class Basque-medium school in Cambo-les-Bains in the Northern Basque country. The Cat that Barked was developed as part of work on narratives and the structure of stories with a class of 8–10 year olds, co-taught by Lilian Hirigoyen and Janine Urruty. The children were put into
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groups of two or three and asked to analyse the underlying structure of A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts (see above). In a subsequent session, they were asked to write their own stories in Basque using a similar structure: introduction of the characters; setting a problem; saying what happened; providing a resolution; giving the tale a twist. The children then read each other’s stories and voted for the best draft. The winning story was The Cat that Barked. Bintu, the cat, drinks a magical potion and starts to bark like a dog. He sets off to find the old man of the mountains to help him get his miaow back. When he returns home he finds that something else has changed… Having chosen the story, the whole class worked on improving it together. Once the Basque version was complete, it was sent to another class, who translated it into French. The story was then passed on to a class of 6-year-olds with less well-developed skills in the Basque language, who drew the illustrations.
Figure 3.A page from The Cat that Barked by children of Errobi Ikastola, Cambo-lesBains, France.
The children now had access to the “ingredients” for making a Fabula storybook. The specially “commissioned” illustrations were scanned and made into JPEG files and the two older classes made digital audio recordings of both language versions of the story. The older children then combined the story texts, audio recordings and images into a full Fabula storybook, a sample page of which is shown in Figure 3.
Bilingualism, stories, new technology 343
5.
Virtual futures
The achievements of the Fabula Project are various. The association of the new technologies enhances the status of minority languages that are often branded as quaint and old-fashioned. The program provides a framework and a stimulus for using minority languages and thus helps develop children’s writing skills. At the same time, Fabula stories contribute to the relatively small body of reading materials available in minority languages. The Fabula Project has now passed from development to dissemination, with attention focussed in particular on the Fabula “Virtual Library”. Here, those who have used the software to create bilingual stories will be encouraged to deposit their work so that other teachers and children can download it to read or re-use in their own classrooms. Versions of A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts in five language pairs are already available and other titles are in preparation. The stories will be indexed so that both teachers and children can pick suitable titles and in turn add to the collection themselves. We see this creation of a collection of electronic resources in minority languages as a major benefit of the project. The prospect of having their work published for the rest of Europe to see has proved highly motivating for children in the partner schools who are keen to hear what children in other schools think of their stories. What has become very clear over the course of the project is that Fabula is much more than a software package. While the software is a useful tool, it also forms the focus for a community of users with a commitment to high quality and innovative teaching, keen to look outwards to share their experiences. From the point of view of the ChiLPA Project and the line of research reported in the present book, two general points are specially noteworthy. First, for the participants this meeting with children’s literature has been a positive and genuinely interactive experience. They not only read stories. They were stimulated to create fascinating stories of their own as a kind of comment or reply, and their attitudes towards the cultural grouping associated with minority languages changed. Literature, in other words, really was functioning as a channel of communication. Secondly, an integral part in this process was played by the computers. Just as the borderline between children’s literature and orature has often been rather fuzzy, so here, the literate, the visual, and the technologically harnassed are in fruitful symbiosis.
Note 1. The Irish translation and the Irish-English simplification were undertaken by Gabriel Rosenstock and the Welsh translation and Welsh-English simplification by Ann Jones.
