Lost in Translation:

I wrote this a few weeks ago for the school newspaper, the Courier.

There’s a certain magic in reading a book, as a kid. There’s something about worlds that you can only get to if you find a golden ticket or crawl into the apple-wood wardrobe that have all kinds of things you can’t see in real life. People and places that are completely and totally real in a book that can only be seen inside your head – until, that is, someone projects them onto the big screen, and suddenly there are images to base the world of the book on.

This week, The Fantastic Mr. Fox comes out in cinemas, followed by Where the Wild Things Are and at Christmastime, there are a whole slew of children’s books that are bridging the gap between page and screen in various incarnations ranging from real life to 3D animation. Whole worlds that have been imagined by children the whole world over suddenly become huge, larger than life, and because of that they carry a lot of importance. Part of their appeal is almost exclusively reserved for adults; how many people are eager to see The Fantastic Mr. Fox because Wes Anderson directed it, or because George Clooney is providing the main character’s voice? Or to see Spike Jonze’s music video rendition of Where the Wild Things Are?

There’s a lot of doubt from this end on the answer to those questions. But while the casting or the directing may go over the head of the average prepubescent viewer, one thing will certainly stick around, and that’s the dazzle of the visuals. Any movie in the past ten years that was specifically wrought out of children’s literature will certainly feature the graphics, the animation and the sets. All anybody has to do is think back to this year’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline to remember the terrific 3D work that was done to bring it to “life.” The more fantastic the world, the harder the filmmakers work to render it up on screen. Take the Chronicles of Narnia, which is a series of books that almost everyone in the western world reads before the age of ten. The recent Walden Media adaptation, filmed on location in New Zealand, has some of the most impressive makeup and CG work done on any recent film, including films that are more geared towards adults. WETA Workshop, the props and sets workshop that is utilized for these movies (and the upcoming adaptation of The Hobbit) clearly put a lot of detail oriented thought into fully crafting the look of Narnia.

How necessary is this meticulous crafting, though? The Fantastic Mr. Fox uses some extremely detailed stop-motion work, but that doesn’t mean that it necessarily translates from imagination to page unless you happen to be Wes Anderson. Would animation be better? Or does that reinforce the idea of children’s movies needing to be almost strictly done with cartoons, particularly if they involve anthropomorphosis? There’s no doubt that there’s some experimentation going on, but does experimentation belong in transforming iconic childhood images into movies is a question that should be asked by anyone who’s producing these films.

It would be ideal to say that every single interpretation of a book works equally well on screen. But anyone watching movie adaptations of children’s books can attest that while there has been a growing improvement over the years, there are still some things that are inherently ill-crafted about these movies. Maybe it’s the tendency of directors to focus on the visuals, which are so strongly rooted in the imaginations of everyone involved on the project, instead of on the script, which is, of course, where the seed of the entire films come from. There is almost no way to translate a mythical world or a magical place in a uniform and completely fair way, even if it’s done to the last detail, without a focus on the words that inspired that world to begin with.

There’s no doubt that what is coming out now in re-mediation of children’s books is far better in terms of production values than what came out previously. These movies certainly appeal to a much wider, broader audience with the visuals, and likely that will only improve and appealing to the nostalgia factor of books that were almost universally beloved, like Where the Wild Things Are, is almost entirely sure to guarantee big returns in the box office. We can hope that the scripts will be able to support them.

Horrible things

What creates horror?

That’s sort of the starting point of my second research paper. According to Tatar, there’s a huge connection between horror and beauty; that we are drawn and repulsed by images of beauty, that things that are horrible are often, in the same light, beautiful. I hate to bring up Twilight, because in no circle of literature can it be considered horror (or, I hasten to add, literature), but that’s the basic idea that Stephanie Meyer was drawing off of. Although it’s really debatable in the first place if horror was her actual intention.

There’s not a lot of vampire fiction that classifies as horror these days, for adults or for children. The age of Dracula and Carmilla are gone, ushered away by Anne Rice and, more recently, Charlaine Harris. What horror writers for children seem to fall back on, are ghosts and monsters that don’t drink blood. The image of the vampire has been irrevocably damaged. It will never be a monster again.

