Committed children’s literature (2/2)

Posted on 19/03/2014 by clembeauvais

The first part of this blog duology (right there) mostly revolved around the publishing and writing of politically committed children’s literature. But what I was most interested in in my thesis were theoretical conclusions to the analysis of such texts. Here are a few of them (necessarily abbreviated and simplified):

What is the implied child reader of committed children’s literature like?

The child reader addressed by politically committed children’s texts (the ‘implied reader’ in Wolfgang Iser’s vocabulary) is primordially someone who would be receptive to the text and its implications – and who would consequently be both willing and able to act to improve the world following his or her reading. This ideal reader would thus be so struck by his/her reading that s/he would attempt to convert these ‘intangible’ encounters with sociopolitical change into ‘real’ actions.

To put it in Sartrian jargon, such texts ‘call’ for a reader who, ideally, would take up the difficult task of accepting responsibility for the world, and contributing to change it. This task is shared between author and reader.

OK, so basically, it’s an implied child reader who would do exactly what the author asks?

Well, actually… no. At least, never straightforwardly, and especially not in the most complex examples of committed children’s literature, where extremely interesting things can happen.

Let’s take for instance the example of The Tooth, a seemingly simple, but actually beautifully profound picturebook by Avi Slodovnick and Manon Gauthier. This is the story of Marissa, a little girl who has to have a tooth extracted. Her mum tells her she can put the tooth under her pillow, and she will get a coin in exchange for it. Instead, though, the little girl decides to give her tooth to a homeless man – quite logically thinking that he needs a coin more than she does. The man smiles, but the narrator closes the story by saying: “Now all he needed was… a pillow.’

The implied child reader in this picturebook is, as said previously, someone who would actualise the values in the text. But it doesn’t mean that the reader is invited to follow Marissa’s actions. In fact, the text is softly but seriously critical of Marissa’s behaviour. By giving her tooth to the homeless man, she didn’t change anything to his material situation. Of course, she’s not a bad person: symbolically, she did good, and the man thanks her with a smile. And she did notice that this man needed money.

However, her action is hollow. Marissa is at the centre of a web of adult-woven fictions. She believes that the Tooth Fairy exists and gives money in exchange for teeth. She also tacitly believes that everyone, including homeless people, have pillows. She is wrong, and the picturebook is explicit as to the latter belief at the very least: the last page in the picturebook shows an empty bed – a bed in which the homeless man will not sleep tonight.

The young reader is forced by the iconotext to detach him/herself from Marissa and is thereby confronted to a vertiginous wealth of new questions. If giving her tooth was ‘useless’, what should we do? If it’s not enough to notice that there is poverty in the world, how should we act? The picturebook remains silent as to those matters. The young reader is ‘dropped’ there, exactly at the moment when s/he would need an adult ‘guide’, some kind of prescription, some kind of answer… but there is no answer.

From those silences, the ideal young reader of politically committed children’s literature is asked to become, more fully, an actor of his or her nascent political commitment.

But does the adult know what to do?

In my view, no – the adult doesn’t know. The ‘hidden adult’ * of committed children’s literature is above all an anguished, unsure adult, dispossessed of any means to act. Those texts testify to the adult’s disempowerment.This disempowerment is such that it leads to a subservience to another authority, an authority-in-becoming, that of the child.

But of course, no one likes to feel that one’s authority is being threatened. The ‘hidden adult’ of committed children’s literature is no exception (I hope it’s clear that I’m personifying an entity that isn’t ‘really’ a person here). As a result, those texts are also in places extremely prescriptive and authoritarian.

So we end up with a double discourse of the adult in politically committed children’s literature: on the one hand, a discourse of hope and adult disempowerment, on the other hand, a discourse of authority and prescription. This double discourse, it seems to me, can never be simplified into one or the other, though some books tend towards one rather than the other.

*I don’t have the space here to explain Perry Nodelman’s complex concept of ‘the hidden adult’ in children’s literature. Very briefly: it is the adult authority ‘in’ the text, not necessarily coinciding with any adult character, narrator or author; it is the synthetic figure of adulthood extractible from teh text.

So is committed children’s literature by nature utopian and unrealistic?

Yes, but only more explicitly so than other types of children’s literature. Children’s literature addresses children, and children are, for adults, fundamentally beings-in-becoming and therefore future-bound and hopeful (this is, again, the perspective I adhere to, shared by some children’s literature scholars but not all).

They are therefore fundamentally unpredictable. Since they are unpredictable, they are beings who could still be anything. The adult authority therefore seeks to make them adhere to certain positions, and to let them create their own positions.

However, politically committed children’s literature exacerbates this utopianism which is present in all discourses addressed to children. This is, firstly, because of the themes it frequently tackles: it is a literature which talks a lot about the future, about the impact of human actions, about hope, and about children’s ability to do better than adults. Secondly, it is also due to the fact that such literature often focuses on adult imperfections: the shortcomings of the adult world, of adult sociopolitical systems. As a result, the motif of the child and its logical counterpart – the adult-in-becoming – are glorified.

Such a literature is utopian, unrealistic, or at least idealistic, because it explicly ‘counts on’ the child reader: it depends on the child reader. But, I think, in all discourses addressed to children there is a similar request from the adult – a similar desire, a similar anguish to be listened to.

