I had a wonderful time at Villanova University on Tuesday, where I gave a talk entitled, “The Purpose and Power of Children’s Literature.” The talk was sponsored by Villanova’s Office for Mission & Ministry as part of their Catholic Imagination in the Arts series. It was a special honor to be invited to speak in a series devoted to a theme so dear to my heart, and I want to thank my host, Office for Mission & Ministry planning and research director, Dr. Christopher Janosik, for so kindly extending the invitation.

There was a great crowd at the talk, comprised mostly of Villanova undergraduates, and we had a very meaty Q&A afterwards which I learned a lot from and appreciated. 

Pictured above is Your Faithful Servant with ardent Kingdom of Patria fan, Dora. Poor Dora had to suffer through my entire talk just so that she could get her Patria books signed. Thanks for being such a trooper, Dora!

What follows are my notes for “The Purpose and Power of Children’s Literature”–suitable for framing or wrapping fish.

Comments most welcome and appreciated!

 

The Purpose and Power of Children’s Literature

Daniel McInerny

A Talk Delivered in the Catholic Imagination and the Arts Series

Sponsored by the Office for Mission & Ministry

Villanova University

October 7, 2014

Introduction

• Seeing the movie adaptation of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. The mother coming out of the theater asking, “Is that what you wanted?” (not, “Did you like it?” more like feeding a need).
• Sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. Currently no. 3 and 4 Amazon bestsellers 2014 (paperback and hardcopy), currently no. 15 in UK–despite being published at the beginning of 2012.
• The move made 48.2 million and a #1 rating in its opening weekend–June 6 (beating out Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow), and has since grossed over 300 million worldwide.
• It’s a seductive book, not because it glorifies illicit teenage sex, but because it aims for authenticity as opposed to phoniness (these are the descendants of Holden Caulfield and the cultural cousins of Lena Dunham)
• Looking for authentic answers to questions about the meaning of suffering and the meaning of romantic love
• But these questions do not receive anything like adequate answers; to be authentic is to realize that the universe does not really care about us, that suffering does not have a point; read the section on Antonietta Meo
• The Fault in Our Stars is our adversary in the fight over the moral and spiritual formation of our children. And it’s a formidable one. How are we going to combat it? What would children’s literature look like as created by the Catholic imagination?  

I. Why is the Imagination So Important?

• G.K. Chesterton, the sword and the trowel: the sword defends but the trowel (the imagination) helps cultivate + build (Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem); 
• GKC says that the development of the imagination is the most essential element in education. Why?
• I can learn what humility is conceptually by studying the relevant portions of Aquinas’s Summa. I can learn humility even better by watching my humble Aunt Edna. When it comes to learning how to act humbly in the world, Aunt Edna is more helpful than the Summa. Why? Because in Aunt Edna’s case I can see her action (we learn through the senses) and the love I have for her and the attractiveness of her humility compels the heart. And because my love for Aunt Edna and for the goodness of her actions motivates me to imitate her example and learn by doing. 
• Works of the imagination occupy a middle space between conceptual works (theology, philosophy) and our friendships in the world (Aunt Edna)–and partake of some of each. Enjoyed in a contemplative, as opposed to practical, space, works of the imagination inspire our loves and thus enable us to imagine how life should really be lived.
• The picture of humility that we find in Edmund’s narrative arc in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is both closer to the contours of human life as it is lived and is a more heightened image of humility that it compels the heart far more effectively (for most human beings) than the discussion of humility in the Summa. 
• Works of the imagination enable us to picture how actually to live out the decisions we have to make, the roles we have to play, the culture we have to rebuild. In order to achieve a thriving homeschool, parish, Church, or culture, we first have to imagine it and experience what it would feel like to love it. Works of the imagination are thus critical exercises in ordering our loves (Augustine defines virtue as the ordo amoris).
• But here’s the rub: works of the imagination can be seductive in a negative sense: they can persuade us with misleading pictures of what life is really all about. This is especially so with children, because children are moved by images, not arguments.  

So we need to ask ourselves: what sorts of images do our children need? 