But that said, what kind of horror is being written for children? When I was a child, it was R.L. Stein and his Goosebumps series that ruled over the horror genre. But series like Goosebumps and Animorphs aren’t published anymore, probably because they were expensive to keep running (the cost of constant publication and ghostwriters is prohibitive in the current economy) and possibly because they stopped getting read by kids. I’m not a publisher, so I won’t claim to know for sure what the situation was.

Neil Gaiman is definitely a name invokes a certain amount of resonance when speaking about horror. His latest novel released the United States, The Graveyard Book, not only was on the New York Times bestseller list for a year but also won the Newbury award and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Despite it’s title, I hesitate to classify it as horror. Nobody lives in a graveyard but his interactions in it aren’t precisely scary. In that sense, Gaiman deconstructs the horror genre. The true horrors in The Graveyard Book don’t lie in the safety of the graveyard itself, but in the world outside it. It’s a story about home and security and like The Jungle Book (which can be safely said to be what The Graveyard Book is based on) about family and the conventions and unconventions of family life.

His other popular children’s novel, Coraline, however, can be categorized as horror. If horror is created by anticipation and expectations, then Coraline bends what expectations we have about it when we first read it. There’s something going on in the novel that moves below the surface.

It’s important to note that scariness – that is to say, if a story is scary or not is not what makes a horror. Most children are not scared by Neil Gaiman’s work, but they’re still horror because the of the intentions and the expectations that come out of it. Other books, like Terrible Things (which I will take a moment to point out is not written by Gaiman) is not technically a horror, it contains a far scarier premise than Coraline and The Graveyard Book.

But then maybe all this classification doesn’t serve any actual purpose at all.

Images of childhood is sort of a sore point in the literary field; at least in the one regarding Children’s Literature. Adults spend a lot of time trying to capture childhood, from parents with snapshots to artists with painting and cameras and so on, so forth. It’s actually pretty wildly contested.

This week I looked at some images. Mostly what we’re working on is on images of innocence; a concept I don’t exactly think is innate. The idea of the knowing child is one that exists in the US, in particular, among middle class people who attribute it to the lower classes. What it basically means is that minorities have an “innate” knowing of things like sex, violence, so on, and so forth. That particular stereotype is reflected in literature a lot, but it’s one you have to think about. Children who are violent or disturbed or low class always seem to be more aware of the world, which I think is a fallacy. Children are perfectly able to be violent without having been sexually abused or having a deep understanding of sex as an act. And race has nothing to do with how quickly a child can grasp these concepts.

What’s at war here is the idea of innocence versus ignorance. Many children are kept intentionally ignorant of things like sex and drugs and violence in hopes that it’ll keep the innocent, but innocence is a modern construction in childhood. What innocence is in literature does not exist in the real world. There is a fine line between innocence and naivety.

An example is that in The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox is innocent even though she is not ignorant. There is almost no doubt that she understand how the natural world continues; she has seen people die, or at least she has first-hand experienced death in her near vicinity. Dickon, too, is not ignorant, but he is innocent. How this is possible is due to their transcendence of pain and circumstance to still see the best and hope for the best in the world. They believe in magic inherently, even though they know that the word magic is only inscribed to natural wonders. The secret garden itself holds magic because it is capable of being the vehicle to Colin’s recovery.

However, most modern Children’s Literature does not have innocence as a trope. Rather, it uses ignorance in the place of innocence, a prime example being The Boy In the Striped Pajamas. Bruno is not innocent of what is going on around him. In fact, he’s guilty, because despite the fact that the pieces are in front of him he chooses to remain ignorant to the plight of the people over the fence. It’s not his fault that he cannot handle the truth, but that does not make him innocent. What would make him innocent is if he chose to understand, or if he had defended what he knew was right and spoken up. Despite understanding, and despite the forced nature of that particular choice, he would have remained innocent – that is to say, without any moral dilemma on his soul.

