(Children's Literature, Culture, and Cognition) Clémentine Beauvais - The Mighty Child - Time and Power in Children's Literature-John Benjamins Publishing Company (2015)

he Mighty Child
Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition (CLCC)

he overarching aim of the CLCC series is to promote new theoretical approaches in
the realm of children’s literature research on the one hand, and to emphasize a non-
Anglo-American focus, bringing in exciting research from other areas, on the other
hand. In addition, the new book series will present research from many linguistic areas
to an international audience, reinforce interaction between research conducted in many
diferent languages and present high standard research on the basis of secondary sources
in a number of languages and based in a variety of research traditions. Basically the
series should encourage a cross- and interdisciplinary approach on the basis of literary
studies, media studies, comparative studies, reception studies, literacy studies, cognitive
studies, and linguistics. he series includes monographs and essay collections which
are international in scope and intend to stimulate innovative research with a focus
on children’s literature (including other media), children’s culture and cognition, thus
encouraging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in this expanding ield.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/clcc
Editors
Nina Christensen Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
Aarhus University University of Tübingen
Elina Druker Maria Nikolajeva
Stockholm University University of Cambridge
Editorial Board
Sandra Beckett Kenneth Kidd Karen Sanchez-Eppler Astrid Surmatz
Brock University University of Florida Amherst College University of Amsterdam
Karen Coats Maria Lassén-Seger Lisa Sainsbury Kestutis Urba
Illinois State University Åbo Academy Roehampton University Vilnius University
Nina Goga Jörg Meibauer Cecilia Silva-Díaz David Whitley
University College University of Mainz Autonomous University University of Cambridge
Bergen of Barcelona
Katharina J. Rohling
Vanessa Joosen University of Bielefeld
University of Antwerp
Volume 4
he Mighty Child. Time and power in children’s literature
by Clémentine Beauvais
he Mighty Child
Time and power in children’s literature
Clémentine Beauvais
University of Cambridge
John Benjamins Publishing Company

Amsterdam / Philadelphia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
he Mighty Child : Time and power in children’s literature / Clémentine Beauvais.

p. cm. (Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition, issn 2212-9006 ; v. 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Children’s literature--History and criticism. 2. Time in literature. 3. Power (Philosophy)
in literature. I. Title.
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hou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom…
William Wordsworth, “Ode, Intimations of Immortality”
(1807/1983: 121–122)
Table of contents
Table of igures ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
Some groundwork 7
Part I. Time
From puer aeternus to puer existens: he advent of the child “thrown forth” 15
A series of footnotes to Rose 15
he temporal otherness of childhood 18
he Little Prince, between untameable others and untimely selves 21
he very timely puer aeternus 22
he thorny scandal of otherness 27
“Not a second for repose”: Untimely others 29
“Serious men” and miserly adults 32
he fox as didactic adult 36
Childhood and the future 43

Existential wait and the child as hope 44
Hope for the end of the wait 46
What are we waiting for? Existential wait in children’s literature
and adventure 49
Promised plenitude with polar bears 52
he unknowable end of the wait 54
he rhythmical otherness of childhood 56
he divided adult 59
Part II. Otherness
“Gaps”, desire, and the didactic discourse 69

Fiction and desire 69
What’s in the gap? Picturebook theory and the mighty “gap-iller” 72
“Readerly” gap, or didactic gap? 74
he didactic gap, between “reasonable” interpretation
and child might 78
viii he Mighty Child: Time and power in children’s literature
Deining the adult-child didactic relation 83

Collapsed prescriptions in the didactic discourse 90
Subject but object but project: he child “thrown around” 95
Cheating death: he Dumbledore problem 100
Problems of others 103

he adult-child relationship as a special “problem of others” 103
he child as “living airmation of human transcendence” 104
he other, beyond the ethical and the empathetic 108
How to cure your dad of his problem of others 113
he pains of living among others 122
Togetherness in the face of otherness 131
he other within oneself 135
Part III. Commitment
“An exigence and a git”: Committed children’s literature 147

Political literature for children 147
he didactic discourse of committed children’s literature 150
heorising committed literature 152
Anguish and hope in the committed children’s book 156
he political child and the apolitical adult in committed
children’s literature 162
Going on a guilt-trip: Ecological children’s literature 169
Contemporary children’s literature as a form of committed literature 178
he pedagogical romance 185

Love 185
All education is a failure 191
Pleasure and jouissance of the pedagogical text 196
Spud subversion 200
Adulthood reloaded: he pedagogical romance as a form of play 203
Conclusion 205
Bibliography 211
Name index 221
Subject index 223
Table of igures
Figure 1. “La Clairvoyance”, by René Magritte (1936) 1

Figure 2. Depressa, Devagar (2013) by Isabel Martins and Bernardo Carvalho 2013 60
Figure 7a. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des
étrangers (2003) by Raik Schami and Ole Könnecke, translated
by Carole Gündogar-Taithe 2003 115
Figure 7b. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des
Figure 8. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des
Figure 9a. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des
Figure 9b. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des
Figure 9c. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des
Figure 10a. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder 124
Figure 10b. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder 125
Figure 10c. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder 125
Figure 10d. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder 125
Figure 10e. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder 126
Figure 11. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder 129
Figure 12. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder 129
Figure 13. La carie (2008) by Manon Gauthier and Avi Slodovnick 164
Figure 14. La carie (2008) by Manon Gauthier and Avi Slodovnick 168
x he Mighty Child: Time and power in children’s literature
Figure 15. Quand nous aurons mangé la planète (2009), Alain Serres
and Silvia Bonanni 172
Acknowledgements
In the middle of an unfulilling adolescence I perceived to be unbearably long,

as I complained that I couldn’t wait for adulthood to come, my mother told me I
was lucky to be young; not because it meant I was healthier, or more carefree, or
more ignorant or more innocent, but simply because it made me so much richer in
future possibilities. he crucial diference between youth and adulthood, she said,
was the fact that more and more choices had to be made as one grows up, making
surprises rarer, and every new day increasingly predictable.
It didn’t strike me at the time as particularly soothing, since I yearned precisely
for all this indeterminacy to end. But I did keep these words in the back of my
mind somewhere, and it amused me to realise suddenly, as I inished my doctoral
thesis, that those three hundred pages had essentially reiterated this maternal piece
of wisdom in another language, with much more jargon and some help from dead
French philosophers. So, perhaps, just as this volume argues, my mother’s didactic
message failed miserably – it certainly didn’t make me enjoy my adolescence any
more – but it also succeeded: it lingered in me somewhere, guiding me perhaps
towards thinkers and theories that extolled the time let, the “possibility capital” of
childhood, against the idea that adulthood was a better and more powerful state.
his is a long-drawn way of saying merci, Maman, and of dedicating this volume
to her as one of the many unplanned consequences of her careful planning.
Other people have had a more direct impact on the research, writing, revi-
sions and editorial work on this book. I am endlessly grateful to Maria Nikolajeva,
who supervised the thesis on politically committed children’s picturebooks from
which some of this book is drawn. She also introduced me, as she does tirelessly
with all her students, to the children’s literature community – encouraging me to
send articles to journals, to present papers at conferences, and to teach and su-
pervise. I am also indebted to Louise Joy, who has been an informal mentor and a
role model for me ever since I met her at the age of seventeen, and who followed
my work from my irst undergraduate essays to my MPhil thesis through to my
PhD viva; she is not just a brilliant teacher and academic but also a uniquely kind,
patient and generous person.
Kimberley Reynolds examined my thesis with Louise and her advice and com-
ments, both on a large and a small scale, were constantly on my mind when writing
this monograph, helping me reorient, historicise and contextualise my argument.
xii he Mighty Child: Time and power in children’s literature
I was extremely lucky, too, to be given not just suggestions for improvements by the
two peer-readers of this volume, but also extremely detailed comments, enthusias-
tic at times, and at others quite rightly sceptical, which allowed me, I think, to gain
measure and precision in my argument. I hope I have done justice to Kimberley’s,
Louise’s, and the two reviewers’ advice in revising this monograph. I would like
to thank my editor at John Benjamins, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, as well as
Nina Christensen and Elina Druker, for being so supportive and committed to the
project (and for answering emails at meteoric speed).
In the children’s literature community, ever since I joined it in 2010, several
scholars have kindly given some of their time to look at my work at diferent stages
of the process, to listen to my talks or to support me in other ways (not least of
which helping me get a job). I am thinking in particular of David Whitley, Jenny
Bavidge, Lisa Sainsbury, David Rudd, Lydia Kokkola, Christine Doddington, and,
of course, Morag Styles. So many other people at the Faculty of Education are to
thank for their friendship and for all the long and fruitful discussions: Erin Spring,
Debbie Pullinger, Oakleigh Welply, Richard Shakeshat, Kate Wakely-Mulroney,
Ghada Al-Yaqout, Eve Tandoi, Faye Dorcas Yung, Ashley Wilson, Susan Tan, Zara
Amlani, Rupert Higham; and outside the bubble, Anna Horvai, Lauren Davis, and
Dan and Sarah Strange. At Homerton College I have found an extraordinarily
friendly, relaxed and welcoming community of Fellows; I cannot single anyone
out without being unfair to the whole, but here’s a special wink to Amy Blakeway,
Melanie Keene and Daniel Trocmé-Latter, who inished their own monographs
exactly at the same time as me.
Mille mercis, bien sûr, à Mum, Papé, Papa et Agathe; and – here I am, almost
done now – thank you, Alex; it’s your turn now to write a book, and I hope I can
accompany you as kindly and afectionately as you accompanied me.
Introduction
Figure 1. “La Clairvoyance”, by René Magritte (1936) © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2014.
Among Magritte’s corpus of usually cryptic paintings, “La Clairvoyance” stands

out for its apparent simplicity. It seems that the painting can be interpreted with
little efort: the artist has the git of clairvoyance – of clear vision, or foresight; he
has the power to extrapolate from the ordinary; he can see a latent bird in a present
egg. Under his brush, on the canvas, the possible animal becomes actualised, is
freed, and takes light. Artistic representation, the viewer is led to understand, can
divine what is to come from what already is. A prophet, a seer of dormant things,
the artist is here to show us what lies beneath the surface of ordinary things, latent
and unsuspected; he has access both to the future and to the hidden side of reality.
Yet this allegorical reading is not entirely satisfactory; ater all, being able to
imagine a bird when looking at an egg is hardly a visionary insight. Knowing
Magritte’s taste for Chinese-box treatments of artistic creation, perhaps the paint-
ing should be taken as a rather more playful and more cynical representation of
the artistic endeavour. his painter is also a poser – and a fairly bad one at that. He
2 he Mighty Child: Time and power in children’s literature
has clearly inished painting his bird: who does he think he is fooling, pretending,
as he is, to be still painting it? And he is truly freeing the bird, or rather freezing it?
Certainly, the canvas is angled towards the right, following pictorial conventions
for the future; but the steel-grey animal, its eyes covered by the paintbrush, does
not quite look like the ideal ambassador for the artist’s proclaimed git of clairvoy-
ance. Statuesque, static, recalling the myriad stone birds in Magritte’s other paint-
ings, the bird is not a thing of the future or even of the present, but already of the
past, determined by the painter (and more prosaically the egg) to be just a bird and
nothing else. From this point of view, artistic creation appears very dull indeed, and
far from prophetic. Is that all there is to the artistic endeavour? If only there was
something else than this bird on the canvas, lying away towards the future – but
what? he painting only shows us, scrupulously, what was always planned; and yet
it manages to create a sense of lack, a longing for more – for something diferent,
something truly deserving of the name “clairvoyance”. But what?
he titillating frustration of Magritte’s “Clairvoyance” can be taken as a
metaphor for a notable theoretical problem within current children’s literature
criticism, a problem which constitutes the premise of this volume. Children’s
literature has been, since the late 1980s, quite oten theorised as underscored by
a powerful didactic adult authority. his “hidden adult”, to take Perry Nodelman’s
term (2008), is always there somewhere in the children’s text, never quite co-
inciding with either adult characters or with the actual author(s). And oten
this adult authority is presented as manipulative or indoctrinatory, and above
all conservative, dictating that from an egg shall emerge a bird, however tricky
and adventurous the hatching. Child characters, for instance, are said to be only
illusorily free, just like the bird looks free only if one momentarily ignores the
solid frame of the canvas around it; they remain constructions, representations.
he child for whom these representations are made – the implied child reader –
is said to be already addressed as the future adult it is expected to become.
Children’s literature, in this view, betrays an adult distaste for the surprising,
the unexpected, the unplanned. Children’s books are characterised, it seems, by
a desire for predictability – generally speaking, the reproduction of established
sociopolitical conventions.
But what can possibly be the point of this exercise in replication? How can
there be a logical justiication for the existence of such a discourse? Why would
anyone waste time endlessly representing eggs which should dutifully produce the
birds expected of them? On one level, the justiication is of course the reinforce-
ment of existing power structures, valued by adult authorities within and outside
children’s literature, and using this type of text as an education in social conven-
tions. As Perry Nodelman explains,
Introduction 3
What adults most frequently believe children need from their literature is educa-
tion. Understood as innocent and inexperienced, children know less about the
world they live in than they might, less about how to think about themselves than
they might, less about how to behave than they might. Adults thus have a duty to
teach children what they don’t yet know, so, from this point of view, children’s
literature is primarily a didactic literature. (Nodelman 2008: 157)
My emphasis added on the triple might. hese “mights” are here almost “shoulds”:
for Nodelman (though he obviously does not endorse this position), most adults
perceive children as being in a state of lack; they see children as less than they might
be. From my perspective, the adult position is not quite, or not just, marked by a
perception of the child as less than. hose “mights” also hint at a yearning for more;
a presumption of more. he child might do something with what the adult writes.
And it might be something that the adult does not anticipate. From this comes
a – slightly playful – reinterpretation of Nodelman’s words. Yes, indeed, “Adults
thus have a duty to teach children what they don’t yet know” – but the emphasised
they could just as well refer to adults themselves. Adults, as this volume theorises,
are in the adult-child relationship a symbolically lacking party, too; they perceive
themselves as less than; they are not the ones consistently in power.
hat is, in short, the argument of this book. Because the implied child reader
of children’s literature might be taught by the children’s book something that the
adult does not yet know, that child is powerful in some sense of the word power –
a sense that I call “might”. he adult authority is not – or not just, and certainly not
always – an omnipotent, manipulative, authoritarian, repressive, oppressive entity.
Authoritative, yes – but not authoritarian. For at the heart of the didactic discourse
of contemporary children’s literature, even at its most didactic, lies a tension of
powers – of time-bound powers – between the authoritative adult and its desired
addressee, the mighty child.
hough oten prescriptive, the (not-so-well-hidden) adult agency in the didac-
tic discourse of children’s literature generally is not, cannot be, and does not desire
to be a dictatorial planner of the future, a controller of child minds and a sup-
porter of adult normativity. As noted by many scholars, most prominently Karín
Lesnik-Oberstein (e.g. 1994, 1998, 1999), Nodelman (e.g. 1992, 2008) and Maria
Nikolajeva (2010a), children’s literature does indeed articulate an adult-child rela-
tionship marked by power dynamics inside and outside the book. However, these
dynamics are of a sophistication which precludes any easy attribution of “empow-
erment” or “disempowerment” to one or the other party. he diferent aspects of
the fuzzy concept of “power” must be deined, reined and redistributed to the
two entities in the children’s book. he adult agency, even when didactic, is not
necessarily powerful; the child igure, even when turned into a projector-screen
for adult desires, is not automatically deprived of power.
he hidden adult, the adult agency in children’s literature, is an eminently am-

biguous entity. hough it may appear to be controlling, what it also demonstrates
through the didactic discourse is a wish for unpredictability in the future. Only an
indeterminate future, both led and symbolised by an ideal child reader, can address
the adult need to deal with the haunting presence of loss, lack and limitations at the
core of lived experience. his study, therefore, ofers to examine the paradoxical
adult desire to ask the child didactically for an unpredictable future, and the various
expressions of this phenomenon in children’s literature.
It will do so through a theorisation of contemporary Western children’s litera-
ture and its didactic discourse, a theorisation sensitive to the central distinction
between adult and child, which is here identiied as temporal otherness, that is
to say the fact that child and adult are symbolically set apart by their belonging
to diferent temporalities – and that this diference modulates the distribution
of “powers” between the two categories. I will take most of my examples from
children’s books published since the 1950s (for reasons that will become clear in
chapter one) which are especially likely to trigger accusations of “didacticism”, in
the sense of prescriptiveness; of an overwhelming desire to control the child and,
by extension, the future. hese children’s books constitute a good entry-point
into the inherent problem of adult “power” in children’s literature, because they
exacerbate it to a particularly obvious degree. hey are books which, by deini-
tion, betray the adult desire to prepare children for the future, for a future seen as
especially desirable, whether diferent or similar to the present. But such books,
once again by deinition, address the child as the agent of this ideal future. hey
reveal the presence of an adult authority necessarily aware of, and deferential
to, an assumed child power that the adult obviously lacks; a power located out-
side of predictability, outside of the adult’s vision. Such children’s books compel
us to look at the hidden adult in children’s literature as aware of its time- and
experience-related authority, but ineluctably dissatisied with it: and therefore
reliant on, and hoping for, the potential might of the child.
his reconceptualization of the attribution of “power” to adult and child par-
ties in the children’s book is proposed through an existentialist theorisation of chil-
dren’s literature. It is apparent to me that the strand of children’s literature theory
and criticism inspired and galvanised by power theory, albeit extremely fruitful for
exploring many aspects of this type of text, is unable to articulate fully the subtleties
of the adult-child relationship at the core of children’s literature, because much of
what constitutes this relationship falls out of its theoretical scope. Such approaches
indeed condense into a deicit model of “power” what should be seen instead as a
variegated spectrum, prominently modulated by an awareness of temporality as an
inalienable aspect of the adult-child exchange of powers. hey fail to give enough
consideration – and perhaps lack the tools to do so – to time-related concepts such
Introduction 5
as anguish, hope, wait, and desire, which cannot be let aside when dealing with
the adult-child relationship and its symbolic representations.
he approach this book ofers, hoping that it may shed an interesting light
on these questions, is an existentialist theorisation of the adult-child relationship
through children’s literature. he adult-child relationship, of which some aspects
can be neatly seized through children’s literature, has considerable (and underex-
plored) philosophical importance. Of particular interest here is what it can tell us
about existence. Maria Nikolajeva, at the beginning of From Mythic to Linear, is
right to state that children’s literature “[strives] to answer some basic existential
questions: who are we? why are we here?” (2000: 2) And another chicken-and-egg
question: what came irst, existential anxiety or its projections into art, literature,
and children? Gazed at by the adult, the child becomes trapped into an enmesh-
ment of imaginative processes – many of them highly paradoxical – which can be
matched with questionings well-explored by philosophers of existence.
In contemporary Western children’s literature, and particularly in highly pre-
scriptive contemporary Western children’s literature, there is an adult authority
coming to terms with, irstly, the perception that it is constantly running out of
time, and secondly, an imagined conlictual relationship to others in society. his
adult authority attempts to adapt to these limitations, sometimes fooling itself that
it can overcome them. It places in the idealised concept of childhood the belief that
transformation can occur in the future as a result of current literary “investments”.
Prominently, it does not actually want to know what will happen in the future, but
rather desires to preserve the possibility of the unpredictable.
An existentialist approach to children’s literature is one that applies particular
critical pressure on the questions of time and otherness which subsume the adult-
child relationship. It is an approach sensitive and receptive to the paradoxes which
characterise this relationship, particularly as it is expressed through children’s lit-
erature. Such an approach does not attempt to simplify these paradoxes, least of
all to solve them, but rather to take them as symptomatic of a more fundamental
ambiguity, that of existence. Here, this approach leans mostly on French phenom-
enological existentialism, particularly the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, and contemporary philosopher Nicolas Grimaldi. Coming from fairly
similar premises, but reaching diferent conclusions and emphasising diferent
concepts, these thinkers’ works help highlight the relevance of children’s litera-
ture to the philosophy of existence. It will remain, however, a hybrid existentialist
theorisation, very much cross-fertilised with children’s literature theory and the
theory, philosophy and sociology of childhood.
his existentialist theorisation takes as its two central axes the questions of
temporality and of the problem of others. I consider the child constructed by
children’s literature as characterised by temporal otherness relative to the adult:
the child igure, namely, is a symbolic construct dwelling within a very speciic
existential “territory”. his temporal otherness can be characterised, for now, as
the synthesis of imagined fundamental diferences between adult and child, from
the point of view of the adult, and anchored speciically in an imaginative temporal
reading of the concepts of “childhood” and “adulthood”. “Metaphors we live by”,
to pilfer George Lakof and Mark Johnson’s famous title (1980), are philosophi-
cally signiicant; there is philosophical signiicance in the oten-heard claims that
children “symbolise hope”, are “bearers of promises”, may “bring about change”,
are “full of potential”; and that adults are “experienced”, “wise” or “knowledge-
able”. What these clichés translate, despite their being monolithically applied to
very diferent human beings, is a symbolic understanding of individual capacities
modulated by an appreciation of their time past or time let, rather than by an
objective assessment of individual performances.
People we call adults and people we call children, relative to one another, have
one important characteristic: they have only partially overlapping temporalities.
he relationship between adult and child is deployed over a special moment in time
(the moment of overlap, one could say) when the concentration of powers of the
past and for the future, which adult and child respectively “possess”, is particularly
pertinent and particularly intense. And children’s literature occupies, of course,
a privileged position in that moment: its mission, should it wish to accept it, is to
organise the conversion of past-bound power (which I call authority) into future-
bound power (might). But this conversion is ambiguous and painful, because it is
above all an acknowledgement of failure and of incompleteness on the part of the
adult authority which overwhelmingly controls this discourse.
he adult-child relationship, barely touched upon in the canonical existen-
tialism of Heidegger and Sartre1 (barely touched upon, in fact, in most works of
Western philosophy), should be considered a unique mode of being-for-others and
of being-in-time, with its own speciicities and its own limitations. Analysing it can
add to our understanding of the existential condition, just as much as it can add
to our understanding of children’s literature itself. Children’s literature provides
the possibility to decrypt some of the ways in which this mode arises, in the form
of a didactic injunction. I want to show how this didactic injunction ramiies into
an oten ambiguous, always fascinating address to a future world which the adult
would like to both control and let be.
From hidden adult to mighty child to nimble reader, to take Roderick McGillis’s
term (1996), there are more than three easy steps. I am not claiming, of course, that
the didactic discourse within children’s literature is always successful in creating
1. Sartre did write about childhood, but long ater what can be considered his existentialist
magnum opus, Being and Nothingness.
Introduction 7
mighty, agential children. My theorisation is irmly adult-centred, as is my deini-

tion of children’s literature. I am interested in what children’s literature tells us of
the synthetic adult intentionality at its core, and the hopes and desires it invests in
the fantasy of childhood. he discourse of contemporary children’s literature pos-
its, hopes for, construes a mighty implied child reader – a child “thrown forth” into
the world, and asked to make something of it. he didactic discourse is a project;
an investment; a wager. It is what this wager says of adult disempowerment and
child might that I would like to explore.
Some groundwork
My theorisation in this volume is adult-centred, and my focus is on the adult in-

tentionality at the core of children’s literature. Correspondingly, my deinition of
children’s literature is an intentionalist one, but not authorial: it assumes a synthesis
of adult intentionalities. It also does not attempt to diferentiate, on a theoretical
level, between conscious and unconscious intentions; such distinctions can only
be hypothesised when doing critical readings of particular texts and historicist
studies of particular authors.
his theorisation is based on the notion that a certain number of adult agents
come to assume that the intended audience of a certain work is located within
the symbolic childhood of its place and time. Symbolic childhood is formed of
an enmeshment of beliefs, values and fears associated with the perception, both
by adults and by children, of what it means to be a child in a given context – in
this case, Western society.2 Peripherally ever-changing, but relatively conserva-
tive at its core, symbolic childhood relates to all real children, “without having to
make reference to a single existing child” (Cook 2002: 3). As famously suggested
by Philippe Ariès (1962), it is a sociohistorical, cultural and political construct,
which both encompasses and transcends the real child, and can be analysed in part
by studying the represented child. Real children, however, do have an impact on
symbolic childhood: they can modify it, for instance, by subverting its discursive
norms. Other institutions, such as the marketplace or the educational system, have
a tremendous inluence upon it.
Within children’s literature, symbolic childhood oscillates between the relec-
tive and the transformative. It is not easily tied to age, but at the same time it cannot
2. Historian of childhood Hugh Cunningham notes that the frontiers of “western society” with
regard to childhood are diicult to establish: “he time when key ideas about childhood were
developing in the eighteenth century coincided with the growing inluence of the west over other
parts of the globe” (2005: ix).
do away with it; as Alan Prout and Allison James note, “the immaturity of children
is a biological fact of life but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and
made meaningful is a fact of culture” (1997a: 7). Symbolic childhood is the reason
why there exist speciic temporal imaginations associated to adults and children –
it is not an actual but a “cultural time-gap” (Hollindale 1997), the modulations
of which are discussed throughout this volume. his symbolic temporality is the
condition of the time-bound powers I detect in children’s literature.
I consider children’s literature to be all texts for which the associated writing,
publishing, mediatory, critical and readerly practices display an awareness of their
audience as primarily located within the symbolic childhood of their time and
place (viz., that they address a “child audience”). Nodelman “happily [accepts] the
pragmatic deinition that children’s literature is the literature published as such”
(2008: 146), but I prefer to take into account multiple adult participants in the cre-
ation and difusion of these works, including, of course, the immense contingent of
adults who have no direct connection to children’s literature, but indirectly inlu-
ence it through the propagation and perpetuation of social, cultural and political
ideals linked to childhood.
By “awareness of an audience located within symbolic childhood” (“child au-
dience”) I do not mean the exclusion of an adult audience, but the awareness that
a text is particularly likely to be read by (what a society sees as) children. his
knowledge appears through the following points (which may or may not all be
present in one text, leaving space for debate over the inclusion of certain works):
Writing practices displaying awareness of a child audience include the decision by the
author, if not to “write for” children, at least to present the work to agents/ publishers
who deal with books marketed for children – and potentially to stress this dimension
in presenting the work to them. his applies to illustrators too.
Publishing practices displaying awareness of a child audience involve the decision
to tailor a literary work to conform to an imagined child readership’s expectations
and tastes. hese include formatting the work in ways believed to be child-friendly;
shaping paratext accordingly; re-packaging so-called “classics” to make them more
palatable to this imagined child audience, etc.
Mediatory practices displaying awareness of a child audience refer to the extent to
a book is likely to be read non-accidentally by a child. Concretely, this is translated
through librarians’, booksellers’ and teachers’ decisions to orient towards a speciic
text a child reader rather than, or in conjunction with, an adult reader.
Critical practices displaying awareness of a child audience are constituted by professional
adult readers’ responses to a text. Whether these professionals are book reviewers or
academics, their critique of the text would plausibly allude to, or at least show awareness
of, the likelihood that children are the intended audience.
Introduction 9
Finally, readerly practices displaying awareness of a child audience consist of the

attitudes adopted by non-professional adult readers towards a text. Whether conscious
or unconscious, their decisions in buying and reading it – which could involve, for
instance, not reading it publicly, reading it with a child rather than alone, or justifying
reading it – indicate whether they perceive this book to be directed at them or at the
“other” audience.
I am not including in my deinition children’s readerly practices or reading choices.