Any discourse targeting children is always in part an acknowledgement of failure by the adult. This acknowledgement is accompanied by a demand, a prayer. Committed children’s literature is a corpus of texts which makes those acknowledgements, demandes, prayers more visible perhaps than other types of children’s literature.

I’ll stop here!

Clem

Committed children’s literature (1/2)

Posted on 12/03/2014 by clembeauvais

I thought I’d write a little bit about my PhD thesis, which I defended last year, as I’ve never actually said much about it on this blog or elsewhere. So I’m going to write two blog posts on the matter, for those of you dear readers who might be interested in the relatively unfashionable topic of politically committed children’s literature.

rainbow thesis

In brief: my thesis was principally concerned with children’s literature theory. My starting-point was the currently quite strong theoretical strand of children’s literature which supports the idea that the adult authority, in such texts, is presented as the norm, and/or as more powerful, and the child as other, and/or as less powerful (see list of works at the bottom of this blog post!). My PhD focused on politically committed children’s picturebooks to attempt to nuance this theorisation.

In this first post, a few observations on what politically committed children’s literature looks like today.

Who writes and publishes committed children’s literature these days?

Not a huge amount of people. As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, France is currently in prey to a pathetic wave of paranoia about committed (feminist/ queer) children’s literature, but in fact most children’s literature internationally remains – in the words of Sartre – ’embarquée’ rather than ‘engagée’, namely ‘carried along’ passively by its values rather than actively ‘committed’. Children’s literature that explicitly either attacks or defends an ideological position is rare.

Plus, some countries are keener than others to publish and to value politically committed books for children. Some, including France, the US, Scandinavia, and some Central and South American countries seem to have a strong tradition of and love for committed children’s literature. They also have a number of small or independent publishers for whom political commitment is an editorial line and commercial strategy. It’s not currently the case in the UK.

Aren’t politically committed books just politically correct?

No. Of course, ‘political correctness’ doesn’t have a fixed definition, but it is extremely unfair and reductive to claim that politically committed works for children are just saccharine, bohemian-bourgeois texts attempting to show that everyone can be happy together if we would only stop noticing that he’s Black and she’s a lesbian (and all save the Earth by turning off the tap when we brush our teeth).

Many politically committed books say very disturbing things about, precisely, our ability to live together peacefully. They don’t say it’s easy, they sometimes doubt it’s possible. This is the case for The Island, by Armin Greder, for instance – a picturebook in which an immigrant is treated atrociously, and then thrown back into the sea, by an insulat community. Or Le Peintre des drapeaux, by Alice Brière-Haquet (The Flag Painter), which ends with the death of the main character who’d been painting flags for war-torn countries…

Going back to Sartre: such books can truly stage the extreme difficulty of living among others; the fact that we’re thrown against one another, with so little explanation, so few reasons to get on, that we’re always at risk of making terrible decisions.

But yes, of course, there are also many politically committed books that promote tolerance, friendship, diversity, in naïve and utopian ways. Such books are another facet of the same phenomenon: they try to solve the same anguish. But they do so by giving simple answers rather than asking tricky questions.

And there isn’t one ‘good’ category and one ‘bad’ category, but a spectrum of different books which are all (at least, so I theorised) ideologically ambiguous, even the most ‘simplistic’ ones. It’s this ideological ambiguity that intrigued me.

Does political commitment sell books?

Not to a very wide audience. Politically committed children’s books target very specific groups of people and committed publishers have precise strategies as to which customers they should be approaching. They rely a lot on mediators. They lean on communities of committed reviewers, booksellers, parents and teachers, and on blogs and websites rather than the general media.

Nonetheless, they are overrepresented in major book awards, some of which explicitly value books which lead child readers to think about social and political questions.

Is political commitment the sign of a bad book?

‘Quality’ is a hugely tricky topic, but it’s not justified to state categorically that books which have a ‘message’ are by definition bad books. Publishing houses which focus on such works are in fact generally very keen to focus on aesthetic quality of text and pictures, partly because they know that the books will not sell to a wide audience and that, as a result, the books must seduce mediators and win awards.

Yeah right, but the text and pictures might be beautiful, and the book extremely didactic! No?

Yes, of course. And those texts are clearly prescriptive and pedagogical. They attempt not just to entertain, but also to interpelate the young reader as to the state of the world. This pedagogical function is there by definition.

But before shouting that they’re therefore rubbish since art should be for its own sake, it’s good to think about two things:

1) Supporting politically committed literature isn’t a stupid ideological position. It might sound weird, but it bears repeating. It’s a literary and ideological position which has had quite eminent defenders, from Voltaire to Sartre. Many Nobel Prize winners are ferociously politically committed writers. The opposite trend – ‘art for art’s sake’ – appears in favour these days, at least in ‘adult’ literature. But already in 1963, Roland Barthes was lamenting the ‘exhausting’ alternation of ‘political realism and art for art’s sake, between an ethics of commitment and aesthetic purism’. The seemingly ‘natural’ reaction these days (‘books with a “message” are bad’) is reductive. Political commitment in literature is an amply theorised position which can (and indeed should) be analysed coolly and reasonably (of course I’m saying that because… that’s what I tried to do.)

