Adults and Children.pdf

Adults and Children

Hugh T. Keenan

Poetics of Children's Literature, by Zohar Shavit. Athens: The Univer-

sity of Georgia Press, 1986.

The title of this book seems straightforward enough, but, as Alice

might say, its contents get curiouser and curiouser as one reads

on. Shavit proposes a large scope and purpose: to account for the

literary quality of children's literatureÂ—hence the "poetics" of the

titleÂ—and to relate children's literature to the mainstream of adult

literature. For a book of two hundred pages, that is indeed a large

double charge. But, with the aid of recent theories of semiotics,

largely the work of colleagues at Tel Aviv University, the author feels

confident in explaining the various influences that adult society has

had on children's literature. Her thesis is that the forms and content

of children's literature are signs of the concerns and beliefs of adult

society.

Unfortunately, Shavit does not clarify what she means by poetics

and semiotics and their relation to children's books until the con-

clusion of her work. Because of this, the preceding seven chapters

often seem merely to offer observations that readers either already

agree with or recall as truisms of contemporary scholarship on chil-

dren's literature. Among these are the propositions that children's

literature begins in the eighteenth century, that children's authors

have to appeal to both adults and children, that children's books fall

into two categoriesÂ—those accepted by the establishment and those

rejected by it but enthusiastically read by children. But the reader

cannot so easily accept some other broad assertions and blanket

judgments that Shavit makes in her early chapters.

Poetics of Children's Literature is divided into three sections: "State

of the System," "Solutions," and "System and History." There is no

apparent reason why the third section should not, as the reader

expects, come first; furthermore, chapters within these sections

are often as nonsequential as the sections themselves. "Transla-

tion of Children's Literature," for example, comes between chapters

Children's Literature 17, ed. Francelia Butler, Margaret Higonnet, and Barbara Rosen

151

152 Hugh T. Keenan

discussing noncanonized and canonized children's literature. Each

chapter is based on a few "test cases"; in many cases, the selection

of cases is open to question.

In the main, Shavit believes that the educational slant on chil-

dren's books has led to the perception that they are inferior to adult

literature, although she feels that evaluation is changing: "During

the last ten years or so, new interest has arisen in the field of chil-

dren's literature, and important work has been done, notably, in

the compilation of national histories of children's literature"(x). Yet

this interest is not that new: Bettina Hurlimann's book on Euro-

pean children's literature appeared in 1967, and the first edition

of Harvey Darton's history of British children's books came out

even earlier. M. F. Thwaite's history was published in 1963, and

Cornelia Meigs's Critical History came out in 1953. As to the purpose

of her own study, Shavit asserts quixotically: "In this study I relate

this newly developed field to the latest achievements of poetics and

semiotics, areas that are quite new to the English-speaking world.

I believe that the time has arrived to extricate children's literature

from the narrow boundaries of the past and to place it in the fore-

ground of literary scholarship, facing the future"(x). Like an early-

twentieth-century anthropologist, such as Margaret Mead, Shavit

believes that children's literature follows the same pattern of de-

velopment in every society; that is, school texts and didactic works

precede imaginative writing and adversely affect its development.

These biases cause Shavit to accept uncritically Phillipe Aries's

Centuries of Childhood (1965) as the basis for her first chapter, "The

Notion of Childhood and Texts for the Child." At the same time

the study ignores the demographic corrections of Aries made by

Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500Â—1800

(1977). In this chapter Shavit's test case is a comparison of five ver-

sions of "Little Red Riding Hood"Â—Perrault's, the Grimms', and

three modern, mass-market American editions. But, curiously, in

a study based on semiotic theory, Shavit fails to provide an expla-

nation for the vogue for fairy tales among adults in seventeenth-

century aristocratic French society. In short, she fails to ask how

this literature is significant for its adult audience. The sophistica-

tion and satire of the Perrault version is obvious in contrast to the

naÃ¯vetÃ© and didacticism of the Grimms', but no one would accuse

the Grimms of being unsophisticated. Shavit also notes that the

American versions are highly censored. Yet Jack Zipes's TriaLÂ· and

Adults and Children 153

Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (1983) has made most of this

information redundant.