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References Barker, P. (1996). Living books and dynamic electronic libraries. The Electronic Library, 14, 491. Chambers, A. (1991). The reading environment. Stroud: Thimble Press. Chana, U., Edwards, V., & Walker, S. (1998). Hidden resources: multilingual word processing in the primary school. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 1, 49–61. Edwards, V. (1995). Reading in multilingual classrooms. Reading: Reading and Language Information Centre, The University of Reading. Edwards, V. (2001). Community languages in the UK. In G. Extra & D. Gorter (Eds.), The other languages of Europe (pp.243–60). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Edwards, V., & Walker, S. (1995). Building bridges: Multilingual resources for children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Edwards, V., Monaghan, F., & Hartley, T. (2001). Bilingual multimedia: some challenges for teachers. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 13, 135–46. Edwards, V. Monaghan, F., & Knight, J. (2000). Books, pictures and conversations: using bilingual multimedia storybooks to develop language awareness. Language Awareness, 9, 135–46. Edwards, V., Weltens, B., & Trudgill, P. (1984). The grammar of English dialect: A survey of research. London: Economic and Social Research Council. Evans, J. (Ed.) (1998). What’s in a picture? Responding to illustrations in picture books. London: Paul Chapman. Feuverger, G. (1994). A multicultural literacy intervention for minority language students. Language and Education, 8, 123–46. Hall, N., & Robinson, A. (1994). Keeping in touch: using interactive writing with young children. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Johnson, P. (1994). Literacy through the book arts. Sevenoaks: Hodder & Stoughton. Milroy, J., & Milroy, L. (1993). Real English: the grammar of English dialects in the British Isles. London: Longman. Monaghan, F. (2000) IT’s all talk? In P. Goodwin (Ed.), The articulate classroom: Talking & learning in the primary school (pp.77–82). London: David Fulton Multilingual Resources for Children Project (= MRC) (1995). Building Bridges: Multilingual resources for children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Peate, M. R., Coupland, N., & Garrett, P. (1998). Teaching Welsh and English in Wales. In W. Tulasiewicz & A. Adams (Eds.), Teaching the mother tongue in a multilingual Europe (pp.87–100). London: Cassell. Reader, D. (1989). A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts. London: Walker Books. Rosen, H. (1988). Postscript to B. Rosen, And none of it was nonsense: the power of storytelling in school. London: Mary Glasgow. Silberstein, S. (1994). Techniques and resources in teaching reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Index A Abelson, R. P., 268 Adams, M. J., 247, 257 Acton, W. R., 271 Adler, D. A., One Yellow Daffodil, 220 Aebersold, J. A., 300 Aesop’s fables, 16 Ahlberg, J. and A., Each Peach Pear Plum, 156 Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women, 115, 116, 117 Alexander, Lloyd, 127; the Prydain Chronicles, 127; the Westmark trilogy, 127 Alfvén-Eriksson, Anne-Marie, 185–6 Allen, Judy, Seven Weird Days at Number 31, 297–8 