The problem with innocence is that it’s boring. No one wants to read about an innocent child, especially not other children. They tend to be faultless. They tend to be ridiculously perfect. No child wants to know about the troubles of someone who hasn’t done anything wrong, because it’s difficult to relate to. Adults, too, don’t particularly care for innocence. It’s just difficult to reconcile.

That is why innocence tends to be the discussion of images, rather than of literature. Images of innocence can last because they tend to be evocative, instead of relatable. But at the same time, the reality of an innocent child seems to remain a bit elusive. The real world doesn’t have the barriers that the fictional or the artistic one does. It’s not possible to remain innocent without being naive, in the real world.

Jacqueline Rose and Bettelheim

Some words on Miss Jacqueline Rose (and more, I suppose, on Bettelheim).

Jacqueline Rose is, roughly, the Judith Butler of the Children’s Literature world. Which isn’t to say that she’s exactly like Judith Butler – I don’t think that she revolutionized or even standardized a cannon of text for the study. But she did begin this new way of thinking about Children’s Literature, which basically states that Children’s Literature is an impossibility.

She states, in her book The Case of Peter Pan: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction that children’s lit cannot exist because the author constructs a child, that the audience who is intended isn’t a real child at all. Adults write for a child that doesn’t exist and create that child in their head, and she uses Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland as examples. That children’s literature is basically used as a way to project the authors concepts of childhood, and so it isn’t for children at all.

Of course, my main issue with this particular form of discourse is that at the end of the day, no matter how many adults construct a perfect audience of a child, is that there is a real, living, breathing, running around and screaming child reading these books. The audience may be constructed but the child isn’t a fantasy or an impossibility. Children read. Children read a lot. And maybe there is a projected childhood and a projected child, a non-existant adult fantasy, but the fact of the matter is that children are there and they are making their voices heard.

Further, there’s a concept of powerlessness that I think that Rose is really sticking to. That children are passive players in their own lives and that is why children’s fiction exists in this non-existent paradox. Granted there isn’t much fiction written for children by children, but there is some poetry, and obviously because I’m still in Holocaust mode, the immediate thing that jumps to mind is I Never Saw Another Butterfly, which is a collection of poems written by children who lived in a specific camp (which one is not coming to mind) during the Shoah. But that aside, there is no reason why simply because the audience is a “construct” that it ceases to be children’s literature. If the intended audience is a child – any child – and the readership is a child, then isn’t that what creates children’s literature to begin with?

That said, a place where Rose and Bettelheim touch is on a notion that I find a little bit peculiar – that is, the sexualization of Children’s literature. Maybe because the idea of traversing the line between childhood and adulthood has always, in a fashion, been taboo, people focus on the idea of sexuality and sexualization in children’s fiction. Rose talks about J.M. Barrie and his obsession and “theft” of the Llewllyn-Davies boys, and obviously there’s Lewis Carroll’s fixation with little girls. However, I think that it starts to get bizarre when people feel the need to put in sexual connotation and innuendo all over the place. Rabbit holes as wombs, swords as phalluses, sexualization of fairy tales. Of course, yes, fairy tales were bowlderized to make them more child appropriate and had in them a great deal of sexual content, but my point is that after that, it’s hard for me to put all this sexual symbology into these works. Why?

Because I honestly think that it’s bizarre. It’s a strange habit to get into in the first place, seeing sexualization happen all over the place. Certainly it’s Freudian in nature, because I highly doubt that sex was what they were thinking about when they wrote these things. But then the entire idea is a notion of symbols. I don’t feel that this kind of symbology is placed on adult literature; I think it’s a phenomena that is classed almost entirely in the domain of children’s fiction because of that taboo idea of crossover; that someone who has an interest in writing for children, particularly work that is progressive or certainly unconventional must have an interest in children that is not healthy in nature.

