Children’s Literature tn Education, Vol. 26, No. 4, 1995 Peter Hunt is Reader in English at the University of Wales, Cardiff. He has lectured on children's literature all over the world, and has published several novels and books for children and adolescents. His numerous critical works include the recent Children’s Literature: An Ibustrated History (reviewed elsewhere in this issue). The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature, of which he is General Editor, will be Published in 1996. Peter Hunt, The Wind in the Willows, 1994 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 1908 Lois Kuznets, Kenneth Grabame, 1987 Richard Scheider, “The Wind in the Willows,” 1975 Michael Mendelsohn, “The Wind in the Willows,” 1988 Peter Hunt, “Dialogue and Dialectic,” 1968 Jan Needle, Wild Wood, 1993 Peter Hunt How Not to Read a Children’s Book Last year, I published A Fragmented Arcadia, 45,000 words compris- ing all you need to know about Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows —or, as my wife remarked somewhat sardonically, more than you need to know about The Wind in the Willows. The book was commissioned for a series on the Masterworks of Literature, and while I was writing it, 1 was able to pile up beside my desk a good deal of serious writing about Grahame, including two volumes of bi- ography; beautifully illustrated books about the real and fictional ‘Thames riverbank; Lois Kuznets’s full-length critical work; a huge ar- ray of paragraphs from virtually every reference book on children’s literature; thirty-five scholarly articles with titles like “The Wind in the Willows: Lyric Prose into Music,” “The Wind in the Willows and the Plotting of Contrast,” and “Dialogue and Dialectic: Language and Class in The Wind in the Willows”; and, of course, Jan Needle’s bril liant anti-teading, Wild Wood. Only natural, of course, for a classic landmark in world children’s literature—a book that is in print Gin whole or in parts) in well over a dozen editions, probably still selling over 100,000 copies a year, and whose sequels and distant relations (Such as the ‘Animals of Farthing Wood’ series) have a firm hold on the contemporary market. And it was striking that in all that criticism no one questioned the assumption that this was a book worth writing about on a high literary level—and, perhaps most of all, every writer liked it (or, at least, approved of it). At the same time, I was writing 10,000 words on the life and work of the world’s most successful children’s author (despite being little known in the U.S.), Enid Blyton, for a major biographical reference work, and I began to stack up books, articles, and references for her 231 (045.6713/95/12000251807.50/0 © 1995 Human Sciences Prat, Inc232 Children’s Literature in Education Barbara Stoney, Enid Blyton, 1992 Imogen Smallwood, A Ghildbood at Green Hedges, 1989 Sheila Ray, The Blyton Phenomenon, 1982 Aidan Chambers, Tell Me, 1993 on the opposite side of my desk. It was not a very large stack. There was Barbara Stoney's rather guarded “authorized biography,” the bleak autobiographical account by Blyton’s younger daughter, Imogen Smallwood, Sheila Ray's full-length study, The Blyton Phenomenon, a couple of brief articles, a couple of entries in biographical reference books, and a few passing comments in the histories (most critical works totally ignored her). What was striking now was that those who did mention her almost universally condemned her. The third ‘most translated author in history and the most widely read children’s author ever (she is, for example, a major force in Singapore) has few advocates. Curiouser and curiouser; one wonders how success might be mea- sured, for if The Wind in the Willows can be counted a success, how do we count Blyton? Grahame, when asked for a sequel to that book, replied that he was “a spring and not a pump.” Blyton, who at her peak was probably producing the equivalent of Grahame's complete output every month, pumped out around 600 books. Indeed, much of what has been written about her seems to be statistical: twenty-seven years after her death, around ten new editions of Blyton books are published in Britain every month; estimates of her annual sales vary between four and eight million copies; there are nearly 100 editions of her “Noddy” books (recently adapted for television) in print; her books are repackaged as multimedia games; and new series of books carrying her name (written in France and translated into English!) are currently appearing, All in all, it seemed to me that as I was writing 45,000 words on one book, and 10,000 words on 600 books, in equity, I could be writing 75 words on The Wind in the Willows and 27 million words on the works of Blyton. Of course the question of equity hardly arises: Grahame is a Classic Blyton mere popular trash; or, to put it more kindly, as Aidan Cham- bers has in his book on encouraging children to be readers and critics, Tell Me, she is “flat earth” reading: Suppose a child selects a story by Enid Blyton (or any other very pro- lific writer . . ) settles down and reads it, enjoys it so much that s/he finds another by the same author, reads it, finds another, and so on. [We are] observing a reader, someone many teachers would count a success. But of course we [are] uneasy. Exclusively repetitious reading ‘of any one kind of book, of any one writer, is flatearth reading. The reader may never know