My deinition of children’s literature, in line with my theoretical interests, is irmly
adult-centred. Avowedly intentionalist, it synthethises several intentionalities. It
is also aware of the degree to which much of this synthetic adult intentionality is
unconscious, structured and conditioned as it is by ideology.
Finally, and importantly, by “children” I do not mean “teenagers,” and will
not be talking, in this study, about adolescent or Young Adult literature. I see the
sociocultural and historical construct that is “adolescence” as belonging to a difer-
ent kind of temporal otherness than the one we call “childhood”; I will not, within
this book, have the scope to discuss teenage literature, the time-bound powers of
which deserve their own analysis.
I am of course aware that there is a vast area of children’s literature which blurs
the distinction between children’s books and so-called Young Adult books; the
Carnegie list, for instance, has evolved rapidly these past few years towards books
which present irmly teenage characters, to the despair of some3; I will steer away
from this blurry literary zone. Most of the children’s books studied in this volume
will therefore be either picturebooks, or iction targeted at primary-school age
children. here is plenty of empirical data to indicate, of course, that many children
of primary-school age read what is commonly marketed as Young Adult. here
may be real children, furthermore, who do not it comfortably within the group
targeted as “located within symbolic childhood”. But my deinition relies on the
texts’ attempts to reach out to an imagined child audience, rather than real chil-
dren’s reactions to the texts or reading choices. hese attempts express a number of
adult intentions, evidently not all conscious or clear, condensed within the textual,
paratextual and epitextual spaces of the books’ didactic discourses (Genette 1997).
herefore, mentions of “adult intention”, “adult anguish” or “adult desire”
should not be understood as claims about the actual author(s). Instead, when such
terms are employed, they refer to properties, extractable from the text, of what I call
the adult agency, the adult authority, or simply the adult. It is not an original con-
cept; it is, as I understand it, what Nodelman has in mind when he talks about the
“hidden adult” in children’s literature – an immensely helpful coinage. his adult
3. See the fruitful debate between Patrick Ness and Shoo Rayner (2013).
agency does not coincide with either author or the narrator, or with adult charac-
ters in the books. It is, so to speak, the adult volition conveyed within the book;
the synthesis, as coherent as it can get, of a given text’s construction of adulthood,
with its accompanying intentions, fears, desires, values and attitudes towards child-
hood. My frequent personiication of this agency (“the adult wants”, “the adult’s
anguish”, etc.) should be understood as a rhetorically convenient phrase, rather
than as reference to any real individual.
Correspondingly, by the term child I generally mean the relatively synthetic
perception of childhood constructed by a given text. To highlight the fact that
both adult agency and constructed child are disembodied entities, I use the neutral
pronoun (“it”) to refer to them.
By child reader and adult (co-)reader I mean, on a basic level, the readers of the
books studied. However and importantly, I never make any claims as to their actual
reactions to the texts (though I may sometimes ofer hypotheses). herefore, such
sentences as “the text addresses the child reader in this way” or “the book appeals to
the freedom of the reader” should be understood as a commentary not on the success
of this address, but on the text’s attempt to reach out to its real audience in such a way.
In this sense, my use of the term reader corresponds to the concept of the
implied reader developed by Wolfgang Iser (1974). I use the term “implied (child
or adult) reader” whenever it is essential to clarify that I am now talking about the
reader as constructed by the text, and drop the adjective “implied” when it is evident
that this is the case. For the most part, the “address to the reader” should be taken
as the way in which the text seeks to engage the reader’s attention, bearing in mind
that this endeavour largely depends on constructions of its own readership, and
that its real efects are unpredictable. By contrast, the constructed child and adult
agency are never said to be “addressed” by the text, as they are contained within it.
My theorisation runs the risk of solidifying both “child” and “adult” parties of
the didactic discourse into monolithic categories, and of suggesting that there is
just one symbolic childhood, and one symbolic adulthood. I do not believe that this
is true, but it is a risk I will have to take here. In particular, there is no space in this
volume for diferentiations of gender, race, class or ability in my understanding of
the implied child reader. I recognise, of course, that didactic addresses vary accord-
ing to these criteria, and I allude to such diferences when doing textual criticism.
But the theoretical aspects of this volume remain grounded in the one distinction
that concerns me the most in this particular study: namely, the “vertical”, temporal
distinction between adult and child, rather than the “horizontal” distinctions of
ethnicity, gender, class, etc., among diferent children.
his distinction echoes the one developed by sociologist of childhood Leena
Alanen, who, while acknowledging that childhood is always already entrenched
in questions of class, gender and ethnicity, notes that “the social world in which
Introduction 11
children live and act are, in the end, generationally structured” (Alanen 2001: 14).
Hugh Cunningham concurs: of course, race, class and gender diferences matter,
but “there were patterns of change in the experience of childhood in Europe and
North America which were broadly similar, and which eventually encompassed
all social classes and both genders” (2005: 2). It is this generational conception of
childhood that I want to explore. he imagined gap between adult and child is
phenomenologically vertiginous because it is indicative of a diference in temporal
statuses, in temporal imaginations. his diference hints at the existential perti-
nence of the adult-child discourse, the elucidation of which is my present interest
and my overarching purpose. he added complexity of sociological and cultural
diferences in status between adults amongst themselves and children relative to
one another is of course another essential parameter, but for a further study.
part i
Time
Time is therefore always disappointing

since it is the postponement of the future; and always exhilarating
since it is the promise of the future.
Nicolas Grimaldi, Le désir et le temps (1992: 250)

From puer aeternus to puer existens
he advent of the child “thrown forth”
A series of footnotes to Rose
Tongue-in-cheek, Alfred North Whitehead famously declared: “he safest general

characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a
series of footnotes to Plato” (1979: 39). In a similar manner, English-speaking chil-
dren’s literature theory might be said to have been, since 1984, a series of footnotes
to Jacqueline Rose. hese three hundred pages certainly are, in their own way, one
of them. Rose’s landmark Case of Peter Pan (1984), still widely discussed, has not
quite been digested: it is diicult, for a children’s literature theorist, to act upon
the now notorious Rosean claim that children’s iction is “impossible” because
the adult-child relationship it posits rests on at least one hollow signiier. Rose re-
mains our Socratic gadly, luttering around the (begrudgingly-granted) children’s
literature oices of the Ivory Tower. here is a contradiction in asserting that our
work of criticism is relevant to the study of the adult-child relationship while ac-
cepting the theoretical axiom that there is no such relationship for the child. Rose’s
conclusion, shared by researchers such as Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, is to accept that
children’s literature criticism cannot tell us about the adult-child relationship per
se, or even about the child; that analysing literature for children can only yield
statements about this type of literature, and/or about the contexts of creation and
the sociopolitical and cultural values which underscore it.
Another option, of course, is to contest altogether Rose’s theorisation that adults
and children are strangers for each other. Marah Gubar, in a – yes – footnote to a
recent article (2013), hopes that her own theorisation to children’s literature will
provide an alternative to Rose’s. She seems to apologise for this “absurdly grand
ambition. But whoever heard of a modest manifesto? Plus, this is just a footnote. I’m
betting no one will read it” (455). But we should indeed read it, because it constitutes
an important alternative route: Gubar thinks we can and indeed ought to talk about
(real) children in children’s literature theory, and that we should stop positing that
children and adults are so diferent. he “diference model” of childhood which
Rose (and others, such as Lesnik-Oberstein) promotes is, in Gubar’s view, a dead
end; and so is the “deicit model” which posits that children are inferior to adults.
However, Gubar’s grouping of these two models is problematic, though it per-

fectly relects the evolution of children’s literature criticism and theory in the past
thirty years. Indeed, the past three decades have been marked by the increasing
derivation of a “deicit” vision of children from the “diference” model of child-
hood. For those who choose to agree, at least to an extent, that little can be said
about children’s literature if one does not acknowledge the “power” that adults hold
over constructions of childhood, the only remaining possibility has been to explore
this power further. his is why, perhaps, children’s literature theory and criticism
have been making such ample use of Foucauldian approaches, of critical theory and
of various kinds of theories positing diferences of power between adult and child.4
he children’s book, which articulates representations of the adult-child relation-
ship from the point of view of the adult, is seen as reinforcing the hegemony of
adulthood and the othering of childhood in variously oppressive ways. In response,
Maria Nikolajeva’s recent coining of the term “aetonormativity” (2009, 2010a), or
age-related normativity, deines the recognition of an “adult normativity that gov-
erns the way children’s literature has been patterned from its emergence until the
present day” (Nikolajeva 2010a: 8). Recognising the fundamental aetonormativity
of children’s literature – and, I would venture to say, of the adult-child relationship
in general – has become a central claim of post-Rosean children’s literature theory,
and one with which I align.5
However, despite the variation between the theoretical underpinnings of
scholars who could be said to be inscribed within a “diference” model – the aeto-
normativity-centred paradigm – there has been an increasingly frequent theoreti-
cal short-cut from the notion of necessary adult normativity to that of necessary
adult domination. his slippage from a “diference” model to a “deicit” model is
controversial, because the theoretical inding that children’s literature represents
and perpetuates adult power over children is becoming a deinition of this type of
4. his research orientation straddles many diferent theoretical standpoints. While Roberta
Seelinger Trites (2000) is overtly Foucauldian, Nodelman’s exact theoretical standpoint is let
purposefully (I believe) undeined; but he refers frequently to postcolonialism and feminism.
Jacqueline Rose’s orientation is psychoanalytical, and Nikolajeva’s is Bakhtinian. he degree to
which these diferent thinkers appreciate the possibility of counter-power is therefore variable:
Nikolajeva accepts that children’s literature is potentially subversive – devoting her opening
relections to Pippi Longstocking as an example of the possibility of child empowerment (2010).
Nodelman appears on the whole not quite convinced by this possibility, and Trites, Rose and
Lesnik-Oberstein are possibly to be counted among the least optimistic on the matter.
5. he words “aetonormativity” and “aetonormative” are used throughout this volume to refer
not solely to Nikolajeva’s work, but more generally to all research, before or ater the coinage
of this particular term, which postulates that children’s literature is marked by an othering of
childhood and a normativity of adulthood.
From puer aeternus to puer existens 17
text. Children’s literature theory appears en route to being another power theory.
Deinitions such as David Rudd’s explicitly – and, arguably, problematically – de-
rive child disempowerment from aetonormativity:
Children’s literature consists of texts that consciously or unconsciously address
particular constructions of the child, or metaphorical equivalents in terms of char-
acter or situation … the commonality being that such texts display an awareness of
children’s disempowered status (whether containing or controlling it, questioning
or overturning it). (Rudd 2005: 26)
Rudd’s statement is an apt synthesis of research to date, but that is precisely the
issue. It is based on theoretical indings about children’s literature – on hypotheses,
not on axioms. It jumps from awareness of age-related normativity directly into the
question of “power”, concluding that the child is systematically “disempowered”
because it is systematically othered. he assimilation of adult norms with adult
“power” is here a “commonality”.6
he risk is to fall into the critical relex of reiterating ad ininitum – because
it is now becoming part of its deinition – the notion that all children’s literature,
because it is essentially aetonormative, is marked by adult domination (Beauvais,
2013). But no such bridges can be built so easily between age-related normativity
and adult power. While the former may justiiably contribute to a deinition of chil-
dren’s literature, the latter can only remain an object of debate at the level of textual
criticism. his swit assimilation demonstrates the impossibility for power theories
to fully encompass and accommodate the idiosyncrasies of children’s literature;
there is a law in the model on which we are currently basing much of our research.
his law does not, however, in my view, signify a fundamental problem with
the “diference” model. Gubar thinks it does, and proposes a “kinship model”
based on the recognition of a shared humanity between adults and children, which
should let us explore their resemblances rather than quibble over their diferences.
his model does provide fascinating insights. However, adults and children are
diferent, because adults do see children as diferent to them, and do communi-
cate to them the awareness of that diference. Rose, Lesnik-Oberstein, Nikolajeva,
Nodelman are right: there would be no children’s literature if adults did not think
that children need their own literature. Sociologists of childhood have, perhaps for
a longer time than children’s literature theorists, accepted this constructedness of
6. his statement is not entirely representative of Rudd’s work, however; his most recent book
explores the ways in which children’s literature and the igure of the child provide a privileged
access to the unconscious (2013). his “re-empowerment”, so to speak, of the child and the
children’s book, comes from Rudd’s realisation (not dissimilar to mine) that there is now “a
certain predictability in much that appears in our journals as yet another feminist, postcolonial,
ecocritical or ‘ill-the-gap’ reading” (2013: 3).
the concept of childhood in contradistinction to adulthood. Adulthood is indeed

normative, adults do indeed represent children as others, and children’s literature
does so particularly forcefully. Dismissing the “diference” model altogether in
children’s literature theory is therefore problematic. However, another “diference”
model to Rose’s and to power theories’ is possible. It is a model which does not
conclude to the disempowerment of the child, because it locates the fundamental
diference between adult and child in the imagined temporality of childhood rela-
tive to adulthood.
he temporal otherness of childhood
Children and adults draw their imagined otherness relative to one another from
the fact that they have overlapping but distinct temporalities. heir diferences are
not in nature or status but contingent on the passing of time, leading to the univer-
sally shared certainty of being one and then (hopefully) the other. Until time can
be frozen, and the children of today guaranteed never to grow up – or until eternal
life becomes available – children’s literature theory, even using aetonormativity as
a conceptual guideline, cannot be articulated in similar ways as, say, feminist or
postcolonial theories. Oppressed and hegemonic groups which have presentness
for one another – women and men, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, animals
and humans – are diferent from adults and children. Feminist, queer, postcolo-
nial, Marxist, etc. political and literary theories envisage the transformation of
the oppressed group’s status. his is not the case for, if I may coin a Nikolajeva-
inspired term, “aetocriticism” or “aetotheory” – the analysis of generational or age
relationships.7 he status of the child vis-à-vis the adult is always already one of
transformation: it is constantly being modiied towards adulthood. he modiica-
tion of the child’s social or political status is not what is prominently at stake in
the power dynamics between adult and child. hose rely instead on the symbolic
temporalities that are associated to childhood and adulthood (by adults).
hese symbolic temporalities create speciic time-bound powers associated
with both adulthood and childhood in the discourse of children’s literature. For if
the diference between childhood and adulthood is symbolically temporal, it does
not necessarily follow that the advantage lies on the side of age rather than on the
side of what I call time let. What if “unrealised” time were a stronger currency than
“realised” time? A currency in which the child – therefore – would be richer than
the adult; more powerful in some sense. Time is the currency which allows me to
call the child party of the didactic discourse of children’s literature mighty, that is
7. Gratefully following Alexander Freer’s suggestion.

to say the owner of a longer future in which to act. he adult party, conversely, I
call authoritative, that is to say the owner of a longer time past with its accumulated
baggage of experience, knowledge, and therefore didactic legitimacy. What one
loses in might, one gains in authority. To be mighty is to have more time let, to be
authoritative is to have more time past.
his distinction is rarely articulated in critical discourse about children’s lit-
erature in a way that highlights the importance of the child’s share of “power”. It is
not enough to speculate that the adult in children’s literature is vaguely betting on
a future enactment of their command. Rather, I hypothesise that the hidden adult
is always subjected to a speciic form of power belonging to the child. hat form
of power is might, and its currency is time. hus, alongside the adult’s authority
inside and outside the narrative, the child’s might emerges: the potent, latent future
to be illed with yet-unknown action.
his distinction is at the core of my understanding of the didactic discourse
of children’s literature. Such literature forces us to contemplate that there can exist
in children’s texts a deferential attitude of the adult towards the child, embracing
the uncertain future consequences of didactic discourse. Children’s literature is
always a discourse of latency. When the overtly didactic adult asks the child to do
something, they are implicitly asking the child to carry that something into another
temporality. And why are they doing so? Because it is a time that adults cannot
access: it is a temporality that is out of their power. hey can inluence it, but not
act upon it directly; that power is the child’s. his gesture implicitly indicates an
awareness of child might.
he adult-child relationship is thus indeed “impossible” in the sense that the
signiiers “child” and “childhood” do not easily refer to any actual entity in the
world (nor do, in fact, “adulthood” and “adult”). Children are indeed projector-
screens for a hazy, multifarious adult erotic of childhood, mingled with nostalgia
and hope. But all relationships, including adult-adult relationships, by virtue of
being relationships to an other, are equally impossible; and especially relationships
of love and desire. From an existentialist perspective, my relationship to the other
is “impossible” (though I would prefer to label it, using Simone de Beauvoir’s term,
as ambiguous), because I want at the same time to imprison the other and set
them free, to accept them as freedom and to prevent them from hindering me as
freedom. his conlict of otherness is no speciicity of the adult-child relationship:
it is part of my existential condition.
he most interesting aspect of the adult-child relationship – most interest-
ing because it makes it a unique type of relationship to otherness – thus requires
bringing back to centre-stage the essential feature of this relationship: symbolic
temporality. “Childhood” and “the child” are indeed not quite devoid of ixed sig-
niieds. heir contents luctuate, it is true, but they are connected to age. Prout and
James (1997b) note that the “social construction of time”, the “temporal dimension
of social relationships”, are a crucial parameter of adults’ discourses towards and
about children. In Western societies, they note, there is a clear imagined temporal
sequence from babyhood to old age, going through childhood, adolescence, and
middle age. Childhood has its time, and this time is characterised, Prout and James
argue, by temporal tension: “its present is continuously banished” (1997b: 234) in
favour of a vision of childhood as past, as hint of a future, or as timeless.
In contemporary readings of childhood, they note, “childhood becomes most
important with respect to the future” (id.: 239); children have come to be increas-
ingly regarded as potential adults.8 And indeed there is meaning, as mentioned
in the introduction, in the metaphors and clichés we use to talk of children – the
“glimmers of hope” and “promises” they recurrently embody. his comes with
a heightened sense of children’s future responsibility for the world. “hey are
the ‘next generation’, ‘the guardians of the future’,” James and Prout emphasise
(1997b: 239), “on whose shoulders time itself sits. … In 1990 it is still the child who
provides the visual mnemonic for the future.” In 2015 too. here is signiicance
in Britain’s fascinated wait, in 2013, for the “Royal Baby” to arrive. here is philo-
sophical importance in the fantasies and fears of child death in our contemporary
times, despite the increased rarity of such events. here is signiicance in the terms
used to mourn, in these tragic instances, the young departed “robbed of a future”,
the child who was “so full of potential” – the child who let “too soon”, to quote
the title of Kimberley Reynolds and Paul Yates’s enlightening study of child death
in children’s literature (1998).
“Childhood”, “the child”, are in our days semantic place-holders for imaginings
of the future – rather than, arguably, for nostalgic recollections of the past. he
Romantic child and the child of Arcadian children’s literature were indeed, as Rose
would have it, immobilised and trapped by the all-powerful adult. But the post-
Romantic child of much contemporary children’s literature is irmly hoped to be
an adult someday, a citizen and an agent. his child stands for the future at least in
equal measure as it triggers nostalgia. As much as the hidden adult might attempt
to hold it in place, to keep it eternal, the child of most contemporary children’s
literature is ineluctably thrown forth, thrown into existence.
One children’s book highlights especially powerfully the growing pains of this
passage from the Romantic puer aeternus to what I would call the puer existens of
contemporary children’s texts, and allows for an overview of many of the concepts
around which this volume’s theorisation is articulated. hat book is he Little
Prince, to which I now turn.
8. A fact much deplored by many sociologists of childhood, such as Prout and James them-
selves, who would like to see the present of the child more valued.
he Little Prince, between untameable others and untimely selves
Martin Heidegger reportedly lauded Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Le petit prince

(he Little Prince, 2009, irst published in English in 1945) as a major “existen-
tialist book” of the twentieth century.9 He would not be the only philosopher to
have appropriated Saint Exupéry’s polyphonic work, which has attracted much
attention, from humanistic and Christian moralists to Kantian and Nietzschean
thinkers (Fermaud 1946). I do not mean to reclaim it as an existentialist text,
nor is it important for my analysis that it should be. But its portrayal of the indi-
vidual’s loneliness in the world, of the pressure of the ephemeral, of the diiculty
of living with others, is indeed very much in tune with the then budding French
existentialism of Sartre’s early works, Gabriel Marcel’s religious existentialism,
and Albert Camus’s major novels he Outsider (1946) and he Plague (1947), the
former of which he Little Prince is contemporaneous with. Nicole Biagioli defends
Heidegger’s reported opinion: to her, he Little Prince is an existential work be-
cause it “[dodges] the game of essences, actualising what is properly human: the
contemporaneity of the past, the present and the future in consciousness” (Biagioli
2001: 2810). What was seen as “properly human”, of course, at the historical time of
Saint Exupéry’s writing.
he Little Prince was probably not directly inspired by these existentialist texts,
but it was a child of the same era pondering about similar issues. he advent and
expansion of French existentialism was catalysed by synchronous social, political
and intellectual events: the experience of the irst, then second World Wars; the
dwindling of both scientiic reason and religious faith; in the cultural and intellec-
tual spheres, the increasing popularity, through recent translations or adaptations,
of Hegelian theories of time and interpersonality, Heideggerian phenomenology,
Kierkegaardian analyses of anguish, and the historical materialism of Marx. his
cocktail of sociopolitical, cultural and intellectual inluences so well energised the
Sartre-led “philosophy of existence” (as it was known at the beginning) and its
applications to literature, that the twentieth century in France was boldly labelled
“the century of Sartre” by contemporary intellectual Bernard-Henry Lévy (2000).
hat he Little Prince should express some insights concurrent with the con-
cerns of French philosophy of existence is no surprise. But it is not, or not simply,
as we oten hear (and as Biagioli painstakingly tries to explain), a novel for adults
9. According to Laurence Gagnon (1973) and Nicole Biagioli (2001), from diferent sources.
However, it has proven impossible to trace this quotation back to any published interview, so
it may be apocryphal. I know it is quite diicult to picture Martin Heidegger reading he Little
Prince.
10. All translations of Biagioli and Fermaud mine.
about adulthood masquerading as a children’s book. On the contrary, it is very

much a book about childhood. It neatly expresses, as I would like to show, the rise
of a post-Romantic view of childhood and children by adults, which is existentialist
insofar as it is foregrounds two central problems of existence theorised by existen-
tialists: time and otherness. he Little Prince showcases the transformation of the
puer aeternus, the eternal child of Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature,
into another kind of idealised child: a child who cannot remain eternal, who can-
not be, as Rose argues, immobilised; a child whom the adult desperately desires
to see existing, in the etymological sense of the word – standing outside of itself.
he Little Prince delineates particularly clearly, on a narrative level, the journey
from a puer aeternus to a child who embodies and dramatizes the contemporary
condition. his condition is characterised prominently by a fraught relationship
to time and to others. he child igure “thrown into existence” reveals an adult
consciousness trying to cope with an increased sense of loneliness, with the rela-
tivity of moral values, and with a perceived acceleration of time. he child, in this
emerging framework, cannot remain eternal: he Little Prince mirrors the evolu-
tion of the classic puer aeternus – the “child held in place” of Rosean theory – into
the contemporary puer existens, existing child, “mighty” child, in my vocabulary.
he very timely puer aeternus
he much-theorised puer aeternus – the child character “locked in time” – can be

understood as a strategic way for the adult authority to deal with the inevitably
dwindling temporality and the closing-up of possibilities which characterise the
human condition. Children stuck in time are children whose potential is preserved.
By virtue of being without an adult future, they remain in complete indeterminacy,
basking in an ininite wealth of possibilities. his is doubtlessly paradoxical: of
course, they are also entirely predictable and determinate, since they are and will
remain the children that they are. But this makes them the bearers of ininite pos-
sibility capital, so to speak. hey are immutable and unevolving, and yet endless
signiiers of something else, something unknown.
he fascination for puer aeternus igures resides, therefore, in the ever-postponed
choice of what they will be, to preserve the alluring uncertainty of everything they
could be. he puer aeternus is, in existentialist terms, a child in the paradoxical situ-
ation of being without a situation. One’s situation is, as Sartre puts it, what “I have
to be without any possibility of not being it,” (1958: 141) from the contingency of
birth to self-binding choices which have already been made. he puer aeternus’s
future is coniscated, and thus also the web of choices and commitments that could
ever fossilise into a situation.
he associated chronotope of the puer aeternus of classic children’s iction is,

generally, one of permanence and enclosedness, as Nikolajeva analyses (2000).
She calls the puer aeternus a child “out of time”. James and Prout (1997b) quote
A. A. Milne’s poetry as characteristic of a “timeless childhood”, an antiquated con-
ception still mutely efective nowadays. In his subtle interpretation of time and
narrative in A. A. Milne’s works for children, Paul Wake (2009) also highlights the
degree to which Milne’s poetry delineates childhood innocence as “atemporal” as
synonymous for eternal; the child is placed “outside of time”. Childhood in Milne’s
poetry, Wake argues, is characterised by “temporal stasis”, “extra-temporality”, “in
the sense that it belongs to an instant that stands outside of the progression of
time” (Wake 2009: 31). He calls this instant the “childish present”, the “a-temporal
present” (id.). He bases part of his observations on Milne’s poem “Halfway Down”,
of which the irst stanza reads:
Halfway down the stairs
is a stair
where I sit.
here isn’t any
other stair
quite like
it.
I’m not at the bottom,
I’m not at the top;
So this is the stair
where
I always
stop. (Milne 1924)
Wake’s analysis of the famous step is that it identiies “a childish stoppage, this
non-place” (Wake 2009: 32) which is a spatial embodiment of a temporal condition:
atemporality. he chronotope of the poem, in Wake’s interpretation, is character-
ised by disjunction from the spatial and temporal norms of adulthood.
My own reading is slightly diferent. he poem does highlight the chronotopic
atypicality of childhood compared with adulthood: the child on the step is indeed
the child in the present, the puer aeternus magically “stopped” between birth and
death. But this child is not atemporal nor extra-temporal; it is actually very irmly
on time, in the simplest sense of the expression, and this is why it is diferent from
the adult. It has stopped on a “stair” between birth and death, between past and
future, and this Goldilocks place appears to give it a sense of completion: of perfect
coalescence between space, time and self. he metrical regularity of the poem,
admittedly unsurprising in nursery rhymes or children’s poems, accentuates the
assertiveness of this “perfect position”. While the visual split-up and arrangement
of the lines playfully refers to the shape of the stairs, the two stanzas are actually
metrically regular: made up of four rhyming tetrameters, which are also four full,
independent clauses, the poem is as “square” as it could be. By saying “I’m not at the
bottom/ I’m not at the top”, the child airms his I, his spatio-temporal self, as located
in that in-between place between past and future: the present. he poem is a decla-
ration, not of atemporality, but of perfect temporality: of perfect self-coincidence,
of peaceful timeliness, symbolised in the narrative of the poem by the perfect stair.
From an existentialist perspective, the individual is untimely; it lacks self-
coincidence. his stems from one of the tenets of phenomenological existential-
ism – the inalienable connection between being and time. In Heidegger’s original
theorisation, the existing being is time; time is not something which “traverses”
an individual, or that is detached from it; it is the matter of existence. A child
growing up is not subjected to the passing of time; its elongating limbs and de-
veloping existence are the passing of time. A crucial aspect of this phenomenon,
however, is that impressions of presentness are but a rara avis in the experiences
of consciousness. “he present is so little present”, as elegantly deplored by Didier
Cartier in his study on Grimaldi (2008: 12211). he individual is characterised by a
tension towards the future; it is constantly beyond itself, it ex-ists; it has its centre
of gravity outside and ahead of itself. One is more oten carried into the future,
“thrown forth”, than securely preoccupied with the present. here is a gap between
what one is now and what one should become: one’s “real” self must be, surely,
something else that this fallacy one currently is. As a result, as Nicolas Grimaldi
puts it, “one’s existence is always late on one’s essence. Every life is the latecomer of
its own impatience” (1992: 13712). At the same time, we are also constantly pulled
back towards inertia – towards the lull of habit, of our situation, the comfortable
sedimentation of all the choices we have made and all the ones which have been
made for us. We are at the centre of a tug-of-war between the past and the future.
So the adult temporal imagination is the one that is constantly out of time; out
of beat; the one that would ind it impossible to stop on that step in space and time.
he puer aeternus is, on the contrary, perfectly on time because, on a phenomeno-
logical level, there is nothing that it is “late for”. here is nothing in it that can be
striving towards futurity. he thought experiment here has profound philosophical
implications: would we have anguish, would we have impatience, or regret, nostal-
gia or anticipation, if we were to remain in a state of childhood forever, if we were
always on time within our own existence? he igure of the puer aeternus actualises
11. All translations of Cartier mine.

12. All translations of Grimaldi mine.
this thought experiment. hrough this child igure, the adult authority conjures up
a soothing imaginary solution to its existential crisis. his solution, elegant, but of
course illusory, is the one rightly denounced by Rose: the one that immobilises the
child, and further eroticises this immobile igure of childhood it has created.
To use a musical term, the puer aeternus is in tempo giusto, at the “exact” speed,
at the right pace, synchronous with its present rhythm. While the normal existen-
tial condition is characterised by arrhythmia, by a constant falling-forward into the
future and stumbling backwards into the past, the puer aeternus leads the tranquil
life of the hand of a clock, going round and round with precise beats, leading no
further than back to the top of the circular face. he existential (adult) individual
is arrhythmic precisely because it ticks out of time: its internal beat is ofset by the
pulls of the future and of the past – it is appassionato, accelerando, agitato. he puer
aeternus, reconciled with the present, is perfectly synchronous with itself, perfectly,
so to speak, autochronous, while the rest of us are anxiously heterochronous.
Winnie-the-Pooh belongs to an older tradition of children’s literature than
he Little Prince, and indeed the autochronous puer aeternus, to use the term
just coined, dwells in what Nikolajeva would call the “felicitous space” chrono-
tope (2005: 137–138), characteristic of “classic” children’s iction. In turn-of-
the-century works inluenced by Romantic conceptions of childhood, a sense of
harmony, autonomy, nostalgia and innocence holds together the time-space. his
type of chronotope, Nikolajeva says, has all but vanished in contemporary litera-
ture, whose chronotopes are “radically diferent” (2005: 139). he “felicitous space”
is characterised by kairos, cyclical time; contemporary children’s books are more
oten at ease with the presentation of linear time, chronos, which emphasises a
process of growth, development, and gradual loss. he adult tension towards a
“lost Arcadia” (Nikolajeva 2005: 259) is however present in both.
In the enclosed, “felicitous space” of the Hundred Acre Wood, Wake notes,
most of the stories are about things not happening – people not catching Woozles
or Hefalumps – or happening in a tautological manner – North Poles being de-
ined “by the very fact of being found” (Wake 2009: 37). his is indeed the funda-
mental paradox of the puer aeternus: it appears permanently engaged in preparing
for something which will never happen, because the child will not grow up – a
truth either speciied in the text or present de facto in the narrative. hus there
is a constant centrifugal movement towards the outside of the enclosed space,
the exterior of the cyclical time, and this is expressed also as a tension towards
decision-making. But an opposite, centripetal force pulls the puer aeternus back
towards its autochronous present and towards staticity.
he puer aeternus of classic children’s iction, Wake notes, is a child character
characterised by the fundamental, “somatic” time of Bergson’s duration, that is
to say the passing of time as inseparable from matter (Bergson 1911). Grimaldi’s
ontology of time draws very irmly, at irst, on Bergson: reality is not, as he says,
“what remains, but what becomes” (1992: 129). Time is matter and the becoming of
matter expresses time; thus reality, prominently including human bodies, is entirely
characterised by its being time-bound. he Bergsonian framework does apply well
to the temporal characterisation of the puer aeternus. Rather than atemporal or
extra-temporal, the puer aeternus in the Arcadias of classic children’s literature
is a child conceived of solely in terms of Bergsonian duration: there is a perfect
adequacy between body and temporal imagination, between matter and time.
But from an existentialist perspective, this Bergsonian conception is prob-
lematic, because, as Grimaldi argues (1992: 129), it does not take into account the
ontological split or contradiction which deines time, and therefore matter – the
light forward which the time-bound consciousness constantly experiences. his
leads to the characteristically existentialist statement that there can be no such
perfect adequacy between one’s being and one’s feeling of temporality as that of a
lump of sugar melting – or as what the puer aeternus appears to embody. he puer
aeternus artiicially soothes, by its reassuring and ideal alignment of matter and
time – by its ideal being-on-time, so to speak – the disquiet, impatient conscious-
ness of the appassionato adult temporality.
he evolution of the chronotopes within the narrative of he Little Prince marks
a signiicant evolution from the Bergsonian, kairos, eternal “felicitous space” of the
little planet, to the linear, chronos, “unfelicitous” spaces of planet-hopping and the
Earth. he blond puer aeternus begins by belonging to the circular, ever-renewed
time of his planet; he begins as an archetypal eternal child of classic children’s ic-
tion. But, signiicantly, he leaves. And what he inds is another temporality. In he
Little Prince, “time on Earth, the profane time, measured by clocks and timetables,
the grown-up time, is linear”, as Nikolajeva notes (2000: 119). But I would nuance
this assimilation of “grown-up time” with linearity. In fact, he Little Prince neatly
shows that the temporality of adulthood, in contrast to that of the puer aeternus,
cannot be truly characterised by linearity. Linearity, timeliness, punctuality are
certainly qualities that the adult world supericially imposes on itself in an efort to
comprehend time in a mathematical sense. But the phenomenological temporality
of adulthood, far from being regular and controlled, is portrayed as characterised
by acceleration, fast-forwards, backward glances in the form of nostalgia, and ir-
regularity. he Little Prince, thrown into this hectic “adult temporality”, will from
then on become less and less a puer aeternus, more and more a child of the franti-
cally untimely adult world. His status as eternal child will be forever corrupted; he
will be thrown into existence.
he thorny scandal of otherness
he Little Prince, at the beginning of his own story, is (or rather was, since the
narrative is given to us a posteriori) a typical puer aeternus. he dreamed-of eter-
nal child of classic children’s literature, a being of perfect temporal regularity, he
seemed to be ticking like clockwork, in accordance with his own internal rhythm.
His daily tasks – mostly weeding his planet from baobab seeds – absorbed him in
what Beauvoir would call a task of immanence: a type of work characterised by
repetition, cyclicality and lack of evolution. However, the Little Prince’s life, even
within the “felicitous space” of the archetypal puer aeternus, was in fact already
threatened. he very presence of the baobab seeds was always a latent, thudding
time-bomb. Baobabs, the Little Prince explains, need to be plucked out of the
ground as seedlings, because they might one day end up smothering the planet
entirely. his faint anguish was thus always there in the Little Prince’s life as a puer
aeternus – a small but signiicant hint that some internal disturbance, nested some-
where in the heart of his planet-self, might one day force itself out and onto him.
And indeed it is from a seed that his existential anguish will come, though not
a baobab seed: it all begins with the birth of the rose. he Little Prince’s fascina-
tion for this new – and only – speaking being on his planet is akin, in existentialist
terms, to the emergence of one’s realisation that one is distinct from others. his
distinction, which begins in early childhood, leads to conlict, incomprehension,
and a possessive attitude towards one another. It is what Sartre calls, in Being and
Nothingness, the “scandal” of others when he is feeling lyrical, and the “problem
of others” at other times. his central “problem” refers to the relationship one has
with other human beings, which is conceptualised as highly conlictual and char-
acterised by a desire to possess the other. As an individual, I am, in existentialist
thought, being-for-others: trapped by others into a social existence. My relation-
ship to others is tainted by the impression that I can never be fully free, nor fully
reunited with myself, as long as others are striving to do the same thing. And yet
others are, at the same time, necessary for my project to emerge, because others
are the ones who give rise to my individuality.
From an existentialist perspective, all attempts to explore relations to oth-
ers must therefore speak in paradoxes. his is articulated particularly legibly by
Simone de Beauvoir in her Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) and Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1947).
All relationships, and ethical judgements surrounding relationships, are charac-
terised by undecidability, ambiguity, irresolvable tensions. he scandal is caused
by the individual’s desire to categorise others, to control what they are going to be
and do, to clothe them with the safe predictability of objects. But others are not
just objects; they are necessary for one’s project to function. I cannot will myself
free if the other is not. To paraphrase Beauvoir (1948), herself inspired by Hegel,
the other steals the world from me, but I can only hope for my share of freedom if
I force myself to understand the other as free.
From the moment the Little Prince encounters otherness, the scandal begins.
Our puer aeternus’s irst attempt at being-for-others is immature, and a failure
on his part. His desire to possess the rose expresses itself through an inordinate
keenness to take “responsibility” for her (a recurring term in the novel), and there
is no reciprocity in their relationship. he Little Prince’s belief regarding the “com-
plexity” of the rose’s personality (2009: 39) is likely to leave the reader with an-
other feeling: that the rose is taking advantage of the Little Prince’s very simple
understanding of otherness, which comes from years of not doing much else than
uprooting baobab seeds.
he rose, meanwhile, seems to have already mastered some of the arts of emo-
tional blackmail and psychological manipulation, and she is able to feel shame:
“At night I want you to put me under a glass globe. It is very cold where you live.
In the place where I came from – ”
But she interrupted herself at that point. She had come in the form of a seed. She
could not have known anything of any other worlds. Embarrassed over having let
herself be caught on the verge of such a naïve untruth, she coughed two or three
times, in order to put the little prince in the wrong.
“he screen?” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 29)
he rose’s desire to be hidden by the screen ater experiencing shame betrays a

