[D66] Children’s Literature

[R.O.]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/20/childhood-ferocious-sleep/

July 20, 2018
Childhood, Ferocious Sleep
by Martin Billheimer


     “How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a 
grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like 
one.”

     ― Tolstoy

In her recent critique of kids’ books, Children’s Literature, 
Domestication, and Social Formation (Routledge; PB edition, 2018), Layla 
AbdelRahim recounts this striking tale from Onchukov’s collection of 
North Russian folk stories:

     A man was walking to Njonoksa, on the bridge… he saw a she-devil 
rambling: “A dress to impress I had; everything was taken away; but 
today, into the water I probe in a fashionable German robe, all bright, 
and with a haircut short and never will I emerge again, and never will 
show my voice.

Her admirable English translation parodies pedagogical grammar in a kind 
of beat hopscotch: dress/impress is serpentine; robe/probe sounds 
slightly lewd (and why is the robe German, not Dutch or Turkish?). The 
haircut seems an unexplained rite (short, shameful?). You cannot show a 
voice, but a face – yet certainly a voice shows something? Colossal 
stature, or its opposite in a visual gag. The babbling she-devil is a 
loopy relative of the Grimm Scissor Man or the Japanese snow witch. Note 
that she’s met on a ramble, where all songs and accidents start (or end: 
‘No more I’ll go a roving’). And bridges are common places for strange 
meetings, once upon a time.

Even a superficial reading gives the puzzling impression that something 
has ‘happened’ in this story, although everything is certainly 
uncertain. The same is true of Dylan Thomas’ poetry, or that famous line 
of Chomsky’s which is often cited as a paradigm of senselessness: 
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. In light of this, the MIT Don’s 
sentence now seems to refer to childhood, or to an adulthood haunted by 
sylvan troubled sleep, by deep unquiet structures where each atomic word 
is obscured in octopus ink.

The argument of Children’s Literature is that most Western childhood 
classics contain, consciously or unconsciously, a virulent antipathy 
toward the natural world, animals and animal nature, and the Commons. 
Fear of the wilderness is a preoccupation of this morose literature, 
represented in mythic or animal forms that both allure and terrify. The 
result is the inculcation of the arid outlines of commodity relations 
over the vigorously dialectical childhood mind. Even when children’s 
books offer a critique of that terrible project which begins at 
childhood’s end – Adulthood – the best it can muster is a kind of 
sentimental admission of defeat, exemplified by A. A. Milne’s final 
paragraph in Winnie the Pooh. Like range in artillery, children’s books 
project the psychological and physical closeness of the world out into a 
plane of total abstraction: the target, the word that lies over the 
thing, a vanishing port. That many of these books were written after WWI 
is probably no coincidence – Prufrock sounds pretty childish, right?

Ms. AbdelRahim contrasts these books with antidotes from outside of the 
European or Anglophone world: Nikolai Nosov’s Dunno trilogy which 
managed to attack both Stalinism and the grotesqueries of Western 
Imperialism with true anarchist verve; and Tove Jansson’s lovely Moomin 
books, which use from a deceptively subdued but equally effective angle, 
somewhat similar to Oliver Postgate and Fred Rogers. She also contrasts 
oral legends from Africa and the Indigenous Nations with the iron-clad 
written texts of the West: sing-song contra lesson and staff, legends 
and ideas transmitted along utterly different paths[i].

The first written records were not poems or prophecy but bills of sale 
and credit. All prophets and teachers first favor the oral over the 
written, as Holy Writ inevitably creates a tension between the flash of 
divine revelation and outward historical time. Symbols, like all code, 
won out after the primary tone faded from living memory. Or to be 
cynical: “People believe almost anything they see in print”, as 
Charlotte’s Web laments. Later, Guttenberg’s linear engines constructed 
sentences word by word, block by block. The typeset leaf follows the 
mechanism which arranged it, joining the vessel with the spirit just as 
technology joins the will with the instrument. In the hour of the fixed 
and perfect page, Time is a barrier to be overcome by ‘immortal’ words 
printed over mere voice, transferred like data along fiber optic cables 
and linked to political power and scholarly interpretation. Maybe print 
is the origin of our awful preference for communication over listening, 
informational exchange over the earlier forms of echo and mimic [ii]. At 
the forefront of this program lies the discipline called Education, a 
system of transforming the passive sensual nature of the early years of 
life into an active state where vision, hearing and touch are identified 
as receptive nodes and used accordingly.

Many of Ms. AbdelRahim’s most piercing observations come from her 
analysis of how children are taught in the places like Sudan versus the 
Bismarckian methods that still dominate European and US schools. Child 
psychology, sociology, the obsession with the origins of language 
(Chomsky again, and Skinner), fear of ‘wild children’ or Hillary’s Super 
Predators loose in Manhattan, Midwich Cuckoos and Bad Seeds… all of 
these concoctions show that we still recognize the power and terror of 
the childhood mind. Behind the eyes of a child lurks Satan or Pan, green 
children from below, our old beings in funhouse distortion. So childhood 
and children are test-subjects to be handled with a vicious scientific 
timidity which must find either Eden or the serpent in the egg.

Ms. AbdelRahim’s critiques of Lewis Carroll, Frank Baum, Milne, Lewis 
and Sendak are incisive and carefully thought through, stated clearly 
but with a true feel for poetics and ambiguity. As arguments, they are 
probably irrefutable. But something is missing, perhaps because it may 
be beyond even the most imaginative and sincere adult: How children 
themselves read and think about those very patriarchal, very tutorial 
tales that confront them.