about (or worse still, may not want to acknowl edge) the world as round, plural, disparate, many-faceted, This seems to be incontrovertible, and to judge from the adult critical response, The Wind in the Willows seems likely to qualify as a bookHow Not to Read a Children’s Book 233 Dale Spender, Toe Writing or the Sex, 1989 that would take the reader into orbit, while Blytox, passim, is so flat- earth that there does not even seem to be a language to talk about her in, or if there is, we do not apply it. There is a snag, though. And that is, that even with the delicate seis mic equipment developed by teachers and writers like Aidan Cham- bers and Michael Benton to elicit genuinely informative responses from children, it is a matter of simple observation as well as theoreti- cal conviction that we do not know what anyone (let alone a child) makes of a text. We make assumptions about writers like Blyton that their texts are not capable of being read in what we might call a literary or worthwhile (or intergalactic) way. What worries me is that it is not simply what we might call (derogatively) popular writers who carry this burden: the unfortunate truth is that even for the most committed of us, all children’s books carry this stigma. We make an assumption about the readers (which is inherently insulting) that they are incapable of making complex meanings, and then transfer that assumption to the text. As far as the non-children’s-book-world is con- cemed, we are in exactly the same position as female writers were until recently: in 1989 Dale Spender subtitled The Writing or the Sex, “or Why You Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good”; sadly, many within the children’sbook-world covertly think the same of children’s books, or behave as if they did. ‘At this stage in the progress of children’s literature criticism, it should be obvious that while children may be incapable of making meanings in the same way as literary adults, that is not to say that their mean- ings are any less complex. Equally, to suggest that any text is not capable of generating complex meanings (and I mean any text) is to misunderstand totally how language works. It is only because we are dominated by certain value systems (the canonical, the “literary,” the adult, the male, the middle class . . .) that we decide not to read certain books in certain ways. “Literature” is a way of reading, not a function of the text, just as a pile of bricks is a work of art in an art gallery, and merely @) a pile of bricks on a building site. The old truism, “what you get out of it depends on what you put into it,” is devastatingly true. But why, then, does The Wind in the Willows get the full “literary” Gerious, considered, culturally respectful) reading? The simple an- swer might be, because it is not a children’s book (a principle that can also be applied to, say, the “Winnie-the-Pooh” books, which being only half for children, get halfserious treatment). The Wind in the Willows is the retreatist dream of a middle-aged man threatened by women and sex, social upheaval, and frustrated ambition, a male para- ble with its protagonists relieved of responsibility by virtue of being234 Children’s Literature in Education Margaret Meek, How Texts Teach What Children Learn, 1988 Enid Blyton, Five Go Down to the Sea, 1991 covered in fur. (However, that answer lays one open to the riposte that it merely proves that there is more to say about adults’ books than children’s books.) Rather (or equally), The Wind in the Willows has been marketed and adopted as a children’s book for nearly a hundred years, and that, I would argue, is because it is the classic example of the adult's chil- dren’s book, which conforms to the dominant literary values, is nos- talgic, rural, retreatist, repressive, male, interested in a sense of place (€tc.) and is thus validated, is on booklists, university courses, and so on. This is directly opposed to Enid Blyton’s books which are none of these things: they are children’s children's books, expedient, not rooted in place, anarchic, and generally paying little attention (what- ever Blyton’s avowed intent) to virtually any concept of “literariness.” It is, perhaps, not surprising that I have encountered a good deal of (occasionally querulous) resistance to this idea that what is important is who is reading rather than what (in terms of marks on the page) is read. It is the reader who makes books good, rather than the other way around. Although, as Margaret Meek points out in her How Texts Teach What Children Learn, there is an interaction in which the text shapes the reader's reading mode (just as the reader shapes the text), it seems to me that the adult, “literature*-oriented mindset overrides or overwrites anything “in” the text. Consequently, it is interesting to consider what happens if we apply the same way of reading to differ- ent texts. Suppose we approached Blyton with the same reverence, the same expectation of excellence that we do The Wind in the Wil- ‘ows—What would we find? (It is scarcely worth trying the experi- ment the other way around, as there must have been millions of readers—starting with Theodore Roosevelt—who took the book up expecting one thing, but finding a disappointing other.) ‘The obvious, conventional answer to the question, “What would we find?" has to be “nothing”: or, “if you do find something, you will have put it there yourself”, The