“This is a book for adults.
More specifically, this is a book for adults about books for children.”
In the opening pages of his new book on the nature of children’s literature and why it matters to both children and adults, Barnett establishes the neccessary rule for the ensuing discussion: “When it comes to children’s books, kids and adults are forever intertwined.”
Barnett goes on to underscore a simple fact that makes this true, which is that by and large, the ones writing children’s literature are adults. Which of course begs the question of this existing power dynamic. The culture of a child, meaning the world it is being shaped by, is simitaneously the culture adults are shaping for that child. The stories a child encounters are the stories we (grown ups) are telling.
And yet. And it’s an important “and yet.” And yet, oe of the most important dynamics of children’s literature is the very thing justifying Bartlett’s desire and need to pen this book about it, which is the role of the child not just in hearing these stories, but in engaging them. Which is why, at it’s most fundamental level, good children’s literature doesn’t instruct or explain, but works to invite that skill that children intuitively hold: to make believe. To engage the imagination. To encounter a story and allow it to open up a yet unseen and unencountered world of newness.
Make believe. A word that evokes notions of that which is not true, a definition that has more in common with the didacticism of the adult sense than the ways children engage truth. Barnett evokes the image of liminal space, of straddling a threshhold, of loosening our grasp on reality that adults so desperately cling to in our efforts to conform the world into something we can control. In this sense, having one foot in both worlds, that of the story and that of our flesh and blood lives, is to open ourselves up to a conversation with a world we cannot control. To bring our fears and questions and uncertainties to the table and ask, what do these tensions reveal about the world. Here we learn to “marvel,” to “blur the boundaries,” and ultimately come to know both how and what it means to be changed by a story.
I kept thinking about who the target audience for this book actually was. Is it written to encourage adults to encounter the beauty of children’s literature anew? It is written to encourage adults to understand how to populate our children’s world with better stories? Is it written to adults to help them to understand the child’s mind and world?
Likely all of the above. I took a very particular road into this book for myself however. I imagined the book speaking to my adult self in an attempt to reengage my inner child. I imagined it helping me to understand these two intertwined elements of who I am. It invited me to consider my own formative grounds, the stories that linger in my memory, books that tell the story of my own growth as a person. Of coming to grips with the questions I was asking as a young 5 year old kid, and seeing which stories met me in that liminal space between those questions and the newness. At least part of why I took this approach is because I am in the midst of planning a boots on the ground pilrgimage through the stories of my childhood and beyond. Thus, this book couldn’t be more timely.
To this end, there is something Barnett absolutely gets, or at least I feel he understands a particular point of crisis that exist for my relationship between my adult and child self. He gives it different terms. He cites the trap of utilitarianism. Here he is speaking to how such an adult and particularly western worldview filters down into the way those adults write children’s literature, but for me it’s that child self noting the disillusionment my adult self feels, when he is able to be honest, with the world I find myself stuck within. A world in which my questions, those tensions, render me to positions of being isolated and misunderstood, precisely because, as Bartlett devotes time to later on in the book, this adult worldview, the dominant worldview it would seem in spaces where western art is being produced, consistently closes me off to the realities my child self once knew to be true. Even where storytelling is championing, the sad reality is, the sort of didactive approaches that utilitarianism requires runs rampant through the whole.
And this doesn’t happen in a bubble either. At it’s core is a worldview that has long since normalized this pattern of thinking that assumes the past is lesser than the present. This is the myth of progress. Here Barnett helps unpack how this makes itself known through particular prejudices, however hidden and often made willfully ignorant they are, which accord with how this myth works in a utilitarian world. We are born, we are formed against our lesser view of reality, we grow up into people with a greater view of reality. And what drives this lesser-greater dichotomy is our allegiance to a kind of truth reduced to facts. Children make-believe. Adults embrace reality. Growing up is, in this way, predicated on the necessary rejecting of the things our childhood once knew to be true. On a grander scale, this applies to our view of western history as well. i just finished Mary Beard’s newest book, “Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old,” which proved to be a fascinating and unexpected compliment to Make Believe given how she draws out the ways we (read: westerners) are talught to approach antiquity. Regardless of the degree of nuance we are willing to entertain in our examination of this cross-cultural movement from our present space and time into the world of antiquity, the narrative is so embedded that it inevitably guides and shapes the process. Here the past must be lesser in order to justity where we find ourselves today. This is how the modern historical imagination functions. Why? Because if we lose this narrative movement, we lose our sense of control over the world. This is why, as I heard it put, this worldview invented the concept of prehistory to begin with. Prehistory becomes to modernity what the child’s world becomes to our adult selves.