Almqvist, C. J. L., Drottningens Juvelsmycke, 177, 187 Andersen, Hans Christian, 88; “The Little Match Girl”, 63; The Snow Queen, 205 Anno, Mitsumasa, Anno’s Journey, 101 Anôshakruvâ, King Khôsrôi, 32 Applegate, K. A., the Animorphs series, 15, 159–75 Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 154 Archer, Carol M., 22, 316 Aristotle, 11 Arndt, W., 41 Ashley, Bernard, 301 As I lay dying, 117 Aulnoy, Mme d’, 179 Auryla, Vincas, 204 Avi, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, 126
B Babbitt, Natalie, 159 Baillie, A. and Tanner, J., Drac and the Gremlin, 140, 153 Baker, Jeannie, 144; Where the Forest meets the Sea, 145 Bakhtin, M. M., 127, 130, 137–56, 169 Bamford, J., 296 Barkan, Leonard, 160 Barrett, N., 245–51, 256, 258 Barrie, James, Peter Pan, 66–7, 114, 129, 132 Barthes, Roland, 6 Barton, Charlotte, A Mother’s Offering…, 143 Baum, L. Frank, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 127, 156 Beecher, Catherine, 179 Bemelmans, Ludvig, Madeline, 90 Benfey, Theodor, 29, 39 Bengtsson, Niklas, 7, 39 Berger, Arthur Asa, 322 Bergman, Hjalmar, Flickan i Frack, 177 Bergstrand, Ulla, 173 Bergström, Gunilla, the Alfie Atkins books, 85, 90 Bertills, Yvonne, 9, 22, 270 Bescow Elsa, Aunt Green, Aunt Brown and Aunt Lavender, 90; The Children of the Forest, 90; Peter’s Adventures in Blueberry Land, 90; Peter’s Voyage, 103 Bettelheim, Bruno, 63 Bible, the, 60, 63–4, 88 Bishop, R. 296 Blackman, Malorie, 301; Operation Gadgetman, 297–8
346 Index
Blake, William, 113 Blyton, Enid, the Famous Five novels, 170–1; Five on a Treasure Island, 117 Bond, G., 296 Booth, Wayne C., The company we keep, 12, 216 Bora Korolevich, 40 Bosmajian, H., 214 Bradford, Clare, 88 Briggs, Raymond, 336 Brocklebank, Lisa, 179 Brooks, N., 267, 268 Brown, H. D., 272 Brown, Margaret Wise, 91 Browne, Anthony, 89, 94; Gorilla, 95, 104; Piggybook, 156; The Tunnel, 91, 94, 95, 98, 100 Bruce, Lisa, 301 Bruner, J., 19, 243–4, 259 Brunhof, Jean de, the Babar books, 89, 90 Bunbury, Rhonda, 317 Bunting, Eve, Terrible Things, 227–9 Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 142 Burke, C. L., 242 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, The Secret Garden, 113, 115, 116–17, 131–2 Burningham, John, Aldo, 93, 97; Come away from the water, Shirley, 89, 140, 153; Granpa, 94, 95, 99, 101; Hey, get off our train!, 104 Burton, Virginia Lee, The Little House, 89, 91 Burzôe (or Barzûjeh), 32 Butler, Judith, 181, 190 Byram, M., 20, 266–84, 292–4 C Carroll, Lewis, Through the Looking Glass …, 205; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 56, 122, 127 Carter, B., 238, 259
Caswell, Brian and Chiem, David Phy An, Only the Heart, 149–52 Cat that Barked, The, 341–2 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 67–8 Chambers, Aidan, 305; Dance on my Grave, 141–2, 147 Chana, U., 336 Chaucer, Geoffrey, “The Lawyer’s Tale”, 40 Chomsky, Noam, 265 “Cinderella”, 63 Cole, Babette, 89; Princess Smartypants, 89 Collie, J., 294 Cooper, Susan, The Dark is Rising, 122; Seaward, 122 Cormier, Robert, 129; I am the cheese, 130; Tunes for bears to dance to, 220 Crew, Linda, Children of the River, 295 Crime and Punishment, 112 Crooks, G., 278 D Dahl, Roald, The Twits, 238, 252–5, 256, 258, 263–6; The Witches, 168 Dal’, Vladimir, 44 Day, R., 296 de Beauvoir, Simone, 189 Deci, E. L., 278 de Felix, J. W., 271 Defoe, Daniel, 4; Robinson Crusoe, 7, 58, 66, 125, 130 Dickens, Charles, 4, 180; David Copperfield, 191; Oliver Twist, 130 Die Schwartzen Brüder, 67 Divina Commedia, 122 Donne, John, “The Ectasie”, 8 Doonan, Jane, 88, 102 E Easun, Sue, 166 Eco, Umberto, 147 Edwards, Viv, 22–23, 237