2) Children’s literature is always-already didactic. Not everyone agrees about this, and many people (especially authors) hate being told that, but for many children’s literature scholars and sociologists of childhood, it’s inescapable. Adults and children are not in an equal relationship with one another. The adult’s ‘mission’ is to socialise the child, whether s/he likes it or not. It’s not a ‘problem’, it’s not a ‘scandal’, it’s not necessarily ‘bad’. Children’s literature is by definition a socialising and acculturating literature, a literature that educates into a society and its values.

It doesn’t necessarily make all adults horrible child-eating monsters

Politically committed children’s literature is a highly prescriptive type of text which reclaims its socialising ‘mission‘ and puts forwards social, political and cultural values in the hope that they will influence the child reader in his or her future life.

Does that mean that politically committed children’s literature manipulates the child reader?

The words ‘manipulation’, ‘indoctrination’, ‘propaganda’, etc. recur among detractors of committed children’s literature. Again, I think it’s a simplistic reaction. ‘Manipulation’ can occur implicitly or explicitly, actively or passively. Feminist critics of (not-committed) children’s books might reproach them with ‘manipulating’ the child reader into associating the presence of one or the other type of genitalia with specific modes of behaviour or types of personality.

Of course, very many politically committed books for children are equally guilty of presenting particular opinions or values as objective and fixed when they are, in fact, debatable and variable.

I’ll stop now, and next time, I’ll share thoughts that are more related to children’s literature theory and the adult-child relationship.

_____________________________________________________________________

Some key works in the area:

On children’s literature theory and the adult-child imbalance

Gubar, M. (2013). Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 38(4): 450-457.
Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1994). Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1998). Childhood and Textuality: Culture, History, Literature. In K. Lesnik-Oberstein (Ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (pp.1-28). London: Macmillan.

Nikolajeva, M. (2009). Theory, post-theory, and aetonormative theory. Neohelicon, 36(1), 13-24.
Nikolajeva, M. (2010). Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. New York: Routledge.
Nodelman, P. (1992). The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17(1), 29-35.
Nodelman, P. (2008). The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Rose, J. (1984). The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan.

On politically committed, or ‘radical’, or ‘subversive’ children’s literature

Abate, M.A. (2010). Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Mickenberg, J. (2006). Learning From the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mickenberg, J. & Nel, P. (2008). Tales For Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature. New York: New York University Press.
Reynolds, K. (2007). Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. London: Macmillan.

This week

Posted on 05/03/2014 by clembeauvais

This week, like many other authors, most of what I’m doing involves talking to people like this:

It’s the week around World Book Day in the UK – and authors are visiting schools everywhere to meet enthusiastic children who want to READ!

Authors are amazing.

In her school visits, Kate Rundell does tightrope-walking:

Julian Sedgwick does knife-juggling:

But even the rest of us, who just talk, ask questions and show pictures, make children happy:

And THEY make US happy:

So this is just a little post to say THANK YOU to schools, bookshops and parents for organising all this –

and if you’re wondering what you could do to make your children’s school a little better…

… persuade them to invite an author!

Happy World Book Week to all,

Clem x

Books I will never read

Posted on 28/02/2014 by clembeauvais

Maria challenges me to a blog post on ‘books I will never read’, as suggested by this Guardian article. Hers is there. Here’s mine:

The Fault in our Stars. It started out as a book I just didn’t make time to read, and then slowly evolved into a weird personal challenge to myself that I would simply never read this book, no matter how vociferous the claims that I really should. No particular reasons other than a vague sense of teenage rebelliousness.

The Luminaries. I always try to read all Booker-winners. But ain’t nobody got time for that flipping mahoosive book. UNLESS she wins the Nobel at some point.

Faulkner. Can’t. Sorry. I’ve tried. It’s just – argh!

Hemingway and Steinbeck, been there, NO.

Piers Plowman and The Faerie Queene, but I don’t think anyone’s actually read those. The Pilgrim’s Progress? ha, no.

Anything labelled New Adult. I did try. Most commercial YA (oh God, I’m going to get lynched). Fifty Shades and copycats.

Authors whose books I won’t read because they said idiotic things: Martin Amis, who thinks you have to have a ‘brain injury’ to write for children, and VS Naipaul, who thinks women can’t write. Yeah I know, no author’s perfect. But there you go, I just can’t be bothered with those two bigots.

Like Masha, I’ll probably never read the sequels to:

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

The Hunger Games

The Knife of Never Letting Go

Eragon

A Wrinkle in Time

(and many more I’m forgetting)

Some of those I actually enjoyed, but I feel one is enough. Same with The Giver and Holes, which are two of my favourite books in the world, but I somehow don’t want to read the sequels.

Like Masha, I won’t read any more Balzac, George Sand, Dan Brown, and I certainly won’t bother either with any more Sade. Paulo Coelho is also out of the question.

I’m not sure why, but I feel I’m unlikely to ever read Atlas Shrugged, Catch-22, The Leopard, Suite Française, The Road, On the Road.

And I’m not sure I’ll ever manage to finish Ulysses.

The quality of silence

Posted on 26/02/2014 by clembeauvais

School visits in primary school are nothing like school visits in high school. Primary school is Care Bear land: children are enthusiastic, chatty, unhibited, fun, on the edge of their seats. You leave feeling exhausted and deliriously happy, with tripled self-esteem. Especially when they’ve made you a book-shaped cake and cupcakes with your initials.

Yeah I’m showing off.

