Three Parents Discuss Children's Books, Part II

"I think Nikki is a liar and Grandma knows exactly what happened."

Previous Chatners on children’s literature include The Boxcar Children never got to spend enough time in the boxcar and Ranking the pages of Good Night Moon according to our ten-month-old son.

Part one of our conversation last week:

GRACE: If I were to imagine what kind of world I would expect to see growing up, if I were reading these books, I would imagine that the diversity of the animal kingdom would be one of the major concerns of life. And identifying and locating different animals, according to different physical properties would be sort of one of the main tasks of existence.

DANNY: I think one of my favorite standalone books is Dahlov Ipcar’s Maine Alphabet. Because it makes it sound like she worked on a Sufjan Stevens-style 50 states project, or like she invented some proprietary alphabet: “You’ve heard of the regular alphabet. You’ve heard of the Maine alphabet. Well, this is the definitive Dahlov Ipcar version.”

LILY: The thing that’s agreeable about Strega Nona is it’s not just Big Anthony who doesn’t listen, but the townspeople also seem to be foolish. Even though they’re the ones who are mad at Big Anthony, they don’t have the moral advantage, they’re too quick to jump to conclusions.

LILY: I was thinking about the fact of all these animals appearing, and the fact that babies seemingly use these books to acquire language. Obviously we read them out loud to him; he doesn’t read them silently to himself, but a lot of them are about animal sounds…

ROCCO: [Approx.] Bair. Rair-rair.

LILY: And babies are mostly non-verbal, or make a lot of babbling sounds that are closer to the moo or the baa or the neigh of the horse.

GRACE: His neigh is so incredible.

LILY: His neigh is really good. He uses it like it’s language. And I hadn’t thought about animal sounds as language in the way that Spanish or English is, but —

ROCCO: BAHH. Coh-erl.

LILY: A lot of his brain space for language is being taken up by animals, and it makes me wonder if why so many animals appear in these books as a protagonist, is because they also don’t speak in the same way in the same way that Rocco is sitting here, making a lot of different cute babble sounds, and obviously they mean a lot of different things — he’s expressing delight sonically — but it’s not the same way you or I speak.

DANNY: I feel like people often describe animal intelligence in terms relative to toddlerhood. Like “dolphins are as smart as a three-year-old.” I wonder if there’s an idea that at this stage of life, a baby is as much an animal as it is a human being, and that ratio will change as the baby grows up and becomes civilized…and I wonder which came first, whether baby babbling reminded adults of animal sounds, and there was this idea of “Let’s utilize this and make a lot of baby books where we can get the babies to mimic these animals on purpose, in a more uniform way, because it’s easier than trying to get them to say other sorts of words…and I like that as soon as babies start to talk, they start to mimic. You’ve barely got sounds of your own, and you’re already trying to sound like another species.

LILY: One of the things I love about the Boo and Baa books is that they don’t have adults in them. There’s a grocery clerk in one of them, but otherwise it’s just the adventures of these little sheep siblings, who I’m guessing are maybe eight or so. They’re kids and they live in this world of their own making, just like in Peanuts. I wonder if that helps establish a sense of independence in a kid who’s having these books read to them, where they’re their own little protagonists in a world that revolves around them, and where parents are there ina. kind of invisible way, where they don’t realize what they’re being provided with…

I was thinking that the absence of adults in a lot of these books is a way of representing the primary narcicissm of the baby. Or it could be serving the interests of the parents to not have competing other authority figures in these books, since they’re the authority who voices the book.

ROCCO: [Warbling.]

GRACE: One of my favorite books of literary theory is called The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, by Jacqueline Rose. You know how in the beginning of Peter Pan the narrative voice is deliberately set against the voice of the mother who’s presumed to be reading it:

“It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect…

It’s sort of goading, and designed to displace the authority of the reading mother — Rose is a Lacanian, so she has a lot of interesting things to say about it at that level, and it also has a lot to do with the developments in educational theory of the early 20th century, the ways in which people came to think differently about the value of being read to, rather than reading to oneself.

[At this point the baby needed changing, so both Rocco and I disappear from the narrative for a few minutes.]

LILY: Yeah, that sounds really aggressive.

GRACE: Yeah, it’s incredibly aggressive. And one of the original titles of the play Peter Pan was The Boy Who Hated Mothers. The whole franchise is about hostility to a mother who is nonetheless constantly upheld as a figure of feminine perfection.

LILY: I imagine probably most young children have love/hate relationships with their parents, or are sometimes afraid of having a hateful relationship with their parents, and that probably one of the central dramas of their young lives is trying to figure out how to negotiate their conflicts with their parents and siblings. I don’t have siblings but that’s probably also challenging.¹

GRACE: And then the parents, in turn, are trying to create a world where a child’s experience of hatred is not so immediately alarming and morally compromising, which we get from Winnicott.

LILY: Most of the books we read to Rocco, so far, have pretty minor conflicts, which are often resolved by accident —

DANNY: But we have started to run into the problem of zaniness. For example, the B is for Bananas book, which he likes so much I have to hide it from him sometimes just to get a break. And I do think books of that type are more common in the last twenty years or so: “Here’s a crazy little character who doesn’t want to sleep, or who wants to do something really wacky,” and I often find them irritating after reading them aloud a few times.

GRACE: Similarly, there’s a genre where one character, or the narrator, says, “Hey, I know something about you that you’re keeping secret,” and the other says “no, you don’t,” and then the first one perseveres, and it’s eventually revealed that they’re right. Often to do with “you’re actually sleepy, but pretending not to be,” although in one case it’s about being the Easter Bunny.

DANNY: Oh, I hate that one.

GRACE: I find that kind of thing really hectoring. I don’t understand why people make books like that, because it seems so against the general spirit of children’s literature.

LILY:

I wonder if one of the reasons why we don't like these books is because Rocco already has so much energy. When I want to read books with him, I'm hoping that he'll be calm. It's a way of focusing his attention. So I prefer a book where he’ll be quietly interested and we'll be able to just sit peacefully, where I won't have to be chasing him or cleaning up after him and those zany books don't allow me to chill out. So I find them counterproductive, rather than like, worried they have a morally noxious effect on our baby. The only book I really didn’t like initially was Dear Zoo.

DANNY: Which is crazy. I love Dear Zoo.

LILY: Well, but Dear Zoo is about how all these animals have something wrong with them, and the narrator rejects them. And the giraffe is drawn to look kind of doofy, with its tongue sticking out. You know, that’s not a respectful depiction of a giraffe. Meanwhile, in this lovely Eric Carle book, the animals are the ones who are speaking, reciting nice little rhyming poems about their physical qualities and their behaviors. And all the animals look respectable and in some cases slightly fearsome. And not even always are they paying attention to the reader. They’re not here to serve you.

GRACE: There’s another class of book here I don’t like, which I’m actually nervous to even mention because I think you’re both big fans of it and this is going to lead to conflict later in the day. But I’m going to say it anyway, for the sake of the importance of the work: I don’t like Sandra Boynton.