While considering the purpose of most children’s books, the author uses 
Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the doxa:

     “The immediate knowledge a person has but is not aware of having”, 
which “goes without saying because it comes without saying”… “Doxa is 
the particular point of view, the point of view of the dominant, which 
presents and imposes itself as a universal point of view – the point of 
view of those who dominate by dominating the state…” This elliptical 
remark would seem to indicate that doxic beliefs, although shared by 
all, are themselves produced and reproduced by the dominant class. What 
is odd, however, is that this group never deliberately planted them in a 
given field’s epistemological soil. Doxic assumptions, then, are a sort 
of unseen and unintended support for the rule of the dominant.

But does not such a critique risk falling into the same dialectical trap 
which lies at the heart of children’s literature? An admission of the 
total triumph of Logic and its sleeping signs over the pure action of 
childhood reading, that way of perception which now looks so estranged 
to us and is – and is never again in one’s life – utterly indivisible 
from the torrent of autodidactic and autochaotic images, visions and 
sounds all around us? Could not The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe be 
freed from its own doxa by the seeds of its own destruction, by a daemon 
arising from an exterior which is also an interior? Childhood sight is 
childhood thought; childhood mind later becomes the orphan of every one 
of our phony homecomings – for there can be no ‘childhood mind’ once you 
have crossed into adolescence. Beyond this point, there isn’t even a 
drop of sweetness left in our cruelty. And no matter how accurate any 
indictment of ruling power and its labyrinthine mirror-effects may be, 
does it not conceal the doxa of the doxa? At the center is the same 
subject – The Child & Childhood – two concepts completely foreign to 
children. Perhaps doxic structures only exist when the subject 
recognizes them in the production of Childhood, is compelled to 
recognize them by various means above and below. But outside of this 
Childhood industry, such things are not even phantoms.

When you read kids’ books again as an adult, your own clouded memory of 
a childhood reading produces the suspicion – even if distorted by 
sentimentality, by a wish to defend a cloying preciousness against your 
own better judgment – that you are not rereading the same book at all. 
We are told not to judge a book by its cover, which is dangerous advice. 
They want to teach us to destroy an ‘innocent’ way of seeing things as 
adjacent screens, rather than as a set of eternal and unyielding 
oppositions (Is this the genesis of those terrible childhood dreams 
where every familiar face turns out to be a changeling? No one forgets 
them, or ever stops having them entirely). The defeat of our first ways 
of seeing is expressed in that fateful admission of emptiness described 
by Milne. He could see it in no other way than as the preliminary 
suicide of a tortured middle class, prey to a doxa before which only his 
child-readers might remain blind.

And how is it that children love to listen to words that ‘make no sense’ 
in languages they do not know, to books like Finnegans Wake, which 
adults always tell us are ‘incomprehensible’? In the most profound pages 
of her book, Ms. AbdelRahim recounts an arrogant lecture given a Somali 
mother by a well-meaning Swiss refugee camp worker (May Allah save us 
from the well-meaning). The ‘illiterate’ mother is a repository of 
language, legends, history and a past that has not yet been consigned to 
the Past – and perhaps this is the only way to retain your childhood – 
yet all the health worker can offer her are exhortations to the same 
devastating literacy that the Nativists and colonial states demand. The 
anarchist mistrust of analogy and metaphor most forcefully put forward 
by John Zerzan is given the starkest of proofs, here in a displaced 
persons’ camp in a West that can no longer read its own unreadable 
records, wandering ragged in its old German robes.

The knowledge of the learned is rarely anything more than the annexation 
of property from the periphery of a central point, an arrogant 
assumption of ‘facts’ free from uneasy questions and especially 
effective when humiliating others. In contrast, a child learns by 
anti-learning, by a substitution of the seer with the object (for 
adults, call it schizophrenia), by a series of dissolves and 
impersonations that are no different from the thing perceived. Before 
the law of voyeur voyant has been imposed (tellingly, from the world of 
Fashion), maybe the child ‘sees’ nothing at all – which is why every 
child wants to be invisible, and the death of parents is the greatest 
dream of this childhood when it first feels the weight of practical 
oppression (confession on the part of Sendak; polemic on the part of 
Time Bandits). In the end, we might have come too far to look back on 
childhood at all. Bakunin’s dictum that “anyone who makes plans for 
after the revolution is a reactionary” is more profound than we think.

By now, even the purpose of ordering childhood in order to order 
adulthood has been forgotten, leaving only sadistic models behind. 
Models are the fate of many children, who once constructed them with 
harmless glue and scissors: prison, mental asylums, the halls of the 
analysts and medical theorists, even gated communities. It began with 
the Word, which became bruised flesh in school and the only heat at 
home. What we have learned since then is all too obvious, which gives 
even the most reactionary kids’ book a pathos scarcely less moving than 
the little creatures in its pages. The author of Tarka the Otter, which 
I remember as a lovely book, returned from the First World War an 
agoraphobic ruin who found anything but fur and leaf impossible to bear. 
To heal himself, he joined Mosely’s British Union of Fascists. Safety 
first, I guess.

Capitalism does accept the right to be hopeless, a right that can only 
be superseded by fire. A recent newsclip shows a lonely gorilla 
attacking a steel crane on a last tract of wild land, which seems like a 
scene out of a children’s book. We speak different languages now, as 
permanent exiles often do. Goodnight, more than Moon.

Notes.

[i] Ms. AbdelRahim uses her own polyglot childhood in East and West to 
make her some of her most telling observations. These 
beautifully-recounted episodes are some of the most compelling parts of 
the book.

[ii] Never mind here that the printing press was invented in China. We 
are speaking a ‘Western’ fable.