High school is resolutely different. Something happens in the first few weeks of Year Seven – you can spot it as soon as you come through the door. Pupils look distrustful, sarcastic – they stare at you, and then at one another, exchanging funny little smiles. Some of their questions and comments are unsettling, if not downright offensive. Evidently on purpose. All the more so if you’re young, female and blonde.

But after a few minutes, if you show them that you’re on their side, you gain their trust and the atmosphere gets more relaxes. And then you can talk about really interesting things, and have fun, and tackle serious topics, and let them speak about themselves, and listen to them.

So it’s not the same dynamic at all in a primary school visit and a secondary school visit. In particular, though I often conclude my primary school visits with a reading, it had never come to my mind to do a reading for high school students.

Well, I was having lunch last year during a literary festival in France and talking to another author who suggested I should. He said teenagers loved being read to. I didn’t believe him for a second; I put on my best polite face (“Really? How interesting!”) while secretly thinking “The poor man is completely disconnected from the real world – the teenagers he read his books to must feel terribly offended to be treated like babies.”

Not a teenager.

Coincidentally, though, that very same afternoon I did a school visit in a Year Nine class where the teacher said to me in front of everyone: “The students would very much like you to read an extract from your book to them”. They’d already all read that book (La pouilleuse), or were supposed to (in France, you do school visits only when schools have studied your books).

Since a teacher had asked, I wasn’t going to say no – like most academics, I’ve always scrupulously followed teachers’ orders – but I thought, once again, that the poor adult was completely deluded: teenagers, I firmly believed, don’t like being read to.

Of course I was completely wrong. Hardly had I begun to read that I noticed the extraordinary quality of the silence that had fallen on the room. The students were staring into emptiness, or at their hands or feet. They didn’t look enraptured, hypnotised or stunned – simply silent, and listening.

What struck me was how different that silence was from the silence you get when you read something to primary school children. Primary school children fidget, giggle, whisper. They’re so used to being read to, it’s just normal to them.

Not to those teenagers. They’d lost the habit – the habit of finding themselves in a situation where there’s nothing else to do than to listen to a word after another, to each sentence with its rhythm and musicality. For them, I could tell, it felt new.

(And no, I’m not subtly bragging about the rhythm and musicality of my book; I’m pretty sure I could have read them anything. It was all about the situation, not the text.)

(And no, I don’t have his voice.)

When I finally found a place to stop, there were a few more seconds of that silence. Then they started moving again, and some of them said, “Just a few more pages…”

Since then, I always try to take time at the end of my high school visits to read extracts from the book. Something always happens. I know, now, that literature teachers know it – and sometimes take advantage of this amazing quality of their listening, to read them texts that they wouldn’t read themselves with the same focus, the same attention.

At the risk, of course, of gradually breaking the spell…

Children’s literature and the current political situation in France

Posted on 12/02/2014 by clembeauvais

Dear UK/US readers, you might have heard of the Hollande/Gayet affair, but that’s so yesterday now. Something much more scandalous has taken its place in the French media: a children’s book.

On Sunday, Jean-François Copé, head of the socially-conservative, neo-liberal party (Sarkozy’s party, right of centre) discovered children’s literature. It was a bit of a shock: the poor man’s blood ‘curdled’ (his own terms) when he laid eyes on this picturebook:

Tous à poil (“All naked”), by Claire Franek and Marc Daniau, had since 2011 lived a quiet, fairly unnoticed life on libraries’ bookshelves. Its only claim to fame was that it had been, like 499 other books (including one of mine), included in the list of ‘recommended reading’ for schools by the Ministry of Education.

This fun little picturebook shows dozens of people stripping: Dad, Mum, children, the neighbours, the schoolteacher, the President – and going to the beach. The avowed aim of the author, not that it matters much, was to trigger smiles in the child reader and de-dramatise body image.

Jean-François Copé, however, was not amused. He brandished the odious picturebook during an interview on TV and proceeded to read it out loud, making sarcastic comments and noting that ‘at some point, in France, we’re going to have to stop to think about what we’re doing to our children.’

Jean-François Copé overestimating the size of his own brain

By Monday morning everyone on French news was talking about this book, and about children’s literature in general, and children’s editors and authors were being interviewed. It had been a while since children’s literature had been on the news so much, and it was actually funny, so we all thanked Copé for the sudden rise in interest for our work.

By Monday afternoon we’d all stopped laughing. Because no sooner had Copé finished his diatribe that a quagmire of Catholic, right-wing extremist ‘associations’ and groups declared war on politically committed children’s literature, stating that their next plan was to ban from school libraries offensive books such as Tous à poil.

Their target, in fact, is perhaps more accurately all those books that promote gender equality, or hint at the fluidity of gender performativity. And of course, books that feature same-sex relationships. For the first time in France, which is by no means a prudish country for children’s literature, we see emerging a very strong desire to prevent librarians, teachers and booksellers from stocking and recommending children’s books that present ‘alternative’, radical, or even slightly transgressive ways of life.

And it wasn’t the first time – things like that have been happening increasingly often for the past couple of years.

Last week, there’d been a much smaller, but (to us children’s literature people) just as noticeable furore on the Internet about a children’s novel called Je porte la culotte/ La journée du slip. Recently published (also by Le Rouergue), that novel contains two stories; one in which a little boy wakes up as a girl, and the other one in which a little girl wakes up as a boy.

A children’s literature blog reviewed it, and the review caught the eye of extremist groups. The authors received death threats. Reading the comments on the original blog post is enough to make you want to stop writing politically committed children’s books forever.