fact that this is also true of The Wind in the Willows (or War and Peace) is generally, for the sake of order- liness, overlooked. Conversely, if we find nothing it is because we expect to find nothing: we have put the nothing there ourselves. Also, many may be equally skeptical about what was found—as op- posed to what was there to be found—in The Wind in the Willows. Accordingly, having labored long over The Wind in the Willows, 1 selected a book from one of Blyton's series, “The Famous Five” (21 volumes, 1942-1962), Five Go Down to the Sea (1953), and, attempt-How Not to Read a Children’s Book 235 ing to rid myself of preconceptions about how I should read it, I read it as if it were an approved, validated classic. But first, what was there to say about Grahame's book? To summarize those 45,000 words ruthlessly, I wrote about (amongst other things) . . . (At this point, in a very advanced draft of this article, I launched di- rectly into the points to be made about The Wind in the Willows; later, when I began to talk about Five Go Down to the Sea, | prefaced my critical points with a plot summary. This now strikes me as both elitist and illogical—as probably more people have read Five Go Down to the Sea than have read The Wind in the Willows.) To return. Grahame's book can be read in the context of the literature of the time and Grahame’s other books: the fin de siécle pscudo- mysticism, the relation of the book to Furnivall and Ransome and ‘Wilde and to its amazing mirror-image, Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. | considered The Golden Age and Dream Days as impor- tant adult books in the history of children’s literature and the way in which the narrator's voice changed through Grahame, Kipling, Nes- bit, and Potter, all in the context of attitudes to the child at the time, and the cult of the perfect child. In terms of the crafting of the book, there is the incredible complex- ity of the narrative: Are the first five chapters Mole’s bildungsroman, or are they best seen as a series of widening circles, or does the second half of the book parody the first? In terms of content there is the image of a lost golden age, the orgies of food, the security of the kitchens, the contrasts between threat and security in all manner of symbols. There is the problem of class as represented by the animals as well as the humans; there are elements of repression and regres- sion, nostalgia, a yearning for escape. And this is all carried by an unstable, varied, evasive style, from the Gilbert and Sullivan comic gothic to the fin de siécle overwriting. Whaat is all this expressing or reflecting? What was the book's rela- tionship to society: to rapid political and social changes, to strikes and the restive working classes, to the threat of war, to the spread of railways up the Thames Valley, to noisy cars, to vocal women . . . all things which attacked the stable rural male-dominated status quo. Beyond that, what of Grahame? Does the book illuminate his search for a father (Mole and Badger), his male (the god Pan) bonding (Mole and Rat), his fear of sex and women (Toad and the Bargewoman), his frustration at being a London rather than River Banker, and so236 Children’s Literature in Education Peter Green, Kenneth Grabame, 1959 Enid Blyton, Five Have a Wonderful Time, 1954 on? (Here I was greatly aided by Peter Green's biography, Kenneth Grahame, which combines facts with razor-sharp psychological spec- ulation reading between text and life in a very illuminating, and mer- ciless, way.) Then, of course, the book can be deconstructed for its blindnesses— absence of women, of servants—for what Grahame called “economy of character”; it can be seen in terms of the way children read it (anarchy, repression, animism, initiation), and the way adults read it Gntertextually, nostalgically, regressively), All very productive and in- teresting—Can the same be done for Enid Blyton? The straightforward answer is yes: as long as we can unblinker our- selves and consider what readers read who are not constrained by what they ought to see. For example, what do we think of this piece of prose: Poppies blew by the wayside in hundreds, and honeysuckle threw its scent out from the hedges as they passed. The corn stood high in the fields, touched with gold already, and splashed with the scarlet of the poppies. [The village] was really nothing but a winding street, set with a few shops and houses, and . . . further off, set in the hills, were a few farmhouses, their grey stone walls gleaming in the sun. Or this: It was about five o'clock and a very lovely evening. They met nobody at all, not even a slow old farm cart. 1 fear that our decision will depend largely on which book we know the extracts to be from (for the answers, read on). Five Go Down to the Sea can be read contextually, first in terms of Blyton’s other books. Her work is very English middle class, largely fantasy, and very often that most potent form of fantasy, fantasy that masquerades as realism. A glance at an earlier book, such as Five Have a Wonderful Time (1952), shows certain Blytonian motifs—an opposition between the lush country and the threatening (ruined) castle, the symbols of movement and freedom in caravans and no- madic people, an emphasis on food as comfort and renewal and secu- rity, a strong sexuality as well as sexism, economy of character, and a basic wish fulfillment by the least