And what gets buried and lost and demeaned in the process? The ancient world in Beard’s case. The child’s world
This is why Barnett can be so bold as to say at one point that “most books published in this country are propaganda.” Propaganda for what? Ironically in a world that has become so adept at singling out and demonizing that old world religiousity as “indoctrination,” the truth is that in a reality where the ones writing children’s stories are almost always adults, propaganda is a natural part of how this works. The issue comes from ignoring what it is that is being propagandized, which is more to Barnett’s point I think. Meaning, a failure to ask and to recognize the simple truth of adults forcing a utilitarian worldview into the stories of children by way of a heavy tendency towards didaction. This completely ignores that “There’s a gaping chasm between childhood and adulthood” that author and story must find a way to cross. More so, it ignores that crossing that chasm cannot be a matter of assuming that we, as adults, have the correct view of reality and must then communicate our truths to the child.
Good children’s literature leaves space to talk back.
Good children’s literature allows our adult and child selves (or adult and child) to meet in equal space.
Good children’s literature doesn’t talk down
Good children’s literature ask big questions that are hard to answer,
And recognizing that children and adult are engaging the same questions is part of the necessary conversation.
And most important is coming to understand the power of story. Returning to Beard, there is this weird relationship in the West to it’s assume Greco-Roman roots and allegiances, and this plays out in the constant out of fashion and back in fashion nature with the Greek myths. A lesser reocognized factor in our continued reclaiming of these myths as our own is the way the myth of progress tends to assume our didactism can be transplanted onto the mythic imagination. The figuratifve “childhood” stories of our western society, now grown up, at once convinces ourselves that these stories tell the story of our adult utilitarianism while simitaneously operating on the assumption that we have progressed beyond the old world storytelling. This leads not just to incoherency, but a complete disconnect from the conversation. This is a complete aside, but it’s one of the real concerning factors of, for example, modern Western assumptions retelling the Narnia stories. Or a modern retelling of the Odyessy bringing Greek mythology back into fashion. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s that it’s done without an awarness of the chasm.
This is what my child self knows, and it is what my adult self, with it’s lifetime of wrestling with the same questions, consantly needs to hear. Not that one or the other has a greater inroad to truth, but that we need one another. One of the biggest things my child self needs, something Bartlett helps give words to as well, is not just the freedom to confront and engage what he calls the abyss of our questions and the world’s tensions, but to know it’s okay to exist there. Not with answers but with doorways to walk through which can help illuminate it. Teaching me that growing up does bring with it the potential for revelation to break into the midst. One of the biggest things my adult self needs is the freedom to engage my child self’s ability to be in this liminal space. To know that growing up is not about control, but about a continued appeal to that revelation my child’s self had the ability to access. while standing in the abyss.
One last aside here. If Barnetts own sentiments decry the systemtized utilitarian tendencies of children’s literature in America, it also opens up a particular awareness of those older authors, many of them occupying space in Medieval England where children’s literature was first emerging and developing, having a unique ability to understand the simple power of the story. They were not yet soaked in a culture that continues to sharply dichotomize myth and reality. They also wrote stories that did not discriminate when it came to age. They functioned as much as myths for England as they did imaginitive invitations for children. They did not restrict, they opened up the world. Which is why they retain so much of that romanticism. Not inconsequentionally, much of that was my own formative grounds as a child.
Discovering myself through the stories of others: a conversation about the people, places, memories, passions and art that make me who I am
The Stories of my Life 