You might be wondering where all that is coming from – France, after all, has a long tradition of subversive and politically radical children’s literature. Yes, but conservative politicians and traditionalist Catholic activists are only just beginning to discover them. Or at least, they’re only just beginning to make their opinions heard about them, because the media are now listening to these small clusters of people who are becoming more and more organised.

It had been brewing for a while but truly took shape last year, when François Hollande’s law legalising same-sex marriage, which we supposed would be just a formality, woke up a normally silent and disorganised fringe. Astonished, we watched people demonstrate, sometimes violently, against that most banal of requests – allowing same-sex couples to marry.

The movement didn’t stop with the gay marriage laws being passed. More recently, galvanised by Spain’s proposed restrictions on abortion, the same activist groups took to the streets again to protest against abortion in France.

Now they’ve found yet another thing to protest against. The Minister of Education as well as the Minister for Women’s Rights in the Hollande government are currently encouraging schools to teach children about the non-essentialism of gender (you know, that idea that was more or less radical in the fifties). Children are asked in schools to engage with the stupendously controversial idea that not all nurses need to be female nor all air pilots male.

Activists are calling this the rise of ‘gender theory in schools’, which refers to absolutely nothing else than the strawman they created by naming it so. Spectacularly, two weeks ago, one of their ‘leaders’ sent hundreds of texts to parents of young children, urging them not to put the little ones at school that day: they were going to be ‘taught to masturbate’, there would be ‘a sexologist coming to school’, and, wait for it, ‘Jewish doctors would come and examine their willies, telling them that they can change them for vaginas if they don’t like them.’

I know.

Jean-François Copé’s absurd attack on Tous à poil thus takes place at a hugely heated time in France, and here we go, he’s given those people another thing to focus on: they’ve already declared that their next battle will be children’s literature.

What power do these people truly have? It’s difficult to say. They’ve dominated our news for over a year. They’ve resorted to acts of violence. And this is all happening some twelve years after the extremist right wing party, Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen’s Front National, reached the second round of the national elections for the French Presidency.

So we children’s writers and illustrators might be posting funny pictures of naked children in children’s books on our Facebook profiles, and Photoshopped pictures of naked Jean-François Copé, and showing support for our colleagues who inadvertently launched a media storm, but we’re not as merry as we may look. It’s ridiculous, yes, but a dangerous kind of ridiculous.

We’d really prefer children’s literature to make headlines for a different reason. In the meantime, we’ll retreat back to our quiet little Internet niche of friendly forums, blogs and Facebook pages. And write yet more politically committed books, because clearly they’re increasingly needed.

On voyeurism in children’s and YA literature

Posted on 29/01/2014 by clembeauvais

Breaking news: children’s and YA literature, especially the latter, can be pretty racy. From Tabitha Suzuma’s tale of an incestuous relationship between brother and sister (Forbidden) to The Hunger Games‘s murderous children, through to that scene in Melvin Burgess’s Junk where the heroin-addict mother punches a needle into her breastfeeding breast in search of a workable vein…

These are just three of dozens of texts where teenagers are raped, killed, torture, or do that unto others; or simply where sex scenes, even consenting and loving, are frankly explicit. Personally, I’ve got a horse in the racy race, or rather two, since my French YA books are so shocking than no UK publisher will publish them as YA. La pouilleuse narrates a day of psychological and physical torture perpetrated by a group of idle teenagers on a six-year-old girl. Comme des images goes through what happens after a video of a sixteen-year-old girl masturbating is leaked to the whole school. So no, I don’t have anything against racy YA.

There will always be people who say that it’s voyeurism. But this frequently-used term is often left undefined. As a result, it’s easy to retort that the person is just a prude, as if an accusation of ‘voyeurism’ was simply a glorified translation of ‘I’m shocked’, or ‘I can’t stomach this’. And it’s often the case, as there are indeed many watchful prudes in the children’s and Young Adult literature world.

Oh my goodness, the F-word!

But sometimes it’s a perfectly justified criticism. And the ‘other side’, the very vocal and active community of Young Adult writers and bloggers, too swiftly responds in terrifying torrents of Tweets to anyone who dares to criticise the work of one of their own.

And yet accusations of voyeurism, in the strictest sense of the word, aren’t necessarily idiotic or prudish or moralistic. They can be perfectly valid, and even important. But what does voyeurism actually mean?

Voyeurism doesn’t just mean ‘something shocking’, or ‘something with which some people might ideologically disagree’. Shocking the reader is good. Shocking the reader is a perfectly valid endeavour. What’s problematic about voyeuristic texts, from both an ideological and an aesthetic viewpoint, isn’t that they shock the reader, it’s that they trap the reader in a position from which s/he can’t escape; a position which forces him/her to feel pleasure, disgust, excitement, etc., when reading a specific scene.