II. Children’s Literature in the Catholic Tradition

Once upon a time, a poet climbed a mountain (Dante’s Purgatorio). Mathilda. His moral and intellectual transformation has prepared him to enter the terrestrial paradise.   

Purgatorio 28

“The poets in their melodies of old

may have dreamed on Parnassus of this spot

singing about the happy age of gold.

For here the human race was innocent;

forever spring, and fruit upon the vine.

This is the nectar which the poets meant.”

• I believe all fairy stories are dreams of the golden world. I propose that all literature in the comic mode can be described as a dream of the terrestrial paradise. (Tragedy is about another aspect of our relation to God.) For this reason I want to argue that children’s literature is also a dream of terrestrial paradise.
• And because of this, children’s lit has an essential understanding to a Catholic understanding of moral formation. Another way of putting My Central Point is this: 
• Children’s literature is about the adventure into the “golden world” in which innocence is fought for and achieved. 

Define children’s literature

Define “golden world” 

Define innocence

A. Children’s Literature

• Children’s literature, at least as we know it today, did not begin to emerge until the 19th century. Aesop (620-564 BC) fables were not children’s stories. We learn from Plato’s Republic that Homer was a key text in childhood education. Shakespeare did not read children’s books as we think of them: he was busy reading the plays of Plautus and Terence in Latin.
• Of course, I’m not denying that these tales and folk tales were never adapted for children, much less denying that fathers have been telling bedtime stories to their children since man first dragged himself out of the primordial ooze.
• But this isn’t what we think of when we think of children’s lit. We think of the children’s section at B&N, with its Winnie-the-Pooh Hundred Acre Wood backdrop; we think of the children’s section of the public library. We think of the books we enjoyed as children, probably none of which were older than 170 years. Children’s literature as we think of it, is of fairly recent vintage. 

John Newbery, Newbery’s Pretty Pocket Book (1744): pays tribute to Locke; edification + enjoyment; a children’s publishing business; The Newbery Medal (American)

The Brother’s Grimm, Children’s and Household Tales (1812)

Hans Christian Anderson, Fairy Tales (1835)

Victorian Era (1837-1901)

Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense (1846)

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)

Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (1863)

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1869)

George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883); A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885)

Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book (1889)

E. Nesbit, The Railway Children, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Five Children and It

The Edwardian Era (1901-1910, approx.)

J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1902)

Kenneth Graheme, The Wind in the Willows (1908)

The Secret Garden (1911)

Hilaire Belloc, Cautionary Tales (1907) 

Enid Blyton, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven series and the Noddy books (40s, 50s)

Roald Dahl (60s) 

Children’s literature rose to the fore in the Victorian era. Why?

• tremendous rise in literacy rates and in education reform
• tremendous growth in commerical publishing, which had a positive effect on book publishing for all ages.
• But perhaps most importantly: in this period childhood came to be seen more and more as a protected period of education and enjoyment. Childhood became romanticized.
• In one of his letters Lewis Carroll enthuses about children, “Their innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful, and gives one a feeling of reverence, as at the presence of something sacred” (Letters 381)

Why this sense of childhood as sacred?

• Because of Romanticism
• The first fifty years of the 19th century was the peak of Romanticism, a literary, artistic, cultural movement that reacted against the Enlightenment ideal of scientific rationality embodied, for example, in the Industrial Revolution. Romanticism was a response to the dehumanizing aspects of modernity.
• Or as the philosopher Roger Scruton has put it: Romanticism was an attempt to recapture, in a secular mode, the medieval Christian sense of local community and reverence for God. 
• This Romantic desire for reverence was exercised in one direction toward non-human nature, and in another direction toward the child.
• This treasuring of childhood gave an increasingly secular culture a way of connecting to purity and innocence, to wonder and other worlds. It encouraged it to favor the imagination as opposed to reason in its scientific mode. Brad Birzer argues in his book, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth, that for Tolkien fairy stories provide us with a means to escape the drabness, conformity, and mechanization of modernity. I think the same could be said for the children’s literature that first sprung up in the Romantic period.
• Indeed, I would argue that the Romantic sense of childhood, and the children’s literature that flowed from it, was one way of trying to re-create the golden world of the “terrestrial paradise.”
• For this reason, though children’s literature is largely secular in inspiration, the fact that its deepest inclinations yearn for a terrestrial paradise puts it in an interesting relationship to the Catholic literary mind. The Catholic can deeply appreciate much of what good children’s literature is trying to do, even while it resists making idols out of childhood innocence and the child’s imagination. 