Yes, Carroll took naked pictures of young girls. No one is disputing that. But there is also no evidence to say that anything besides that took place. Certainly the concept of trauma is one that would make any arguments by any of these girls, Alice Lidell included, pretty much null and void. However, there are few children’s writers who would have the same claim. However people make that claim all the time. They sexualize everything. I don’t suggest that children or adults are wholly innocent, but it’s hardly fair to not give them the same benefit of the doubt awarded to adults who write fiction for adults.

Bettelheim and explanations

Despite my attempts to be good, I’ve been deviating a little from Holocaust fiction and the secondary sources that are pretty normal in regard to said fiction. I did read some Lydia Kokkola, to be fair, and her book is extremely good, to the point where I’m going to have to sit down and re-read it. But after reading In Between Seasons of Happiness, I couldn’t handle it anymore. I needed something else to keep my attention; preferably something that did not heavily feature dying parents, dying children, or Nazis. I know this is my own fault, really, but that’s beside the point. Since this paper is not actually due for another month or so, I needed a break.

So I picked up Uses of Enchantment by Bettelheim and started working through it. I haven’t gotten very far, but what he’s saying, up to this point, is very sensical to me. The use of fairy tales is pretty standard, in most regards, to simply tell stories and to pass them on. Bettelheim claims that we also use them to nurture and soothe. He claims that there is psychological power to a child reading a fairy tale, and I do see what he’s saying, which isn’t to say that I think he’s 100% right on most accounts. He claims that a child and a parent can read a fairy tale together but that the adult interpretation will only have detrimental affect on the child.

At first I wasn’t sure if I really agreed with him. But I’m not a therapist, and clearly he’s approaching the subject from a therapists standpoint. However, I still am resisting the idea, but allowing the book to speak for itself. It’s not the first time that I’ve encountered this particular viewpoint, the first time being in The Child that Books Built, but he was referencing Bettelheim.

Does explaining stories to children provide a detriment? Granted, as adults there is a responsibility to explain, to a degree, what is going on in a book. However, where does that degree begin and where does it end? When we read, as adults, are we reading how we were taught or are we reading and thinking for ourselves? It’s a bit of a convoluted question. There are a lot of books that cannot be understood without some kind of intervention from a third party, in my opinion, whether that party is a person or another book. There is a huge discrepancy there. We cannot hope to understand historical fiction to it’s fullest without a historical context, and historical context is only available through what is told to us. Further, any story set in the present also has a historical context.

In fact, the only stories that don’t need to be explained would be stories set in a purely fantastical or utopia/dystopia setting. Those, presumably, should have all the tools to explain themselves, but even those sometimes hold themes that need to be explained – a current example fresh in my mind is the idea of a totalitarian government as shown in Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games. I don’t think that a novel whose primary focus is a rebellion against an unfair and totalitarian government can be fully grasped without an understanding of what that means to a real-world audience. I suppose it could be read without a contextual viewpoint – that is to say, purely through means of a dystopia. However, I think that’s pretty disgenuine to both the writers and to the intentions of a book. Every book has a context, even something as innocent as Goodnight, Moon – that is the entire basis on which the theme of Children’s Literature is founded on.

That said, is it fair to expect a child to read a book that is laden with symbolism and meaning without further explantation? Or is it fair to explain it? Anyone over the age of eighteen who reads The Chronicles of Narnia recognizes Aslan as God and the White Witch as the devil, but I don’t suspect that any child who is not a Christian will – and I also suspect that children who are Christian still may not. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that, either. It certainly broadens the audience of readers.

In fact, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is so ridiculously heavy handed in it’s explanations that sometimes I feel that it goes overboard. Clearly one has to read the Bible, or at least have an understanding of a God, or the Book of Genesis, to fully grasp things he’s saying, and it reads as heavy and didactic if someone does. For someone who loathes the The Chronicles of Narnia so fully, he fails exactly where Lewis succeeds – in involving children in a story that they need no outside knowledge to completely enjoy.

Which is not to say that I think that either book series is completely perfect or completely flawed. Both have strengths and weaknesses and are inherently products of their time.

Maybe Bettelheim will sway me yet.