This happens, for instance, in the case of:

Gratuitous episodes of sex, of psychological or physical violence, etc., which don’t add anything to the plot or characterisation but are there principally out of complacency, to elicit strong sensations in the reader.
Explicit descriptions that leave the reader no space to imagine what happens. Everything is said.
The (conscious or unconscious) desire to trigger sexual excitement in the reader, or a fascination for violence.
A lack of narrative distance towards what is represented, translated for instance as a unicity of narrative focalisation, or a narrative voice from which the reader has no way of detaching her/himself.
The choice of particularly ‘hot’ themes, such as child prostitution, forced marriages, teenage pregnancy, etc., mostly for their narrative potential, that is to say without taking into account the fact that real people experience these situations.
A lack of critical distance towards the ideological implications of the represented scenes or their symbolic meaning(s), or a representation which eludes unpleasant or questionable aspects to focus only on their sensationalism.
A lack of awareness of the generational gap between implied readers and implied author, and therefore a lack of awareness of the particular ethical and ideological issues linked to the representation, for instance, of extreme violence or of sex scenes; especially when those are ventriloquised by young characters behind which lurks, of course, an adult author.

Obviously, none of these elements is either sufficient or necessary to make a text voyeuristic, but it makes it more likely to fall into voyeurism.

The solution, of course, isn’t to eliminate controversial themes from Young Adult literature. I’d have to burn my own books. In fact I think that YA often doesn’t go far enough, in the sense that, even when it superficially engages with super-hot-themes, it often remains moralistic and conservative. Twilight is fairly racy, but it’s also, of course, hugely conservative. We need some more radical YA, and this radical YA must of course represent sex, violence, drugs. Those themes are not only attractive, they’re crucial to one’s understanding of existence, and literature can present and analyse them in different ways to our biggest ‘competitors’, film and video games.

So how can we write racy or violent scenes without falling into voyeurism? I’m not saying I’ve got an answer (I wish), but here are some thoughts:

Weakening the narrative voice. Voyeurism first and foremost establishes a relation of power between narratee and narrator. The reader must be able to rebel against what we’re forcing him/her to see: it’s only fair. On a narrative level, that means a narrator who isn’t omnipotent anymore. That means a voice that, even seemingly strong and assertive, reveals fault lines and hollow spaces. A narrative voice from which the reader can detach himself or herself, and actively seek a different vision of the scene.
Creating discomfort and unease. When we’re uneasy, it means we can’t fully be voyeurs. Voyeurism implies being mesmerised, adhering totally to what we see. Uneasiness, discomfort indicate that we are aware that, for some reason, we shouldn’t see what we’re seeing – and therefore we’re already judging what we’re seeing. An uneasy reader is a cleft reader, a divided reader, and therefore a questioning reader. Why am I feeling uncomfortable reading this? What isn’t right about this representation? You can’t fall into the trap of voyeurism when the text allows you to question what it’s giving you to see.
Being so outrageous the reader can’t see clearly anymore. Let’s be hyperbolic, lyrical, grandiose, excessive, disgusting, crude. If we’re going to shock the reader, let’s do it so it creates a screen so thick that the reader, try as they may, can’t even see what’s behind it. Nabokov lets Humbert Humbert say he wants to “turn [his] Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys”. This is the twelve-year-old girl he rapes “every night, every night”. Lolita is the story of an obsession for Lolita in which we can’t see Lolita anymore from the moment Humbert Humbert sets eyes on Lolita. Look as much as you want, you’ll never see her through the haze of that language. As a reader, you can’t enjoy her, you can’t delight in her; there’s nothing to see.
Not showing enough. This is the opposite strategy, of course: not giving enough to see. Punching holes through the text, disappointing the reader, not finishing what we started, forbidding climaxes. We can surprise the reader with a shocking paucity of details, insert endless, frustrating ellipses. And thus force the reader to become responsible for the text: to become responsible for his or her vision of things. Force the reader, therefore, to become empowered, active, inventive, and accountable.

Any other ideas? Thoughts? Disagreements?

If not, until next Wednesday, au revoir…

_______________________________________________

EDIT: This article was inspired to me by an interview in French where I was asked to respond to accusations of ‘voyeurism’ in my own works, so I wrote it mostly under my ‘creative writing hat’.

However, my ex-supervisor having noted that I tacitly appeared to refer to her own works in this article, I hasten to refer readers interested in the ramifications of this question for children’s literature criticism to the following:

The question of identification and of the importance of narrative voice in ‘trapping’ the young reader is tackled notably by Maria Nikolajeva in, among others, Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers (2010), and also by Maria Tatar in Enchanted Hunters, The Power of Stories in Childhood (2009).
Maria recently published an article on guilt in Forbidden and His Dark Materials which tackles the question of the overpowering narrative voice and the ethical problems it leads to in the adult-child relationship.

Some Royal News

Posted on 21/01/2014 by clembeauvais

Having read quite a few children’s books since I was born (they’re generally pretty good, you should try them), I recently became dissatisfied. Yes, dear readers, dissatisfied. Because none of them, no – none of the books I’d read ever gathered the following ten things all together in the same story:

Windsurfing starfish
Sextuplet princes (of toddlerish age) (crowns equipped with elastic bands)
A foreign king obsessed with blitz invasions (finished in time for dinner)
Hummingbird cannons
An amazing holiday including a trip to a Mars bar
A babysitting job paid one thousand pounds a day
A naked porcupine
A knitted parachute
A lift especially designed for a cow
A day of leave at the Independent Republic of Slough.

I was extremely sad about this oversight, because it appears to me that no children’s book can ever be quite complete without these ten things.

So I decided to write it!

And since other people agreed that the children’s literature world could not survive much longer without these ten things all neatly folded into a children’s book, it will be published as the first book in a series, by Bloomsbury, in September 2014!