recognition, from a Sartrean perspective, that she exists alongside others on a
conlictual mode. he Little Prince, she feels, might be trying to deine her as she
has momentarily presented herself – a liar – rather than granting her a continu-
ous, complex existence. Notably, she is wrong on this account: the Little Prince
does not seem to have picked up on this aspect of her personality as a deining
feature, and he believes her to be a complex being: “his lower is a very complex
creature,” he thinks (Saint Exupéry 2009: 29). He sees her with the generosity of a
pre-existential being, who does not perceive the other as threat. He does not look
at her, at irst, as a menace.
he vignette pictures on pp. 28 and 29 make it unclear whether the Little Prince
eventually covers the rose with an opaque screen or with a glass globe. he former,
represented on p. 28, implies that the Little Prince may not be able to see the rose
at all times (and vice-versa), while the latter assumes complete transparency on
both sides. his adds a level of threat, as being looked at by others is an essential
component of the problem of others. As long as the other sees me, they see me
as a moment in time. I am not for them, as I am to myself, the being-continuous,
the being who could and, I believe, will become something more complete in the
future. he other sees me while I wait – while I am in lack. But I know intimately
that I can and will be something else; and that is how I want to be seen – as the
being that I will be, not as this disappointing fake I am now. To put it simply, I want
to tell the other: “No, wait – don’t look at me now, I’m not ready yet.” But inexorably
the other persists in taking snapshots of my lacking existence, thus blocking me
in my project, thus barring my future from me, thus making me no more than an
accumulation of the factitious events that have situated me and are keeping me
unfree. We objectify others and they objectify us: we are subjects and objects at
the same time. his phenomenon is part of what Beauvoir calls the fundamental
ambiguity of existence.
Protected from draughts, the rose is not protected from the Little Prince’s
look. his is perhaps why, ater some time, the Little Prince “had soon come to
doubt her” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 29). He realises that by “listening” to her, rather
than simply looking at her, he has put himself in a perilous position. “One never
ought to listen to the lowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their
fragrance” (id.: 29–30). he Little Prince has confusedly registered that while
the look puts one in a simple position of power over the other, the emergence of
speech complicates this situation. He could indeed have simply looked at her, and
remained in a mutually objectifying relationship with her, one of simple posses-
sion. However, this would not have allowed him to tackle the problem of others,
which requires accepting the dangers of this relationship, fuelled by the equivocal-
ity of language. It is, perhaps, to acquire the skills necessary to being with others
that the Little Prince decides to lee the planet. Or perhaps it is because he cannot
stand to ind himself trapped in the look of the irst being he ever experienced as
a real “problem”. (Un)fortunately for him, he will from now on meet many others,
and the developing scandal of otherness, complicated by a growing awareness of
time, will gradually demote him from puer aeternus to puer existens.
“Not a second for repose”: Untimely others
On the ith planet in his run from dangerously erotic gardening, the Little Prince
meets the lamplighter. he lamplighter, carefully “obeying orders”, keeps lighting
and putting out a street-lamp. he men the Little Prince has met before were all
equally busy in their work, but the young intergalactic traveller’s irst impression
is that this one might be diferent. his one, perhaps, might be making some kind
of meaning emerge in the world, or at least his world, by virtue of ritually throwing
light upon it and of putting it to sleep. But the lamplighter is absorbed in his restless
work. Regular as clockwork, he turns the lights on and of on the tiny planet. In
appearance this thankless job is very much dictated by an invisible command, “the
orders”, which aligns with Nikolajeva’s and Wake’s conceptions of adult temporal-
ity as regular and rigid. However, as the lamplighter explains to the Little Prince,
this apparent obsessiveness for keeping on time is not as solid as it looks. It would
seem, in fact, that time itself is changing:
“I follow a terrible profession. In the old days it was reasonable. I put the lamp out
in the morning, and in the evening I lighted it again. I had the rest of the day for
relaxation and the rest of the night for sleep.”
“And the orders have been changed since that time?”
“he orders have not been changed,” said the lamplighter. “hat is the tragedy!
From year to year the planet has turned more rapidly and the orders have not
been changed!”
“hen what?” asked the little prince.
“hen – the planet now makes a complete turn every minute, and I no longer have
a single second for repose. Once every minute I have to light my lamp and put it
out!” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 46)
he curse of the lamplighter is a delightful case study in the fundamental difer-

ence, for the temporal imagination assigned to the adult, between chronological
time and phenomenological time. he “tragedy”, as the lamplighter puts it so well,
is that the “administrative” adult aspiration to temporal regularity, circularity and
rigidity – in other words, the adult love of time-control – is ceaselessly counter-
acted by an individual perception of time, materialised here by the planet’s end-
lessly accelerating revolution. he full-page illustration emphasises the importance
of time and its disjunctive nature: the round, clock-like planet, with its lamplight-
hand, is ofset to the right of the page – into the future – and misaligned with the
beaming red sun at the centre. Even more ofset is the lamplighter, whose lit stick
does not quite connect to the lamplight-hand.
As Grimaldi would say, the lamplighter is always running late on the task of his
own existence. No matter how precise and calculated the desire to break up time into
manageable segments, the ever-increasing speed of one’s perceived temporality will
render the task both unmanageable and absurd. Of course the lamplighter “no longer
[has] a single second for repose”, unlike the Little Prince-puer aeternus who, by virtue
of being perfectly on time, can still dwell all he likes in the present. he lamplighter,
who is very clearly running on adult time, is therefore running out of time. He can
never catch up with the demands that he makes upon himself to be constantly the
man he is making himself. He can never be the ideal lamplighter, the one who per-
fectly lights up and turns of the lamp, because he “tragically” does not have the time.
here is a hint that this was not always the case; a long time ago, the planet
revolved more slowly. he lamplighter used to have time, therefore, for other oc-
cupations (mostly sleep and rest), in-between his daily putting-out and turning-on
of the street-lamp. his fondly remembered past paints a nostalgic portrayal of a

youth free from the torments of the “light-forward”, of the phenomenological
temporality of adulthood.
he plight of the lamplighter is, however, interestingly paradoxical. He does
seem to be mourning this idyllic time where he could rest; he tells the Little Prince
that he “always wants to rest”. And yet, when the Little Prince ofers a relatively
well thought-out way of regaining a semblance of this lost time, the lamplighter
decides not to heed his advice. he Little Prince’s option would involve having to
walk slowly, following the sun, so as to make the day last as long as he wants and
thus rest from his work. But the lamplighter seems to have changed his mind. his
“rest” would not suit him; what he really wants in fact, he says, is “sleep”.
In other words, he does not want to stop working at being a lamplighter, even
though this project is clearly doomed to failure; he still wants to be involved in
this quest; he still hopes he might one day catch up with himself. But at the same
time, confusingly, he wants to sleep – perchance to dream – in other words, to die.
However, consciously, he does not want to, since he is not actively doing anything
towards it. He could just curl up on the loor and fall asleep – kill himself – but it
does not seem to form part of his agenda. “Following the orders”, “being faithful”,
as the indirect speech of the Little Prince puts it, compels him to go on and simply
hope for sleep. Sleep – death – is both the promised completion and the dreaded
ending. here is no easy answer to the lamplighter’s plight – “just walk following
the sun” or “just curl up and fall asleep” would be illusory escapes from the un-
bridgeable mismatch, so characteristic of adulthood, between chronological time
and phenomenological time.
Faced with this failure of helping the lamplighter to change his ways, the Little
Prince concludes, “hen you’re unlucky” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 48) – in the original
French, the more impersonal “Ce n’est pas de chance”: it is not lucky, there is no
luck. here is no “luck” involved, indeed, in the lamplighter’s routine; no chance
that he might one day attain completeness, timeliness, tempo giusto. here is no
sense of destiny; we can count on no happy coincidences, no external lucky strikes,
to heal the disjunction between the lamplighter’s desire to cohere with himself in
time, and the impossibility to do so in the time that is imparted to him. he Little
Prince, who is certainly, in some sense, “lucky” that his own autochronous quality
allows him to rest and sleep, pities the lamplighter:
“hat man,” said the little prince to himself, as he continued farther on his jour-
ney, “that man would be scorned by all the others: by the king, by the conceited
man, by the tippler, by the businessman. Nevertheless he is the only one of them
all who does not seem to me ridiculous. Perhaps that is because he is thinking of
something else besides himself.” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 48–49)
he French version states, to be precise, “Parce qu’il s’occupe d’autre chose que de
soi-même”, “because he is busy with something else than himself ”. his very existen-
tialist remark makes the lamplighter perhaps the only truly existentialist individual
in the Little Prince’s interplanetary whistle-stop tour. he lamplighter is not “ridicu-
lous”, though he is certainly pitiful; he is “busy with something else than himself ”,
because he is the only one who confusedly realises that this “something else” is what
he himself will be, or should be.
“Serious men” and miserly adults
By projecting himself constantly into the future, by running ater himself, by re-
fusing to either rest or sleep – though he also, of course, desires these states – the
lamplighter proves that he is not the “serious man” which Sartre and Beauvoir
have so much disdain for. he “serious man” is the individual who sees their goals
in life as external, immutable and objective.13 he scientist, the religious person,
the essentialist thinker, the opinionated person will thus hide to themselves their
existential concerns by focusing on absolutes. he “serious man” is a person in bad
faith, who attempts to deal with the dwindling of their time let and the increased
limitations to their freedom by inding some external, immutable, determined end
to their project. he “esprit de sérieux”, the “spirit of seriousness”, consists for the
serious man in “[pretending] to separate the end of the project that deines [him]
and recognise in it a value in itself: he thinks that values are in the world, before
man, before himself ” (Beauvoir 1947: 22214).
Apart from the lamplighter and the tippler, most men the Little Prince meets
on his intergalactic trip are “serious men”, and they are violently derided by both
the pilot and the Little Prince. he Little Prince calls them “mushrooms” (Saint
Exupéry 2009: 25), and the pilot is ashamed of being categorised, as an adult, al-
most automatically as a “serious man” (id.). I shall focus here on the businessman
and the geographer, who are even more “serious” than the King and the conceited
man. he businessman even says so in the French version, though this unfortu-
nately gets lost in translation: “Je les compte et je les recompte… c’est diicile. Mais
je suis un homme sérieux”: “I count and count them again… It’s diicult. But I
am a serious man”. hey are, in Sartre’s vocabulary, absolutely in bad faith. heir
13. I will not be amending Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s gendered language when using the term “seri-
ous man”, as it would cause confusion, but the inverted commas will signify that I am referring
to their formulation. he inclusion of women in the “spirit of seriousness” (esprit de sérieux)
goes without saying in Sartre and Beauvoir’s understanding.
14. All translations of Pyrrhus et Cinéas mine.
strategies for dealing with their dwindling temporality translate as the desire, for
one, to amass as much money as possible; for the other, to chart as many landscapes
as possible. Both of them use precise calculations to evaluate the advancing of their
“projects”. he businessman counts his money; the geographer recoups informa-
tion to obtain “evidence” that he is mapping the universe correctly. Both of them,
it is clear, are craving reliability, immutability, in other words eternity.
he Little Prince’s encounter with the businessman leads to his expressing
surprise at the “serious man’s” desire to “own the stars” with his money:
“If I owned a silk scarf,” he said, “I could put it around my neck and take it away
with me. If I owned a lower, I could pluck that lower and take it away with me.
But you cannot pluck the stars from heaven…”
“No. But I can put them in the bank.”
“Whatever does that mean?”
“hat means that I write the number of my stars on a little paper. And then I put
this paper in a drawer and lock it with a key.” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 44)
he naive puer aeternus does not understand the adult need to hoard, keep and
lock away arbitrary objects – in this case, money, pieces of papers and names of
stars – because he does not understand that these arbitrary objects are signiiers:
they stand for the wished-for completeness of the adult consciousness, which (in
bad faith, and to avoid anguish in the face of the passing of time) redirects its
energy towards “stopping time” in this manner.
Miserliness, according to Grimaldi, is one of the strategies deployed by con-
sciousness to deal with the temporal strain of existence (1992: 354). Money, in
Grimaldi’s view, is a language, a signiier: it stands for other things, it represents
them, but it is in itself an arbitrary denomination for those things. he miser is
the individual who, in his desire for the immutable, the certain, the inalterable,
obsessively collects the ultimate signiier of all material things, but will never bring
himself to transform it into those things. his is because, of course, whatever he
buys will not bring him satisfaction; on the contrary, it will annihilate what was
previously unrealised, potential, latent, and which therefore had ininite value. If
it is so hard for the miser to part with some of his fortune, it is because he under-
stands money as a malleable future; it could be anything. Once he spends some of
it, that money solidiies into the real, and immediately sinks into the past: it has
been spent that way, it cannot be anything else. he miser administers to himself
an illusory antidote to existential sufering: the belief that he can stop time from
solidifying into his situation; that he can, somehow, store future possibilities in the
form of coins and banknotes, securely locked in a strongbox.
he analysis of eternal children in children’s literature can doubtlessly ben-
eit from a parallel with Grimaldi’s theorisation of the miser. Like the miserly
businessman, the adult hidden behind the puer aeternus is using this child igure
as a placeholder for an ininity of future possibilities. he hidden adult of Arcadian
children’s literature is, in this view, a “serious man”, an adult in bad faith, who
has found in this treatment of the child an illusory solution to a latent anguish
of initude. he child prevented from solidifying, the child deprived of a future
situation, is to the adult what money is to the miser: an economic translation of
an existential concern.
If the puer aeternus is a igure of nostalgia, it is therefore in part the nostalgia of
all the possibilities which childhood ofers. he creation through literature of this
ideal being who could be anything indulges the adult desire for a yet-unformed,
perennially unknown future. But crucially, the Little Prince cannot seem to remain
in this non-solidiied state. He does not remain an autochronous child, a child
perfectly on time. His last visit before he lands on Earth is of crucial importance
for the evolution of his concerns. his visit truly sanctiies his evolution from puer
aeternus to puer existens, from child-perfectly-on-time to being-in-time, that is to
say, a being out of beat with himself: an existential being.
his occurs when the Little Prince visits the geographer, another “serious man”,
whose external object of self-validation is cartography. For geography, as he puts
it, is the science of the permanent and the eternal:
“Geographies,” said the geographer, “are the books which, of all books, are most
concerned with matters of consequence. hey never become old-fashioned. It is
very rarely that a mountain changes its position. It is very rarely that an ocean
empties itself of its waters. We write of eternal things.”
“But extinct volcanoes may come to life again,” the little prince interrupted. “What
does that mean – ‘ephemeral’?”
“Whether volcanoes are extinct or alive, it comes to the same thing for us,” said
the geographer. “he thing that matters to us is the mountain. It does not change.”
“But what does that mean – ‘ephemeral’?” repeated the little prince, who never in
his life had let go of a question, once he had asked it.
“It means, ‘which is in danger of speedy disappearance.’ ”
(Saint Exupéry 2009: 52)
he geographer logically and callously concludes that he cannot possibly chart

the Little Prince’s rose on his map, nor indeed any living thing; living things are
ephemeral. Ironically, of course, according to his own deinition, the geographer
cannot chart himself on his own maps. He is himself in danger of speedy disappear-
ance, and therefore absolutely unworthy of attention, following his own criteria.
his is perhaps the paradigmatic condition of the “serious man’s” existence; by
devoting himself to a greater project, convinced of the external validation it will
bring, the “serious man” cannot ind himself, comprise himself, into that project. By
looking for the eternal and the immutable, the serious man loses track of himself
completely. he Little Prince, by contrast, is profoundly interested in the ephem-
eral. Because of his love-hate relationship with an ephemeral being, he has let his
planet and his perfect eternal present, his ideal timeliness. he puer aeternus long-
ing for ephemerality is here presented as a direct counterpoint to the arrhythmic
adult looking for eternity.
his visit to the geographer, the last one before the Earth, marks a turning-
point in the character development of the Little Prince. For the irst time his prob-
lem is spelt out: his rose is going to disappear. his discovery plunges the Little
Prince into his irst existential epiphany; for the irst time, he is led to envisage his
life without the rose, and that life, even though he once had it and did not think it
problematic, is now felt as unbearable. his is the beginning of the gradual falling-
out of internal rhythm which characterises the evolution of the Little Prince, and
it is suggested by the narrative voice: “hat was his irst moment of regret” (Saint
Exupéry 2009: 52). Namely, this is the irst time the Little Prince perceives him-
self as having-done something in the past and having-been someone else before.
Suddenly, arrhythmia occurs.
Having started as an Arcadian puer aeternus, content in the circular immov-
ability of his internal rhythm, the Little Prince will gradually become increasingly
dissatisied with his condition, and eventually, like the lamplighter, desire to regain
his original state of completeness through death (though, unlike the lamplighter, he
eventually acts upon this temptation). he Little Prince is a post-Arcadian eternal
child, because even for him, in the end there can be no escaping the existential
condition. Even for someone born to live a tempo giusto, constructed by the “mi-
serly adult” as eternal spectrum of future possibilities, there must be an event – a
rose, a baobab – to break the eternal present and trigger a light-forward towards
future planets and future encounters.
Grimaldi speaks of the individual’s existential relationship to time as a “shard”,
a “splinter” in consciousness – the thorn of a rose, perhaps, in the case of the Little
Prince. Time is what hurts consciousness, and consciousness responds to the pain
by creating, so to speak, analgesic remedies. he puer aeternus of Golden Age
children’s iction was the self-medication of a “miserly hidden adult”, intent on
preserving forever the potential associated with childhood. he modern hidden
adult displays more ambiguity in this endeavour. Saint Exupéry’s novel betrays
the adult’s diiculty with keeping the puer aeternus in its stable state. It represents
the temptation, instead, to let the child feel, gradually, the “sting” of time in con-
sciousness – to let it grow up. he character of the Little Prince stands at the heart
of a conlict between the centripetal and centrifugal forces which characterise the
contemporary perception of time. Despite the careful opposition between adult
and child chronotopes, between the eternal child-wanderer and the ephemeral
adult bubbles he visits, the Little Prince matures into an existentially tormented
being. And his time-related torments are accompanied by yet more scandals of
otherness, including the didactic other.
he fox as didactic adult
On the diferent planets he visits, the Little Prince’s inability to relate to others
is presented as relatively unproblematic. here is little incentive to the reader to
feel friendly towards the characters; they are merely prosopopaeic features of the
text, embodying human laws. he short chapters serve as independent cautionary
fables, which, as we have seen, are crucial for the character development of the
Little Prince but do not venture far into questions of interpersonality and other-
ness. But on Earth, the Little Prince enters into relationships of a diferent quality.
His irst desire when he lands in the desert is to climb up a mountain in order
to “see the whole planet at one glance, and all the people” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 59).
his one embracing look, from an existentialist viewpoint, would allow him some
form of domination over the people of Earth. But he sees “nothing, save peaks of
rock that were sharpened like needles” (id.), recalling the thorns of his own rose
and of the myriad others he will soon meet. He then indeed discovers, in the form
of a garden of roses, the existence of a multitude of others, all similar to his own
“original other”, so to speak – the being who precipitated his irst painful experi-
ence of otherness. his vision makes the Little Prince realise the inadequacy and
the limitations of his own sense of being-for-others up to then. He realises he has
been living in awe of one other, when there was nothing diferent in this other from
all the others she looks like.
By doing so, however – by assimilating his rose to all the other roses – he
proves that he has entered into a more “grown-up” understanding of others. He
has lost some of his original, naïve vision of the other as complex, and is beginning
to integrate singular individuals within a more manageable and less threatening
whole, easily categorised. He is objectifying roses. herefore he is beginning to
reason “like adults”, who, according to the novel itself, enjoy grouping people ac-
cording to what they look like and what place they occupy in the social “garden”.
An individual arrives, however, to rescue the Little Prince from this too-easy
assimilation of his rose with all other roses. hat individual is the fox, whose rela-
tionship to the Little Prince is as cryptic as it is poignant. he fox teaches him that
he must in fact learn to distinguish between others despite their apparent similari-
ties. He begins by telling the Little Prince that to him he is “nothing more than
a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys” (Saint Exupéry
2009: 64), but that this status will be changed if the Little Prince “tames” him (a
rather unhappy translation of the French apprivoiser, which suggests a less domi-
neering process of gradual acclimation to the other).
“Please – tame me!” he said.
“I want to, very much,” the little prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have
friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”
“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no
more time to understand anything. hey buy things all ready made at the shops.
But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no
friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me…” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 65)
he fox’s words, as well as many occurrences in the narrative voice and almost all
tales of the Little Prince’s visits to “serious” adults, give out indications that we are
here being told of a new condition of existence, a contemporary one, animated by
a sense of loss of a perceived easier relation to time and to others. he apparent
increase in diiculty of dealing with others and with the passing of time “in our
days” accompanies the evolution of the Little Prince from puer aeternus, content
with continuing his life of adventure and exploration, to puer existens, dissatisied
and “stung” by the inconsistencies of his phenomenological relation to the world.
Jacques Fermaud (1946) notes that this discomfort is present throughout
Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s work. Saint Exupéry, Fermaud argues, is neither the
tender humanist nor the nihilistic Nietzschean that critics have made him. His
works betray a “conlict” between “individual happiness, which enslaves; and, on
the other hand, action, which liberates” (Fermaud 1946: 1201). What Fermaud calls
the disquiet (l’inquiétude) of Saint Exupéry, a prominently existentialist concept, is
distinct from Romantic torment, from a religious crisis of faith, or from a search
for the illusions of either childhood or heroism. Saint Exupéry is split between
his pilot self and his bourgeois self; between “his thirst to serve something higher
than him, on the one hand, and on the other hand doubt, contempt almost, for
this civilisation” (Fermaud 1946: 1202). Fermaud notes the “cruel satire of women,
and of society in general” (id.: 1208) in he Little Prince, and yet the “tenderness”
which recurs throughout the tale. his constant ambiguity, which he attributes,
biographically, to Saint Exupéry’s experience, is translated as the unease of the
character of the Little Prince, whose “tender”, joyous evocations of home – his puer
aeternus traits – are constantly counterbalanced by his literal and metaphorical
lying-forward, propelled by his “anger”, as Fermaud puts it (1946: 1202), against
the consumerist, materialist, bourgeois mindset he encounters.
And yet the Little Prince gradually appears permeated by this very mindset.
His response to the fox already hints that he is very much seduced by a vision of
time as passing too quickly, a problem which certainly was not on his mind before
it was instilled in him by the adults he has seen (especially, as argued previously,
the geographer). Added to his temporary lapse into the “adult” belief that all others
are similar, this “fall” into existential crisis hurries the Little Prince forward into
anguish and loss, which the fox’s teachings will not fully ease – though they will
lead to some form of understanding of them.
he fox, Bonner Mitchell notes (1960), is one of the two “avowed teachers”
in the story (the other one being the snake). He attempts to re-instil in the Little
Prince the notion that we must distinguish between diferent people, and that
relationships take time. Looking, says the fox, is the beginning of the process of
taming, and words, which complicate everything, must occur later. Patience, and
sticking to a schedule – in order to create anticipation and trust – are essential
ingredients for friendship. he fox’s teaching is idealistic and humanist, in that it
aspires to plenitude in a satisfactory relationship with the other. But it does not
work. he diiculty and ambiguity of being-for-others plague the slow-building
relationship between the Little Prince and the fox. If the fox is “tamed”, even in
the milder French sense of apprivoiser, there is little sign that the Little Prince is
“tamed” in return. he fox cries when the Little Prince goes away; the Little Prince’s
dependence on the animal is not equivalent. He has learnt from the fox, but beyond
the didactic process there has been little emotional attachment on his part; while
the fox, who apparently has not drawn any new knowledge from this relationship,
has been deeply emotionally invested in it.
he fox explains that “it has done [him] good… because of the colour of wheat
ields” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 68). his enigmatic declaration expresses what I would
analyse as an adult fascination for the child, here crystallised on the Little Prince’s
hair colour, which cannot spell out rationally what motivates it so. he fox’s mas-
ochism in this relationship – he knew that the Little Prince was to leave, and he
knew that by “being tamed” he was setting himself up to be abandoned – reads
like a metaphor for the adult-child didactic relationship. In it, the transmission of
knowledge from the didactic adult to the child addressee only paves the way for
the child’s life without the adult. Barely aware of the adult’s pain, the child will
go forth, carrying remnants of the adult’s teachings. he adult’s didactic power
and the child’s need for the adult’s knowledge last only as long as the moment of
“overlap” between their two temporalities.
he duration of the Little Prince’s relationship with the fox is thus only until
“the hour of his departure” (Saint Exupéry 2009: 66). Note that “his” is ambiguous
(as it is in the French version): it is not possible to say for sure whether it is the Little
Prince’s hour of departure that has come, or the fox’s. As the fox says, displacing
his own experience onto the Little Prince’s, this time has been “wasted”, but this
“waste” is consequential: “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes
your rose so important” (id.: 70). he sentence could easily apply to the fox: it is
the time he has wasted for the Little Prince which makes the boy so important.
I would expand this into a more general claim: it is the time adults waste for chil-
dren which makes children so important. It is that “wasted time” which hints, in
my vocabulary, at the child’s supposed might in the eyes of the adult.
he Little Prince laboriously parrots the fox’s teachings, as if learning them
by heart; but it remains unclear, in the rest of the novel, whether he has truly done
anything useful with them. he Little Prince does shakily attempt, a little later, to
recall the fox’s claim that “What is essential is invisible to the eye” (today, of course,
he would not have needed to learn it by heart as this sentence is helpfully available
to buyers in mawkish cursive font on every imaginable product of kitchenware and
stationery). But the fox, the didactic adult, suddenly disappears from the narra-
tive. heir relationship, however central to the Little Prince’s development, raises
many questions. What has their long-drawn mutual “taming” produced? Has it
truly been mutual? he fox’s teaching does not stop the Little Prince from ind-
ing himself in anguish and disquiet. It does not seem to constitute a satisfactory
enough relation to an other. Nor does, in fact, the Little Prince’s relation to the
pilot, which seems to indicate that the fox’s teachings have not found a satisfactory
“application” for the next other the Little Prince met.
As the anniversary of his landing on Earth draws near, the Little Prince’s an-
guish is accentuated. his is an odd fact, since the “external”, chronological time,
calculated by clocks, has been the target of so much scorn since the beginning of
the novel. But it seems that the Little Prince has caught up with, or at least inter-
nalised, the symbolic importance of “linear” time. And this perceived temporal-
ity is clearly putting too much pressure on him now. he Little Prince’s eventual
“suicide” can be analysed in many diferent ways – including, of course, not as a
suicide at all. I read it both as the literal suicide of the character and the metaphori-
cal death of the pilot’s desire for stasis and eternity. he Little Prince’s decision
has long been coming; it stems from the “sting” of time which has wound its way
into his consciousness ever since he let his planet, and the added pressure of the
impossibility of relating fruitfully to others, despite the fox’s careful teachings and
the pilot’s tenderness.
his failure to adapt – to “jump” fruitfully from puer aeternus to puer exis-
tens – is problematically bleak as a didactic injunction. It implies that being-in-
time and being-for-others are impossibly alienating tasks. Now out of beat with
himself, and out of tune with others, the Little Prince prefers to solicit the snake’s
“help” in escaping a world from which all harmony has gone. In this act I detect
the unease of an adult authority which both desires the child to remain the puer
aeternus of the Arcadian past and to exist in tune with perceived changes in the
rapport to otherness and to time which characterise the adult’s condition. he Little
Prince is perhaps an aborted attempt to create a puer existens, since the child is
eventually killed, returning in this way to his “eternal” existence on his planet. As
Reynolds and Yate note, killing of child characters is a prominent way of “prevent-
ing children from becoming something less perfect” (1998: 167), in other words,
to preserve them as children for eternity. But this last-minute strategy arrives too
late: the puer aeternus had ceased to be, he was already dead. he rose, then the
geographer, then the fox had instilled too much anguish in him to let him remain
an eternal symbol of childhood.
he quite common reading of he Little Prince as the aviator’s self-therapy
(Biagioli 2001) – which includes the perception of the character of the Little Prince
as the pilot’s idealised construction of himself (Nikolajeva 2000) – also throws an-
other light onto the Little Prince’s “suicide”. he pilot, having “killed of ” the Little
Prince, is now able to ix his plane and ly away, back to society. He knows very well
that he will never overcome the sense of disjointed self he experiences there, nor
the general unfriendliness of the world. He will be, once again, lonely in the midst
of the multitude. However, he will always keep a sense of hope. his hope becomes
entirely invested, at the end, in the implied child readership of the novel. On the
very last page of the novel, the narrator turns to the child reader, whose astronomic
wealth of possibilities is symbolised in the illustration by an empty sand dune and
a faraway star. he narrator alludes to the possibility that in this place, the Little
Prince might come back, descend again upon the world to “laugh” (Saint Exupéry
2009: 91), to exist and to ind a more bearable way to be among others and in time.
he child reader is now responsible for what happens next; they must wait for the
Little Prince to return. he novel constructs an implied child reader who may one
day, unlike the pilot, ind the object at the end of the wait.
he classic puer aeternus is like the money of the miser in Grimaldi’s analysis.
It stands for a “time-let capital”, stockpiled and stable, intensely rich in possible
future meaning. It also embodies nostalgia, the “pain of return” – painful because
it evokes a time which retroactively appears to have been richer. he Little Prince
fails to remain the puer aeternus he used to be. he novel relects a historical shit
in children’s literature from, so to speak, a miserly hidden adult to a spendthrit
hidden adult. It hints at the emerging desire for the adult authority in the text to
“spend” the child’s time let – to awaken this static being, the puer aeternus, into
existence. his desire is so great that the narrative, agitated by a permanent oscil-
lation between evolution and stasis, inally gives way to the former, even though it
does so reluctantly and ambivalently. he adult hidden behind this new, evolving
child is still miserly – it still wants to accumulate, through the signiier of a child
who never grows up, the dreamed-of signiied of a completely indeterminate fu-
ture. But like the miser with his money in Grimaldi’s analysis, the adult’s obsession
with the child stuck in the present is constantly counteracted by the desire for this
child to become someone, to exist.
he Little Prince was thus only ever a puer aeternus for the purpose of ceas-
ing to be one. he novel stands, arguably, at a moment of shit between nostalgic,
“felicitous” conceptions of children held in place, and future-bound, anguished
conceptions of children “thrown forth”. his movement corresponds, too, to the
progression from Evangelical and Romantic conceptions of childhood to a more
contemporary one. As historian of childhood Harry Hendrick shows, Evangelical
and Romantic conceptions secured the child to their present and past, by either
highlighting its vulnerability and corruption or its godlike closeness to nature
(1997: 37). he notable disappearance of the puer aeternus character in contem-
porary literature for children is thus perhaps unsurprising.
I am not suggesting, of course, that he Little Prince triggered a shit from puer
aeternus to puer existens igures in children’s literature and in adult conceptions
of childhood in general; rather, it relects this shit diegetically in a remarkably
condensed manner. he didactic discourse of most children’s literature now ac-
commodates the growing desire that children should exist, that is to say should
become, rather than be “held in place”. What should they become? Something
which the adult cannot quite put their inger on, because it is now in the future
more than it is in the past, more hopeful than nostalgic; something which has no
more speciic content, no more rational explanation, than the fox’s longing for the
colours of wheat ields.
Childhood and the future
he above analysis of he Little Prince ofers a preview of the main concepts devel-
oped in this volume, and of what existentialist readings of a children’s text could
focus on. hese main concepts are:
Time – the temporal otherness of childhood relative to adulthood, the temporal “shard”
in consciousness which leads to a lack of self-coincidence, the weight of existential wait.
Otherness – the diicult, appropriative relationship to others, the relative otherness of
childhood and adulthood, the other in oneself.
Bad faith – the convictions of the “serious man”, the strategies of consciousness
deployed to hide or “solve” the pressures of time and otherness.
Anguish – the realisation of one’s fundamental freedom, but also of the ineluctably
situating nature of circumstances and of all choices.
he didactic discourse – the complex transfer not just of knowledge but also of desires
for the future, which characterises adult discourses addressed to children.
An existential analysis of children’s literature is one which interprets the children’s

