Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood.

New York and London: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-8153-3882-1

Review by Francesca Orestano, University of Milano, Italy

By exploring the literature of childhood both as the text which engages the child reader's response, and as a theme for poetical representations of that experience, Roni Natov posits her conceptual focus at the crossroads of a twice-trodden area: the discursive polyphony centering around this space constitutes the poetics of childhood. By reading into a wide variety of books, Natov proves that the imagination of/about childhood provides the object of a pursuit which engages both experiences, both readers: and the value of this book is to be found in the critical approach to a variety of texts which are not just the texts of Romantic poetry, or Victorian variations on the Pastoral, Dark Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral, or Adult narratives about childhood, but altogether deserve to be critically acknowledged as belonging to children's literature - together with classics such as Carroll's or Grahame's.

Natov's first chapter retrieves Blake's Songs of Innocence into the child's first experience, which should foreground a supposedly holistic microcosm; whilst even more radically Wordsworth's theoretical approach to 'early childhood' functions as an optical device, a primal lense to perception; in this context Natov places the Diary (1920) of Opal Whiteley's, a modern avatar of the children (and their creative role) in Blake's and Wordsworth's poetics. Carroll and Grahame provide two versions of Pastoral, one a dark Eden of grotesque quality (yet what about the logical exhilaration of the child's creative language games?); the other an elegy: on the author's childhood, as well as, perhaps, on his adulthood and identity as a father.

The 'Body of the Mother' provides issues which at once exploit the visual and the discursive in order to examine Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny illustrated by Clement Hurd, Faith Ringgold's Tar Beach, Else Holmelund Minarik's Little Bear illustrated by Maurice Sendak, Sendak's own In the Night Kitchen, and Randall Jarrell's The Bat-Poet. Illustrations here, when cast side by side with textuality, signal the complexity of the relationship of presence/absence, which in adult literature resurfaces in the discourses of loss, ambivalence, treason, which in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and in The Autobiography of My Mother fail to restore the mother, and her absent body.

'Childhood and the Green World' provides room for the analysis of pastoral space as a topos for regression and retreat, and a green carnivalesque milieu as well, which is often contrasted against the rigid laws governing urban space. Burnett's The Secret Garden provides the master narrative for Philippa Pearce Tom's Midnight Garden and further naturalistic variations that can be followed up in Linnea in Monet's Garden and in the more recent Julie of the Wolves. 'The Dark Pastoral' theme is also relevant to the poetics of childhood insofar as it becomes associated with the nightmarish forest of the fairy tales: E.T.A.Hoffman's The Golden Pot, Nutcracker and the King of Mice, and The Sandman are all stories focusing on nursery magic, frightful transformations, the 'wild thing' self, and the mixture of horror and fantasy that makes the beauty of a poetic arabesque. Andersen and Dickens come into the picture as authors who are not immune from the charms of the dark pastoral: particularly in The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens views Nell as the abused and neglected child, and by offering her a perspective of wonder and distortions, he manages to fragment - but nevertheless to expose - a discourse of adult manipulation, power and cruelty. Similarly the antipastoral invites a discourse of nonsense poetry, grotesque disconnection, of emotions turned into humour, when one examines it in Alice in Wonderland: but in Lolita the object of Nabokov's narrative is the pastoral world only when defiled, made cheap and vulgar, caged and killed by the European jaded intellectual. The pastoral myth of childbirth is shattered by Doris Lessing with The Fifth Child, which appropriately identifies childhood, as an adult creation, with the birth of a monster.

The last chapters, 'The Contemporary Child in Adult Literature', and 'The Contemporary Child in Children's Literature' provide issues to the point from a range of texts as distant as Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible whose stories complement the realistic mode of Williams's Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart, An Na's A Step From Heaven, and Sapphire's Push: life stories of survival that, for all their apocalyptic realism, grant childhood a possibility of resilience and hope. David Almond's Skellig is a fantastic story, reminiscent of Bram Stoker's Dracula and of its female protagonist, Mina, the character who faces the frightful quest for the vampire, ultimately defeating it. But Skellig is also a tale of the uncanny, exploring the realm of dreams and spiritual longings for wings, feathers, angelic harmony. Not unlike Blake's, a poetics for children is created by Almond; and not surprisingly the next author considered is Philip Pullman whose debt to Blake is openly acknowledged as one of the ruling inspirations behind his trilogy. Whilst only examining The Golden Compass Natov provides a careful depiction of the ways Pullman shapes a world according to his 'antichurch, antisexist and anticlassist values' and yet manages to build a child hero, Lyra, a character marked by instincts, negative capability, intuition, ignorance, and a powerful quality of emotion represented by her daemon, Panthalaimon. The poetics of the self for these children are generated and preserved by a powerful concept, the daemon, and not casually: Lyra is made to fight against those (among whom are her own father and mother) who would profit from such energy by separating children from their daemons. Unlike Lyra, who thinks herself an orphan and is going to discover her parents, Harry Potter is a real orphan, both in literary terms and in his own narrative right. Like Lyra, he moves into the world without the safety net provided by parents, and his initial consciousness develops with his sense of his own uniqueness, centrality, difference and desire to develop extraordinary powers. Thus the child's discovery of his or her own identity coincides not simply with overcoming through imagination a boundary of powerlessness, but also with the right to 'knowledge and expression of self'. In discussing Rowling's books (Sorcerer's Stone, Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire) Natov pursues a dialogical track, highlighting the developments of Harry's consciousness, the value of interrogation and reflection, to connect, negotiate, and struggle through different experiences by questioning their meaning and realizing complexity. The literature of childhood, as it is dealt with in Natov's book, proves valuable not only in itself, as the token of innocence and healing wisdom, but also in that it contributes to our knowledge of literature in general, adult literature indeed, and its role both within and without the classroom.

Francesca Orestano