 

B. The Golden World

What do I mean by the “golden world”? 

• Wonderland, Neverland, The Secret Garden, Oz, and the dreamworld where the wild things are; the magical London of Mary Poppins, The Hundred Acre Wood, Hogwarts, the pastoral world of The Wind in the Willows and the Redwall series, Terabithia, the barn of Charlotte’s Web, the house with Green Gables on Prince Edward Island; the revolutionary-era Boston of Johnny Tremain, the Connecticut Colony of Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond, the medieval England in Avi’s Crispin: The Cross of Lead. The golden world is not always a “secondary” world; it’s Treasure Island, the Camp Green Lake of Louis Sachar’s Holes, the “Mysterious Benedict Society” of the books by that name by Trenton Lee Stewart
• The “golden world” represents the triumph of death over waste land.
• Notice that these “golden worlds” are far from perfect images of Eden. They are filled with conflict, danger, evil, but I still call them “golden worlds” because it is in these worlds that characters undertake the work of restoring innocence. Innocence is not something given–it has to be fought for.
• We see this very clearly in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 classic,The Secret Garden: the garden of innocency needs to be discovered and tended to. And in doing so, friendship and reconciliation and renewed innocence are achieved. It’s a story, to paraphrase Mathilda, of how to get back to the Garden.
• In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings the golden world is in one sense the Shire, but more, it’s the adventure that sustains the peaceful life of the Shire. 

GKC: “Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

• So we’re not talking innocence in the sense of remaining “sheltered”–quite the opposite, in fact. Remember, good children’s literature pictures innocence as an achievement. What Bilbo says to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings captures the point well: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” 

Innocence

Finally, I want to say a word about the innocence that is achieved I’ve been talking a lot about innocence. What do I mean by that? 

• Start here with another objection. Children’s literature keeps us “innocent” in a negative sense.
• Innocence is an achievement; it’s an exercise of virtue; it’s not being sheltered: quite the opposite. What Bilbo says to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings captures this point well: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
• So the kind of innocence I’m talking about is a state of moral character–reached, like Dante’s, at the end of a long journey with many hardships along the way.
• This understanding of innocence is becoming increasingly threatened by the contemporary children’s publishing establishment. Meghan Cox Gurdon, children’s book reviewer of the WSJ: “The Case for Good Taste in Children’s Books.” in Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College. Her point is about the pernicious state of YA “problem novels.” Sex. Abuse. Self-abuse. Gurdon: “The argument in favor of such books is that they validate the real and terrible experiences of teenagers who have been abused, addicted, or raped—among other things. The problem is that the very act of detailing these pathologies, not just in one book but in many, normalizes them.”

Conclusion

• Weeding. Much contemporary children’s literature seeks to distort this picture of innocence. So we need to remain vigilant. The dangers of YA and not only for teenagers.
• At the same time, we need to be “catholic” in our tastes. These golden worlds need not be explicitly Catholic or Christian to make for valuable reading. The story of Mathilda implies that the stories of non-believers have truth to them. In a sense, these attempts to find the golden world are “our” stories. There’s no need for us to be pigeon-holed by anybody as “parochial.” What we need are stories that trace a hero’s journey to fight for innocence.  Support excellence wherever you find it.
• My last point is my most important one. We need Catholic artists and we need books, we need works that will rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. What we need more than anything else are works by Catholics who really understand how to use the trowel, who master the craft of storytelling–and not just stories about saints and not just Catholic writers living 50-60 years ago. We need to encourage such authors and to support them. And the writers themselves need to write and bring their works into the world. By any means necessary Self-publishing: ownership. Analogy with homeschooling.