text as a strategy of the adult consciousness to deal with the complexities of the
above concepts. he didactic discourse is the resulting text that can be analysed.
Such an analysis is particularly (perhaps even solely) relevant to texts which move
beyond the puer aeternus to embrace the notion that the child both in and beyond
the children’s book must grow up, and only such texts are tackled in this volume.
hey will be sometimes labelled more generally as “contemporary children’s lit-
erature”, but of course their dynamics are not characteristic of all contemporary
children’s literature if we take “contemporary” to mean simply “published now”;
there are still contemporary children’s books with puer aeternus igures and “fe-
licitous” chronotopes. hose, however, are understood as belonging to a diferent,
older literary tradition, for which an existentialist approach might be anachronis-
tic, if not irrelevant.
his chapter delves further, and more theoretically, into the notions of exis-
tential wait and of the temporal otherness of childhood, which characterise the
adult-child dynamic in the didactic discourse of children’s literature.
Existential wait and the child as hope
he child “allowed” to grow up, the child thrown into the future, the existing child,
is freed from the imperative of living outside of an eternal present. It is free to
exist outside of the perfect autochronous rhythm which characterised the child on
the stairs in Milne’s poem and the Little Prince at the beginning of his quest. It is
free to become, like the adult, heterochronous. But this child remains, of course,
a temporal other to the adult, precisely because it will grow up and therefore has
time let for that to happen. Symbolically, the child, as mentioned earlier, stands
for the future. he child thus has a speciic place in what Nicolas Grimaldi calls
the process of existential wait, and the strategies deployed by consciousness to
deal with this wait.
he concept of wait is tied to one of the main “problems” of existence for exis-
tentialists: the impossibility ever to coincide with oneself, and therefore the ever-
postponed promise of plenitude. I am in the present in a state of lack; therefore I
imagine the future as the time when I will be what I should be. But when the future
comes, it simply solidiies into a new present and I am still not what I should be.
As Sartre puts it in characteristic Sartrespeak: “I am the self which I will be, in the
mode of not being it” (1958: 56, original emphasis). In other words of that colourful
patois, “I am my Future in the constant perspective of the possibility of not being
it. Hence that anguish … I am not suiciently that Future which I have to be and
which gives its meaning to my present” (1958: 152). I am not what I am, I am what
I am not; I am condemned to yearn for this I which I could be.
Nicolas Grimaldi, in his own magnum opus Le désir et le temps (“Desire and
Time”, irst published in 1974), identiies a central quality to the perception of this
existence by the individual: this quality is wait. Biological life, he says, adapting
Aristotle’s concept of entelechia, is characterised by tendency: in each acorn is a
potential oak, and the life of the growing seed, if unhindered, will realise its ten-
dency and actually become an oak. In each egg, as Magritte’s painting shows, there
is a latent bird. However, when talking about humans, we run into the problem
of consciousness. he reason why we have existence and not just life is that we,
humans, are characterised by consciousness, that is to say, centrally for Grimaldi,
the ability to imagine. In particular, the ability to imagine ourselves outside of our
quickly-solidifying situation: the ability to envisage the future and remember the
past. Grimaldi spells out the following analogy: just as life (of plants, for instance)
is characterised by tendency, so existence (of conscious beings) is characterised
by wait. It would make no sense to say that the acorn is “waiting” to become the
oak, but it does make sense to argue that the human being is waiting to become…
Well, become what, exactly? his is where the central problem of conscious-
ness lies. We do not know what it is that we will and want to become, though we
sense that our existence is currently incomplete and must someday ind its answer;
that it will at some point reveal itself to us in all its truth and reality. However, of
course, the more we live, the more this answer appears to be postponed; time is
dwindling, and the “promise” never gets realised. here is a gap between the human
consciousness in the present and the hoped-for “complete” consciousness; a gap
which does not exist as such between the acorn and the oak. As a result, one is
always waiting for the promised completeness to occur.
he consequence, Grimaldi argues with ruthless logic, is that one is always
paradoxically longing to die: the lamplighter’s plight can only end if he “sleeps”,
but that would signal the end of everything. Every time happiness occurs, in the
form of a perfect moment when we inally feel satisied – Grimaldi calls these mo-
ments “small deaths”, in full awareness of the sexual undertones – we realise not
long ater that it was not it. We are longing again – we must start anew on another
adventure. We are, Grimaldi says, “haunted” by the absence of what we should
be. he present bears the “splinter” of this future which is not yet. And of course,
the more we grow old, the more it dawns upon us that there is an ever-dwindling
chance of reaching that thing which we should be. he individual is plagued, as
time passes, by the gradual and paradoxical realisation that they are becoming less
and less what they are.
Grimaldi proposes several ways in which consciousness attempts to deal with
dwindling time, and to represent to itself, albeit illusorily, the moment of reconcili-
ation, so wished-for and so awaited, with one’s “real” self. He mentions religion,
which posits a future beyond death. Political engagement, meanwhile, is motivated
by a desire for actual change among communities of humans in the future. Love
allows the subject to be, albeit temporarily, blissfully “united” with that self with
which they so waited to fuse, but displaced onto another person. He also mentions
play, which forever gives the impression of a reachable endpoint, and forever allows
for an ersatz of existence to be launched again – in a new turn of the roulette, in a
new dealing of cards, an existence of sorts can start anew with all its possibilities.
He inally analyses social behaviour, particularly the attitudes of the dandy and
the snob, who attempt to cope with the problem of otherness by putting on show
either their complete detachment from the crowd, or their complete assimilation
to it. For Sartre, the alienated individual in the workplace, irst the portrait of the
famous waiter of Being and Nothingness (1958), then the more Marxist portrayal
of the female factory worker in Critique of Dialectical Reason (2004), are equally
individuals in bad faith, trumping the wait. hey are playing parts, acting their
selves, unwilling and/or unable to become aware of their possible liberation.
hese moments, modes and strategies all illustrate the paradoxical relation to
time in existence. Individuals may desire to locate themselves in the present, briely
suspending the wait, briely stopping their own light forward into a desired future.
Or, on the contrary, they may desire to constantly “reload” potentialities for the
future. Finally, they may desire to dwell in imaginary spheres outside of temporal-
ity, in the contemplation of eternity – this, it could be said, is symptomatic of the
hidden adult of Arcadian children’s literature. All of these desires may arise in con-
currence, and their conlictual interplay constitutes part of the ambiguity of being.
But neither Grimaldi nor Sartre mentions the adult-child relationship. And
yet the adult address to the child, of which children’s literature provides a neatly-
packaged portrayal, also betrays the adult’s existential wait even as it sketches
out strategies to avoid it. he educational discourse is subsumed by the assump-
tion that any educational “message” delivered to the child now will ind its enact-
ment or realisation in the future. he didactic relationship is therefore articulated
around a time-slip: the notion that the words uttered (or any non-verbal form of
communication engaged) are in the present for the future. It is also, of course, a
discourse intensely permeated with the past. Insofar as the adult speaker in the
didactic discourse is speaking from a position of authority – with a baggage of
past experience – it is assumed that the discourse must ind its roots in the past, a
temporality unavailable to the child, and that from this temporality stems a form
of power which justiies the educational and pedagogical endeavour. But this dis-
course tends towards the future just like the child tends toward adulthood; just like
consciousness waits and tends towards an unarticulated future.
Hope for the end of the wait
his wait is permeated with hope, a quality or value which adults oten mention in
common discourses about children. Hope is an inalienable attribute of childhood;
as long as the child remains considered as temporal other, an other-for-the-future,
the child will be hope.
Hope is a problematic notion in children’s literature criticism. Contemporary
children’s literature scholars tend to view “hopeful endings” as a form of noble lie.
Descriptively, it can be accepted that children’s literature is oten characterised
by hope, but one is discouraged from turning this observation into a normative
claim. But that is a disingenuous request. Hope is not an ingredient “added” or not
to the children’s book. It is a notion so tightly entwined with the very construct
of childhood, with symbolic childhood, that it is not pried away from it so easily.
Nikolajeva explains:
Child protagonists have their potential intact, they have not yet taken the decisive
step, which means that in children’s iction there is still the possibility of hope for
the future which modern adult literature has so oten lost. (2000: 264)
An entirely hopeless children’s book might indeed probably have to be categorised

as “adult literature”, since the presence of an implied child reader signals by neces-
sity the presence of an implied hope. here is a large degree of overlap between the
terms “possibility”, “hope”, “future”: all of these terms could be condensed into the
notion of time let. here is hope because there is time to come. In the particular
case of the eternal child, it is eternally long, albeit eternally postponed; in the case
of the puer existens, the existing child of contemporary children’s literature, the
time to come will come. herefore there is hope. Sara Smedman’s analysis of hope
in children’s literature makes a similar point:
Hope is a vital dimension of a children’s book, for it recognizes, at least implicitly,
that readers are at the beginning of life, in crucial areas still uncommitted, even
to their own personalities, and that for such readers growth and change are still
to come. (1988: 91–92)
“Decisive steps”, “uncommitted” – we are here talking about a postponement of

the choices that will, in existentialist terms, situate the child. “Growth”, “change”,
“potential”, “possibility”: in those terms the “being that I will be, in the mode of
not being it” appears in all its beautiful indeterminacy.
But hope and hopefulness are distrusted concepts and many children’s litera-
ture scholars do not like them. See, for example, Nodelman’s attack (2008: 217)
on Smedman’s claim that a sense of “hope” should be a necessary attribute of all
children’s literature. And if hope is associated with wishful happiness, with a be-
nevolent form of change, then it is indeed easy to dismiss it as yet another weapon
of the adult crusade against children. However, stripping the notion of hope of its
idealism and religiosity, we can go back to another deinition, on the model of the
Latin verb sperare – most oten translated as “to hope” – of which the temporal
dimension is the crucial node. Sperare points at spes, “the wait”. Spero is multiple: it
is “I hope”, but it is also, a term dear to Grimaldi, “I wait”, “I expect”, “I anticipate”,
“I adjourn”; I consider myself and my situation within a stretching future ahead.
Whilst optimism is by no means absent from this deinition, it does not obliterate
the unknowability, the unpredictability of this future; the impossibility to tell what
one will ind at the end of the wait.
Hope is also a problematic concept in the philosophy of education. Paulo Freire,
the father of critical pedagogy, explains in his Pedagogy of Hope (1998) that hope is
a necessary prerequisite to education, and that it is the educator’s duty to unveil it
to the child. His conceptual analysis stops here. One of the rare philosophical stud-
ies on the subject, by David Halpin (2003), is quick to deplore the lack of similar
enterprises. And yet, as Halpin argues, hope is the fabric of education, which by
deinition is concerned with the latent, the immanent – in my vocabulary, with
the time let of the students, beyond that of the teacher’s. hrough educational
applications of utopia and dystopia, Halpin suggests that one is able to cultivate
“ultimate” or “complex” hope: a speciic, realistic teleology, always political and
always relational, which ofers a calculated optimism for the future in relation to a
thorough knowledge of the past. he tension between past and future, presented as
key to education, mirrors my own vision of the didactic discourse. Halpin concludes
that hope does not solely mean looking ahead: it is “a way of living prospectively
in and engaging purposefully with the past and present” (2003: 14). Hoping for the
miraculous, conversely, is to develop fruitless “absolute hope”, located in an impos-
sible future, and deemed to make one profoundly unhappy – that is the kind of
represented hope which children’s literature scholars are right to deplore.
And how does one develop ultimate hope? As Halpin argues, by conducting
“thought experiments” of the “what would it be like if…?” kind (2003: 54). hese
thought experiments should allow for an assessment of future possibilities, while
leaving free space for the student to improvise. his is precisely what children’s litera-
ture strives to do; children’s literature is inherently hopeful because it implies a child
reader who is future-bound, who might do something with the thought experiment
that it is given. However, what matters in hope as deined here is the recognition of a
length of time with its wealth of possibilities, but also of limitations. It is a temporal
construction, before we invest it with cultural, religious or sociopolitical wishes. As
such, hope is the very fabric of the didactic discourse of children’s literature, counter-
acting the dwindling length of time of the adult’s life by decentring its actions onto
the new timeframe opening up thanks to the children. his displacement is vital to
children’s literature: we are talking about a temporal investment irst and foremost.
Signiicantly, as Reynolds and Yate note (1998), twentieth-century visions of
childhood and their associated conceptions of hope for the future are marked by
the secularisation of the question of identity. When “futurity was widely regarded
as the responsibility of the Divinity” (Reynolds & Yates 1998: 157), the amount
of personal agency present and expected in the direction of one’s existence was
minimal. Identity, socially, religiously and politically, was mostly ixed from birth.
However, they note, nowadays identity “is a product of achievement” (id.); there-
fore, child death, on which they focus, is overwhelmingly perceived as a “waste”, a
“lack of fulilment”, even a source of “shame” (id.). hese relatively recent anxieties
mark a change towards a irmly future-bound and, one could say, pragmatic and
worldly version of adult hope for children. Reynolds and Yate regret this “new”
hope, which “[foregrounds] futurity and potential” and implies a vision of identity
as “deined by longevity and life-style” (1998: 175). While this is true, it is important
to note that hope in this view is also deined by the conception that the child, given
the time, could do anything. his ininite malleability of identity, this promise of
an unpredictable existence, emphasises the child’s future to the detriment of their
present, and accentuates the existential dimension of the issue.
his type of hope is one of the central attributes of the temporal otherness of
childhood in our times. It is therefore unsurprising that we should ind it, either in
its simplest deinition or clothed in sentimental or religious ideals of redemption,
within the didactic discourse of children’s literature. It partakes of the fundamental
diference between adult and child temporal imaginations. While the adult per-
ceives itself as anchored, situated and blocked, it sees the child as future-bound,
free-lowing and boundless. Hope is the speciic modality of the existential wait at
the heart of children’s literature. Children’s literature hopes for the end of the wait,
as Grimaldi would have it – for the moment when there will be a perfect overlap
between my current self and what it is not-yet. But this moment is, of course,
unimaginable; we are uncertain as to when or how it may occur. he child, there-
fore, lends a safe, tangible, visual outline to this unknowable desire; it provides a
convenient signiier for the slippery signiieds of hope and wait.
What are we waiting for? Existential wait in children’s literature and adventure
Nicolas Grimaldi reinterprets, in Le désir et le temps (1992), the myth of the

Fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis. As he sees it – evidently metaphorically – it is
not because of the Fall that there is disquiet in being; it is not because human
beings fell from grace that they are cursed with worry, anguish and desire. In
fact, it is the opposite causality: it is because of an intrinsic disquiet in being
that Adam and Eve fell from grace. Even ininity and eternity, Grimaldi argues,
were “not enough” for Adam and Eve – just as the little planet was not enough
for the Little Prince, and was already riddled with baobab seeds even before the
rose appeared. he myth highlights the dissatisfaction of human consciousness
with the eternal and the complete, which is not suicient to preclude desire and
temptation. Grimaldi detects in this tale the intrinsic non-representability of the
object of desire, of the object of the wait.
So what are we waiting for, if it is not even the quiet completeness of ininity?
Cartier glosses: “What matters, in fact, is not what consciousness desires or awaits,
but the fact that consciousness is desire and wait” (2008: 148, original emphasis).
In other words, for Grimaldi, theorising the phenomenon of the wait is not a
matter of getting to know which object consciousness waits for. hat question is
counter-productive, and impossible to answer. Desire has no other objects than
the ones it inds for itself, and that it more or less arbitrarily labels as “desirable”.
his should not be confused with the Lacanian view, which posits that desire in-
carnates itself in diferent objects, but derives from early childhood experiences.
here is no such point of origin to the emergence of desire in consciousness for
Grimaldi. his emergence is in fact due to the ontological “splinter” of time which
stings all beings, and particularly afects humans as they are conscious beings. he
ontological disjunction of time with itself is turned into, among many other things,
a psychological disjunction; the inite and the ininite are thus bound to be equally
unsatisfactory to the human consciousness.
he psychological translation of this ontological split gives rise to strategies of
coping, which, for human beings, are on the mode of the metaphorical. Grimaldi,
just like Sartre, believes that language and the imagination – the ability to speak
of, perceive and picture that which is not here – are both the blessing and the
curse of the human experience, because they allow individuals to avoid the real, to
envisage reality as standing for, as signifying, something beyond it. hanks to this
faculty, or because of it, “we manage to invest with signiicance that of which we
cannot have any representation, and that which we can even less pretend to know
conceptually” (Cartier 2008: 149, original emphasis). Because consciousness longs
for something, it posits that this something-longed-for must exist in the future –
since it has not yet happened, or else desire would have ceased. And because one
does not generally experience desire without object (on a basic level, most desires
have clear objects), the human consciousness gives this something illusions of shape
through representation. But, once again, these representations are misleading; the
point of this particular, fundamental tension of consciousness – wait – is not its
object, but its existential relevance.
Similarly, from an existentialist perspective, there is no use in exploring the
overt objects of adult desire for children and for the future represented in children’s
literature, despite their presence – even omnipresence – in this type of writing. In
other words, it is not what the adult wishes that the child should do and become
which is of importance to me, but rather the fact that adult wishes are channelled
through representations of what the child should do and become. What is impor-
tant is not the wished-for outcome itself,15 but the ways in which this outcome is
summoned by the adult. An existentialist perspective thus focuses on the spectrum
of strategies of adult consciousness to postpone actual action while still envisaging
an end to the wait through the child igure. he discourse of children’s literature
is understood as only supericially concerned with reality, with representability.
Children’s literature, like all human endeavours, deploys strategies to plant
representable objects of desire in the path of the waiting consciousness. hese
strategies occur in religion, art, relationships to others, etc. Being French, Grimaldi
is endowed with a remarkably triadic imagination, and generally sorts everything
into three categories, sometimes subdivided into another three. heorising the
illusory objects which consciousness administers to itself as remedies for its exis-
tential malady, Grimaldi ends up with the following triplet:
15. Again, of course, these overt objects of desire are important when doing any kind of ideologi-
cal or historicist criticism, but from an existentialist perspective this content is less primordial.
1. Illusions of present eternity: portrayals of current plenitude.

2. Illusions of past eternity: portrayals of lost plenitude.
3. Illusions of promised plenitude: portrayals of departure and adventure.
his distinction highlights three ways in which consciousness strives to achieve
metaphorical “ownership” of plenitude and eternity, of complete self-coincidence;
or, failing this, to despair at the impossibility of the endeavour. All three are what
Grimaldi calls fundamental “pathoses” of consciousness. Some are more “optimis-
tic” than others, but all betray the inability of consciousness to reconcile itself with
its lack of self-coincidence, with the “splinter” of time that hurts it.
Grimaldi’s categorisation of arts is a suspiciously clear illustration of this
“three-headed” strategy of consciousness to deal with its ambiguous attraction
to both immanence and transcendence, being and nothingness, and eternity
and initude. In his description of the three “fundamental aesthetic pathoses”
(1992: 258), poetry and music are typically the “arts of Absence”, in which “the
present rhyme is but the echo of a vanished rhyme, and hearing reveals the
work only as it abolishes it” (1992: 261). Meanwhile, visual arts, and particularly
sculpture and architecture, aim at saturating the eye and the mind with pure
presence; they give back to consciousness “the symbol of plenitude” (id.), they
ofer “instants without desire” (id.), in which “time has absorbed [résorbé] the
future into the present”. However, this labelling is not inlexible; within those
art forms themselves, the three “illusions” are further refracted; there are visual
works concerned with the depiction of lost or absent eternity, and adventure,
even though the formal features of this art form correspond more generally to
the second type of illusion.
Children’s literature can, perhaps too easily, be classiied historically, formally,
generically and thematically according to Grimaldi’s categorisation:
1. Illusions of present eternity, portrayals of current plenitude: he construction

of a current, unending plenitude of the state of childhood its with the mode
of the pastoral, with the motif of the puer aeternus. It brings to mind Rose’s
analysis of Peter Pan, and visions of the Little Prince on his little planet; it is
particularly characteristic of earlier articulations of children’s literature.
2. Illusions of past eternity: portrayals of lost plenitude: he illusion of a lost
plenitude, of the despair and downfall, of the loss of eternity, corresponds
well to the more contemporary manifestations of young adult literature; on a
literal level, in dystopian iction; on a psychological level, in the “ironic” hero,
to quote Maria Nikolajeva (2002b): the post-modern, fragmented and self-
relective character who may long for completion but does not consider it a
realisable outcome in the future.
3. Illusions of promised plenitude: portrayals of departure and adventure: Such

are the ones this volume covers; I would risk a general claim that contem-
porary children’s literature belongs mostly to the third type of fundamental
aesthetic pathos. It is an injunction from the adult to the child to go on a
journey towards a promised, hypothetical plenitude at the end of the wait,
oten not reached. On the journey, the child, thrown into existence, will face
the diiculties of being-in-the-world, mostly in the form – as investigated in
this book – of time and otherness.16
Promised plenitude with polar bears
An example of the pathos of promised plenitude in contemporary children’s lit-

erature appears in Dave Shelton’s Carnegie-shortlisted A Boy and a Bear in a Boat
(2013). his Beckett-esque tale does exactly what it says on the cover, following
the adventures of a young unnamed boy and an unnamed bear who, for reasons
unclear, are crossing the wide sea (and getting lost on it) on a small boat. his
short novel is characterised by a radical destruction of the traditional plot arc of
home-away-home, and names no object to its quest. On the irst page, as the little
boy lowers himself into the boat, the bear asks him, “Where to?” (Shelton 2013: 1),
but the boy does not answer. Later on, the boy’s thoughts are given to us in free
indirect speech, before a short dialogue with the bear:
And the boat pitched and rolled and bounced as if the world had become unixed.
It was a little unnerving. He would be glad to get where he was going, back on
irm ground again. He looked past the bear, out over the water ahead of them.
“You can’t even see it from here, can you?” he said. “I thought you’d be able to
see it.”
“No, it’s quite a way,” said the bear. (Shelton 2013: 4–5)
What it is, of course, is never made explicit – leaving the interpretation of the
journey entirely open to readerly questioning, and draping the novel’s apparent
meaninglessness in a sense of mysterious meaningfulness. he novel, as a result,
is extremely pliable to philosophical interpretations. From an existentialist per-
spective, it is easy to state that the boy, on his way to adulthood, and expecting to
16. I am aware of the simplicity of this categorisation. Like all categorisations, it must be taken
with a pinch of salt; of course, as in Grimaldi’s own theorisation, aspects of the three “illusions”
are further difracted within the works that would otherwise “belong” to one of the categories.
For instance, Arcadian children’s literature is profoundly characterised by a sense of loss and
nostalgia, and dystopian Young Adult iction is not necessarily devoid of hope. I hope the rigidity
of this categorisation does not obscure the interest of the argument, however.
ind “irm ground again”, inds himself instead increasingly disoriented, lost, and
confused. Even though he thinks he has an endpoint, and is waiting for it to appear
on the horizon, that endpoint is forever postponed and there is no end to the wait.
he end of the book, accordingly, brings no relief to the existential wait of the boy:
“Jolly good,” says the bear. And, ater a pause, “Do you think we’re nearly there
yet?”
he boy looks ahead and away to where the sun is sinking into the sea.
“Yes, Bear,” he says. “I’m sure we are.”
And the boy paddles and the bear kicks his feet and, ater a while, they sing a little.
And they disappear over that lat blue horizon and on towards another.
(Shelton 2013: 293–294)
he use of the present tense, which occurs only in the very last chapter, indicates
the iterative nature of the boy and the bear’s struggles, and opens them up onto an
undecidable, indeterminate futurity. he sense of wait for an indistinct endpoint
is prominently conveyed by the accumulation of vague deictic terms – “there”,
“ahead”, “away”, “that lat blue horizon”, “another”, linked together by an abundance
of “ands”, which indicate sequence without suggesting causality. he “sun sinking
into the sea” can of course be interpreted as a metaphor for death, towards which
they are equally headed.
he motif of the interminable journey, the adventure towards a promised
plenitude, is here taken to its most exaggerated form. It could be easily objected,
in fact, that the novel is so purposeless that its openness to interpretation allows
the reader to ease into comfortable but supericial statements about the meaning-
lessness of existence. Still, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat provides a striking example
of the motif of the journeying child, the adventurous child, the mighty child. hat
child is journeying towards a goal that is unforeseeable for everyone concerned –
adults, children and bears. he hoped-for conciliation, the “irm ground”, remains
an illusion; an illusion which many children’s books dilute, label and attempt to
give shape to, but which children’s books like Shelton’s expose as just what it is: a
process, not an endpoint.
he child thus occupies a unique position within what Grimaldi calls the con-
sciousness’s process of wait. he individual consciousness waits for something
which is never realised, but which in its absolute and evanescent perfection re-
mains somehow intrinsic to the strivings and struggles of existence. Children’s
literature ofers the adult a way of acting upon the future to bring about the end
of the wait. But by doing so, this end is in fact, of course, postponed further still
into the future. he didactic individual betrays the central feature of the existential
wait, which is that it refers to a potentiality, completely unrealisable in the present
and also completely unrepresentable. he child gives an illusion of shape to an
absolutely shapeless desire; its fantasised lifespan delineates a temporal horizon for
a longing which must remain forever atemporal. he child ofers an ideal target for
the sublimation of this impulse, precisely because one of its primordial signiieds is
“the future” – and this turns the child into a igure of intense temporal ambiguity,
and of appealing unknowability.
he unknowable end of the wait
he symbolism of adventure, for Grimaldi, is replete with allusions to the un-