(NB The lovely people at Bloomsbury, as a welcome present, having somehow heard from somewhere that I didn’t dislike one of their series, gave me this brand new Harry Potter box set -)

now I'll have to reread them for the 67th time... oh well!

uh-oh, now I’ll have to reread them for the 67th time. Ah well!

The first volume of my own series, meanwhile, will be called The Royal Babysitters.

Based on a true story. (not)

What’s the pitch? Bickering sisters Anna and Holly, along with rather clueless little prince Pepino, have to look after six little princes for just one day – yes, but a day chosen by the bloodthirsty King Alaspooryorick of Daneland to invade the country.

A rather tough job, then, but you see, they have to earn some serious money to pay for the unbelievably cool Holy-Moly-Holiday that they’ve seen advertised in the newspaper. .

The second book in the series doesn’t have a name yet but it will be out in April 2015.

And it all takes place in a world… not quite like our own.

“But what age is it for?” asks the anxious adult. “From your description, it sounds like it could be for anyone between seven and a quarter and eight and a half! I need it to be more precise!!!”

It will be, I think, intended for children who are just getting to grips with the Art of Reading (well done them), though once again, like the Sesame books, I have written them carefully so they won’t immediately burn the neurons of anyone at a different stage of literacy.

And, what is supermuchmore exciting, it will be what I believe my friend and colleague Eve Tandoi would call a hybrid book series, that is to say a book where words and pictures both tell the story. It’s not quite a comic and it’s not quite a picturebook, but it’s somewhere in between, and I think it’s going to be hugely fun once the pictures are all drawn.

And it will be edited by none other than the extraordinary Ellen Holgate, who had already picked my Sesame at Hodder before moving to Bloomsbury. All those of you who’ve read Sesame books know how beautifully conceived and designed they are, so I’m ferociously excited that she’s working on the series too.

I hope you’re looking forward to it too. In fact I hope you’re now considering making lots of new babies in order to have an excuse to read them this series and then the Sesame Seade books. I’ll leave you to do that, then. I’ll just leave you to it.

Clem x

Starting a New Research Project

Posted on 15/01/2014 by clembeauvais

I’m starting a new research project!

fascinating, I know.

OK, it’s the project for which I obtained my Junior Research Fellowship from lovely Homerton College, and said Fellowship started in October, so it was high time I began working on the new project. But I’ve had a monograph to write, as you may remember (yes, it’s almost done, yep, oh, thank you very much, that’s very kind of you, we’ll talk about it again when the peer-readers get back to me saying it’s a huge pile of rubbish), and courses to teach, and essays to mark, and books to read.

So the project had been pushed back until NOW. And NOW it’s really got to start because, well…

… because I’ve been invited to present some results from it at a symposium, erm, next, erm… ~~year~~ ~~term~~ ~~month~~ week.

WHAT?

YesIknow. ButIhaven’thadtime. Andwhoareyoutojudge. Anyway, that symposium is on a tiny part of what the new project entails. SO THERE.

My new project as a whole is about cultural and literary representations of child precocity. Nope, it’s not narrower than that yet; I haven’t even reached the narrowing-down stage, it’s that early. But I know it won’t be solely a children’s literature project; I’ll be foraying into other discourses (aw no don’t cry, I’ll still write about children’s books sometimes). I want to be able to jump from Matilda to Ada in the same sentence.

So how do you start researching something so vast? Frankly, I’m not completely sure. I’ve been thinking about it for months, and though thinking doesn’t technically count as research, it organises it. I’ve settled for a number of areas I need to investigate first to lay the foundations of the project.

Some of them I’m already familiar with (children’s literature, philosophy of childhood and education, sociology of childhood); others, less so.

One of them – psychological and sociological research about actual ‘precocious’ children – is completely outside my comfort zone. I don’t generally look at anything to do with real children (why on Earth would anyone). But I need to be able to analyse the discourses of these two fields of study, because scientific studies, discoveries and texts surrounding things contribute, of course, to social, political and cultural representations of those things.

Another one – ‘straight English’ scholarly research about representations of precocious children in literature ‘for adults’ – is, on paper, outside my current field, but I’m comfortable with it. The only danger I face is lack of legitimacy in the eyes of ‘straight English’ researchers, since most of them don’t think children’s literature scholars can actually read anything else than children’s literature (in fact, some doubt that we can even read children’s books). But my study will remain firmly within Childhood Studies, not English.

Finally, there’s another field I’ll need to get acquainted with – visual culture, which ranges from cinema to fine art. No biggie, right? I might eventually discard visual representations of precocious children if the task becomes too daunting, but it would be a shame, because there are so many of them. Again, it’s not my field at all.

Those disciplinary boundaries are a pain, because despite the emphasis laid on multidisciplinary research projects by universities, I don’t have the feeling that they are very popular among academics – especially people in very canonical disciplines. Philosophers, English Literature scholars, Historians don’t like it very much when other people dare to ‘do’ interdisciplinarity with ‘their’ discipline.

(They might look at your funny little hybrid subfield and tell you things about it (that you’ve known for twenty years), but the other way around is more controversial.)

Of course there’s always the danger that you might look like the person who pops into another office in the Ivory Tower and says ‘Do you mind if I borrow that tool of yours for a minute?’ having barely read the instruction manual, so the tool breaks, and whatever they were trying to operate with it breaks, and worse, they don’t even realise anything’s gone wrong.