Index 347
Egan, K., 19, 243–4, 259 Ehlers, Gerhard, 34 Einstein, Albert, 137 Eliade, Mircea, 114, 132 Eliot, T. S., 72 Ellis, R., 299 Emerson, Caryl, 137, 139, 140 Estarte-Sarries, Veronica, 272 Evershed, J., 251 Ewers, H. H., 244 Ezrahi, S. de K., 214 F Feuverger, G., 334 Field, M. L., 300 Fielding, Henry, 4 Fish, Stanley, 215, 229 Flanagan, Victoria, 178 Fluck, Winfred, 162 Forsén, Ulla, 183–4 Forster, E. M., 111, 162 Foucault, Michel, 6, 14 Fox, C., 251 Frank, Anne, The Diary of a Young Girl, 58 Friedlander, S., 214 Frye, Northrop, 113 Fuller, R., 244 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 3 Gann, M., 214, 225 Garber, Marjorie, 187 Gardner, R. C., 278 Garner, Alan, Elidor, 122 Gavin, Jamila, Granpa Chatterji, 297–8, 301; Granpa’s Indian Summer, 301; I want to be an angel …, 297–8 Geertz, C., 268 Genette, Gérard, 117 Gilbert, Sandra M., 178 Gilmore, Rachna, 301
Gleeson, L., Eleanor Elizabeth, 156; Hannah and the Tomorrow Room, 140; Where’s Mum?, 156 Goethe, Johan Wolgang von, 67–8 Golding, J. M., 255 Goodman, Ken, 239, 242 Gordon, Sheila, Waiting for the Rain, 295 Graesser, A., 255 Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows, 7, 113, 115, 116, 117, 149 Gregory, K., 307 Greimas, J. A., 112 Grice, H. P., 10–11 Gripe, Maria, the Shadow tetralogy, 178 Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Carl, Kinder und Hausmärchen, 30, 88 Griswold, Jerry, 124 Gubar, Susan, 178 Gubarev, Vitaly, Korolevstvo krivyh zerkal, 16, 201–12; Pavlik Morozov, 208 H Habermas, Jürgen, 12 Hallberg, Kristin, 184, 187 Hautzig, Esther, The Endless Steppe, 223–4 Hellberg, Hans Eric, Love love love, 178, 196 Helle, T., 240 Heppermann, Christine, 166 Hermans, T., 74 Hill, J., 296; and Barrett, J. , Beware beware, 157 Hinton, Nigel, Buddy, 295 Hlubeck, Stefanie, 178 Hoban, Russell, The Mouse and his Child, 132 Hoban, Russell and Lillian, the Frances books, 89, 90, 93; Bread and Jam for Frances, 96
348 Index
Hoffman, Mary, 301; Amazing Grace, 294 Holquist, Michael, 137 Houriham, Margery, Deconstructing the hero, 190–2 Hunt, Peter, 73, 113 Hurd Clement, 91 Hutchins, Pat, Rosie’s Walk, 89, 98, 99, 156 I Inglis, Fred, 131 Isadora, A., At the Crossroads, 156 Iser, Wolfgang, 215, 229, 231, 244, 316 J Jaensson, Håkan and Grähs, Gunna, Jag såg, jag ser, 153 Jakobson, Roman, 46 Jane Eyre, 130 Jansson, Tove, Moomintroll books, 9, 19, 71–82, 113, 114, 116, 127, 141, 149; The Dangerous Journey, 90–1; Muminpappas bravader skrivna av honom själv, 58 Jarman, Julia, 301 Jatakas, The, 31 Jewell, T., 305 John of Capua, Directorium vitae humanae, 32 Johnson, R. K., 241 Johnston, Rosemary Ross, 13–14, 149, 159 Jules, Jacqueline, The Grey Striped Shirt, 230 Jung, Carl Gustav, 112, 121, 125, 127, 128 K Kalevala, The, 67 Kalila-wa-Dimna, 32 Katz, Wendy R., 173 Kautiliya, Arthasastra, 31, 33 Keene, Carolyn, the Nancy Drew novels, 170–1