Shavit's second chapter, "The Self-image of Children's Litera-

ture," really concerns the poor self-image of children's writers and

their methods of compensating for it. It is easy to demonstrate the

inferior cultural status of children's literature: its awards are minor,

its scholarly studies relatively few, and it is usually taught in de-

partments of education. Few would dispute the fact that awards are

often based more on societal agendas or educational value than on

the literary merits of the books themselves. All would agree that, if

they are to be successful, writers have to appeal to a dual audience

of adults and children. But is it a sense of inferiority that leads chil-

dren's writers to direct their works primarily to one group rather

than the other? According to Shavit, the writers who appeal mainly

to adults find their material accepted into the canon, while those

who appeal mainly to children remain uncanonized.

The test case for this chapter is provided by the two versions

of Roald Dahl's Danny the Champion of the World, written first as a

story for adults and later turned into a book for children. Shavit's

comparison of the two versions shows how constraints on language,

subject, narrator, character relationships, and narrative structure

result from rewriting for children. But these points hardly need

demonstration; any one familiar with both types of literature recog-

nizes the differences. Furthermore, Shavit's choice of this example

betrays an ignorance of many children's writers of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries who have written "unconstrained" works

for childrenÂ—that is, works that could be read equally by children

and adults. Shavit says such a test case was hard to find because "not

many writers write for both children and adults" (44). Yet one need

only reflect briefly on the statement to come up with numerous

examples she could have examined in the works of such writers as

Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and, in our own time, E. B. White,

Randall Jarrell, and Judy Blume.

Shavit's consideration of "The Ambivalent Status of Texts" draws

on a favorite tenet of current reader-response criticsÂ—that children

prefer uncomplicated, single-vision texts. But, one might add, so do

many adults. Shavit's test case here comprises three versions of Car-

roll's Alice in Wonderhnd. Unfortunately, this comparison ignores the

fact that The Nursery Alice was planned and marketed for a much

younger child than Carroll's original draft or its published revision.

154 Hugh T. Keenan

Shavit notes that the story is simplified in three modern American

versions intended for the mass marketÂ—the kinds of books often

found in grocery store display racks; it is hardly surprising that

these have been simplified. But Shavit does not explain this phe-

nomenon of simplification within the context of reader-response

theory. Instead, she asserts that "almost any reliable information is

lacking on how children do indeed realize texts and in what way it

is different from that of adults" (70). Such information is readily

come by in scholarly journals, though, and there are recent books

by Arthur W. Applebee (1978) and Suzanne Romaine (1984) on

the subject. Shavit dismisses such studies as "too speculative" and as

having "no sound scientific basis." Evidently, this chapter was heav-

ily cut, because the bibliography lists Hebrew translations of Alice

as well, but the text makes no comparison between them and the

English versions.

There are similar problems in other chapters. In "Translation

of Children's Literature," for example, she employs the mainly He-

brew translations of Gulliver's TraveLÂ· and Robinson Crusoe to show

that, on the one hand, the translations of children's books are gen-

erally freer and less literal than those of adult books and, on the

other, that adult matters, such as political satire, sex, and scatology,

are often omitted from such works as Gulliver's TraveLÂ· when they

are translated for children. Since adults translate these books for

a market of adults buying books for children, the surprise would

be if these adult elements were left in. Shavit's observation about

this form of censorship is mixed with pseudo-scientific jargon, as

in this assertion about translation: "Hence, the final product of the

act of translation is the result of the relationship between a source

system and a target system, a relationship that is itself determined

by a hierarchy of semiotic constraints . . ." (111).

In "The Model of Development of Canonized Children's Litera-

ture," Shavit provides the reader with a survey of English children's

literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.

She insists, though, that "the very same stages of development re-

appear in all children's literatures"Â—that is, that didactic children's

literature gives way to imaginative writing. It would be difficult to

accept this point without a great deal of proof. None is given. Ac-

cording to Shavit, canonized children's literature grew out of the

books promoted by the educational/religious establishment. But

such books as Alice in Wonderland, the Robin Hood stories, and the

Grimms' fairy tales prove the opposite.

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