Tag: Opinion

A Love Letter to Children’s Literature

From: Ben White at Unsplash.com

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for children’s lit.  Obviously, when I was a child, that was all I read.  I felt rather guilty about doing this around middle and high school, due to the fact that I was “no longer a child.”  I was obsessed with the idea of “reading at my level,” because as a third grader, I was told that my reading level was very high.  Naturally, this fueled my ego, and I became one of those “burnt out at twenty” types who didn’t have the attention span to read a single two-hundred page novel in a sitting.  I have since learned to fall back in love with reading, but even when I “wasn’t reading,” I could still make it through a children’s book. 

Now, when I say children’s lit, I don’t mean the picture books we read at bedtime as kids.  (Though I will always have a special place in my heart for “Froggy Goes To Bed.”)  I mean things like fairytales and the books we all devoured in middle school—the Percy Jackson books, Harry Potter stories, Lord of the Rings, Anne of Green Gables, and those other random books we were all assigned during those grades and somehow still remember.  Most people think on these books with the fondness that only nostalgia can bring.  There are people who outgrow children’s literature—those are the people who will give their childhood books to their children but not open the stories themselves.  I am not one of those people.  And I’m gonna tell you why. 

One of my favorite things about children’s literature—and stories in general—is that they are simple.  Our own lives are messy, and they are difficult to understand as we live them.  Stories organize events to form a cohesive whole; as Aristotle would say, a plot is following one action from beginning to end.  Each story is like a microcosm of the world, but without extraneous details that tend to complicate it.  Adult literature often explores the world of adults, dealing with more nuance and, shall we say, PG-13 themes.  This is not to say that children’s literature can’t have a complex plot, or that children can’t understand those “PG-13” themes, or even that those themes shouldn’t be there.  Children’s literature just distills those themes into a manageable bite-size pieces.  For example, children’s literature is what first teaches children about the existence of dragons, which is a PG-13 theme if I’ve ever seen one. 

There is a quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton that goes like this:  “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist.  Children already know dragons exist.  Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”  Not every story has an actual dragon, of course.  Harry Potter’s “dragon” is Voldemort, Frodo’s is Sauron, and so on and so forth.  I must say, I have to disagree with Mr. Chesterton here.  Most loving parents don’t want to show their children dragons, and so shelter them as long as possible.  As a consequence, a lot of these children don’t meet a dragon until a bit later in life, or at least not until after they’ve been introduced to their first fairytale.  Chesterton got it only half wrong:  fairytales, in fact, do teach children that dragons exist, and that those dragons have dangerous claws and teeth, and if you get too close or don’t pay attention, the dragon can and will strike.  Fairytales introduce evil in that manageable bite-size nugget.

But the second half of Chesterton’s quote is spot-on:  fairytales teach that dragons can be beaten, and they show a range of different ways to beat them, because not every dragon is defeated the same way.  Some dragons, like Sauron, are defeated with two little half-dead hobbits, others, like Voldemort, are defeated in a very public battle and a simple spell.  Most of the time, the fact that the dragon is defeated isn’t nearly as important as how the dragon is defeated.  Children’s books show that defeating the dragon rarely comes from pure luck (that’s just lazy writing), but requires a certain amount of skill (which means that you’re going to have to learn something). They also show perhaps the most important part of all to defeating a dragon:  bravery.

Bravery is a running theme throughout almost all of children’s literature.  Real children often feel small, not least because everyone else in the world is so much larger than they are, and those larger people certainly do seem to make a mess of things.  In stories, children feel the exact same way, which makes those characters relatable not only to children, but to adults as well.  (Don’t pretend like you’ve never felt that the world was entirely too large and that you were entirely too small.)  Merely existing as a child takes a certain amount of bravery, but to exist as a child in a novel would be a great feat given the dangerous mission that likely lies ahead in every adventure story.  These children are usually terrified, but they face their dragon anyway.  Somehow, they find the resolve to carry out the duty no one else wanted, because they understand that if they don’t, more horrible things could happen.  In fact, most of the children in storybooks are cheerful in the face of adversity, or at least they do their best, and that is perhaps the bravest thing of all.  