Fingers crossed this won’t happen (too much) with this project. I have three years (well, two and two-thirds now) of full-time research that I can use to study those areas seriously and methodically, and acquire the legitimacy to branch into other fields of childhood studies (as well as, of course, to get to interesting conclusions about the whole of existence.)

Starting this new research project is looking a bit like walking into relatively hostile countries on a more or less forged visa, and pretending not to notice the locals’ suspicious glances. I’ll let you know if I manage to earn their trust while stealing their treasures.

A quarter of a century

Posted on 06/01/2014 by clembeauvais

I’m turning 25 today!

Therefore I’m officially a quarter of a century old, and, as Simone Weil politely told me this morning in my serendipitous current reading, “at twenty-five, it is high time to leave adolescence radically behind oneself…”

I think I’m fine with that, thanks – I hated being a teenager, and I was delighted to leave that bit of existence aside as soon as possible. But I thought a twenty-fifth birthday warranted a lightly self-reflexive blog post on the things I knew and didn’t know I’d do, at the then very old age of twenty-five, when I was a little girl.

And so, when I was a little girl…

When I was a little girl I would never have thought that, at twenty-five, I would be an academic.

I never imagined, until very, very late, that I’d become an academic. First I wanted to be a primary schoolteacher, then I wanted to work in publishing. I hated school. I told my mother, when I was ten or eleven years old, that I would quit school as early as the French system allowed – sixteen years old.

Fourteen years after that inflexible promise, I was out.

Even in my undergrad years, when I’d suddenly discovered, thanks to the UK system, that I loved studying, I didn’t think I’d stay on to do a Masters. Even during my MPhil, it took my supervisor to tell me “Just apply for PhD funding, you never know…”, and the aforesaid funding, for me to realise that this was indeed what I wanted to do more than anything else.

When I was a little girl, I would never have thought that at twenty-five, I would be childless(/free).

Until very late – 21, 22 years old, pretty much – I was convinced that I wanted to have children very early. The idea of being a young parent appealed to me greatly. I’d decided 23 was the perfect age to have a first child. Yep, 23. No idea why, but the arbitrary age was a firm decision.

As you may have noticed, I rarely talk on this blog about my two-year-old toddler. It’s because no such person exists.

Not only have I not fulfilled this youthful oath, but the idea of having children has never been farther from my mind than it is now. Complete change of heart, due, I think, to a variety of factors – some quite interesting, but matter for another blog post.

When I was a little girl, I would never have thought that at twenty-five, I would be constantly in touch with hundreds of people.

As a child and a teenager, I was quite solitary. I used to think I wasn’t very sociable, but I didn’t mind at all – I enjoyed the feeling of self-sufficiency it afforded me. I didn’t think I often met people with whom I felt on the same wavelength. I’d never have thought, of course, that with Facebook and blogs I would have the opportunity to meet and talk to hundreds of people who shared my interests, people with whom I would interact everyday, even though I might never meet them. On the French side, this is exactly what is happening, and I love it. These friendships and acquaintances are only virtual in their manifestations – not in their status. You learn so much, and are enriched so much, when you get in touch so easily with people who think about the same things as you do.

When I was a little girl, I already knew I would be a writer. But not exactly like this…

I always wanted to be a writer, and I never wanted to be a full-time writer. That’s done, but of course when I was a child I imagined something else. Immediately successful books, showers of awards and instant film adaptations. That’s normal for childish daydreams, I think.

But more importantly I never imagined that there would be this weird feeling of inadequacy regarding the books you publish, the constant, nagging impression that they’re not-quite-right, not what you meant – at all. Your name is on them and you sign them to people. But. There’s always something missing.

When I was a little girl, I already knew I’d always be interested in children’s literature and in childhood.

My interest in children’s literature and in childhood were always a part of my life. Even as a child, I was fascinated by childhood as a concept, even though of course I didn’t formulate it in that way. My own childhood, that of others. The passing of time, the end of childhood. Younger children fascinated me, too. I always devoured children’s books, regardless of age guidelines. As a teenager, I wanted to be a school teacher, but then I understood it was the theory that interested me. Not real children, but why adults (and me) were so obsessed with them, and with childhood. As I said, I’d never have thought I’d become an academic, but I knew that what I would do would be linked to childhood.

When I was a little girl, there were lots of other things I didn’t think I’d do at twenty-five years old.

Living in the UK, of course I couldn’t have foreseen that as a child – but as a teenager I started becoming interested by the English language and Britain. And other things were unexpected. I didn’t think I’d become so engrossed in philosophy one or two years after leaving France, where I’d received rigorous teaching in the discipline but also the impression that it was a dry and cold subject.

My personality has changed, of course. I’m more sociable and more accommodating now than I used to be. I feel much more balanced, less irritable, and less close-minded. But also much more stressed by the passing of time, the urgency of writing, reading, transmitting, learning, creating. I get bored less quickly, but each empty moment is oppressive – I’m more impatient than when I was a child.

And I hope the next twenty-five years are just as full of new opportunities, new discoveries, new books to read and to write, new friends. And at last my own home and an actual job (please!).

As well as more projects, which I see for now as fusing into ‘one’ project, that of thinking in different ways about childhood, always – that concept which still fascinates me even though I left childhood quite a while ago now, and that I’m less sentimental than I used to be about mine and that of others. If anything, it’s made it much more interesting.