Kertzer, A., 214, 220, 224 Kimmel, E. A., 214 Kincaid, James, 160 Kitamura, Satoshi, 89; Lily takes a walk, 89 Kivi, Aleksis, Seitsemän veljestä, 60–2, 64–6, 68, 72 Kokkola (formerly Williams), Lydia, 16–17, 19, 216, 239, 242 Korczak, Janusz, 115 Krashen, S. D., 281 Kress, Gunther, 102 Kristeva, Julia 6, 142, 156, 160 Kullman, Harry, Stridshästen, 178 L Lacan, Jacques, 6, 126 Laird, Elisabeth, Secret Friends, 297–8, 301–5 Lambert, W. E., 278 Lang, B., 214 Lassén-Seger, Maria, 15, 161–2 Lawrence, D. H., 4 L’École des Robinsons, 66 Lee, E., 271 Le Guin, Ursula, the Earthsea trilogy, 127; Tehanu, 127 Lehnert, Gertrud, Maskeraden und Metamorfosen …, 178 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 204 Les Enfants du Capitaine Grande, 66 Leslie, Eliza, 178 Levanthal, R. S., 17, 214 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 6, 267 Lewis, C. S., the Narnia books, 202; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 121, 122; The Last Battle, 121 Lindgren, Astrid, The Brothers Lionheart, 202; the Noisy Village series, 115, 117; Pippi Långstrump, 64–7, 114, 119, 120, 127, 129, 178 Lindgren, Barbo and Eriksson, Eva, the Wild Baby books, 90, 94; The Wild Baby, 97–9; The Wild Baby goes to Sea, 103
Index 349
Lionni Leo, Little Blue and Little Yellow, 93 Littlefair, A. B., 251 Lobel, Arnold, Frog and Toad, 89 Loivamaa, Ismo, 55 Long, D. L., 255 Loveday, L., 271 Lundqvist, Ulla, 182; Tradition och förnyelse, 187–9 Lundström, Janne, 188, 194 Lurie, Alison, 132 M MacDonald, George, At the Back of the North Wind, 118; The Princess and Curdie and The Princess and the Goblin, 127 MacPhee, J., 294 MacLeod, Anne Scott, 129, 170 Mahabharata, The, 31 Mählqvist, Stefan and Nygren, Tord, Come into my night…, 96, 97, 104; I’ll take care of the crocodiles, 104 Mäkiä, Tuula, 56 Mann, Thomas, Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, 197 March, S., 224, 226 Marchetta, Melina, Looking for Alibrandi, 21–2, 315–31 Marsden, J., the Tommorow series, 156 Marshak, S. Ja., 45 Martin, W., 251 May, Paul, Troublemakers, 297–8 McCallum, Robyn, 55 McGillis, Roderick, 160–1 McKee, David, Charlotte’s Piggy Bank, 101; I hate my teddy bear, 89; Not now, Bernard, 89, 105 Midgley, M., 268 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, The, 161, 164 Milne, A. A., Winnie the Pooh books, 7, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 132, 133, 149 Moebius, William, 86
Möller, Cannie, Stortjuvens Pojke, 178 Montgomery, L. M., Anne of Green Gables, 115, 119, 140, 156, 188 Morgan, C., 292–3 Morosov, Pavlic, 16, 208 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, 149–52 Morson, G. S., 139, 140 N Naidoo, B., 294–5 Neate, Bobbie, 230, 256 Nelimarkka, Riitta, 60–2, 68 Nesbit, E., The Railway Children, 117; The Story of the Amulet, 121–2 Nettervik, Ingrid, 183 Nikolajeva, Maria, 9–10, 13–14, 88, 89, 111, 163, 173; From mythic to linear…, 113; The magic code, 122 Nodelman, Perry, 14, 86, 131, 160, 175; Alice falls apart, 156 Nolan, H., If I should die before I wake, 223 Nordqvist, Sven, 100; the Festus and Mercury books, 94, 101; The Hat Hunt, 101 Nurejev, Rudolf, 66 Nygren, Tord, The Red Thread, 89, 100 O O’Dell, Felicity Ann, 202 Oittinen, Riitta, 73 One Hundred Years of Solitude, 112 O’Neill, L., 307 Ong, Walter J., 30 Orlov, Janina, 7 Ormerod, Jan, Moonlight, 89, 98; Sunshine, 89, 98 Österlund, Mia, 15–16 Ottley, M., Mrs Millie’s Painting, 156 Overend, Jenni and Vivas, Julie, Hello Baby, 154–6 P Pañcâkhyanaka, The, 31 Pañcatantra, The, 7, 23, 29–36