known. he promised plenitude remains unknown until it is found; it is character-
ised only by the knowledge that it will be new and diferent. Grimaldi cites a line
from Baudelaire’s poetry, “To the bottom of the unknown to ind newness” (“Au
fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau”), and his multiple poems of journeys
and displacements, as typical of the pathos of adventure. But of course the Odyssey,
and mediaeval articulations of the quest for the Holy Grail, are eminent precur-
sors to Baudelaire’s romantic wanderings, and the pathos of adventure is in many
ways representative of the oldest forms of storytelling; as such, it is intimately tied
to archaic forms of children’s literature too. he journeys these works foreground,
as Grimaldi notes, appear to have objects, but in fact their overwhelming appeal
is the unknowability of their endpoint. his type of writing spells out a promise
never realised.
his promise never realised and never represented is the future. As Sartre
articulates in Being and Nothingness, there is a problem with the assumption that
the future can exist as representation. Any “represented future” would need to have
content, which would have to be present. Namely, any future that one attempts to
represent is necessarily a simulacrum of a future: the apparently “future” bird in
Magritte’s painting is very much a present bird. here may be volition to repre-
sent the future; in children’s literature, there almost always is. But this is a central
distinction in this volume: the adult agency supericially controls, possesses and
organises a represented future; but never an actual one. he actual future is beyond
the book. he past, meanwhile, for Sartre, is the exact opposite to the future: it is
entirely representable, because it is always already represented. It is facticity, which
in my vocabulary is part of what constitutes authority: it is “invulnerable contin-
gency” (Sartre 1958: 141). he past is something I must be, something I cannot not
be: it is the part of me that I have already been and therefore cannot un-be. he
future, meanwhile, is what I can be. But the past’s existence is also what motivates
the light into the future: it is what makes the individual aware of nothingness,
and craving for completion. his weighty past is, I postulate, the property of the
adult authority.
Children’s literature is on the one hand governed and organised by an authori-

tative symbolic igure which cannot un-be what it already is: which is characterised
by facticity. his is the hidden adult. his facticity is always there in whatever is
present in the text. However, contemporary children’s literature is also future-
bound, because it axiomatically addresses a symbolic category, childhood, which
is perceived to be in becoming. his implied readership is perceived by the adult as
efectively enacting the “light forward” into the future, and potentially achieving
plenitude. hus it must be a literature spangled with uncertainties, “nothingnesses”,
in Sartrean vocabulary, which are the territory of the child. hese “escape routes”,
so to speak, highlight the desire for what I call child might. In this light, represen-
tations of the puer aeternus are ways of de-representing the future. Ironically, of
course, this undeined postponing of adulthood brings with it the impossibility
ever to reach the end of the wait.
he puer existens, meanwhile – the child thrown into existence – is imagined
as potentially reaching the end of the wait: it is allowed to move through time.
However, the end of the wait must remain hazy and vague, because it must remain
unpredictable. Contemporary children’s literature thus attempts both to imagine
a promised land of reconciliation – for the child in the future – and yet to make
this promise unclear and ever-delayed – because the future can only be valuable if
it remains indeterminate, if it remains an adventure.
Grimaldi develops the idea that the journey in the adventure pathos bets on the
possibility of unproblematic relations to others, of complete conlation with one-
self, of temporal quiet – a passage “from alterity to identity” (Grimaldi 1992: 267).
As always with strategies of consciousness, however, this “optimistic” promise
collapses onto itself. By postponing the endpoint indeinitely, the adventure pa-
thos efectively reactivates and validates the wait. And if and when the endpoint
is inally represented, its knowability and tangibility deactivate and invalidate the
wait. his paradox is the symptom of a consciousness which is dissatisied with
knowledge and with its encounters with the present; and secretly desirous not to
know the future.
Contemporary literature for children may be largely theorisable as belonging
to the fundamental aesthetic pathos of promised plenitude. his theorisation is
existentialist because it is premised on the belief that the temporal disjunction at
the core of consciousness causes representations of the human experience to sufer
a similar tension, articulated in diferent ways. As Grimaldi theorises, the sym-
bolism of promised plenitude is only supericially concerned with adventure and
journeying. hose are elements which trump the wait, and allow for the impression
of doing something, anything, to realise the hoped-for reconciliation between what
one is and what one must be. he ultimate goal, therefore, is to stabilise one’s self
into that new and unknown state of plenitude.
But this goal, at least from an existentialist perspective, is akin to a death wish.
Because it signiies a state where desire is annihilated, and where there is no ten-
sion between inertia and light-forward, this endpoint is of course undesirable: it
would mean the overcoming of being by nothingness. he adventure, therefore,
may be an instrument, a supericial concern, but it is indeed valuable in its own
right, and not for the Holy Grail it may end with. In the vocabulary of children’s
literature criticism: the hidden adult, by weaving around childhood in the didactic
discourse of children’s literature a world of adventures and journeys, is only super-
icially concerned with these adventures and journeys. It is, in fact, constructing
an implied reader who can respond to these narrative devices in a way that will
bring about a hoped-for plenitude.
his portrayal of temporality is receptive to the fact that we cannot think of
children’s literature without becoming trapped within a tight network of para-
doxes and apparent contradictions. he future remains an entirely imaginary but
un-imaginable temporality; and so does the child’s might, in my vocabulary. Yet
despite this artiiciality, the yearning for the future is absolutely necessary: it is
conditioned by the “inevitable contingency” of one’s incomplete situation. he
individual hoping to be reconciled with what it lacks may know that the object
of its desire is illusory, just like the adult may be fully aware that might is a purely
artiicial property of symbolic childhood, stemming from the encapsulation of
the signiied “future” within the signiier “child”. To comfort itself that it has some
control over the future, the authoritative being may resort to the simulacra of
representations. But these can never have actual futurity.
However, and at the same time, the unknowability and impossibility of this
promised plenitude refocuses all attention – and all value – upon the journey,
which represents existence itself. It is laden with desire and unachievable goals,
rather than focused on the endpoint, which represents death. Stability and insta-
bility, desire and quenched desire: the didactic discourse of children’s literature,
as a displacement of existential concerns, is constantly in prey to opposite pulls,
to apparently mutually exclusive concepts, and it is no surprise that this literature
should be characterised by the paradox of their coexistence.
he rhythmical otherness of childhood
he temporal otherness of childhood in the pathos of “promised plenitude” is

coveted by the adult authority. he child symbolically dwells in an other temporal-
ity: it is, again, synonymous with the future. As a result it is of great value to the
existentially anguished adult, who is trapped in the centre of a glutinous web of
commitments, stuck into a situation, characterised by having-been-ness. hus the
adult authority in contemporary children’s literature (and, as will be argued later,

in any didactic relationship with a child) is disempowered. he adult has gradually
acquired the “vertiginous” or “nauseating” (to paraphrase Sartre) conviction that
it cannot coincide with itself, nor live fully satisfactorily among others; and that
it is too late to change this fact. here is very little indeterminacy let to the adult.
Conversely, the child, by virtue of the many imaginative acts which surround the
adult’s perception of childhood, is existentially titillating: its imagined time let is
its irreducible currency and bribing power. he child as symbol is mighty because
it “owns” the only thing that the adult does not: the future, and the indeterminacy
that goes with it.
he mighty child is this ideal child of the imagination created by the existential
anguish of the “waiting” adult. his claim should not be taken as yet another claim
that the mighty child is just a chimera, ready to collapse into yet another assertion
of adult “power”. Adult “power” over children may be more tangible – express-
ing itself in the form of orders, classrooms, corporal punishment, marks. But the
mighty child is all the mightier because it belongs to the realm of the imagination,
to the symbolic sphere, and is inseparable from contemporary constructions of
childhood; it therefore invades every representation of childhood, every instance
of dealing with a child, every relection on childhood. In that respect, the adult
cannot help seeing the child as mighty, to the detriment of their own power. And
the adult yearns to harness this might: that is what much of contemporary chil-
dren’s literature is about.
Contemporary children’s literature oten represents child characters whose
time let, uses of time, and internal rhythms are constantly under threat from the
adults that surround it. his threat is paradoxical: it displays the characteristic
ambiguity of the adult-child relationship. he child of children’s literature, whose
time let is of enormous value to the existential adult, must be pressed on to act, to
exist, in order to take on the existential burden imposed by the adult. On the other
hand, the adult authority remains dragged back by a tendency towards inertia; by
an ancient, nostalgic outlook on childhood inherited from Romantic conceptions
of the child. So the adult authority in the children’s book also exerts an opposite
pull onto the child, enjoining it to slow down and stockpile its time let. his para-
dox can be linked, as described earlier, to the “miserly” tendencies of the hidden
adult, who wants both to spend and not to spend the mighty time let of the child.
In both cases, there can be an ambiguous tendency in the didactic discourse
of children’s literature to attempt to control the internal rhythms of children and
of childhood, as if taming this aspect of the child could lead to an appropriation
of the temporal otherness of childhood. hrough it, the adult attempts to harness
the imagined might of the child. By applying pressure and release onto the child’s
actions in time, by successively slowing down and speeding up childhood through
children’s literature, the adult attempts to create what it envisages as the perfect
“readiness” for mighty action on the part of the implied child reader. he ultimate
release, it might be said – that of the closure of the book – is strategic: it should
occur at the moment where the implied child reader is constructed as most “ready”
to act upon it in the future.
his remote controlling of the child’s rhythm is imperfect; it can be either
too weak or too strong. It also contributes to a highly aetonormative treatment
of time, temporality and internal rhythms in children’s literature. But once again,
aetonormativity should not be seen as necessarily leading to the superior power of
the adult. In this case as in many others, the desired entrapment of the child into
adult-imposed rhythms is counterbalanced by the adult’s gradual loss of power in
the process, and the child’s possible liberation through it.
he adult desire to control and channel the rhythms of childhood in order to
act upon its temporal otherness can operate in several ways. On a diegetic level, a
recurrent feature of children’s literature is the alternatively thwarting and helpful
presence of adults in the child protagonists’ adventures. he presence of adult char-
acters as the organisers of the child’s quest, either as catalysts or as blocking agents,
is characteristic of adventure stories for children. hese adult characters can be quite
self-aware about their own “blocking” or “liberating” roles: they sometimes know
they are constructing an artiicial “readiness-for-action” of the child. In a revealing
dialogue with Harry in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Albus Dumbledore
thus spells out: “When you are older… I know you hate to hear this… when you are
ready, you’ll know” (Rowling 2007: 216, emphasis added). Much of the saga indeed
relies on Dumbledore’s alternatively prompting Harry and withholding information
from him, in an efort, as we will later learn, to ensure that Harry is ready to tackle
the inal task with all his might. his highly controlling adult presence at the core
of Harry’s development epitomises the phenomenon that I am describing.
he ambiguity of the didactic situation leads to a double fantasy of power and
disempowerment on the part of the adult. Faced with a problem of others of a
singular kind – of a temporal kind – the adult response is an undecided blend of
coercion and release. Perry Nodelman puts it best:
he adult impulse to control children, to keep them “safe” … requires that children
be both controllable and uncontrollable, both what adults want them to be and
incapable of being what adults want them to be… he divided child is the only
possible child constructed by children’s literature. (Nodelman 2008: 187)
Children’s literature is traversed by a fantasy of actual control through the didac-

tic discourse, followed by future liberation through child might; consequently it
constructs a divided child. However, and this is paramount, it also constructs a
divided adult.
he divided adult
here is no wholeness, indeed, to the symbolic adulthood of contemporary

children’s literature, even of the most prescriptive type, because such children’s
literature betrays the ambiguous condition of being an adult. It highlights the con-
tradictory desires, fears and modes of behaviour that it engenders. Contemporary
children’s literature has, better than many types of discourse, understood the ex-
istential undertones of the adult-child relationship and exposed, wilfully or not,
the problems of adult existence.
Many children’s books explicitly denounce or comment upon, in particular, the
unreasonable amount of control which the adult world imposes upon the rhythms
of childhood and of children, the obsessive concern which adults seem to have with
the speciic temporality of childhood. he pathological aspects of this control and
obsession are represented as evidence of a divided adult consciousness. It is not
rare to see child characters in children’s books ventriloquising such thoughts, by
fervently complaining about the disjunction between their own purposes and the
external time of the adult world, with its irrational imposition of speciic schedules.
his cleverly happens in the Portuguese picturebook Depressa, devagar (“Quickly,
Slowly”), by Isabel Minhós Martins and Bernardo Cavalho (2013).17 he short
narrative makes explicit not just the adult desire to orchestrate children’s daily
lives by the imposition of external rhythms, but also the arbitrariness and the self-
contradicting nature of these rhythms. In so doing, it points at the adults’ inability
to deal with time coherently.
Told through the irst-person perspective of an unnamed male child, Depressa,
devagar narrates a day punctuated by quasi-simultaneous requests, by adults, for
him to slow down or hurry up with whatever he is doing. he design of the picture-
book, and particularly the hand-lettering, as Sandie Mourão notes (2013), cleverly
relects these frustrating imperatives by imposing a reading rhythm on the reader.
Sometimes cramped, sometimes more easily legible, the calligraphy efectively
slows down or speeds up the reader’s eye movements as the narrative develops. To
the cursive letters respond the luid strokes of the illustrations, made-up of curls,
meanders and spirals from the endpapers onwards. One particular feature stands
out: the hairlines of the characters, which provide a visual Ariadne’s thread to the
story. Tristram-Shandy-like, these swirling hairlines visually express the chaotic
rhythms of the narrative. hey carry the reader’s glance alternatively forwards
and backwards, sometimes connecting characters together, and make visible the
17. All translations of this text are Sandie Mourão’s, to whom I am also indebted for the discov-
ery of this picturebook.
rhythmical arbitrariness of the child’s day, which becomes embodied within both
adults and child characters, and also spills out beyond them, alternatively blending
them together and separating them.
he cover of the book (Figure 2) immediately introduces the motif of the
temporally divided individual.
Figure 2. Depressa, Devagar (2013) by Isabel Martins and Bernardo Carvalho 2013
© 2013 by Bernardo Carvalho. Reproduced by permission of Planeta Tangerina.
he two selves of a laughing child – the slow and the fast – are depicted, solely
linked by a hairline and an eye; it is impossible to know which of the two states
is the currently “enforced” rhythm. his cover perfectly illustrates the existential
status of the individual in time, tending both towards past-facing inertia and a
future-bound state, ahead of oneself. Overlapping only to a small extent, those two
contradictory aspects of human consciousness are here igured by the child, as if
to point at the early onset of this existential state.
he text on the irst spread (Figure 3) – by far the longest in the picturebook –
conirms the disjunction between “outside” and “inside” imperatives in the per-
ception of time by the child protagonist. While no humans are represented on the
spread, the contrast between regular clock time and the fanciful requests of adults
is rendered by the visual clash between the straight lines of rectangular buildings
and the whimsical curls of trees and bushes. he sun rising, furthermore, takes
on the appearance of the face of a clock, adding to the confusion between natural
and adult-enforced time.
[Outside time goes through a counting machine which calculates the seconds and
marks the days lawlessly.
Here inside, clocks don’t worry about counting: sometimes they get distracted,
slowing down when there is so much to do, sometimes they rush along when
there’s no time to lose.
Outside time doesn’t appreciate a stroll or a race… and so that’s why, here inside
all I hear is quickly, slowly. From morning to night these are the words that take
over my day.]
he title page had already illustrated the diiculty for the child to separate bodily
rhythm and external rhythms enforced by adults. Formed partly of the words
which haunt his life – “quickly, slowly” – like his hairline, the child has already got
it “in his head” that these two words are indeed going to “take over his day” (and his
life). hough the picturebook is more humorous than critical, and certainly does
not hint at a loss of happiness over this constant contradictory command, such
imagery implies that the adult time-related adverbs control and rule the child’s life
by becoming symbolically part of his body.
It is clear, however, from the erratic orders of the adults – “Quickly! he bus
is coming round the corner. Slowly… do you want to break your leg?” – that their
own mastery of time and of their own rhythms is disjunctive and fragmentary. On
each doublespread, adult characters contradict and rectify themselves, oscillate
between calls for eiciency and for carefulness; they cannot decide whether they
want to impose respect for rules or allow for the child’s individuality to express
itself. his is particularly clear on the following doublespread (Figure 4):
[Slowly now, so you don’t fall. Quickly now, if you want to win the war.]
In this subversive doublespread, the adult voice hesitates between protecting the
child and letting him “win the war”, playfully (for now), against other children, fore-
grounding both the caring and the competitive strands of parenthood. he children,
however, seem joyously unperturbed by this order. Linked together by their hairlines,
and visually melting into one another, they appear solely focused on their current
action – running – with little concern for either falling or winning. here is here
tension between protecting the child, which Nodelman noted as a characteristic of
the discourse of children’s literature, and the adult’s desire to see the child’s potential
develop (with and against others). It is unclear whether the children depicted are
oblivious to this double impulse, or revolting against it, but they are certainly ignor-
ing it, and imposing a diferent rhythm – their own.
Similarly subversive is another evocative spread (Figure 5), where a literally

“divided adult” issues contradictory orders:
he Janus-like teacher, at once happy and unhappy, at once calling for the child
to hurry up and to slow down, at once raising her thumb in approval and her
index inger in reprobation, represents the adult incapable of giving a coherent
didactic message to the child. From the (probably amused) viewpoint of the child
character and of the child reader, she becomes a strange double-headed monster,
the two halves irreconcilable and yet linked in the middle. he attack against
authority in this falsely naive picture is diicult to miss. It is a child’s eye-view of
the incoherencies of the adult prescriptions given to them over their organisation
of time, betraying the adult’s internal divisions over the bringing up and educa-
tion of children.
he picturebook emphasises that from the point of view of the adult, the child
is always doing something wrong with their time. his is highly problematic, be-
cause the child’s time is precious: it is not just time, it is time let, time unrealised.
Either going too fast or too slowly, the child is desperately out of touch with the
adult’s temporal aspirations for him, failing to develop as the adult wishes. he
child’s rhythms appear incomprehensible and irrational. Adults, therefore, have
spent their time today – “wasted” their time today, perhaps – making it clear
to the young boy that he is never on time, according, of course, to the adult’s
understanding of what this timeliness should be. he child is the rhythmical as well
as the temporal other; this rhythmical disjunction partakes fully in the temporal
split between adult and child.
But this diference in rhythm does not disallow moments of adult-child inti-
macy. Depressa, Devagar ends with two doublespreads where the general rhythm
of the narrative is slowed down; from two sentences per doublespread, it goes
down to just one. “Quickly, look who’s coming down the corridor”, says the mother
to the young boy, “linked” to him by her hairline (Figure 6). he next and inal
doublespread highlights all the tender violence of what I call in a later chapter the
“pedagogical romance”:
[Slowly… Don’t strangle me please!]
he family is uncontroversially happy to be reunited ater a day of work, and the

hairline, one last time, connects the child to the two adults in their embrace. But
the child is, again, sotly reprimanded for being out of beat with the adult’s rhythm.
His father is clearly tired, his eyes small and low despite his smile; his stubble and
bags under his eyes highlight the impact of long hours of work upon his body. By
contrast, the child’s hurry to hug and squeeze him is perceived, hyperbolically but
signiicantly, as “strangling”. he emotional disjunction between adult and child
needs alludes to the inexorable degree of violence in relations of intimacy between
adult and child.
he violence is here of course double-sided; it is not far-fetched to interpret this

strangling hug as the child’s retaliation for the “strangled” timeframe which adults
have imposed on him throughout his day. he loving adult’s temporal indecision –
their erratic orders meant to protect, command, control the child – is a form of
symbolic violence, to which the loving child responds with physical brutality. In
a similar fashion, the monstrous representation of the double-headed teacher, the
indiference of the running children, and the quirky intrusion of a giant ape in the
place of a teacher in another spread, are small “victories” of the child against the
adult, reacting to the adults’ constricting impulses.
Depressa, devagar provides a subversive portrayal of the adult manipulation of
child time. Beyond denouncing it, it also actively undermines it, by portraying subtle
moments of either wilful or unconscious rebellion against this control. he picture-
books articulates both the dictatorial aspects of the didactic discourse and its liberat-
ing ones, presenting a child in need of control and protection, and a disempowered
adult wishing that the child could take his own rhythm into his own hands – so as
to act upon his vast stretch of remaining temporality to act meaningfully.
But what does “meaningfully” mean? What is this constructed child of chil-
dren’s literature, this mighty child, going to do with this time the adult so longingly
strives to control? To be able to reply to this question, we must look more closely
at the paradoxes of the didactic discourse itself, and attempt to probe the “content”,
so to speak, of its many diferent gaps.
part ii
Otherness
In the rearing of the child, as in any relationship with others,

the ambiguity of freedom implies the outrage of violence;
in a sense, all education is a failure.
Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity (1948: 142)

“Gaps”, desire, and the didactic discourse
Fiction and desire
Literature is laden with desires; the text ofers itself to interpretation, the reader
desires to access meaning: but meaning is slippery. he ictional text, Marcel Proust
tells us, is an incitement: “We sense very well that our wisdom starts where the au-
thor’s ends, and we would like him to give us answers, while all he can do is give us
desires” (Proust 2011: 4918). Yearning for knowledge, the reader is ofered instead,
in the work of iction, desires. Within the ictional experience lies a latent meaning,
temptingly tugging at the fabric of the text; a potentiality of which just enough is
kept unrevealed to forbid closure. And perhaps this desire draws its value from
staying unfulilled. Fulilling desire, of course, efectively dissolves it – following
the characteristic paradox of the philosophical problem of desire, its beauty dwells
in what it suggests of nonexistence, rather than what it could eventually bring into
existence. Desire, steered away from the unproductivity of illusion and the mun-
daneness of fulilment, must remain on the mode of allusion.
In this view of literature, the reader is turned by the text into a desirer. While
some strategies of the ictional utterance, such as the metonymous or the metaphori-
cal, serve to enclose within ictionality a sublimated form of the real, it is the discon-
nectedness of the two worlds which speaks to the reader. Charles Crittenden (1991)
detects in this disconnectedness the oxymoronic presence of nonexistence. Literature
creates a reader compelled yet unable to ind unambiguous references to reality in
the text; the elusiveness of the signiied triggers a form of vertigo – this attraction-
repulsion force we feel when confronted with the possibility of nonexistence.
he literary text turns the reader into a desirer, but it also desires the reader:
at the root of the speciic communication which iction deploys is a mutual desire
for knowledge and its transformation. It is, Barthes writes, a “dialectic of desire”
(1973: 1119), a “space of jouissance… of an unpredictability of jouissance” (id.).
he interdependency of the reader who asks “what can you give me?” and the text
which responds “what can you do with what I am giving you?” triggers the mysti-
cal “good-for-me” or “that’s it!” (id.: 22) of the literary experience. Barthes argues:
18. My translation.
19. All translations of Barthes mine.
he text is a fetish and this fetish desires me. he text chooses me, through a whole
disposition of invisible screens, of selective chicanes: vocabulary, references, read-
ability, etc.; and, lost in the midst of the text… there is always the other, the author.
As an institution, the author is dead… but in the text, in some way, I desire the
author: I need his igure. (1973: 39, original emphasis)
he text desires the reader who desires the text. he text is a two-way street, walked
by the addressee as well as the speaker, in the hope that they might stumble upon
one another and achieve something with their mutual desire for each other. his
ictional wandering is constantly both threatened and fuelled by the possibility of
its own ending.
Children’s literature complicates the question of ictional desire and the mu-
tual quest for knowledge between speaker and addressee. Jacqueline Rose misses
both the mutual and the dynamic quality of these desires, because she is ixated on
their static aspects (which are undeniably present too). Rose’s adult addresses an
impossible child, the child who can be held in place; who can be, within the erotic
fantasy of children’s iction, prevented from growing up:
I am using desire to refer to a form of investment by the adult in the child, and
to the demand made by the adult on the child as the efect of that investment, a
demand which ixes the child and then holds it in place. (Rose 1984: 4)
hough I concur with this deinition of desire as “a form of investment”, I come to a

radically diferent conclusion. he literal prerequisite for an “investment” is a belief
in future progress. his progress may be predictable to a degree, but it is impos-
sible to anticipate fully. he demand that this investment creates cannot solidify
or immobilise. he adult authority must express a desire for the not-yet-existent,
for the impossibility to predict what exactly this investment will yield.
his dimension of the didactic discourse as a discourse of desire has to be
due to a shiting perception of the child by the adult. here are gaps between
the impossible child and the possible adult, the child as agent, meaning-maker
and value-chooser, and the child as icon loaded with oppressive adult demands.
his cohabitation of multiple perceptions of the child is necessary in the didactic
discourse. In his analysis of time and knowledge in children’s literature, Victor
Watson argues that
all iction is inevitably linked with time and the past, but children’s iction is ad-
ditionally and uniquely so concerned. We understand that with children’s litera-
ture there is an inequality of status and experience between the adult author and
the child. Because an author has been in the world longer, there is a diference of
knowledge and experience. (Watson 2007: 26)
Watson merges here the objective and the subjective in his explanation of why
there is an inequality of status and experience between adult and child. his gap
cannot simply be explained by any countable temporal spans. An eighty-year-old
addressing a twenty-ive-year-old is speaking across a tremendous knowledge and
experiential chasm; yet we do not talk of a didactic discourse in that case as neces-
sarily as if the same twenty-ive-year-old was addressing an eleven-year-old. here
is uncontroversially, as Watson notes, an inequality of status and experience there,
but its variable is not time per se: it is symbolic time, modulated by symbolic child-
hood. he didactic adult agency is not just speaking across an objective time gap
but also across subjective symbolic demarcations: what Peter Hollindale calls the
“cultural time-gap” (1997: 12). Adulthood and childhood belong to diferent tem-
poral imaginations. he didactic text is the theatre of this complex performance
of adult desires, towards and away from the child.
As Hollindale rightly notes, the adult is always obsolete: it can never have
“presentness” (1997: 22) for the child. He advances the problematic notion that
children’s literature may be conceived of “as autobiography”, a narrativised and
“childly” presentation of memory, meant to “achieve a sense of identity” (id.: 71).
“We do this,” he says, “through a constant dialogue between experience and mem-
ory, in which both elements are unstable” (id.: original emphasis.) Hollindale hints
at the capacity for children’s literature, precisely through the instability of this
reconstruction, to constitute a projection as well as a relection. And one which is,
importantly, unpredictable and dependent on the imagined child reader. his is
what this volume highlights: the adult authority’s dependence on the implied child
reader in the didactic discourse.
he “didactic” has long been seen, especially in literary studies and in educa-
tional philosophy, as an undesirable and obsolete mode of discourse, though it is
oten mentioned without much explanation as to what it actually is. Wayne Booth,
for instance, gets rid of any need to deine the term by saying, in the opening
sentence of he Rhetoric of Fiction, that his book is not concerned with “didactic
iction, iction used for propaganda or instruction” (1991: xiii). For Iser, the novel
evolved from early (Richardsonian, for instance) didacticism to the more open
texts of Fielding and his followers (1974). Both of those major literary theorists
therefore implicitly declare the “didactic” and the “literary” more or less irreconcil-
able, and furthermore reject the applicability of their literary theories to texts they
see as didactic. Yet their theorisations of literature, which are intensely concerned
with readerly positions and with the communication processes at the heart of
literature, cannot quite so easily do away with considerations of the didactic ex-
changes in the literary text; in the light of Booth’s profoundly ethical readings of
literature, and of Iser’s insistence on textual “guidelines” for the reader to invest its
gaps, it appears quite disingenuous of them to assert that they are not concerned
with the didactic. Similarly, in children’s literature, the didactic mode is associated
with traditional religious and doctrinal education. But, as Lisa Sainsbury argues
(2013), modern and contemporary children’s literature, however child-centred,
does not shy away from transmitting ethical “messages”; there is still very much
an educational mission to the children’s book. And this didactic discourse is, as
will become clear, both fundamentally future-bound and reliant on a vision of
adulthood as lacking. Whether or not the texts still spell out direct, overt injunc-
tions with the intention to instruct, works of children’s literature are characterised
by an ambiguous didactic discourse where adult knowledge is not assumed to be
complete. he paradox of didacticism can be articulated as follows: the adult asks
the child for something the adult does not know.
To help perceive this paradox more clearly, it is worth focusing on the case
of the picturebook, with its famous “gaps”; both metacritically and as a medium,
picturebooks have generated discourses which illustrate the uneasy position of the
adult in relation to the didactic mode.
What’s in the gap? Picturebook theory and the mighty “gap-iller”
here is little need to provide a literature review of picturebook theory; I will take
it as a well-accepted axiom of this domain of study that sophisticated picturebooks,
or iconotexts (Hallberg 1982), are characterised by a gap between pictures and text;
between words and images. his gap, importantly, is oten celebrated as evidence
of the better uses of the medium – of above-average literary and aesthetic merit:
“Many picture books – indeed, possibly all of the best ones – do not just reveal
that pictures show us more than words can say” (Nodelman 1988: 209). Gaps thus
denote talent, and a good anticipation on the reader’s participation, on the part
of the adult creators of the picturebook. Gaps are said to encourage creativity in
the young reader, leading the child to “ill them in” with their own interpretation,
since no clear meaning is given in either text or picture.
he concept of the picturebook gap owes much to Wolfgang Iser’s theorisation
of implied readership and of what he calls the gaps or blanks of literary texts (1974,
1978), but gaps in picturebooks have now long had their own body of scholarship,
with typologies developed, among others, by Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott
(2003), Joseph Schwarcz (1982) and Denise Agosto (1999). Furthermore, in Iser’s
works, part of the readerly “illing-in” of the gaps of a text consists in visualising in
one’s head the scene that is happening textually – a notion derided by several crit-
ics, such as Fish (1981), or Hammond, who calls “touchingly naïve” the idea that
in the reading of a text, “the reader’s imagination necessarily ills it with a pop-up
cartoon version of the scene” (1993: 74). In picturebooks, on the contrary, there is
a given visual backdrop to the words, and gaps are created when the two discourses
are misaligned. It is further notable that the notion of gap in the literary discourse
of children’s books, albeit Iserian in many ways and therefore stemming from the
study of novels, is prominently discussed in relation to picturebooks and relatively
little in relation to children’s or teenage novels. his is interesting from a metacritical
perspective because it isolates picturebook theory, criticism and empirical research
as a ield particularly concerned with readerly “freedom”, in contrast with the em-
phasis on adult “power” which characterises scholarship on other types of text.
he notion of readerly “freedom” indeed transpires when speaking of the efect
of this gap, emphasised by terms such as “imaginative” reading (Styles and Watson
1996: 2), with the child engaging in “co-authorship” and “interpreting” (Walsh
1993: 22; Pantaleo 2004: 9; Sipe 2011: 247; Pantaleo 2012: 66). he “readerly gap”,
as it is sometimes called (Styles & Watson 1996: 2), therefore implies independence
on the child’s part; and on the adult’s part, less didacticism, less indoctrination, less
subjection to ideological pressure. But what is that celebrated gap made of? What
does it contain, if such a paradoxical question be allowed? What are we talking
about when we postulate the child’s freedom to ill it? What happens to the adult
part of the equation when a gap is created?
On closer inspection, the hallowed “readerly gap” is ambiguous. Not the pres-
ence of gaps between text and image; that is indubitable. But such gaps in picture-
books, and the ensuing readerly “freedom” that they supposedly allow for, might
be seen less as evidence of creative energy and interpretive generosity on the part
of the adult, and more as evidence of the didactic situation created by the medium
of the picturebook. Gaps in iconotexts, characterised them as blind spots of the
hidden adult, as unknowable spaces, sound like the domain of the young reader,
and out of the control of the adult author and illustrator. Empirical research on
children reading picturebooks, in particular, has lourished, galvanised by the quest
to unearth child readers’ interpretations and gap-illing processes.
he pioneering study in this area, led by Morag Styles and Evelyn Arizpe and
published as Children Reading Pictures in 2003, is a good example of adult scholars’
respect for child readers of iconotexts. From the introduction onwards, the study
states how much the children “surprised” the researchers, made sense of details in
the picturebooks that adults had not noticed, and provided unexpectedly sophisti-
cated drawings in reaction to their reading. Perry Nodelman reportedly criticised
Children Reading Pictures for its “optimism”,20 and indeed the researchers’ admira-
tion for the child readers’ understanding of the texts is clear. But this “optimism” is
20. According to Evelyn Arizpe, who responded to that comment in her paper at the Stockholm
picturebook conference in September 2013.
characteristic, I would argue, of most picturebook criticism, theory and empirical

