Writing for a generation that might never grow up – Clémentine Beauvais

In the past few months or years, in the light of what seems like a dramatically accelerating ecological crisis, many of us in jobs linked to education, teaching, or children’s culture and literature have thought, why are we doing this? What’s the point? What becomes of our main drive to act, reasons to exist, if the generation of children we’re addressing might never grow up to be adults? 

My first (and only) academic monograph, drawn from my PhD thesis, called The Mighty Child, was a theorisation of politically committed children’s literature. It is premised on the idea that children’s literature relies on one simple theoretical ‘fact’: children are, in today’s world, symbolically endowed with greater temporal power than adults. Children's symbolic currency is time left, while adults are defined by a greater wealth of time past. Time left provides one with a kind of power I called might, or potential, and time past with a kind of power I called authority. Children’s literature, I theorised, is one of the ways in which society orchestrates the conversion of time past into time left – of authority into might.

But over time, struck, like many others, with the alternatively depressing, paralysing, infuriating and – to a weird extent – liberating, realisation that we might actually be among the last representatives of humanity on Earth, I’ve come to rethink my relationship to writing, to children, to transmission. The panic is concrete, contextual, situated (where will we live? What will we eat? When and how will we actually die?), but the thinking is more philosophical in nature. What is the essence of children’s literature in a world where childly temporality is no longer overlapping with adult temporality, but coterminous with it?

Some might say that in this climate, the sole function of children’s literature should be entertainment, and aesthetic pleasure without purpose, as it always should be and always should have been. In a world which dies tomorrow, the argument goes, making today the best possible day for children should be on everyone’s list of priorities. That means – no to ‘didactic’ children’s literature, no to ‘edifying’ books, educational non-fiction, none of that stuff. Give them their Pascalian entertainment, and let them live a short, but happy, life.

Some might say, on the contrary, that children’s literature should now be about teaching children the wisdom of how to die, which would be a fascinating comeback to the times when children’s literature had that mission, to a great extent, as its priority. When child mortality was high, literature for the young was, of course, very much geared towards preparing readers for that eventuality – making sure they died virtuously, so that the pearly gates would creak wide open at the squishy sound of their footsteps on the clouds.

Some might say children’s literature should no longer be a priority for anyone; in fact, that its very existence is both environmentally harmful and intellectually and emotionally distracting. It destroys armies of trees that should breathe for us; every single stage of its production, from designing it to printing it to transporting it to storing it to selling it to throwing it away, is toxic. I have been acutely, anxiously aware of this recently, thinking of my own books to come, each of them with a little cloud of CO2 hovering above its covers: the lovely picturebook with bright inks and glossy paper shipped from China, the cheap paperbacks to be gluttonously devoured and discarded, the luxury hardback editions in indestructible shrink-wrapping. 

And those oh-so-instagrammable publicity packs, lovingly prepared for the purpose of being ripped open and thrown away on a Story with 24 hour planned obsolescence, the gold-glazed bookmarks, the nylon ribbons around the resin trinket, the plastic-stick lollipop, the superfluous fridge magnet, all in a nest of bubblewrap and chunks of polystyrene the size of cocktail sausages…

Some might say that children’s literature should, in fact, continue existing, should continue existing even more, albeit differently – be more modestly produced, be more politically committed still. That school, of which I am, or want to be, sees that category of text as characterised precisely by the fact that it carries within it a hope for tomorrow.

It is perhaps, we say, the most important thing that distinguishes children’s literature from ‘literature for adults’: its very existence is premised on an extreme, obsessive concern with tomorrow. Not necessarily a better, more enchanting tomorrow; just a tomorrow. As long as that faith exists, then children’s literature is imperative; it calls; it must exist too. Children’s literature, perhaps, is the literary expression of our desire and belief that there is such a thing as a day after this one for us as a species.

To what extent is this desire, that belief, maintained solely by that very performance? To what extent is it anything else than an odd kind of Pascal’s wager? I have days when I don’t think it is anything else than that; days when I am genuinely convinced that we are speaking and writing for the very last generation of children to reach adolescence, adulthood maybe at a stretch.

Some other times, I’m more upbeat, and I think – and yet, what if we do survive? or what if some of us survive who value the fact that we kept producing that discourse that we call children’s literature? Sometimes I think that I would like, even after I’m dead, for a corpus of texts to remain that testifies that, even in the face of a potential complete loss of future, we kept alive that discourse of hope for the existence of tomorrow. 

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Clémentine Beauvais is a writer and literary translator. Her YA novels in English are Piglettes (Pushkin, 2017) and In Paris with You (trans. Sam Taylor, Faber, 2018).