Historically historical and contextualization?

It’s important to realize that Children’s Literature is sort of a new kind of critical field, and I’m a really new kind of researcher; which doesn’t imply that my techniques are new, just that I’m learning all of this from basically scratch. This last weekend was my very first grown-up Masters student conference, Past Continuous, which focused on Historical Fiction in celebration of Seven Stories (which is the Children’s Literature archive here in Newcastle-upon-Tyne) receiving the Geoffrey Trease and Leon Garfield collections.

I’m going to take a minute here to point out that up until a week and a half ago I had absolutely no idea who either of these writers are. Since then I’ve read John Diamond by Leon Garfield and Bows Against the Barons by Geoffrey Trease is in my bookbag awaiting to be read. The fact of the matter is that this kind of historical fiction – fiction written about 18th century England, about boys and their adventures, never appealed to me. I didn’t spend any amount of time interested in this time period as a child; my first brush with historical fiction actually came in the shape of a series of mystery-related fiction written for adults when I was thirteen or fourteen years old that took place in Ancient Egypt (I hasten to add, though, that I did read historical fiction that was assigned to me when I was younger, the primary title in my mind being The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which I loved and hated by turns).

So sitting through the conference wasn’t as bad as I imagined it would be, even though I had read none of the texts that were being spoken about that I barely knew anything about the genre itself. I honestly don’t think that children are reading Garfield and Trease right now, and I wonder if that is part of my disinterest in the work itself. My area of interest lies in texts that are popular with children because I think that’s what says a lot about how and why both adults and children read, but then I also was not raised in England and I don’t have a lot of feel for the English market. For all I know Garfield and Trease both jump off the shelves. I certainly do know that one of the book series that a parallel paper was given on, The House at Green Knowe, is very popular, because I had been told about it by several people who all said they read it as a child. I hadn’t heard of it, and after listening in on the paper, I understand why. While I feel that it probably would be extremely familiar for a child in the UK, in America, the idea of old manors, old houses where your family comes from and has always come from is probably only relevant in the Deep South and nowhere else. The United States of America and to an extent, the entirety of the New World has always been far more concerned with moving and progress than it has with ancestral property and the idea of being “landed”.

Our first assignment, however, had to come out of a topic that we’re studying in our first research group, which is sort of a class and sort of not. Mostly it seems to be a way to get the MLitt students to learn about Children’s Literature as a genre and to begin to understand the criticism offered in this field, since most of us come from unrelated English subjects (I, for example, have my undergraduate degree in Creative Writing) and we all sort of need a brush up.

My first paper, so, is forming in my head right now. Basically I’m beginning to look at the Holocaust as a genre of “historical novel” because in terms of children, very little of the work aimed at them is in the form of a testimonial, which is of course is the famous “literary product” of the Holocaust. However, upon examination of a lot of texts, I noticed that the main theme of these works pretty much focus on perspective as opposed to content or even context. Children wander around 1940s German land thinking that Nazi’s are bookburners or that they’re going on vacation, that they can’t be loud because their landlords have delicate constitutions, or, famously, that the child on the other side of the fence is wearing pajamas.

I guess the hardest part of this isn’t the actual research but getting through all the sentimentality of trying to portray something horrible to 9-12 year olds. Clearly things can’t be just laid out on the page (although, if I’m to be honest, some people do lay it out there) like it can for adults, but the outcomes of these novels are no less gruesome. How people deal with death and the idea of systematic murder is curious because it’s basically a way to teach history that no one really wants to remember but that everyone feels an equal burden responsibility to remember, and that includes children.

It’s a different kind of Historical Novel, not one that glorifies, romanticizes or condones the past as a simpler, sweeter time, but at the same time, it does romanticize the idea of the Holocaust – the idea of the “noble victim” is prevalent throughout almost all of these texts. There’s nary someone who is morally ambiguous in these fictional representation sort camps that is not a Nazi.

I’m still hammering out what I fully intend on doing, but I’m sure that by the end of the week I’ll have a better idea.