research, speciically when it highlights the presence of “readerly gaps”, because
this presence is seen as being a privileged space for the child to become equal or
indeed superior to the adult in the readerly experience. As Lawrence Sipe puts it,
“It is possible that young children are more comfortable than adults with this new
deinition of text as a collection of signiiers with ininite possibilities for meaning
making” (2008: 234). Arizpe and Styles sound “optimistic” because picturebook
theory and empirical research in general stand in direct contrast to the scholarly
notion that children’s literature is inherently aetonormative. Of all domains of
children’s literature theory, picturebook scholarship is possibly the most animated
by the desire to show how the best examples of a given medium can “free” the child
reader, and prevent “indoctrination” and adult “power”.
“Readerly” gap, or didactic gap?
Still, the ways in which the “readerly gap” in picturebooks is described are not
devoid of ambiguity. In particular, scholars’ faith in the child reader to ill in the
gaps is oten proportional to their admiration for the actual creators of the picture-
books, to a greater extent, perhaps, than in other domains of children’s literature
criticism. It is not uncommon to read, in articles and monographs of picturebook
criticism, quotations from artists and authors on their creative processes, inform-
ing scholarly work on an apparently equal level to that of quotations from other
researchers. Sandra Beckett, in Crossover Picturebooks (2012) thus takes care to
weave snippets of interviews with authors and illustrators into her own analysis
and theorisation of crossover picturebooks. Many pieces of picturebook research
begin and/or end with creators speaking (Arizpe & Styles 2003; Sipe 2008; Evans
2011; Sipe 2011…). Some of these creators conirm that gaps in picturebooks are
the result of careful work: as Anthony Browne puts it, “What excites me… is work-
ing out the rhythm of the story and seeing how much is told by the pictures, how
much by the words, and how much by the gap between the two” (interviewed by
Evans 2009: 194). Allusions to authorial or illustratorial intentions in picturebook
criticism are legion; the authors’, illustrators’ or author-illustrators’ creative pro-
cesses are oten probed, as are the children’s reactions to their work.
On a supericial level, it would seem that the speaker and addressee are there-
fore considered as equally free agents, and the picturebook’s numerous gaps as
a shield against any didactic exchange between the two. More careful consider-
ation, however, shows that this is not always the case, as this statement by Judith
Graham illustrates: “Children respond to the respect which these serious author/
illustrator accord them and learn how to read the important message that books
can bring” (1990: 107). he implications of this claim are problematic. Graham is
here implying that the adult picturebook creator respects the child, but should be
therefore seen as a bountiful authority for it, and that the child should perhaps
realise how lucky they are to be learning about the single, “important” (adult)
“message” contained in the picturebook.
It is suggested in that quotation, but also implicit in the deinition of the read-
erly gap, that this gap is in fact very much part of the didactic discourse of the pic-
turebook. It is not extraneous to the didactic impulse in the book; it partakes fully
in it, it belongs to it; it shapes the didactic address to the child. It has a “message”,
even though this message is a blind spot; it is both an order and a prescription,
both “an exigency and a git”, as Sartre would put it (1950). Even though it may be
a “liberating” space in some sense, it cannot help but entrap the reader in many
ways. he gap might be the point at which ideology collapses, or at the very least
becomes deformed by an opening whirlpool of readerly interpretation, but even
this collapse is irmly contained within the pedagogical project of the picturebook,
whether intentionally or unintentionally. It is not outside of the didactic. A gap,
ater all, can only be deined by what surrounds it; and that which surrounds
it necessarily encloses it. And a gap always begs to be illed. David Low quotes
Groensteen’s deinition of the gutter in comics as: “that-which-is-not-represented-
but-which-the-reader-cannot-help-but-to-infer” (2012: 373). If indeed the reader
cannot help it, the gap calls for the reader’s imagination not just to celebrate but
also to abolish indeterminacy. his ambiguous necessity for the reader to “commit”,
and yet to do so thanks to openings in the texts, illustrates the tension germane to
this volume: the diiculty for any discourse oriented at children to be fully liberat-
ing or fully constrictive. In this particular case, there is also a metacritical point
to be made: that research on picturebooks expresses a parallel tension, conceals a
similar hidden (scholarly) adult, concerned with ways both of letting the child be
free and of structuring that freedom.
Picturebook criticism gloriies the presence of gaps in part because, arguably,
that presence is taken to represent adult self-control against the indoctrination of
children – an indoctrination which is everywhere, in children’s literature scholar-
ship, seen as a risk. As a result, scholars may distinguish between picturebooks that
are “closed” and “open”, between those that leave freedom to the child and those
that do not, and talk of sophisticated picturebooks, of postmodern picturebooks, of
picturebooks that address a dual audience. But what if the gap was less evidence of
adult self-control than of the failure of adult knowledge – and of the omnipresence
of the didactic in response to that failure? he gap may stem, beyond authorial
and illustratorial decisions, from a particular problem of the didactic discourse in
general: adult powerlessness and lack of knowledge. Picturebook gaps, in brief,
could be considered as expressions of the “impossibility”, or rather the ambiguity,
of the didactic address.
he gap indeed only makes sense, as clariied by the expression “readerly gap”,
if we consider the reading experience. Any work of picturebook criticism which
mentions a gap between text and image is already engaging minimally in reader-
response criticism. he illing in of the gap occurs at a speciic moment, the reading
event. It sometimes occurs, even more precisely, in the implied interaction between
adult and child in the reading event. And not just for sophisticated iconotexts;
many illustrated bedtime stories in picturebook form imply that the closing of the
book will be followed by a conclusive formula improvised by the adult co-reader,
of the type “And just as little Bear is asleep, so you must sleep now”, which although
not spelt out in the text constitutes an easily illed gap.
A basic but eloquent example of a picturebook gap to be illed in the reading
event between adult and child is the ending of Roger Hargreaves’s Mr Tickle (2008),
which is not unanimously praised as an example of sophisticated picturebook. he
penultimate doublespread is split, in the characteristic style of the Mr Men books,
between a verso of black text on white background and a recto entirely covered by
the drawing. he square picture of Mr Tickle peering to the side of the bedroom
door and stretching his long arm merely illustrates, rather than enhances, the text
to its let:
Perhaps that extraordinary long arm of his is already creeping up to the door of
this room.
Perhaps it’s opening the door now and coming into the room.
Perhaps, before you know what is happening, you will be well and truly…
(Hargreaves 2008)
he page must now be turned to the last spread: two white pages, with one word
on the verso: “…tickled!”. Here the “drama of the turning page”, as Barbara Bader
famously puts it (1976: 1), is remarkably orchestrated. he call to the young reader
and their adult co-reader (or, in some cases, another child co-reader) is a particu-
larly clear example of the status of the gap in picturebooks: it is both internal and
extraneous to the text. he disappearance of the visual gives rise to the situational,
so to speak: unsupported by felt-tips drawings, the last word must be “illustrated”
by the actual tickling of the co-readers. he ending, to function, must be “activated”
by the couple of readers.
his gesture is external to the picturebook, in the sense that it occurs ater
its reading and is untranslatable into either verbal or visual vocabulary. But it is
obviously provoked and controlled by the picturebook. It is contained within the
picturebook’s project for its implied reader, and it anticipates the readerly situa-
tion. For all its apparent simplicity, the ending of Mr Tickle provides a relatively
sophisticated anticipation of an intimate co-reading event, and of the continuation
of the story outside of the book. It is very much an intentional gap, and yet one
that is never cited in studies of gaps in picturebooks, because the Mr Men books
are not generally seen as iconotextual.
he existence of gaps in picturebooks of all levels of sophistication highlights
the presence, within children’s literature, of readerly spaces which are at once in-
ternal to the didactic discourse of the text and have their efect outside and beyond
the text. A gap is only “readerly” insofar as it is didactic, and it is only didactic
insofar as it is an incomplete injunction. he imperfection of the didactic address
incarnates itself in the incompleteness of the picturebook. his incompleteness, of
course, should not be seen as a law. he ever-increasing interest of picturebook
theorists and picturebook artists for “gaps” is justiied. It highlights that gaps are
inevitable in the didactic address to a child – and that picturebooks may be a way
of reclaiming and celebrating this inevitability. It would thus perhaps make more
sense to call these gaps “didactic” rather than “readerly”.
Of course, one might immediately object that we should not lose sight of the
vast diference between didactic gaps in Mr Tickle and in Anthony Browne’s Voices
in the Park (1999). he diferences that we perceive in quality between picture-
books reside mostly in whether the incompleteness of the didactic address is ac-
cepted or “repressed” by the hidden adult. Some picturebooks, the ones we call
sophisticated, rejoice in and reclaim the ambiguity of the didactic discourse, and
then turn it into a celebration of child freedom. his is particularly clear in post-
modern picturebooks which are delightfully riddled with interpretive openings.
Other picturebooks, seemingly “closed” and deprived of gaps, can be seen on the
contrary as betraying adult desires to have “all the answers”. However, it does not
necessarily mean that they have no gaps. Furthermore, while some gaps are within
the control of the picturebook creators, some may be beyond their power; in other
words, creators might not be able to prevent gaps from arising, in picturebooks
deemed both of high and of low quality.
here are gaps of every kind in any form of discourse; as Umberto Eco points
out, every text “is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work” (1995: 3).
his can occur on a very basic level, because the text cannot mention every aspect
of every action, and illustrations are only ever snapshots. Outside the literary, there
is no reason either to think that discourses are either more determinate or more
self-explanatory; this is one of the central points of Stanley Fish’s virulent attack
against Wolfgang Iser’s foregrounding of “gaps” in the reading event: “We know
‘real people’ no more directly than we know the characters in a novel;… ordinary
language is no more in touch with an unmediated reality than the language of
literature” (1981: 10). It could be retorted that in literary texts, the degree of unde-
cidability or indeterminacy betrays the presence of a machine that is not so much
lazy as playful, its imperfect knowledge of the world celebrated, as mentioned
earlier, rather than hidden. Regardless, it is true that there is no obvious diference
between verbal gaps in literature for adults and iconotextual gaps in picturebooks
(or indeed verbal gaps in other types of children’s literature), insofar as both rely
on the reader to “work for them” to ill them in.
hen why should picturebook gaps be called “didactic”, when they might as
well be encapsulated within the theorisation of all gaps in literary and non-literary
discourse, for adults and for children indiscriminately? Without getting into a
Dadaist taxonomy of gaps, there is a case to be made for iconotextual gaps in
children’s picturebooks to be analysed as an expression irst and foremost of the
gaps present in the adult-child relationship. Getting back to Fish’s quotation, in
discourse targeted at children “ordinary language” is indeed “no more in touch
with an unmediated reality than the language of literature”, but the “ordinary lan-
guage” of the adult-child relationship is uniquely “mediated”, to take Fish’s term
again, by the “ordinariness” of its didactic features. In picturebooks which one can
reasonably evaluate as meant primarily for children (according to the deinition
given in the introduction), the didactic and temporal nature of the iconotextual
gap must be foregrounded as much as its aesthetic and ideological makeup. While
all discursive gaps in texts for adults count, to various degrees of simplicity, on the
collaboration of the addressee to complete the message, gaps in texts for children
assume the presence of an addressee with less time past and more time let, and
this addressee is “ordinarily” subjected to the didactic.
he diference is crucial. he implied reader of a text for adults is constructed
as having an equal level of experience and knowledge, but also of time to act, as
the implied author. But the implied reader of children’s texts is in the opposite
situation. his sets up a relationship whereby there is a temporal complementarity
between implied author and implied reader. his complementarity of time-bound
powers inevitably deines a didactic situation rather than a solely transactional one.
We cannot deal in the same manner, therefore, with iconotextual gaps in children’s
picturebooks as we do with verbal gaps in everyday and literary discourses between
adults. hey certainly highlight the playful dimension of the reading event, and
its many interpretive possibilities. But gaps in picturebooks and elsewhere in chil-
dren’s literature display ambiguities inherited from their belonging speciically to
an adult-child discourse.
he didactic gap, between “reasonable” interpretation and child might
here are gaps in picturebooks, even those that appear most closed, because there
is behind the didactic discourse a paradoxical adult desire to trigger unpredictable
responses in the child reader while at the same time seeking to control them. he
gap is not just evidence of adult control upon their indoctrinating tendencies. It
is also evidence of the gap at the heart of all didactic encounters; namely, the fact
that the knowledge communicated is insuicient, it lacks, it calls for the addressee
to act upon it – and the child reader is here the one who must ill the gap, solve
the lack.21 However, there is knowledge communicated; there is a degree of adult
authority, whether intentional or unintentional on the part of the physical creators
of the picturebooks, which prepares the child’s encounter with the gaps. here is
no gap without contours; a gap is deined by the space around it. he didactic gap
highlights at the same time two irreducible dimensions of the didactic discourse:
hollowness and fullness, control and release, determinacy and indeterminacy, adult-
centredness and desire for the child. Gaps are at once enclosed by the texts, and al-
most ininitely “illable”; they are the Mary Poppins’s bags of the didactic discourse.
I said “almost ininitely”, because of course it is incorrect to argue that gaps
invite all readerly interpretations and illing-in. It is only when the reader’s in-
terpretive freedom is curbed to espouse the possibilities raised by the text that it
becomes valuable. For instance, the young reader is “free” to interpret the ending
of John Burningham’s Granpa (2003) as the grandfather’s death, as a departure to
a retirement home, as a kidnapping by aliens, or as his having suddenly shrunk so
much that he is no longer visible to the naked eye. But only the most liberal educa-
tor (and certainly no literary critic) could insist that these various interpretations
are equally valid, and most readers young and old could intuitively rank them in
order of plausibility. he “freedom” of the reader to ill in the iconotextual gap
loses meaning when it overlooks the more or less gentle pushes of the iconotext,
everywhere “around” the gaps, towards certain interpretations.
Ironically, thus, gaps have paraphrasable content. Even an extremely sophis-
ticated iconotext such as Anthony Browne’s Zoo (1992) can be summed up in
a “reasonable” way, to quote Eco. Jane Doonan’s analysis of the iconotext thus
includes, on the same level as the description of the pictures, a description of its
“message”: “he composite text … questions the value of caging wild animals for
21. Again, this is by no means restricted to picturebooks. Why children’s literature critics focus
particularly on picturebooks as gap-studded texts cannot be explained easily. It could be hypoth-
esised, irstly, that the presence of a double narrator (verbal and visual) makes them so evidently
dialogic that the presence of gaps is an overwhelming aspect of the reading experience; secondly,
that the establishment of the gap as foundational to picturebook theory engendered a powerful
critical relex to get back to this notion more frequently than in, say, teenage literature, where
critics focused more from the start on questions of ideology and identity; thirdly, that picture-
books are a more convenient medium for studies of reader-response than longer works; fourthly
and contentiously perhaps, that postmodern examples of the medium can be so impressively
sophisticated, and so cryptic, that they do indeed instinctively appear to be more full of “gaps”
than other children’s texts.
the casual pleasure of the majority of visitors” (Doonan 1993, cited in Arizpe and
Styles 2003: 77). here is little doubt, here again, that the gaps are fully part of the
didactic discourse of the iconotext: they have ideological purposes, and there is a
limit to how far their interpretation can go. Of course this is an adult interpreta-
tion, and “reasonableness” is here a highly aetonormative concept. But Arizpe and
Styles’ study shows that “most children read Zoo as a book which is severely critical
about animals being held in captivity”, though “there is no reference to this in the
written text” (2003: 79), and “for children to judge that this is a book about how
humans treat animals… they have to be able to interpret irony and read moral
ideas into pictures” (id.).
his suggests that there is indeed a didactic purpose to the gaps, and a norma-
tive interpretation of them. he development of this interpretation coincides with
the acculturation of the child, and their increased engagement with iconotexts. If
anything, the didactic function of the gaps in picturebooks (namely, the balance
between adult authority and child “freedom” of interpretation) could be said to
increase alongside readerly sophistication. his paradoxical phenomenon supports
the argument that not only are these gaps inherent in the didactic discourse of the
iconotexts but also that any shrewd, mighty interpretation of them by the child
reader can only occur with a certain amount of iconotextual literacy.
So is there really any “freedom” for the young reader of picturebooks? he
question is not restricted to children’s literature; in English literary criticism, it
has been debated ever since the advent of reader-response theory. As Fish notes,
critiquing Iser’s theory, “the reader [Iser] can imagine is always the creature of the
machine he has already set in motion; in every analysis the reader is described as
being ‘guided’, ‘controlled’, ‘induced’ and even ‘jerked’” (1981: 12). Iser could here
be seen as equivalent to Arizpe and Styles, and Fish as sceptical Nodelman high-
lighting the “optimism” of such claims. Perhaps, indeed, the young or old reader
is sometimes visionary, or sometimes particularly creative in reaction to a text,
but these responses can only exist as afordances given by the text, as moments of
loss in an otherwise ordered world. As a result, as Eco says, “readers are generally
willing to make their own choices … on the assumption that some will be more
reasonable than others” (1995: 8).
he notion of “reasonable choice” in reading dynamics should immediately
set of the aetonormative alarm, just as Iser’s “guiding”, “controlling”, “inducing”
text should point, when transferred to children’s literature, at a hidden adult egre-
giously pulling the interpretive strings while pretending all the while that the child
is moving on their own. his is what Brean Hammond disparagingly denounces
when analysing Iser’s idea that Henry Fielding is an exemplary writer in terms of
the freedom he afords his readers:
Fielding is ofered to us as a writer who gives the reader considerable freedom to

participate. It soon turns out that the participation being ofered is rather like the
kind of “audience participation” theatre I recollect being popular in the 1960s.
his was participation entirely on the theatre company’s terms. (1993: 75)
Hammond is here criticising, of course, not Fielding’s skill as a writer, but rather
Iser’s insistence that what makes him such a good writer are the blank spaces he lets
the reader ill. Are picturebook scholars similarly misguided to lay such emphasis
on gaps as a guarantee of their quality and of readerly freedom, when in fact the
gaps they highlight are entirely constitutive of the didactic message of such texts?
Again, when children’s literature is concerned, this is not just an aesthetic question;
if adult creators are indeed orchestrating a 1960s-style “audience participation the-
atre”, which adult scholars blissfully sanctify as evidence of high quality, then there is
an aetonormative issue dominating picturebook theory, criticism and empirical re-
search that is directly at odds with its celebrated empowerment of the young reader.
But limitations and guidance can be reclaimed, and in fact implicitly are in
picturebook research. Rather than bemoaning the didactic message of Zoo as a
limitation on readerly “freedom” of interpretation, even the “optimistic” and child-
centred Arizpe and Styles agree that it is a good thing that children did not miss out
on this interpretation of the picturebook. While other elements of the picturebook,
such as Mum’s place in the family and her psychological state, may give rise to
profound relections by children and adults alike, there is a sense that the denun-
ciation of the treatment of animals by humans is the unspoken manifesto of Zoo,
let for the reader to sort out. he implied child reader and didactic addressee is
constructed by the text as the decoder of this implicit message, in preference to other
interpretations. he child’s might is called upon insofar as it leans on this snippet
of adult authority. here can be no meaningful action spurred by this picturebook
if the young reader fails to grasp the contents of the main didactic gap at its core.
So the gap does contain adult knowledge and authority; however, it does not
mean that it disempowers the reader. If the child fails to interpret the gaps in
Zoo as a critique of zoos, the picturebook becomes meaningless. If the child does
understand the critique, its meaning emerges. But what still remains for the child
to make this meaning truly meaningful is far beyond the adult’s control, and far
beyond the reading of the book: it concerns the modiication of the child and future
adult’s actions according to this implicit “message”. his modiication is unpredict-
able. his is where the full potential of the didactic address arises: in a temporality
unavailable to the adult authority, and therefore inluenced but not predicted by
the didactic address. he critique of zoos is still within the adult-speciic power of
the children’s book – authority. But acting upon that critique meaningfully is the
domain of the child reader’s speciic power – might.
his might is a type of temporal commitment, which is precisely what Iser’s

theory puts forward; he does not deny the coercive aspect of the “gap-illing” pro-
cess, as for him, gaps force the reader to commit, to make decisions regarding
the text (1974: 280). In the case of children’s picturebooks, this commitment is
indubitably didactic, controlled to a large extent by the iconotextual relationships,
and of temporal nature; but by virtue of being a commitment (a prominent ex-
istentialist concept), it engages the reader beyond the experience of reading; it
structures, prepares, but also disturbs, future encounters with texts and with the
world. Bernard Harrison (1993) proposes that gaps may perhaps be more happily
labelled “stumbling-blocks”, moments in the text where there exist
ironic warnings to [the reader] that the paths his feet are to travel have not been
made smooth for him: that they abound in rough places where he must be ever on
his guard against being misled by his own assumptions and fore-understandings.
(1993: 165)
However easy to overstep, stumbling-blocks, to take Harrison’s term, represent

encounters with a textual authority imperatively asking of the reader that they
commit to a certain interpretation, by unsettling them. his commitment shapes
future encounters with text, and although it is didactic, it is also laden with uncer-
tainty. Both gaps and stumbling-blocks, Leona Toker notes, “are metaphorical ways
of thinking about textual stimuli for non-automatic modiications of the reader’s
attitudes or trains of thought” (1994: 157). hey represent the awareness, on the
part of readers, that a text will guide their interpretation and might – a point dear to
Iser – have a durable impact on their lives; and on the part of the texts themselves,
that the structure put into place to transmit a didactic command is to a degree
insuicient, holey and “rough”, whether wilfully or not – its impact on the reader
“non-automatic”, uncertain, and always moving beyond the book.
Picturebook theory, criticism and empirical research are marked by a para-
doxical adult desire. On the one hand, the unpredictability and the indeterminacy
of child readers’ responses are celebrated; on the other, these responses must
always be contained within gaps that are adult-orchestrated. he gap is taken as a
sign of adult creators’ control upon their own didactic tendencies. However, there
is knowledge communicated. his paradox is, recognisably, the same one that this
volume has reiterated a number of times by now; it is the adult’s double desire,
irst, to channel the child reader into a speciic line of relection, and second, to
trigger unpredictable responses branching out from that line of relection. he
second desire suggests that, to an extent, the adult authority does not perceive
itself as having the answers to the questions it asks, nor the power to act upon the
considerations they trigger. he didactic gap in picturebooks, on a metacritical
level as well as on a critical one, illustrates the problem of the limit of adult power,
and the resultant fascination with child power. I now move from this illustration
of the tensions of didacticism to a more theoretical understanding of the adult-
child didactic discourse.
Deining the adult-child didactic relation
he didactic mode constructs childhood as, to put it into existentialist jargon, situ-
ated potential. In other words, it represents the adults’ desire both to contain the
child within their own project, and to throw it forth into an unknowable future;
both to recognise the child as agent, and to turn it into an instrument. he didactic
is a highly situated form of discourse because it only comes into existence when, in
a certain context, the symbolic statuses of the speaker and the addressee relative to
one another require an adjustment of the speaker’s usual discourse to correspond
to the imagined needs of the addressee. More precisely, I posit that the didactic
mode is underscored by a perceived gap, in what is being talked about, between
the knowledge of the speaker and that of the addressee. By “knowledge” I mean not
only information, but also the partly unspeakable baggage of emotions and beliefs
which comes with experience. A didactic mode of discourse is engaged when some
of the motivation for the speaker’s address is a reduction of this gap, by providing
knowledge, or knowledge-enabling tools.
Many didactic situations which adults engage in are easily recognisable insofar
as they take place within speciic educational or instructional contexts. Someone tak-
ing Spanish lessons, a group of senior managers listening to a motivational speaker,
spouses going to couple counselling; all can be said to have willingly entered, for a
limited amount of time, into a didactic mode of conversation with other adults. It
is mostly unproblematic, because it is assumed that the beneits retrieved from this
temporary lapse into the didactic outweigh the relationship of symbolic subservience
and domination that it temporarily establishes. But of course, in cases of sociocul-
tural or economic inequality amongst adults – prominently, for instance, class-, race-
or gender-related – the didactic mode might automatically be established between
adults on a regular basis, and possibly to the indignation of the addressee.
“Mansplaining” is a good example of this phenomenon. his term, coined by
feminist bloggers, describes a form of paternalistic explanation which some men
unconsciously (or indeed, in some cases, consciously) engage in when addressing
a woman. In this case, the didactic discourse employed by the speaker is perceived
by the addressee as illegitimate and disempowering. Any didactic situation is thus
likely to depend heavily on, irst, socioculturally-engineered representations of the
relationship between speaker and addressee; second, its speciic working contexts;
and, third, on the tone of the message, that it to say on form. “Mansplaining” is
perceived as a problematic indicator of gender inequality in society and culture

for all of these reasons simultaneously. he addressee rejects the assumption of a
gap between her knowledge and the speaker’s, because she suspects that he posits
this gap solely on the basis of gender stereotyping. At the same time, the context
of the didactic discourse does not seem to her to be legitimate: she has not asked
for a transfer of information or knowledge to take place, and thus perceives it as
unwelcome and gratuitous. Finally, she is disturbed by the tone – the form – of the
discourse. hough this aspect is more diicult to theorise, the language sounds
threatening to her because it is not employed solely to convey information (the
“explanation”), but also to make it clear that this information will, ultimately, not
remedy the gap in knowledge between him and her. In other words, “mansplain-
ing” is perturbing for the individual (and ideologically problematic) because it
is not just a temporary and legitimate lapse into the didactic mode for an adult
woman; it perpetuates the myth of the ignorance of women relative to men. hus,
while an adult life is full of contextual, situated moments of didactic discourse, the
didactic is not – or should not ideally be – a permanent mode of discourse for an
adult (whether as speaker or as addressee).
However, in the case of the adult-child relationship, this basic deinition of the
didactic (articulated around a central distinction between legitimate and oppressive
didactic discourses) does not quite function in the same way. We cannot think about
the adult-child relationship, and the imagined gap in knowledge between adult and
child, without linking it to the symbolic temporal otherness of the child for the
adult. We need to incorporate within the deinition of the adult-child relationship
an understanding of the period of latency between the utterance of the message and
its potential realisation. In this latency, in this delay, in this wait, to borrow from
Grimaldi’s vocabulary, there is more than information transiting; there is also the
possibility for the didactic addressee to do something unexpected with that infor-
mation. here is the always-present notion that the “result” of the didactic address
may well take place ater the death of the didactic speaker. his is why the didactic
relationship between adult and child treads the line between unidentiiable existen-
tial aspirations and the more straightforward desire to instruct.
What is, therefore, the temporal status of the didactic utterance? On one level,
it is a discourse with very little presentness to it. It is uttered from a position of
heightened awareness of a past experience – from a position of authority – and it
seeks its enactment in a non-immediate temporality. his temporality, possibly,
will be reached beyond the existence of the speaker. It is therefore a discourse of
temporal instability, and also a discourse permeated with uncertainty. here is no
assessing, at least not immediately, the consequences of the didactic utterance. It
may or may not be remembered, it may or may not be followed, it may or may not
be interpreted in the way one desires.
he adult-child conversation is likely to imply an alteration, voluntary or not,

of the speaker’s discourse, to adapt to the addressee’s understanding, perceived
as diferent. It is diicult to envisage a situation of adult-child interaction which
would not be didactic. If adult and child recognise each other and themselves as
belonging to symbolic adulthood and symbolic childhood, an alteration of their
discourses is a condition of their encounter – an encounter with a perceived tem-
poral alterity – and this altered communication precipitates the didactic. heorist
of childhood Daniel T. Cook explains this inescapable dimension of the adult-child
relationship:
Tensions of voice, of persona, and of the locus of decision-making are present
in every personal interaction with a child, in every depiction of a child, in every
iteration of childhood, and in every gesture made by, toward, and about children.
Each word to a child seems like a directive; each decision made on its behalf or in
response to a request favors some aspects of the world over others; every lifestyle
choice is potentially didactic. (Cook 2002: 7)
his is what philosopher of education Charles Bingham (2008) calls a “perfor-

