| Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-8153-3882-1 Review
by Elisabeth Wesseling, This inquiry starts out from the Romantic concept of childhood as a poetic state of mind that is characterized by openness, sensuality and "a sense of mystery and awe" (6). It investigates how this mindset is represented by fiction, while dealing with the following questions: "How has the freshness through which a child sees the world been approximated? How has the literature of childhood conveyed the ways in which the child's experience is retained and renewed in adulthood? What language expresses and contains this sense of deep and intimate experience?" (5-6). The Poetics of Childhood opens with some seminal Romantic texts, namely William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" and William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" and The Prelude. Blake and Wordsworth contended that the poetic genius can only flourish by drawing nourishment from the spirituality of childhood. Blake's ironical ruminations about the fragility of innocence, and Wordsworth's association of childhood with the natural world have set down two basic paradigms for the poetics of childhood, the author suggests. This perspective is fleshed out through detailed and sensitive readings of a large array of texts from both adults' and children's literature, dating from the age of Romanticism up to the present day. Several chapters reflect upon the relevance of the pastoral mode to the literature of childhood. Treading in the footsteps of William Empson, Natov outlines various versions of pastoral. The "green pastoral" is exemplified by Kenneth Grahame, Frances Hodgson Burnett and William Steig (The Amazing Bone). This genre embodies the literary heritage of Wordsworth, and equates childhood with the pastoral idyll of nature. If green pastoral celebrates the 'light' emotions of childhood (untrammeled awareness of and direct access to the beauties of nature), then 'dark pastoral' explores the wilder and more threatening aspects of the imagination: fear of abandonment, nightmarish visions of estrangement and cruelty, and so on. The prototypical setting of the dark pastoral is the primeval forest where child protagonists have so often been abandoned. Natov forwards E.T.A. Hoffmann novella's as embodiments of dark pastoral, as well as some of Andersen's darker tales (e.g. The Snow Queen) and Charles Dickens's representations of the sufferings of childhood (The Old Curiosity Shop). Lastly, there is also such a thing as the "antipastoral", a disjunctive mode which represents loss and isolation. The antipastoral deals with the disconnection of head from heart, child from parent, man from nature. It often derives a grim sort of humour from separation, which may be regarded as a means of coming to terms with the pain it involves. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland counts as the primary example here, but Natov also discusses Nabokov's Lolita and Lessing's The Fifth Child under this rubric. Ideally, all three versions of pastoral are "integrative" rather than "escapist" (p. 92). They seek for a way to reintegrate tentative recreations of childhood into the daily grind of quotidian life. It has often been observed that the unfortunate tendency to isolate literature for children within a special enclave of 'children's literature' unavoidably truncates the insights into childhood which this body of fiction may offer. Setting children's literature apart reinforces hierarchical, developmental notions of the relations between children and adults. The child then counts as an underdeveloped adult, and children's literature as diluted, inferior literature. Those looking for a way out of this quandary will find an inspiring guide in Roni Natov's dense and thoughtful book, which shows that the attempt to retrieve childhood as a source of inspiration is a shared preoccupation of different types of imaginative literature, regardless of the age of their intended readership. Natov convincingly demonstrates that "the literature of childhood" constitutes a whole which does not divide along the lines of age limits, although it may be subdivided in all sorts of other ways. Natov also shows that children's literature partakes of the same generic modes as literature at large. The way in which she brings the genre of 'pastoral' to bear upon the literature of childhood is mutually illuminating. The desire for immediacy and innocence is indeed central to the pastoral complex and our comprehension of the pastoral is furthered by the insight that this impulse is in fact a longing for our lost childhood. The
only fault I can find with Natov's work is that she
occasionally falls short of a certain type of reflexivity
that no inquiry into childhood can do without. Let me
explain. Critics of children's literature often wrongly
assume that we already know what a child is and that
we are therefore in a position to evaluate children's
literature accordingly, whereas childhood is bound to
remain opaque to those socialized in adult modes of
cognition and behavior. Natov seems to fall back on
this old habit when launching the first question of
her inquiry ("How has the freshness through which
a child sees the world been approximated? [6]). The
mistaken assumption that adults are in the know about
childhood also seems to have resulted in an overly dichotomous
concept of pastoral: "As in all literary pastoral,
the green world in the literature of childhood is a
response to the worldliness of the world. Whether it
represents a retreat from the world's injustices - parental
or the extended social world - it offers a natural critique
of civilization and stands in contradistinction to the
"unnatural" -- machines, laws and customs,
all that runs contrary to children's sense of freedom."
(91). This observation turns the retrieval of childhood
into a facile matter: it is everything that the adult
world is not. Moreover, it is not entirely accurate.
As Leo Marx's classic The Machine in the Garden
argues, the pastoral is organized around three, rather
than two points of reference, namely the wilderness,
the city and the pastoral idyll, which is a rather complex
"middle landscape" in between nature and culture.
When applied to the literature of childhood, the argument
could run as follows. There is the inaccessible immediacy
of childhood on the one hand and the conventions of
adult society on the other. The literature of childhood
struggles to stake out a meeting ground in between.
It displays the adult mind in the attempt to recover
the mindset of childhood. In the case of children's
literature, it also represents children in the process
of exploring types of consciousness other than their
own (I am indebted to Perry Nodelman's concept of "divided
consciousness" here). This refinement is meant
to reinforce, rather than detract from, the author's
point of view. It goes to explain how pastoral literature
at its best could be integrative rather escapist. Dichotomies
can only make for escapism, but the imaginative invention
of a common meeting ground between adults and children
may be conducive to a carry-over from one domain into
the other and vice versa. After all, as Natov rightly
remarks, the child is not only the father of man, but
children need adult guidance as well. Elisabeth Wesseling |