350 Index
Pandit, Narayan, The Hitopadesha, 32 Parkkinen, Jukka, 12; Kaupungin kaunein lyyli, 56; Korppi ja kumppanit, 55; Mustasilmäinen blondi, 56; the Oscar books, 56; Sinun tähtesi, Allstar, 55; the Suvi Kinos novels, 8, 19, 55–69, 72 Paterson, K., Bridge to Terabitha, 157 Paul, Lissa, 179, 192; Reading otherways, 179–80, 182 Pearce, Philippa, Tom’s Midnight Garden, 115 Perera, K., 257–8 Perrault, Charles, 88, 179 Picture of Dorian Grey, The, 130 Pinsent, P., 296 Plato, 11 Pogorelsky, Antony, Chernaja Kurica …, 210 Pohl, P., Johnny, my Friend, 132, 141–2, 178, 181 Posner, Roland, 315–16 Potter, Beatrix, 90, 91, 113, 115; The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 93 Pound, Ezra, 4 Pratt, D., 305 Pride and Prejudice, 112 Pritchard, R., 296 Propp, Vladimir, 42–4, 112, 128 Proust, Macel, 117 Pûrnabhadra, 7, 23, 30, 33 Pushkin, Alexander, 9; Eugene Onegin, 46; “Osen’”, 52; Ruslan and Lyudmila, 51; The Tales of Belkin, 46; The Tale of Tsar Saltan, 7, 23, 39–52; Zapiski Skazok, 51 Puurtinen, T., 239, 251 R Ransome, Arthur Michell, Swallows and Amazons, 113, 115 Rättyä, Kaisu, 8, 70 Reader, Dennis, A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts, 22, 337–43 Reichter, Hans Peter, Friedrich, 295
Reimer, Mavis, 161, 164 Rey, H. A., Curious George, 89, 90, 96 Reynolds, Kimberley, 160 Rhedin, Ulla, 98 Richardson, Samuel, 4 Riffaterre, Michael, 215, 229 Ringbom, H., 241 Ringgold, Faith, Aunt Harriet’s Railroad in the Sky, 294 Rönnqvist, Lilian, 20–22, 237, 266, 285, 333 Rose, Jacqueline, The Case of Peter Pan, 12–13, 112, 116, 131, 160–1, 175 Rosenblatt, Louise, 330 Rosenfeld, A. H., 214 Rosseel, E., 267 Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter series, 132, 133, 141 Roy, Jacqueline, 301 Rubens, Peter Paul, 57 Rumelhart, D., 268, 270, 275, 284 Russell, D. L., 214 S Sabin, Francene, Jackie Robinson, 294 Saint-Exupéry, A. de, The Little Prince, 114, 132 Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye, 128–9 Salminen, Jenniliisa, 16 Samway, K., 295 Sapir, Edward, 270 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 6, 269 Schank, R. C., 268 Schewe, M., 20, 294 Schmidt, R. W., 272, 278 Schwarcz, Joseph, 88 Scott, Carole, 88, 89, 224 Searle, John, 11, 74 Seelye, H. N., 267, 286 Sell, Charlotta, 20–21, 237, 266, 285, 333 Sell, Roger D., 19–20, 180, 237, 285, 294, 330
Index
Sendak, Maurice, In the Night Kitchen, 100; We are all in the dumps…, 9, 100, 229, 231; Where the Wild Things are, 85, 90, 91, 93, 99, 102, 103, 105 Seth, Symeon, Stephanites kai Ichnelates, 32 Shakespeare, William, 8, 155, 177, 182, 185; As You Like It, 185; King Lear, 188; Macbeth, 323; Twelfth Night, 186 Shavit, Z., 144 Shaw, George Bernard, 4 Shotter, John, 140 Showalter, Elaine, 178 Sidney, Sir Philip, 11 Sigsgaard, Jens and Ungermann, Arne, Paul alone in the World, 104 Silberstein, S., 294, 296, 309 Sim, Dorrith, In my pocket, 226 Sipe, Lawrence, 88 Slater, S., 294 “Sleeping Beauty”, 45, 218 “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, 