mative” vision of authority: the notion that adult authority over children is not
characterised by the content of the speech, but rather by its very utterance. he
“tensions” that Cook notes are symptoms of the formal relation of authority be-
tween adult and children, and they are at the basis of the notion that children’s
literature is an intrinsically didactic form of literature – an idea shared, among
others, by Lesnik-Oberstein, who argues that children’s books “are controlled and
formed, implicitly and explicitly, by the didactic impulse” (1994: 38). Nodelman
(2008) and Nikolajeva (2010a) are likewise proponents of this view. But we should
not, of course, jump too quickly from this descriptive statement (which remains
a description of a socioculturally-engineered state) to a normative one. Is it right
that the adult-child relationship should be characterised by didacticism? Who
beneits from this situation?
First, if all that were at stake was the transmission of knowledge to remedy a
perceived ignorance, it would seem that the child addressee would systematically
beneit from the exchange. he speaker, according to this view, has not gained any-
thing from the didactic situation. It would seem, supericially, that it is a perfectly
selless mode of discourse on the adult speaker’s part.
But evidently the exact opposite could be argued (corresponding more to the
pejorative understanding of the word “didacticism” in children’s literature criticism
and in education). he adult, as leader of the didactic project, having imparted
both knowledge and knowledge of previous ignorance, has reinforced his or her
position and weakened the addressee’s. he didactic mode is here a form of power
play: the speaker’s assessment of the addressee’s ignorance leads to the speaker’s
choice of what knowledge to impart, how to impart it, and what knowledge to
withdraw. he speaker’s position of superiority, ater the exchange, would thus be
strengthened, even as the two agents have been technically made equal regarding
the knowledge imparted. he addressee, meanwhile, even if richer in knowledge
than before, has been objectiied by the speaker’s didactic project. his didactic
discourse could be called, tongue-in-cheek, “adultsplaining”.
Crudely speaking, these two extreme views correspond to two critical posi-
tions regarding the value of the didactic discourse. One is the pedagogical view,
encouraging explicitly educational forms of children’s literature as a worthwhile
transmission of knowledge from adult to child. In this view, the child is made
simultaneously more knowledgeable and more aware of past ignorance, and there-
fore encouraged to grow up in the knowledge that knowledge can always be ex-
panded. Adults might be willingly giving up some of their time, in other words,
both to situate the child, and to “prepare” the child, whatever this “preparation”
means, for the future. Benevolent, selless adult speakers are here seen as bountiful
givers of knowledge, and organisers of the didactic experience.
he second view – more prominent, arguably, in current critical discourses
about children’s literature and also in child-centred pedagogy – is that the didactic
impulse is one of the ways through which both the normativity and the “power” of
adulthood are reinforced, in part because it forces the child to notice the gap be-
tween adulthood and childhood even as knowledge is being imparted. Since, in the
particular discourse of children’s literature, knowledge is oten equated with age
and experience – a corollary of the aetonormative bias described by Nikolajeva –
age becomes metonymous with superiority, conirming the paradigmatic view that
knowledge is age-related and that age is power.
In both cases, the argument hinges on whether identifying and illing a gap in
someone’s knowledge is an act of altruism or oppression. But my view is diferent
to these two, as highlighted by the conclusion to my analysis of the “readerly gap”
in picturebooks. Rather than focusing on the knowledge transmitted, I focus on
the equilibrium of adult and child imagined temporalities in the didactic project.
From this perspective, the balance of power between speaker and addressee in the
didactic discourse depends less on the gap between the two than on the modula-
tion of both parties’ knowledge of the world in the present and for the future. It is
neither a selless endeavour on the part of the adult nor an oppressive or manipula-
tive one. It reveals, instead, the adult’s malaise with their knowledge and “baggage”
of experience: the feeling that there should be something to be done with it that is
beyond their means.
he adult wants to transmit something: that desire is undeniable. It may be
seen as existential; the individual, says Grimaldi, is “mediation” (2013: 13), char-
acterised by “tendencies” rather than stasis. hus it wants to communicate, to
transfuse itself into others: “As it has its being in what is always to come, as it feels
itself only within a perpetual wait, how could it not have the feeling of being just
a passage, a transition?” (id.). Sartre’s whole theorisation of committed literature
(littérature engagée) is also based on the premise that we do want and need to
project ourselves into others. he more the individual feels itself incomplete, and
feels time closing up, so to speak, onto its existence, the more it engages into trans-
mitting to others what little it has accumulated. But the adult individual has been
socioculturally conditioned to perceive knowledge as synonymous with “experi-
ence”, with “adulthood”; and yet it may be unclear what could be achieved with this
knowledge. his dissatisfaction, I posit, triggers the didactic; it pushes the adult to
communicate with the child.
By unloading some knowledge onto the child, the adult is not solely imposing
it: they are seeking to convert it, to transform it, to make sense of it. he didactic
discourse would be a waste of time, so to speak, on the part of the adult author-
ity, if there were not somewhere, somehow, the conviction that the child is better
equipped to make meaning emerge. In other words, adults are both giving children
something that they know, and asking children to process it so as to tell them
something they do not know. he adult tendency towards the didactic betrays
the adult’s desire to know more. his model should not be seen as teleological or
intentional; but the recourse to the didactic, the time wasted imparting knowledge,
makes little sense if we assume that the adult does not perceive it as a way to fulil
desires beyond the selless wish to teach the child.
his turns the didactic discourse into, essentially, a bet; a leap of faith; even, as
shall be discussed, a game. Since it is an utterance which lacks presentness, it is no
more than an attempt to form or frame a futurity which is condemned to remain
essentially unknowable. Signiicantly, therefore, the didactic utterance is a pro-
foundly risky mode of discourse, stretched between a temporality which does not
exist anymore (the past, and the property of the adult) and a temporality which
does not exist yet (the future, and the property of the child). his conception of
the didactic discourse goes against the “economic” model of education, which, as
Biesta notes, is characterised by the assumption that “consumers know what their
needs are and that they know what they want” (2006: 19). By “consumers” one
can understand “learners” here – “economic” education, forcefully denigrated by
Biesta, relies on a conception of the teacher-learner relationship as transparent.
his relationship is instead, in existentialist terms, ambiguous, because of this
temporal tension and because of the fact that it can only be articulated in rela-
tion to an other. Bathed in the symbolic discrepancy in temporality between the
two diferent “ages” of adulthood and childhood, the didactic utterance is both
an attempt to reconcile them and a sign of the profound failure to do so with any
form of certainty.
his ambiguity is linked to the consciousness’s propensity for imagination.

he imagination is one of the ways through which, in existentialist terms, we can
detect that our consciousness is spangled with absences; or, more accurately, that
anything present can be layered over with something absent, thereby demonstrat-
ing the presence of absence in existence. Grimaldi puts forward several acts of the
imagination which betray the “nothingness” that our consciousness can create.
Worry, fear, hope, and of course reverie and daydreaming are means by which
consciousness shows its transcendence upon nature; by imagining, we are able
to visualise what is not there or not yet there. One of Grimaldi’s most profound
metaphysical questions is how consciousness can possibly have erupted in nature
and yet be characterised by the insistent desire – and ability – to transcend nature.
But there are other acts of consciousness which could be in essence imaginative
acts without seeming quite so active – or being felt as quite so intrusive – as day-
dream, anxiety, hope, etc. he act of speaking to a child (the didactic discourse) is
also an act of the imagination, insofar as it signals, oten unknowingly to the adult,
the presence of an absence in the discourse. he words and other communicative
signs are “hollow”, so to speak, because their “reality” spills over the moment of
communication. It overlows into two temporalities which once were and once
could be, respectively the past and the future.
he adult-child didactic relation is perhaps par excellence the discourse of the
non-existent and the non-present, and therefore it is supremely an imaginative
form of discourse, always riddled with openings and gaps. It is an act of the imagi-
nation insofar as the recipient of the didactic discourse – the child – is an imagined
iller of absences. Compared with the adult’s sense of misitting, of overlowing, of
lacking adjustment with the world, the child as symbol appears arrogantly “full”.
he child is one of those portals by which hope comes into the world, in the form
of a possible iller of gaps. his hope, crucially, must remain indeterminate: the
child is what gives back to the adult some sense of indeterminacy.
Why would the child symbolise this indeterminate hope for future comple-
tion? A partial answer may be given by sociological explanations, in particular the
concept of symbolic childhood. he didactic act as act of the imagination is always
dependent on the varying constructs associated with childhood, which synthetize
current and past anxieties about society, politics and culture. he didactic discourse
is an imaginative discourse because it must navigate the diferent layers of beliefs
and ideas into which the concept of childhood sediments, at diferent time peri-
ods and in diferent civilisations. As a result, it is always a discourse in precarious
equilibrium, a discourse constantly verging on the non-existent and the unrealis-
able. he phenomenon I posited at the beginning of this book – the passage from
a past-bound erotic of nostalgia (Rose) to a future-bound, existential erotic of un-
predictability – is correlated with symbolic changes in the perception of childhood.
Arguably, the concept of childhood has recently started to “resonate” particularly

well with the adult existential project because it is now well-positioned to align spe-
ciic sociocultural conceptions with tensions of a more existential nature. Entering
the didactic mode also betrays both an awareness of transience and an awareness
of the younger other as a way of perpetuating one’s project.
hese two ideas may sound relatively basic and widely shared: anyone asked
will assert that they are perfectly aware of their mortality, as well as of the use of
education in transmitting values and beliefs. he latter may occur on an individual
scope (through parenting, and engaging with speciic children) and on a larger
social level (through educational policies and cultural productions for children).
But it is clear, judging by the nature of the didactic discourse and of discourses
surrounding that discourse, that these two aspects of the human condition are not
accepted peacefully and rationally. What the didactic act hints at – the reason why
it is so paradoxical and so ambiguous – is the ambiguity of existence itself, which
has little to do with children per se. he didactic discourse is an imaginative type of
discourse which uses a concrete output (the child) to remedy a perceived absence
of alignment between the individual consciousness and the world.
his project, of course, treats the child as much as a symbol as an independent
agent. he dynamics of desire that surround the didactic discourse, especially in
children’s literature, are characterised by a struggle between two entities equally
desirous to reach closure, and equally unlikely to do so in any satisfactory manner.
he child addressee is constructed as asking “What can you give me?”, while the
adult authority retorts, “What can you do with what I give you?”. hese questions
are bound to remain within the realm of the potential, of the unrealised. Since the
former is unlikely to process the latter’s git with any sort of world-changing result,
and since the latter is unlikely, in the irst place, even to be able to communicate
that git with any sort of success, a nihilistic conclusion would be that the didactic
discourse is doomed to constant failure.
But when dealing with desire, such terms as “fulilment” and “unfulilment”
are of course impossible to associate with either “failure” or “success”. Since the
child is the adult’s instrument, assumed to contain potency or might, it is part of
the adult’s project for the world. But because the child is also understood by the
adult as a person, and therefore an independent and a fallible entity, it also sporadi-
cally slides out of this project, and gains independence in doing so. he didactic
discourse betrays the efort to encompass these two states of childhood under the
adult’s gaze, oten to the beneit of one over the other.
Of course, children’s literature can be and oten is overly prescriptive, slid-
ing from a didactic mode to didacticism. A perfect illustration of “adultsplain-
ing”, the uncalled-for, undesirable form of the didactic in children’s literature,
can be found in J. K. Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard (2008), where Albus
Dumbledore’s annotations to “he Wizard and the Hopping-Pot” include a comi-

cally Bowdlerised, sanitized version of the wizardly tale by “Mrs Bloxam”, ending
with the happy conclusion that “Wee Willykins kissed and hugged the hoppitty pot
and promised always to help the dollies and never to be an old grumpy-wumpkins
again” (18). his humorously exaggeration of didactic tales foregrounds here the
exasperation of the adult – but also the empathetic attitude towards the child –
faced with uncalled-for didacticism in children’s texts.
However, interestingly, Dumbledore then notes:
Mrs Bloxam’s tale has met the same response from generations of wizarding chil-
dren: uncontrollable retching, followed by an immediate demand to have the book
taken from them and mashed into pulp. (Rowling 2008: 18)
he overly prescriptive, unproblematic, idealistic children’s tale, the text implies,

is not and cannot be met passively. he child is not the disempowered recipient of
the adult’s utopian visions of the world, but rather a discerning didactic addressee,
who desires the adult’s knowledge but may also respond violently if this knowledge
is dishonest, belittling or over-prescriptive. Since the adult depends on the child
to complete the message, to act upon the knowledge transmitted, the child’s “un-
controllable retching” in this particular instance of didacticism disarms the adult
perhaps more than it hurts the child.
he adult authority is ineluctably altered by its partial deference to the child.
hrough the didactic discourse, adults acknowledge their own incapacity to be the
adults they desire to be. Children’s literature is replete with such dark frustrations;
Nikolajeva has described it ironically as “a sort of storytelling therapy for frustrated
adults” (2002: 306). It is, consequently, an ideal lens through which to observe the
frustrations of the didactic mode – to analyse its potential “therapeutic” efects,
and highlight the moments when its apparently rigid prescriptions collapse.
Collapsed prescriptions in the didactic discourse
In 2012, the small independent San Francisco publisher Manic D Press released the
iconotextual picturebook A Rule Is To Break: A Child’s Guide to Anarchy, written
by John Seven and illustrated by Jana Christie. It did not go unnoticed: widely re-
viewed, it was condemned by a Tea Party publication as “horrendous” and “down-
right shocking” (Odom 2012), which probably improved its sales. he text reads
as a list of rules or guidelines, energetically enacted in the pictures by a little girl
dressed as a fox (named Wild Child on the back cover). he irst spread claims:
“he opposite of rules is anarchy! here are plenty of ways to make anarchy”. From
“Don’t be like everybody else – be yourself!” to “Don’t buy it – build it!” through
to “Do what you want”, those “ways” are as prescriptive as they are liberating. he
liar’s paradox of the title – “A Rule Is To Break” – expresses in an exaggerated form
the self-contradictions of the didactic discourse of children’s literature.
It is not my concern to discuss the validity of the word “anarchy” to refer
to what could be seen as a liberal humanist, child-centred, mildly anti-capitalist
educational ideology. Rather, I am interested in the intrinsic tension, in this text,
between prescription and liberation; between the imperative and the speculative.
he prescription in A Rule Is To Break unravels itself just ater it has been woven.
he formally prescriptive aspects of the text are belied by their absolute absence
of content. his picturebook illustrates the phenomenon I have been discussing
so far in this volume: the presence, in some contemporary children’s literature, of
a strong adult voice commanding the child to do something in the future, along
with the desire to let the child do so without it being fully dictated.
A Rule Is To Break, which, being a children’s book, is already didactic, is also
prescriptive. he whole text is written in the imperative; it is unclear whether the
voice is that of a narrator, “dictating” actions to the main character which she per-
forms in the visual text, or whether it is Wild Child’s own voice, describing what
she is doing in the pictures. he didactic text cannot truly be said to be instructional
or informative – only the irst sentence, “he opposite of rules is anarchy!” conveys
some kind of factual knowledge. And yet Wild Child is most deinitely faced with
strange pedagogic doublespeak. One doublespread claims: “When someone says,
‘Work!’, you say WHY?” and the next, “Educate yourself. Use your Brain” (Seven &
Christy 2012). he adult prescription, whether we understand it as ventriloquized
by the child character or by an invisible narrator, is self-contradictory, and this is in
line with the prescription of the picturebook: since “a rule is to break”, the implied
child reader is let to choose whether or not to accept these rules, with no particular
pattern, leading to potentially unpredictable choices. he “prescription” soon col-
lapses onto itself: the “orders” given by the text are un-followable.
Additional contradictions take place in the interplay between the visual and
the textual. Wild Child’s name signals a space outside of culture, outside of social
norms. Forced out of the adult-controlled world by the adult prescription, she
is represented as taking her performance of childhood into her own hands. But
her singularity, which is extolled early on – “Don’t look like everybody else! Be
YOU!” – is questionable. She is shown sewing for herself a fox costume or red
wolf costume which resembles Max’s in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild hings
Are (1963/ 2000), and engages in a similar wild rumpus later on with a clique of
monsters, robots and sea and earth creatures. On an intervisual level at least, she
has a precursor. Like Max, she models herself on a “wild” animal. Like Max, she
appears terribly alone. Although apparently deliriously happy amongst her hybrid
friends, she is clearly segregated from other humans. In fact, the picturebook never
seems to be willing to tell us what will happen if and when Wild Child (re)inte-
grates a human society. he endpapers, covered in the circled A of anarchy, form
visual parentheses to her carnivalesque exploration of “wild” life. his wild life is
essentially solipsistic. he picturebook is full of empty, colourful pages, in which
Wild Child hovers as if in space. Perched on a tree, reading, encountering alterity
solely in the form of words on a page or fantastic creatures carrying party balloons,
Wild Child is fundamentally deprived of the problem of others.
his is not a good thing. Being “free” of others may supericially feel like heaven,
since hell is other people, but as detailed in the next chapter, others provide the neces-
sary limitations on my freedom for it to blossom within its situation. he picturebook
may claim “hink for yourself ”, but our anarchic Wild Child cannot actually think, in
existentialist terms, until there is another consciousness to recognise as other. “When
we say ‘I think’”, says Sartre (1948a: 45), “we are attaining to ourselves in the presence
of the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves”. he other
is indispensable to me; it limits me and thus gives rise to me as freedom. Beauvoir
conirms that “anarchy”, as envisaged for instance in A Rule Is To Break, is a false kind
of freedom: “To be free does not mean to have the power of doing anything; it means
being able to transcend the given towards an open future; the existence of the other
as freedom deines my situation and it is even the condition of my own freedom”
(1947: 113). My own endeavour snugly espouses the shape of the limitations the other
imposes on me, and as I try to push them aside, I rise as an agent.
But for this to occur, I need an education in dealing with others – I need, as
Beauvoir details, to learn to accommodate the violence of the encounter with alter-
ity, and to understand the other as an ambiguous consciousness, just like I am an
ambiguous consciousness. We cannot know what will become of our foxy friend
once she experiences for the irst time this encounter, once her joyous crowd of
cute monsters and robots is replaced by the gazes of others who want to claim part
of her territory, and may not be happy with her doing “what she wants” (especially
her not taking baths, as prescribed on one of the doublespreads). his fundamental
knowledge is denied to her and to the reader.
his fantasy of a child in a vacuum may seem to revert to an Arcadian vision
of childhood as “held in place”, in Rose’s words, and secluded from society. But
both the child character in the picturebook and the implied child reader are con-
structed as constantly on the move towards adulthood. hey are both in becom-
ing. here is a sense of urgency in the accumulation of imperatives and of their
performance, reminiscent of the current trend in list-books of “things to do before
you die”. Wild Child is allowed by the carnivalesque set-up of the picturebook to
satisfy all her desires and act upon every single one of her wishes in quite a fran-
tic manner, but this carnivalesque aspect is forward-looking and transformative.
Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque implies that any reversal of traditional order
or temporary empowerment relects on the arbitrariness of that traditional order

(see Nikolajeva 2005: 91). In this case, the wild rumpus is supposed to pave the
way for a future adulthood blissfully free of subservience to social conventions,
which are revealed as unjustiied. But the gap is vast between the performance of
“anarchy” in a vacuum and within an adult society – revealing the adult voice as
unmistakably “frustrated”, to borrow Nikolajeva’s expression. he clear adult in-
junction to stop respecting rules is counterbalanced by an absence of suggestions
as to how this could be realised outside of the picturebook.
he didactic discourse of the picturebook cannot fulil its own desires: it can
only present fantasised and simpliied versions of them, because the adult voice
has no clear knowledge to convey about them. It can happily give many orders
and prescriptions, but it cratily eludes the central matter of their implementation.
Knowledge, which would appear to be the most evident “thing” communicated
between adult and child in the didactic mode, is lacking. Because the didactic is
a fundamentally unstable mode relying on a network of imaginative statements
and on a paradoxical understanding of when this knowledge should be “digested”
and acted upon, the knowledge transmitted can only be a knowledge-in-waiting,
a knowledge-for-the-future, in other words, not really knowledge at all. To the ap-
parent solidity of the form in the picturebook responds an evanescence of content.
Entering the didactic thus becomes the equivalent of giving orders that are gram-
matically correct but devoid of guidelines as to their application. A Rule Is To Break
emits a great wealth of orders, assuming that the addressee will indeed see some of
them as worthy of obedience. But it mostly relies on the child addressee’s striving to
create or ind a situation in which this may be achieved, to varying levels of literal
interpretation. In other words, in the prescriptive examples of didactic discourse
there is an excess of formal expliciteness, strongly framed by a situation in which it
is seen to be appropriate for the child to be talked to in this way by the adult. But this
excess compensates for a content that has little clear meaning for its child addressee.
In A Rule Is To Break, of course, the form is the content; any nonsensical
order remains an order, insofar as what characterises an order is precisely its form.
herefore the didactic is an imperative mode, a prescriptive discourse regardless
of how much its content stands to examination. he didactic is only characterised
by the presence of an individual addressed as fundamentally lacking knowledge,
and as able to act (and responsible for acting) upon the new knowledge received
from another individual. However, since the didactic discourse of the children’s
book is enmeshed in a network of situations and contexts characterised by tem-
poral otherness, the didactic mode only functions because of that relationship.
And since this relationship is fraught with a lack of knowledge on both sides, the
didactic discourse – in form and content – is bound to be so too; the knowledge
communicated is bound to be found lacking.
he didactic mode, arguably, is premised on the fact that the knowledge it

transmits is fundamentally incomplete. here can be no didactic transmission
of knowledge which does not assume that there is something to be gained from
its transmission; therefore knowledge is not complete until it is transmitted. And
since the child is the receptacle of this particular knowledge, there must be in
the didactic act the belief that a time will come beyond the adult’s power when
the child’s acting upon this knowledge will complete it. Maybe the child reader
inspired by Wild Child will igure out a way of applying all these rules and orders
in the way she wants amongst others; that hope motivates the whole picturebook.
But the picturebook is of course remarkably quiet as to how this may be achieved,
as it evidently cannot bring such an answer.
A Rule Is To Break gives a hodgepodge of unfollowable orders so as to highlight
the nullity of orders and to trigger a diferent, creative kind of action in the child
reader. In other words, the intensely prescriptive text self-destroys in order to re-
veal escape routes – gaps – for the implied child reader to create new meaning. By
creating an absurdly determined space (albeit one of anarchy and disorder), the
adult authority in the picturebook attempts to trigger indeterminacy in the future
spaces created by the child readers. However, as in most didactic discourses, the
adult voice is not just selless and bountiful. he collapse of all prescription does
not mean the collapse of adult authority. A Rule Is To Break still irmly signals the
presence of an adult authority dissatisied with its current situation, and demand-
ing that a mighty child address this situation in better ways.
Knowledge in the didactic discourse is characterised by incompleteness and a
tension towards the future. It is thrown at the child, so to speak, because the child’s
futurity and temporal otherness make the adult consider the possibility of comple-
tion: all of a sudden, the end of the wait seems to be within reach. he child is one
of the entry points of the adult’s waiting consciousness into the world, but does not
really solve its troubles. here is no inished knowledge in the didactic discourse,
just as there is no inished knowledge in the world; the pursuit of the latter, with
its problems and paradoxes, is refracted within the former.
he implied child reader in children’s literature – and more speciically in very
prescriptive children’s literature, which foregrounds the question of child agency –
is not just an instrument in the adult agency’s project; that would mean that the
adult knows where the project is going. And the adult does not know where the
project is going. he adult simply desires it to go somewhere. he implied child
reader is, thus, not “part of ”, or “a helping hand in” the adult’s project: the child is
the project. his needs to be explored in relation to the common pigeonholing of
child igures and implied child readers in children’s literature criticism according
to their status as subjects or objects.
Subject but object but project: he child “thrown around”
Texts of children’s literature criticism are spangled with attempts to pin down the
constructed children of the texts as either subjects or objects. his efort implies
a correlation between being a subject and being powerful (active, decisive, con-
structive) and being an object and being powerless (passive, reiied, constructed).
Etymologically, the object is that which is thrown into the harsh spotlight of ob-
servation. he child-object is the Rosean child, trapped in the gaze of the adult,
Alice Liddell on her eternal boat; the child who cannot exist outside of the adult’s
look, and lasts only as long as it is under scrutiny. his type of constructed child
is the object of the adult agency, of its desires, fears, beliefs, ambitions. In this un-
derstanding of the term, the child is a tool, reiied and instrumentalised to suit the
adult’s purposes. And once these objectives are met, it is discarded, having fulilled
what it was created for. his complete dependency of the constructed child-object
on the adult agency is, in theory, colonialist, invasive, oppressive.
he constructed child as subject, meanwhile, would be the critical child, the
agential child, Wild Child: the child who rejects the adult’s authoritarianism and
repression, who is its “own subject”, its “own person”; who has a “subjectivity”.
Such terms recur, oten undeined, in criticism of children’s literature. It is gener-
ally admitted that being a subject is emancipatory and “good”: aware of one’s own
desires and able to fulil them.22
I question both the distribution of “good” and “problematic” on either side of
the subject-object divide, and the validity of that divide within children’s literature.
he complexity of the status of the constructed child in children’s literature, and
speciically in contemporary children’s literature, requires a vocabulary which,
while not excluding such concepts altogether, allows for luidity between them.
he implied child reader could be thus perceived not solely as subject or object but
as project. A convenient trick of language allows all three concepts to be linked to
the verb “to throw”, which constitutes their etymological parentage – and there-
fore reaches back to the consciousness “thrown into the world” in existentialism,
and to the issue of the child “thrown into existence”. But beyond this convenient
wordplay, one can, and should, expect the child fabricated by the adult to retain
the complexity of a person, a complex person, sometimes subject and sometimes
object but, particularly in the type of literature I am looking at, transcending these
two states with an escape forward which turns one into a project.
22. I am not including here psychoanalytical conceptions of the child subject, which can be
extremely detailed and well-deined – an outstanding example being Karen Coats’s Looking
Glasses and Neverlands (2004). I am setting aside, as well, Althusserian deinitions of the subject
as “subjected to” ideology.
he ideal child-subject is oten identiied as a child-almost-adult: it is deined

by critics using the very epithets which Nodelman (2008) sees as characteristic of
the adult normativity in children’s literature. Outside of the book, the “good” child
reader is one who is able to create a “subject position”: “A mature reader will cre-
ate a subject position disconnected from the characters” (Nikolajeva 2010b: 187).
he use of the term “mature”, though readerly immaturity may be found in adult
readers, is connoted as an adult ability, associated with experience and self-
relectiveness. he child-subject is “mature” enough, ideally, to avoid identiication
with the characters. But whether this readerly position, however desirable, truly
characterises the emergence of an independent reading subject can be questioned.
Robin McCallum and John Stephens, in an otherwise rigorous and enlighten-
ing analysis of ideology and transgression in children’s literature (2011), fall into
some blurriness when describing the transgressive positions of the implied child
reader as evidence of its status as “subject”. Transgression, they state, occurs when a
tear in the hegemonic ideology exposes it as what is it – just an ideology. his phe-
nomenon presupposes two requirements on the part of the implied child reader:
“a sense of a personal identity as a subject”, and “a sense of identity as an agent”
(McCallum & Stephens 2011: 368). What these concepts seem to convey is that
“personal identity”, whatever it is, is linked both to subjectivity and to agency; or at
least to “a sense of ” both. Whether this “sense” is enough to characterise a person
is open to interpretation. he ideal child subject is once again hinted at positively,
as a constructive, self-aware child, but with no further explanation.
Mary Galbraith’s plea for an emancipatory theory of childhood (2001) asserts,
with deinitional grounding in philosophy, psychology and sociology, that real
children are permanently prevented from being “subjects” and that they should
be helped to become so. Inspired by power theory and by Habermas’s deinition
of emancipatory human study, Galbraith advocates
a commitment to understanding the situation of babies and children from a irst-
person point of view, exploring the contingent forces that block children’s full
emergence as expressive subjects, and discovering how these forces can be over-
come. (Galbraith 2001: 188)
It is an appealing ambition, but which again raises more questions as to the possibil-
ity for such a “subject” to emerge. What is an “expressive” subject? Is it solely one
who is endowed with a voice, or who does something with it which the adult could
not have foreseen? Who can hope to understand children “from a irst-person point
of view” in a postmodern age when, in theory, we do not even understand ourselves
from a irst-person point of view? Would understanding someone in this way, if it
were possible, necessarily lead to our being able to help them emerge as “subjects”?
Philosopher of education Gert Biesta notes that emancipatory approaches to

childhood, though seemingly radically opposed to traditional education, in fact
spring from the same Enlightenment tradition: one which posits the possibility
of a straightforward subject characterised by rational autonomy (Biesta 2006: 15).
Emancipation from objectiication is diicult to envisage outside of a wishfully ra-
tional understanding of “personhood” and “agency”. Once again, the child-subject
is wished for only insofar as the child-object is denounced; but the dividing line of
“good” subject and “bad” object is not further questioned.
he problem is, irst, that the concepts of subject and subjectivity are philo-
sophical riddles and deinitional nightmares; and within children’s literature criti-
cism they are hardly ever attached to recognisable philosophical traditions. Second,
undeined uses of the term “subject” are, I would argue, bound to be by nature
aetonormative. he desire to ensure that the children’s book should construct child
“subjects” reveals that we do not take it for granted that children are subjects. he
assumption that the child reader needs to develop subjectivity, whatever we mean
by that, is an aetonormative conlation of subjectivity with adulthood.
And if the adult desires so much the emergence of this child subject – as
opposed to the objectiied child, the reiied child, the observed child, the “bad”,
impossible Rosean child – then does it not automatically turn this ideal subject
into an object? I have said a few times “the ideal child subject”, because this inde-
pendent, self-aware child subject is largely a chimera of adult agency: a construct
again. he child subject is an object of a diferent adult desire, perhaps a seemingly
selless adult gaze, but it is no less than objectiication to desire so ardently that
one’s object should become a “subject”.
All of this hinges, of course, on the multifariousness of the concept of subject,
which varies in its implications according to whether it is considered by psycho-
analysis, historical materialism, phenomenology, or child psychology. By leaving
the term “subject” undeined, it is easier both to attribute positive characteristics
to it and to establish it as an adult norm. For, in order to be able to assert that the
“mature”, transgressive person is a subject, one must be speaking precisely from
this subject position.
From an existentialist perspective, there is no possible position of conscious-
ness that would not be simultaneously subject and object. his is the fundamental
ambiguity of being as theorised by Beauvoir. We are agents, choosers, deciders;
but also “an object of perception (both others’ perceptions and one’s own), at the
mercy of forces beyond its control” (Card 2003: 14). Beauvoir’s ethics of ambigu-
ity rests on the imperative notion that no understanding of being-for-others can
be complete without the recognition that the other is equally ambiguous, equally
subject-but-object. We are systematically intertwined with others: both separate
from and linked to alterity, we may struggle to recognise others as fully subjects,
but we cannot quite represent them solely as objects, devoid of personal agency
and of aspirations of their own.
Within the model of didacticism developed above, the position of the child ad-
dressee is similarly ambiguous. As Bonnie Latimer points out in her analysis of the
didactic mode in children’s adaptations of Samuel Richardson (2009), the educator
is always faced with a characteristic dilemma which subsumes didacticism. he
didactic mode “necessitates coercion”, but it also purports to “grant imaginative
agency to [its] audience” (Latimer 2009: 167). In other words, the didactic adult
agency wills the child addressee to be both the object of its gaze, beliefs, and desires,
and a subject, agential, independent, and free. Latimer concludes:
In this more sophisticated model of didacticism, the novel engenders extra-textual
conversation, a creative space out of which a multiplicity of conclusions – or even
no conclusion – may arise. (id.)
he notion of extra-textuality is vital if we want to move beyond the categorisation