empowered (the children)—all mo- tifs found very strongly in Five Go Down to the Sea (and, of course, The Wind in the Willows). intertextually, within the oeuvre and the series, reference can be made to a complete world, to the irascible parents, to the timidity of one of the characters, and to the ironicHow Not to Read a Children’s Book 237 inevitability of certain kinds of events: “I'm not going to have any adventures this time,” said Anne in a firm voice. “I just want a holi- day.” In the context of post-Second World War literature, Blyton’s books are entirely consistent with the ruralist, pacifist, nostalgic trends ex- emplified by John Moore and H. E. Bates; in terms of children’s litera- ture, Five Go Down to the Sea, with its acknowledgment of the cruel reality of shipwrecks and potential violence, is a precursor of writers such as Philippa Pearce or the early Alan Garner, where fantastic (and serious) happenings are contextualized in the secure family, or in eco- nomically drawn characters, And so from the title onward, in which the key words, “Go Down” imply a lost, golden, idyllic world, with the image of walking down to the sea, the atmosphere of an Arcadian Cornwall (similar to the Arca- dian River Bank) is established. In the opening chapters we have bicy- cles, a puncture, a steam train, dusty, empty lanes—in which the children (their ages range from ten to twelve, as established immut- ably in the first book of the series) are innocently free and em- powered. Not only have the period details become potent—the iso- lated railway-halt, the village shop with lemonade kept cool in the cellar—but the emphasis is on food catered as much for the desires of 1953 England as for the symbolic meanings we now perceive: The high tea that awaited them was truly magnificent. A huge ham... a salad fit for a king. In fact, Dick said, fit for several kings, it was so enormous . . . “[a}nd lashings of hard-boiled eggs.” There was an enor- ‘mous tureen of new potatoes, all gleaming with melted butter, scat- tered with parsley. There was a big bottle of home-made salad cream. \d look at that cream cheese, too,” marvelled Dick, quite overcome. “And that fruit cake. And are those drop-scones, or what?” . . . “And ‘there's a cherry tart made with our own cherries, and our own cream with it...” (The farmer's wife] was now filling up their glasses with rich, creamy milk . . . “Why don’t you take a short walk and go to bed? Til have a snack ready for you when you come in.” Just as The Wind in the Willows is built around ceremonial food, so Five Go Down to the Sea uses food (or its absence) to indicate accep- tance or rejection, initiation or outsiderism, security and insecurity — as at the end, when the wild boy, Yan, is only allowed to join the feast if he voluntarily cleanses himself and accepts the basics of civi- lized behavior. And this is carried by a prose that can be subtle, and that is a good deal more under control than Grahame’s. Consider the line we have already met, from the first chapter: “It was about five o'clock and a238 Children's Literature in Education Barbara Wall, The Narrator's Voice, 1991 Barbara Stoney, Enid Blyton, 1992 very lovely evening. ‘They met nobody at all, not even a slow old farm cart”: the device of describing an absence, an expectation, moves us into an intimate collusion between narrator, character, and reader, a virtuoso use of free indirect discourse. As Barbara Wall, in her study of narrative voice in children’s literature, puts it: The pervading tone of the dialogue becomes inescapably blended with the narrative voice. The narrator briefly recounts an action and then slides imperceptibly into the thoughts of the character, so that it ap- pears as though the narrator is commenting on the action in the voice of the child character. This has the effect of causing the narrator to appear to be confiding in the narratee. Just as with The Wind in the Willows, we have to decide what kind of book we are reading: Five Go Down to the Sea is primarily fantasy, but Blyton approaches grim reality (with the historical account of wreckers on the Cornish coast), and has much the same problems with confronting it and absorbing it into the idealized world as does Grahame (“How horrible!” said George, quite appalled at such wicl edness). Such evasion may have similar roots: the social world was rapidly changing: postwar standards were not the same as prewar standards. Blyton’s personal background provides a potent explica- tion of the insistence on the happy family group, the displaced, lost, or misjudged father figures, the ambiguous men, the overcompensat- ing, obsessive mother figures. (And here I was greatly aided by Bar- bara Stoney’s Enid Blyton, a masterpiece of subtle, indirect sugges- tion.) Blyton was described at one stage as “the mother of the world’s children,” while not speaking to her own mother for much of her life, and having perhaps not the best relationship with her own children. As Stoney wrote in the 1992 revision of her biography: She was a talented, hard-working writer for children who, behind the public image which she guarded so carefully, was a very insecure, com- plex and often difficult, childlike woman whose life was at times far removed from the sunny world she created for herself in her highly successful writings. Emotionally she never matured beyond the un- happy little girl . . . who was not allowed to tell