57, 60, 62–3, 114, 264, 266 Soderman, A., 307 Somadeva, The Kathasaritsâgara, 32 Spangenberg-Urbschat, R., 296 Sperber, D., 274–5 Spiegelman, Art, the Maus books, 217 Spinoza, Benedict de, 188 Spyri, J., Heidi, 113, 118–19, 131 Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich, 202 Stark, Ulf, 266; Dårar och Dönniker, 15–16, 18, 177–98, 265; Karlavagnen, 182; Låt isbjörnorna dansa, 182 Stark, Ulf and Höglund, Anna, The Jaguar, 104 Steig, William, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, 89, 93 Steiner, George, 16, 214 Stephens, John, 102, 112, 159, 180, 322, 329–30
Stevenson, Robert Louis, Treasure Island, 58, 191 Stones, R., 296 Story of Branwen, The, 338–341 Stotsky, S., 296 Styron, William, Sophie’s Choice, 217 Svensson, Sonja, 196 Swain, M., 241 Swan, Anni, Ollin oppivuodet, 67; Iiris rukka, 67 Swarbrick, A., 296 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels, 7, 125, 181; “A modest proposal”, 181 Swindell, Robert, Staying Up, 329 T Taketani, Etusko, 178 Tallis, Raymond, 6, 269 Tammi, Pekka, 59; Russian subtexts in Nabokov’s fiction, 59 Tantrâkhyâyika, The, 31, 36 Taranovsky, Kiril, 59 Taylor, Marilyn, Could I love a stranger?, 221–2, 227; Could this be love?, 221 Taylor, Mildred, The Friendship, 295; The Gold Cadilac, 295; Mississippi Bridge, 295; Roll of Thunder …, 295 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 4 Terrell, T. D., 281 Thompson, Colin, 100; Looking for Atlantis, 100 Thompson, Kay and Knight, Hilary, Eloise, 90 Thousand and One Nights, The, 40 Tidblom, Thomas and Anna-Clara, Resan till Ugri-La-Brek, 153 Toijer-Nilsson, Ying, 183, 185, 192 Toker, Leona, 215–17, 223, 225, 227 Tolkien, J.RR., 122; The Hobbit, 116 Tolstoy, Alexey, Aelita, 209 Tom Jones, 130
351
352 Index
Topelius, Sakari, “Björken och Stjärnan”, 67 Townsend, John Rowe, 24 Townsend, Sue, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, 58 Trites, Roberta Seelinger, 125, 179, 198 Tucker, N., 256–7 Tumanov, Larissa Klein, 207 Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 123–5, 127; Huckleberry Finn, 58, 125–6 U Urpañcatantra, The, 31 Usrey, Malcolm, 118, 131 Utemorah, D. and Torres, P., Do not go around the edges, 140 Uttley, Alison, 122 V van Leeuwen, Theo, 102 Vigna, Judith, Black like Kyra, white like me, 294 Vygotsky, L. S., 268 W Wahl, Mats, 181; Anna-Carolinas Krig, 178 Wall, Barbara, 7–8, 145–6, 225 Walter, V. A., 224, 226 Whang, G., 295 Warner, Marina, 165
Weil, E., 214 Westin, Boel, 182, 190 Whitburn, M., 271 White, Gwen, Antique toys …, 224 White, Hayden, 10–11 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 270 Wild, Margaret and Vivas, Julie, Let the celebrations begin ( = A time for toys), 225–7 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, Little House in the Big Woods, 115, 116 Williams, Lydia, see Kokkola, Lydia Wilson, D., 274–5 Winter, F., 270 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus logophilosophicus, 213 Wolde, Gunilla, the Betsy books, 90; the Thomas books, 90 Woolf, Virgina, A Room of One’s Own, 190; The Waves, 117 Wordsworth, William, 39, 113; Lyrical Ballads, 44 Y Yolen, Jane, Briar Rose, 218–21, 222; The Devil’s Arithmetic, 223, 231 Z Zeffirelli, Franco, 323–4 Zipes, Jack, 43–4 Zhukovskij, Vasilij, 45