As an adult, I am continually impressed with these literary children.  I understand that not only are they being braver than I ever could be, (I would most definitely abandon the wizarding world to its fate rather than face Voldemort) but they are dealing with these grandiose scenarios on top of the ever-so-difficult process of growing up.  It’s no small feat to grow up.  Growing up means you start to understand the world and your place in it; you start to understand why and how society is structured the way it is, and it comes with an appreciation (and a certain cynicism) of that structure.  To do that is not a small accomplishment.  I think this is the key as to why I like children’s literature so much:  I believe that no one ever truly grows up.  I don’t mean in the idealistic Peter Pan sense, in which some adults deliberately choose not to become more mature as they grow older.  And I don’t even mean in the “every adult as a child in them” sense either.  I mean that I think that everyone is in a state of becoming, and that people try to be a better version of themselves every single day.  Children understand this concept very well, because they continually reference the future—“when I grow up.”  They want to become a great person.  Adults usually lose this sense because they are grown up.

Children’s literature helps me, at least, to remember that I am not fully grown up, and I never will be.  I relate to Anne of Green Gables for her awkwardness and her ability to speak out of turn, and I especially relate to her remorse when she does the wrong thing.  Learning how to deal with people is part of maturing.  I relate to Harry when he feels like everything crashes in on him at once, and he doesn’t want the responsibility of saving the wizarding world.  Shouldering one’s duty the way he does is part of becoming an adult.  My problems won’t always look like theirs, and I think that’s part of growing up, too.  The problems in children’s literature will forever serve as reminders:  I’m not complete.  I’m still working to become the “grown up” version of me. 

If you think you have fully grown up, perhaps you should open one of those old dusty children’s books. Maybe you won’t feel as grown up as you think.

Why (I think) Flannery O’Connor Needs to Chill

Photo from Angelus News. (Originally from CNS Photo.)

WARNING: If you are in love with O’Connor’s work, the following may trigger, disturb, or cause emotional distress to you. Do what you will with this information.

Have you ever watched a movie based on a book you haven’t read? Typically, if you watch the movie with a bookworm, they’ll completely understand the plot and where the movie is headed, and more likely than not they’ll lean into you halfway through the movie and say something like, “This part was way better in the book.” Ignoring that obnoxious behavior, sometimes the more obnoxious part is not understanding the movie at all because the director assumed you read the book. (Looking at you, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Also Divergent.) Books usually provide context and motivations that don’t always translate well to movies. But I am firmly of the opinion that if a book is going to be translated to the silver screen, it has to make sense without having read the book. For example, The Hunger Games can be watched without reading the books; the world is coherent and character motivations are shown through acting. The Lord of the Rings might have more depth in the books, but you don’t have to read them to watch the movies. When I go to a movie theater, I go to be entertained. I don’t want a thousand plus page trilogy assigned as homework. I want to be inspired to read the book, not told to read it to make sense of the movie.

I feel the same way about books. In order to understand the point that an author is making, I shouldn’t have to dig through outside scholarship for hours. I have two reasons for this: first, my four years of digging through outside scholarship for hours, and second, my assertion that human beings are supremely lazy. If you assign “homework” to something that’s supposed to be for pleasure, then most people won’t do it. This would be why most people don’t know why Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings: he wanted his books to be to the English people what the ancient myths were for the Greeks–a kind of pre-historical web that people passed down from generation to generation. As it stands now, only people who have actually studied Tolkien and his work know this. (Though the YouTube channel Wired has put out some excellent videos on Tolkien lately.) LOTR is now just a fun novel-esque story that only “nerds” get really into.