anyone that her be: loved father had deserted her for someone who appeared to mean more to him than herself. From this psychological—and the social and literary—background emerges a complex texture, which balances dark and light, security and violence, power and helplessness, which explores (often with the crudity and directness of childhood) insider and outsider, and class and race and sexual distinctions. In Five Go Down to the Sea these complexities are seen even in the behavior of the Cornish dogs, who are wild and working-class, in comparison with Timmy, in the ambi-How Not to Read a Children’s Book 239 Peter Dickinson, “A Defence of Rubbish,” 1970 guities of the masks of the traveling players, of the acceptability of everything from accents to beards. Five Go Down to the Sea is a rich text, not only capable of being read in a “literary” way, but almost certainly given endless such readings by hundreds of thousands of readers. American readers might wish to contemplate the same analysis of a “Nancy Drew” or “Hardy Boys” mystery, and they will note that I have not dealt with the sociological or educational implications of Blyton’s work, precisely because (as with “Nancy Drew”) those have been the only dimensions in which the literary culture allowed her to be con- sidered. (Perhaps significantly, The Wind in the Willows has only re- cently been accorded sociological and historiographical criticism!) I could go on, but the point should be obvious. The value we accord a book is proportional to the way in which we read it, and the way in which we read it is not a function of the book, but a function of the way in which our culture allows us to read it. ‘What are the implications of this? The first is that, attractive as the Flat Earth theory of reading is, hidden behind its reasonableness is an allegiance to a particular worldview of reading’s possibilities and ben- fits—and that certain texts are more likely to “supply” these benefits than others is hardly surprising. Second, we might remember Peter Dickinson, speaking twenty-five years ago in defence of rubbish, which he defined as “all forms of reading matter which contain to the adult eye no visible value, either aesthetic or educational”—and re- member the most neglected of his six defences: “it may not be rub- bish after all." Who is to say that Five Go Down to the Sea is not to be read in an intergalactic way—just as those who do not respond to The Wind in the Willows (and there are many of them) are reading very flatly or reading a flat text, or making a flat meaning. Consequently, those of us who are concemed with children’s literature need to beware of the trap laid for us by the very concept of “litera- ture,” and literary standards that claim to be (or aspire to be) authorita- tive but are actually like the emperor's clothes. If we are tapping into this mystery of what meaning children make, and if we value it at all, as ‘We purport to, we have to see them making it within their own cul ture, as well as in relationship to other cultures (such as that which validates “literature"). And pethaps even more seriously, if we sce cer- tain kinds of books and certain kinds of narrative as inferior or unre- warding, then we are potentially ignoring the vast impact of otber media—writing and text in the broadest possible sense, and thus los- ing touch with the inevitable future. Whose culture will it be anyway?240 Children’s Literature in Education References Benton, Michael, et al., Young Readers Responding to Poems. London: Routl- edge, 1988. Blyton, Enid, Five Go Down to the Sea. London: Hodder Headline (1953), 1991. Blyton, Enid, Five Have a Wonderful Time. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1954. Chambers, Aidan, Tell Me: Children, Reading and Talk. South Woodchester: The Thimble Press, 1993. Dickinson, Peter, “A defence of rubbish” (Children’s Literature in Education, 3, Nov. 1970] in Geoff Fox et al., eds., Writers, Critics and Children. Lon- don: Heinemann Educational and New York: Agathon Press. Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows. London: Methuen, 1908. Green, Peter, Kenneth Grabame 1852-1932. London: John Murray, 1959. Hunt, Peter, “Dialogue and dialectic: Language and class in The Wind in the Willows,” Children’s Literature, 16 (1988): 159-168. Hunt, Peter, The Wind in the Willows: A Fragmented Arcadia. New York: Twayne, 1994, Kuznets, Lois, Kenneth Grabame. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Meek, Margaret, How Texts Teach What Children Learn. South Woodchester: Thimble Press, 1988. Mendelsohn, Michael, “The Wind in the Willows and the Plotting of Con- trast,” Children’s Literature, 16 (1988): 80-90. Needle, Jan, Wild Wood, London: Scholastic (1981) 1993. Ray, Sheila, The Blyton Phenomenon. London: Deutsch, 1982. Scheider, Richard L., “The Wind in the Willows: Lytic Prose into Music.” Lit- erature in Performance, 2 (1975): 64-68. Smallwood, Imogen, A Childbood at Green Hedges. London: Methuen, 1989. Spender, Dale, The Writing or the Sex, or Why You Don't Have to Read Women's Writing to Know I's No Good. New York: Pergamon 1989. Stoney, Barbara, Enid Blyton: The Biography. London: Hodder and Stough- ton, revised edition 1992. Wall, Barbara, The Narrator’s Voice. London: Macmillan, 1991Copyright of Children's Literature in Education is the property of Kluwer Academic. Publishing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.