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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