Making people fish around to understand intentions doesn’t really work–though I may have been too harsh. It’s not actually because people are lazy; it could be because people don’t even realize there even is something beyond the canon. Would it occur to a casual reader of LOTR that they should read Tolkien’s letters? Probably not. His purpose was lost not necessarily because people are lazy (though this is still a fact) but because people didn’t realize there was more.

Don’t assign a handbook to your work. Your brain is a complex web of motivations–it’s arrogant to expect everyone to understand what you’re doing. You shouldn’t assume stupidity on behalf of your audience, but don’t you dare assume they know what’s going on in your head, even that they even care. If you are an author, it is your job to make me care, and you cannot make people care by assigning outside source material.

Which is why I really just don’t like Flannery O’Connor’s work.

Flannery O’Connor spent her life battling two things: lupus and nihilism. Eventually, O’Connor died of lupus at thirty-nine years old, and never gave into nihilism. If you’re just a casual reader of her stories, though, you might think otherwise.

Don’t let the beautiful watercolors on her books fool you–O’Connor’s stories are typically dark. One story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” follows a grandmother riding in a car with her son, his wife, and their children. The car crashes and a man called The Misfit kills each member of the family individually, including an infant. The grandmother is the last to die, and the story ends with her being shot. The grandmother is a pusillanimous woman, thinking much of herself and her appearances. If you read the story “correctly,” however, you can tease out a brief moment of grace before the grandmother is shot to death–she forgives the Misfit and sees him as a child of God. The Misfit appears to possible have a brief flash of grace but kills the old woman anyway. A supremely hopeful reader thinks that perhaps he will turn his life around someday.

While the story doesn’t end in a particularly hopeful vein, though Flannery leaves the door to the Misfit’s redemption very, very slightly ajar. Flannery writes her stories in a way to shock the reader. The Misfit is such a horrible, evil man, that the reader is supposed to look at the Misfit and be shocked by the consequences of his nihilistic philosophy. The reader is also supposed to relate to the small-souled grandmother and be shocked with her at the Misfit. This revelation at the end of the story enables her to escape her pusillanimous prison and have an epiphany of grace just before her death.

I object to this for two reasons. First, if that explanation is not given, Flannery’s work is incredibly difficult to decipher. Most readers, unaware of Flannery’s Catholic roots, would just read the story and remark on the fact that it’s a little dark. Most people will not be teasing out the meanings behind short stories; let’s be real, not everyone took a short story class in college. (I sure didn’t.) Most people I know who like the stories enjoy dark literature and would have no problems with the story above, even without the explanation. Before moving on to my second reason, let’s assume for a moment that the reader picks up on this way of writing and the meaning behind it. My second reason for disliking Flannery’s writing is that I object highly to the idea that only evil can shock a small-souled person out of their shell of a world. In my experience, evil hardens people and tends to close them in more, not less. It is in the nature of evil to divide and make people isolated. In fairness to Flannery, her characters can be read as either giving into nihilism or holding out hope for a new beginning, but most Flannery scholars focus on the idea that there is hope shining through the darkness in her stories. It is my personal belief that kindness and beauty are the more solid options than a more roundabout route.

I’ve also had teachers explain to me that there is beauty in her stories, but it’s harder to find, just like in real life. This is a perfectly valid point, and my objection to this point isn’t so much a reasoned argument, rather than a personal preference. I do not like dark short stories. In my personal opinion, they are entirely too nihilistic and the lack of closure I expect from a plot. Life is already too dark, and I do not need to be reading dark literature in my spare time.

I have been told that readers must be humble before the work of an artist, because it’s always better to give the benefit of the doubt. As has already been established, the human mind is complex and there could be a good message hidden behind the words. I highly encourage you do act this way towards new authors and new works. There does come a time, however, where your logic and opinion matter. Artists aren’t above criticism just because they’re artists. I respect the work Flannery O’Connor did, but in my own personal opinion, I believe she failed in her mission. I realize, however, that people much smarter than I believe she succeeded. Perhaps someday, unlikely though it may be, I will come to appreciate the work of Flannery O’Connor.