of the implied child reader as either object or subject. As Latimer points out, the
constructed child is never just one or the other. he condition of didacticism, the
reason for the very existence of the didactic mode, is that the adult should believe
in both subject and object states at the same time. A supplementary requirement
is that the adult should hope for extra-discursive (here, extra-textual) continuation
of the conversation within the child reader.
Extra-textuality is a peculiar space for positioning the implied child reader. It
is a space outside the adult’s gaze. And yet it is not a space where entire indepen-
dence can lourish, because by calling it extra-textual or extra-discursive we still
hint at the presence of a past text or discourse – we still hear echoes of the didactic
project. his is a space similar to the didactic gap, to get back to my earlier explo-
ration of picturebooks. he child’s position, rather than object or subject, invests
these gaps to become a project, partly constructed by the didactic discourse but
also partly freed from it.
he adult desires which permeate the children’s text therefore ind their
(un)fulilment outside the text through the ambiguous positioning of the implied
child reader by the didactic discourse inside the text. As Margot Hillel expresses it,
talking about politically committed children’s literature, the child is “constructed
by authors to perform a dual role – active within the book and outside it, as an
enticement to the reader” (2007: 248). he unpredictability, the unaccountability,
the possible nonexistence of this endpoint is, as described above, a major compo-
nent of the appeal of the didactic mode. In children’s literature, the adult agency’s
desire is located far outside the book. It objectiies the implied child reader while
counting on it as a subject, and thus transcends the distinction between the two.
he term “power” to talk about this efort is thus reductive, and a full “con-
trol” of the didactic situation is impossible. An analysis of “power” in the books
is doomed to remain just one aspect of what characterises them and which can-
not be assimilated to a quest for domination. As for “control”, such a discourse is
characterised precisely by a desire for uncontrollability – for throwing the child
into the world with no guarantee of a ixed outcome.
he implied child reader may thus transcend the object-subject dichotomy by
being positioned outside of the textual, of the adult agency’s gaze, but in continu-
ation of it. In existentialist terms, this child is still part of the free adult’s project;
as Sartre describes in Being and Nothingness, whatever I, as a free being, take upon
me to choose and value becomes part of my creation and part of my project. But
the implied child reader is also willed to emerge as its own project, because it is
asked to choose a pathway out of the text and to assess and value it. his move-
ment stems from the adult agency’s ability to desire something for someone else
but at the same time for itself. here is no direct sellessness in the address – but no
straightforward selishness either. his movement may be enigmatic to a degree,
but in it resides the true quality of the didactic exchange.
As the children’s book draws to a close, the adult agency’s project dwindles
and asks for the extra-textual emergence of the child-project, the mighty child.
Ideally, the child should become the person in which my project towards others
transfuses itself. he child becomes the person into which I continue myself. he
child-project, this once-objectiied subject diving in and out of independence and
oscillating between freedom and responsibility, is the only “possible” child of most
contemporary children’s literature. Children’s books now – at least those which
have abandoned the Arcadian emphasis on a child locked in time – form a litera-
ture of paradoxes, which orchestrates the release of the child while ensuring the
continuation of an adult project in them.
he child-project is also turned by this type of literature into the depository of
future projects: of future agents. It is a virtuous circle – or a vicious one, accord-
ing to whether one envisages it as misery handed down from person to person, or
liberty. his model suggests that childhood can be at once symbolic of diferent
temporalities – the child as past, the child as future, the child as target of desire
for time – and a space for free experimentation and value-making. he children
of these children, ideally, will also be the targets of a similar emancipatory de-
sire – they will be projects in themselves, recipients of past projects, and project
themselves into future ones.
here is a degree of incomprehensibility or unspeakability in the possibility
of desiring something for someone else and through them. hough sellessness
is not possible in this type of literature, there is a beyondness to the discourse
of children’s literature. We cannot fully account for the numinous quality of the
implied child reader and the constructed children of children’s literature as scat-
tered, as children-but-persons, objects-but-subjects-but-projects. here could not
be a didactic project if the implied child reader were not trusted as agent. But this
literature is also loaded with the assumption that the child is a wishful, alchemical
formula who can transform authority into might, and who can become a project
while taking up the adult’s project. In short, despite the impossibility to do so
without running into paradoxes, children’s literature must be theorised by breaking
down the boundaries between subject and object, the didactic and the prescrip-
tive, independence and generational transmission, and ignorance and knowledge.
he extra-textuality of the didactic discourse’s outcome symbolises life ater
the adult authority’s temporality. he didactic discourse does not know what it will
lead to, because its aim is located outside – I would even suggest, in the forgetabil-
ity – of the children’s book. he project of didacticism is an attempt for one’s desire
to graduate from the imagined to the real unpredictably. Importantly, the child,
in this process, must remain the being by whom the adult’s lost indeterminacy
is “returned” to the adult. he future-bound fantasy of a child project that could
bring an end to the adult’s existential wait remains, to a degree, indeterminate,
uncertain. he child’s mighty action is shapeless and vague, because the existential
aspiration which underscores it has no clear and determined aim. It is due not to
any material, objective and remediable lack, but to a more fundamental disquiet. In
Grimaldian terms, we never know what we are waiting for, because we are waiting
for something we do not know.
Cheating death: he Dumbledore problem
As a less jargonny and more playful conclusion to these relections on the didactic,
I will comment on a key moment of children’s literature when the main didactic
adult character, breaking all the rules, is able to cheat death in order to see the result
of his didactic address. his is the notorious “Kings’ Cross” chapter in Harry Potter
and the Deathly Hallows (Rowling 2007: 565–579).
Albus Dumbledore, as we ind out in this seventh novel in the series, was all
the time aware that Harry’s inal task would have to be performed beyond his own
death. He is dying, and knows it, when he orchestrates Harry’s irst encounters
with Horcruxes and prepares him for the inal battle. his increases the urgency
of his control of Harry’s time and of Harry’s knowledge – and also spells out con-
cretely the abstract concern with adult death at the heart of children’s literature.
Dumbledore has apparently predicted every aspect of this inal task, down to the
sacriice of Harry’s life, and planned his own actions according to it.
In the end, however, Dumbledore’s prediction is shown to have been partly wrong.
Harry saves himself from death, and though he does achieve what Dumbledore ex-
pected him to – defeating Voldemort – he does so in a way that Dumbledore could
not either have expected or achieved himself if he had had the time. As Dumbledore’s
ghost points out to Harry in the bizarrely whitened train station, he himself had
been unable to resist the pull of the Hallows, and would have been unable to destroy
Voldemort in this manner.
In other words, Harry followed Dumbledore’s best-laid plan, carefully con-
ceived to organise Harry’s time and gradual acquisition of knowledge and abilities;
but this did not preclude Harry’s liberation from this plan, and the emergence
of the unexpected. Harry surprised Dumbledore despite achieving just what
Dumbledore wanted him to achieve. He introduced unpredictability in what was
predicted; he dodged the prophecy while respecting it. he Harry-Dumbledore
didactic duo nicely illustrates the ambiguous dynamic of the didactic discourse of
the children’s book that I have described. What happens in the end strikes just the
right balance between the adult’s desire to plan what will happen to the child and
the world ater their death, and the modiications of these plans in unpredictable
ways, the unpredictability being triggered by the mighty child character.
It is not far-fetched to analyse the “King’s Cross” episode, from the perspec-
tive of Dumbledore, as the ultimate fantasy of the didactic speaker. He is able to
see, even beyond his death, the unpredictable efects that his didactic address has
caused. He is able to be surprised by the child he has addressed; he is able both to
approve of the ways in which that child has followed the plan, and to delight in
the manners in which the child has asserted his own positions. Dumbledore can,
improbably, have his cake and eat it: spell out the didactic injunction, and come
back to see it interestingly un-followed ater his death. Perhaps that is why this
chapter is faintly bothersome. Not solely does it present the incoherent reappear-
ance of Dumbledore beyond the grave; but also, in doing so, it allows him to know
what no adults should know – the unknowable consequences of their ambiguous
didactic address to the child, the unplanned efects of their careful planning.
Problems of others
he adult-child relationship as a special “problem of others”
Unfortunately, I have to share the world with you. We are here together and this
togetherness is inescapable. his does not simply mean that you and I and all oth-
ers are condemned to bump sotly into each other like soap bubbles with polite
excuses, though this does happen a lot in Britain. I cannot ignore you: my existence
is tightly interwoven with yours and that of others, to such an extent that every tug
on the fabric of the world by you and by others pulls at me, pleasantly or unpleas-
antly. We have an interest in all others – we are concerned about them. Heidegger
calls this concern about others and about the world Sorge, which is, I understand,
resolutely less tender than the English word “care”, though generally translated by
it, and is also close to “worry” – expressing quite irmly the disquieting aspect of
being-for-others. Whether or not we meet one day, whether or not you become
dear to me to the extent that I would begin to care for you, I care about you already
because you are in the world as I am. And, from a Sartrean perspective, this is not
necessarily a merry state of afairs.
From that perspective the individual’s relationship to others is troubled and
negative. Sartre’s discussion of others is full of famous examples of entrapment,
power play, shame, guilt. he other founds my being by being equally present; it
gives rise to my distinctive self. But because of this originary distinction between
us, the other is separated from me forever, and in this unbridgeable gap lies the
problem. his is as much a temporal problem as it is a social one. Sartre’s very dark
vision of the other, however, is not fully shared by Grimaldi or Beauvoir. Grimaldi
argues that more oten than not I seek, in fact, union with and recognition in the
other – “communion”. I do not just fear entrapment by them or their petrifying
glance. But the three concur – and this relection is nowhere better articulated than
in Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity – that there can be no freedom of the individual
self without willing the other to be free as well. So, in existentialism, the paradox
of the other is that I want the other as free as I want myself. And yet I squirm to
ind myself in their glance. Such terms as “selishness” and “altruism” collapse into
one central tension of my being-for-others: I am split between being the centre of
my own project, and “spilling out” into other people’s existences.
In his most recent work, Nicolas Grimaldi explains this fundamental tension:
On the one hand, life inspires each individual to attract everything to himself,
counting the rest for nothing… On the other hand, life also inspires each indi-
vidual with the painful desire to unite to another to reproduce himself… his is no
matter of having the truth on one side, and a mistake on the other; these are two
contradictory expressions of life itself. his is its originary and unsurpassable am-
biguity. It is what makes each individual selish, while inspiring him to devote his
existence to those of others, as if it could transfuse itself to them. (2013: 114–15)
here is, for Grimaldi, a “centrifugal” force to one’s being-for-others: it dwells on the
level of representation, it is static and factitious. It is the temptation both to appro-
priate others and to appear to them as one uniied whole. In other words, to make
others and myself into objects of the look. But there is also a “centripetal” force to
one’s being-for-others: this is the temptation, just as strong, to continue one’s project
through another individual. his translates into the will to “transfuse”, as Grimaldi
puts it – and therefore to relinquish part of – oneself into others. On a basic biological
mode, this occurs through reproduction. But on a higher level, it is the transmission
of ideas, of thoughts, of imaginings, of pleasure, that Grimaldi theorises here.
And yet he inexplicably does not mention childhood. he educational endeav-
our, which would appear to be an obvious “centripetal” mode of being-for-others,
does not form part of his theorisation. How can this be, when of all relationships,
the adult-child relationship is evidently the most oten characterised by a “centripe-
tal” “transfusion” of ideas and beliefs? How can it be, when Grimaldi acknowledges
himself that it is, at its most basic level (that of life), enacted through the concep-
tion of children? his highlights how overlooked the adult-child relationship has
been in the philosophy of existence, even as it would appear to ofer a particularly
strong line of relection on the matter. he adult and the child are temporal others
for one another; the relationship between adult and child thus ofers an observation
platform for the problem of others as it mingles with – and is modulated by – the
speciic questions of temporality developed earlier.
he child as “living airmation of human transcendence”
Beauvoir goes some way towards theorising the adult relationship to childhood as
a particular form of being-for-others. Although not a philosophy of childhood per
se – her thoughts on the question are rather sporadic – her theorisation is marked by
a telling insistence on ambiguity. his term is a fully-developed concept of Beauvoir’s
philosophical vocabulary and in existentialism as a whole, and it has an ethical di-
mension. With the Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir seeks to extend Sartre’s Being and
Nothingness into ethics, a ield Sartre did not believe could belong to existentialism.
Ambiguity deines the status of the individual as both subject and object and also as
lacking presentness to oneself (such are the problems of time and of otherness which
constitute the two parallel tracks for this book’s train of thought). Ambiguity is at
the root of ethical judgements and therefore of relationships to others. Because the
individual is split between existential tensions of many diferent kinds (time being
one), it is impossible to think objectively of relationships, and therefore of ethics.
In the Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir recurrently foregrounds childhood as the
primordial site and origin of the fundamental ambiguity of ethics, and therefore of
being-for-others. For Beauvoir, who is much more receptive to psychoanalytical
theory than Sartre, childhood, so to speak, sticks: it remains with and within the
adult, as the paradoxical reminder both of past freedom and of past entrapment. In
childhood, one is blissfully free of most facticity, save for the inalienable condition
and situation of one’s birth; and one has an untouched future at one’s disposal – in
my vocabulary, the child is mighty. Contrary to the adult, the child has a whole life
to live; it is, so to speak, unsolidiied potential. But, as Beauvoir argues,
he child’s situation is characterized by his inding himself cast into a universe
which he has not helped to establish, which has been fashioned without him, and
which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only submit. In his eyes,
human inventions, words, customs, and values are given facts, as inevitable as the
sky and the trees. (1948: 35)
Childhood is the time when one is made to believe that acts can be intrinsically
right or wrong; when one is made to adopt modes of behaviour without having
chosen them; when one is taught to see as “normal” or “natural” aspects of exis-
tence which should in fact be questioned; and when one becomes accustomed to
others (in this case, mostly adults) telling one what to do and how.
Grimaldi also locates the aetiology of existential wait, the constantly delayed
“promise”, in childhood: “All the time of our childhood was haunted by the prom-
ise of a future in which we would be what we are; but no time has ever kept that
promise” (1992: 369). he wait begins in the cradle; the fantasies we are given of
completeness in adulthood serve to soothe our early torments when we begin to
experience our own existences as temporally disjointed. By adjourning our “real”
existences to adulthood, which will be, which must be the hoped-for moment of
reconciliation, we as children are already well underway in the process of existen-
tial wait and anguish.
Children’s literature is mentioned several times in Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a
Dutiful Daughter (1963). Her memories of children’s books are, in accordance with
her memories of adult discourses, tinged by the awareness of Good and Evil; of
soothingly well-deined values. And yet, once in a while, she recalls, a book stood out,
seemed to “shake [her] convictions” (1963: 51). She thus remembers being shocked
at the “mort afreuse”, the “frightful death”, of a character in a children’s book. It

“made nonsense of all the rules of life; … anything could happen” (52). his anything
resonates, in the light of her existentialist thinking, like a beautiful incitement – if
anything can happen in the controlled and safe world of children’s literature, then
texts are not the prescription they seem to be, and the world might be just as unpre-
dictable. But childhood is mostly, she says, the time when one is promised that all
will be well in the future, that the experience and authority of adulthood will bring
real power in the face of one’s growing feeling of existential fracture.
We are, Beauvoir argues, irremediably scarred by this exposure to this didac-
tic doublespeak. Because the child is made to feel at once the bearer of hope for
the future and the perpetuator of established conventions, the adult it becomes
will never fully realise its freedom, and may never even be made aware that it is
fundamentally free. “Moral freedom”, which occurs when one understands that
one is naturally free and begins to act upon this premise, may never happen. And
because the child is taught to wait for the hoped-for reconciliation with oneself to
occur, it is set up to be disappointed; children will gradually realise that age does
not seem to be bringing the expected release of existential tension. Instead of ma-
turing into stable individuals, they will ind themselves increasingly disoriented.
Authority and experience remain unfulilled promises. Growing up will deepen
the gap between oneself and others, and highlight the uncertainty of values and
precepts. Childhood is thus the primordial soup of the ambiguity of being-with-
others and of being-in-time. his double ambiguity is, to go back to my analysis,
at the root of the didactic discourse of adults towards children.
But Beauvoir’s discourse on childhood is not fatalistic; nor is it a theoretical
cul-de-sac. In fact, Beauvoir constantly turns to childhood to ind answers and
explanations for one’s current situation – and for ways of transcending it. In her
philosophical works, she analyses the concept of childhood in existential terms;
in he Second Sex (1997), her approach is sociological and historiographical; in
her ictional works, childhood is oten perceived as the seat of anxiety about one’s
individual project; and in her autobiographical works she turns to her own child-
hood to relect upon her privilege and upon her solidifying situation. Beauvoir,
albeit uninterested in “real” children, displays a constant and earnest interest in
childhood. he reason is, I think, that she has correctly identiied (contrary to
Sartre, Heidegger and Grimaldi) that there is something about childhood that is
intrinsically connected to many crucial aspects of their considerations of existence.
hat something is the special type of otherness which children represent for
adults. Adults allow themselves to dictate and control children in ways that they
would not deem appropriate for the treatment of other adults (apart from speciic
cases such as slavery or tyranny). And yet they are also intensely attached to chil-
dren and project onto them endless desires:
If, in all oppressed countries, a child’s face is so moving, it is not that the child is
more moving or that he has more of a right to happiness than the others: it is that
he is the living airmation of human transcendence: he is on the watch, he is an
eager hand held out to the world, he is a hope, a project. (Beauvoir 1948: 102)
Beauvoir here grants the child a kind of symbolic speciicity over the adult, though
not an actual one. he real child is efectively no more precious than adults; and
yet it is special in some way, by virtue of being a child. he crux of this privileged
state lies in its embodying a tension towards futurity; a temporal otherness which
validates the transcendental potential of humanity. Beauvoir here briely sketches
an existentialist theorization of childhood.
She proposes, notably, a development of the Sartrean analysis of the “look”.
I fear the other’s look, says Sartre, because it frames me in a moment of my exis-
tence and thus fails to perceive me as a continuous being; I thus have no option
but to return the other’s petrifying glance (Sartre 1958: 276–326). But here, for
Beauvoir, the child is not a “normal” other. Of course, this does not mean that the
adult does not objectify the child: what is “moving” is not the real children, but
the future possibilities they symbolize; what they contain of the not-yet-existent;
what they suggest of transcendence. In return, however, the child “is” a watchful
look over the adult: in a counter-didactic move, it symbolizes a judgemental and
thus similarly oppressive glance at adults.
Clearly, the child is not an other like any other for the adult. When I look at a
child, in contrast to my looking at another adult, I am not framing a “moment” of
its actual existence. he child is the future; symbolically, it has so little presentness
that it barely registers with me as a “present moment”. I am, rather, confusingly
merging the presentness of my vision of the child with a hopeful, shapeless “mo-
ment” of what it might become. he child resists my entrapment and objectiica-
tion: I struggle to see it solely as a child now, and instead overload it with my visions
of an adult later. he child symbolically conirms the existence of this later: it is
the “living airmation of human transcendence”, the peculiar shape hope takes in
the eyes of adults.23
23. Of course, this “special” look can be, so to speak, “deactivated”, or forever absent. It is evident
that not every adult feels the fascination for children through the symbolic ilter which I am
describing here. heir existential anxieties or tensions may be channelled in other ways, such as
the ones deined by Grimaldi, or even not at all. If I cease to project hopes and dreams onto the
child, if I am an adult who does not conceptualise the child in such a way, for whatever reason –
then I will simply see it as it is; not as my temporal other. I will see it as funny, whiny, interesting,
or exasperating, but mostly as a “normal” other. his is not particularly “more noble” of me; in
existentialist terms, I will consequently objectify it as I would any other individual.
he child’s status as temporal other to the adult means that children’s literature
is both an “other” and an “othering” type of literature – as proponents of aeto-
normativity rightly point out – which further reinforces the temporal otherness
of childhood. he child is indeed only precious insofar as its symbolic “wealth” –
expressed in the currency of time let – is either preserved (in the case of the puer
aeternus) or invested (in the case of the “mighty child”).
However, as Beauvoir points out, childhood is also the time when the prob-
lem of others arises; when I suddenly become aware that I am being manipulated,
guided, and cared for by others, and that I am myself thrown among others. he
ethical agenda of children’s literature – the part of the didactic discourse which is
particularly concerned with the child’s apprenticeship of being-for-others – thus
has to strike a precarious balance. he implied reader must remain perceived as
a temporal other, as “mighty”, as future-bound, as project unimpeded – and yet it
must also be thrown into the problem, the “scandal”, of otherness. Contemporary
children’s literature, even at its most prescriptive, is replete with examples of this
diicult ethical equilibrium. And it is further complicated by the pedagogical in-
sistence on “ethics” and “empathy” as two conditions for “peaceful” encounters
with otherness.
he other, beyond the ethical and the empathetic
Scholars can ponder about the ethical agenda of children’s literature in descriptive
terms – to what extent do children’s books favour or discourage ethical relec-
tion? – but among many people who care about and/or look ater children, this
type of questioning is not just a purely academic exercise. he pedagogical role
of children’s literature is historical; from strict religious principles to less overt
moral guidance, ethical instruction has always formed part of children’s literature.
Categorising children (and adults) according to the ethical value of their actions
and behaviour is a common strategy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lit-
erature: Lisa Sainsbury notes that children’s literature has always tended to “[stack
children] neatly on schoolroom and nursery shelves in jars labelled accordingly”
(2013: 13) as good, evil, bad, wicked, etc. his should not be seen as solely an
ancient trend: Sainsbury argues that the “labelling” of children by deviance and
disability continues.
As her analysis of the concept of naughtiness shows, in fact, children’s literature
has perhaps always rendered the ineluctable ambiguity of the concepts of good and
evil. Even morally prescriptive children’s literature can allude to the impossibility
of characterising someone solely according to these categories. Sainsbury’s telling
iconographic analysis of two book plates – one of a “good child”, the other of a
“naughty child”, both of which are the same child – hints that there might always have
been some awareness, however implicit, of the coexistence of contradictory ethical
behaviours in children. To quote the subtitle of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence
and Experience (1970), literature about and arguably for children could be detecting
and “showing the two contrary states of the human soul”, with no conviction that one
should or even could be chosen over the other. However, it can reasonably be argued
that contemporary children’s literature is more oten willing to showcase this other
who dwells within oneself, and to represent the irresolvable conlicts which arise
from living among others. As Sainsbury argues, leaning partly on Matthew Grenby’s
work, contemporary children’s literature is characterised by a didactic discourse
receptive of a more luid approach to ethical judgements. Its didactic discourse is
thus more prone to trigger conversation than to dictate behaviour.
he role of literature as a facilitator of ethical life, as a companion in ethical
choices, and more generally as a participant in the ethical climate of a given society
has also been a topic of debate in scholarly studies of literature “for adults”. Wayne
Booth and Martha Nussbaum are the most famous proponents of ethical readings
of literature. Ethical readings should, in their views, inluence what is known and
studied as the literary canon, and provide grounds for dismissals of some books to
the beneits of others. heir theses rely on the status of alterity inside and beyond
literature. For both Booth and Nussbaum, literature allows for speciic, “safe”, but
ethically charged encounters with diferent kinds of alterity; diferent others. he
ethical power of literature comes from the reader’s ability to empathise with, and
therefore understand and judge, the behaviour of literary characters. hus in Poetic
Justice (1995) Nussbaum envisages the reading experience as a form of ethical edu-
cation in encountering the other. hrough a diligent analysis of Charles Dickens’s
Hard Times, she endeavours to demonstrate that there is a correlation between the
use of the imagination in readerly practices associated with certain types of literary
works, and awareness of sociopolitical injustice.
his neo-Aristotelian view of literature shares characteristics with pedagogical
approaches to children’s literature, which could be crudely seen as answering the
normative question: “which book is good for the child (in part, as future citizen)?”
instead of, or as well as, describing the aesthetic features of this type of literature. Of
particular interest to the study of contemporary children’s literature is Nussbaum’s
claim that speciic books (“novels of social justice”) allow readers to develop moral
involvement with unfamiliar others, prominently by understanding – I am here
slipping back into existentialist vocabulary – their situations. Such books therefore
should broaden readers’ social conscience and enhance their ethical judgement.
his training in social justice through literature, Nussbaum argues, should begin
in childhood, and she has high ambitions as to the telos of this reading practice.
Novel-reading, she says, should “play a role… in the construction of an adequate
moral and political theory”; and it also “develops moral capacities without which
citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any
moral or political theory, however excellent” (Nussbaum 1995: 12). “Adequate”
might be here safely understood as corresponding to liberal-democratic values.
Nussbaum’s thesis relies, therefore, on the assumption that one could under-
stand the others better, and generalise from their experiences, if only their situ-
ation were well-understood; if only we were allowed a peek into the limitations
to their freedom that have constituted them as individuals. From an existentialist
perspective, this could at irst be seen as a Beauvoirian position on alterity – which
posits that a form of mutual recognition is possible between individuals. But, for
existentialists, the dramatic consequence of encountering the other, that Nussbaum
does not truly allow for, is the fact that this encounter is almost always complicated
by the limitations that the other imposes on me. herefore I will respond very
diferently – and unpredictably – to the various encounters with otherness that I
will have to undergo, and the experience always runs the risk of being negative.
Nussbaum’s plea for literary education in “novels of social justice” in law
schools – a “humanistic ield” (1995: 86), she argues – is likely to remain unre-
alised. And yet, it is precisely this type of exercise which much younger citizens
are subjected to daily. hough this fact is deplored by many a children’s literature
critic (Nodelman 2008; Tatar 2009; Nikolajeva 2010a and 2010b), reading exercises
at school oten focus on pupils’ ability to extract information from the text, and
to “project themselves” into the protagonist. Just as Hard Times ofers the reader
personal involvement with situations very much unlike their own, books are ex-
pected to trigger in the child empathetic encounters with the other – which are
not requested of the pupils during other types of learning.
David Rudrum summarises Nussbaum’s argument as follows: “literature
places us in positions that encourage us to identify with the other, thereby culti-
vating sympathy in the reader, and enhancing our capacity for moral judgement”
(Rudrum 2006: 126). Nussbaum’s use and understanding of identiication as a
readerly position seems to be equivalent to vicariously “living the life” of some-
one else, noting for instance that the reader of Hard Times “identiies” with Louisa
and Stephen Blackpool, thus “living each of those lives in turn” (id.). he ques-
tion of identiication is much-debated in children’s literature criticism. As Maria
Tatar puts it (2009: 19), it is preferable that a child-reader should be “with” and
not “as” the protagonist. Nikolajeva argues (2010b) that immersive identiication
is the stamp of unsophisticated reading, rendering the child vulnerable to emo-
tional manipulation. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein highlights that the iconic vision of
a passionate child immersed in their reading, fully “identifying” with the book,
is a nostalgic construction: “this ‘child’ constitutes the image of a Romantic and
innocent reader” (1994: 114).
he dangers of romanticising identiication are widely recognised. Analytic

philosophers of literature Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen (1994) note that some
readers may think that certain novels are “about” them; but they claim that this
mainly happens with speciic types of iction, “where a condition for understand-
ing a work (getting the point) is for the reader to project him- or herself into the
iction” (1994: 129). It is easy to see here that they are talking about paraliterature
and genre iction, in which children’s literature could be included, and about an
Emma-Bovary type of reader characterised, as they say, by “insatisfaction” (id.). he
thought of training a reader who “identiies” with a group of character-“friends”
suggests a dwindling responsibility of this reader in their emotional connection
with these characters. he reader remains consequently bound on several levels: by
a text, by a purposeful form of reading, and by their own emotional involvement.
But the concept of identiication is not problematic solely because it assumes
that it is “good” to be intensely connected to a ictional being to the extent that
one loses one’s individuality in the process. It is problematic also because it as-
sumes that it is possible, by doing so, to adopt an ethical and empathetic perspec-
tive towards the other. As Biesta suggests, leaning on Hannah Arendt’s work, the
educational efort to cultivate empathy is problematic. Empathy, he argues, “as-
sumes that we can simply (and comfortably) take the position of the other, thereby
denying both the situatedness of one’s own seeing and thinking and that of the
other’s” (2006: 64). he emphasis on situation, which betrays existentialist leanings,
could indeed be what is lacking from approaches to otherness which foreground
empathy. In doing so, they deactivate, to varying degrees, the dangers of alterity.
he didactic discourse within contemporary children’s literature thus oten strives
to present alterity as fully benign and “understandable”, empathisable-with. But
encounters with others in iction, even if presented and read as invitations to em-
pathy, are inevitably shot through with pain, lack, at the very least ambiguity. It is
from the always imperfect overlap between a text’s ethical project and a reader’s
compliant empathetic “projection” that the complexity of the relationship with
alterity arises. It is there that didactic texts provide “escape routes” out of blissfully
humanistic and “friendly” relationships and into the transformative but necessarily
unsatisfactory reality of intersubjectivity. It is there that texts ofer a reading of the
other which is not ethical nor empathetic, but ambiguous – or which founds its
ethics in ambiguity, as Beauvoir would have it.
he neologism “alteriication”, however hideous, provides a convenient way
of comparing and contrasting with the phenomenon of “identiication” a process
of ethical reading whereby one experiences alterity qua alterity – rather than as
a return to the self under complacently exotic masks. It deines the way in which
the text begs the reader to develop a speciic relation to characters whereby their
otherness is experienced as a limitation on – not a recognition of – one’s identity.
his limitation is essential to one’s existence. he other constitutes, for Beauvoir,

“a foundation and context” for my freedom, even though individual freedoms are
always “radically separate from one another” (Arp 2003: 257). Beauvoir’s inter-
est in the Master/Slave dialectic developed by Hegel24 leads, in her work, to an
increasing emphasis on the ideal of mutual recognition between individuals. For
Sartre there are no happy human relationships, and little hope of ever achieving an
ethics (although he irmly desired to design one, he never succeeded in doing so).
For Beauvoir, the ethical stance must rely on the mutual recognition by individu-
als that the other sufers just as much from the necessary entrapment of others’
looks; I must recognise others as equally eager to transcend their situation, and
equally frustrated in that goal. In other words, “ethics” does not quite denote care,
empathy, or attention to others so much as awareness of their ontological status as
similar to mine, which could then lead to an understanding of the psychological
and psychosocial expressions of that status.
In Beauvoir’s chronological analysis of the emergence of this ethical stance, the
child is incapable of perceiving the fundamental ambiguity of existence because
this fact is concealed from children by adults. he other is presented as simple,
easily categorisable, essentially “evil”, “nice”, or “clever”. But this reassuring, infantile
state of being-for-others is never perfect, even in childhood:
As early as childhood, fault lines reveal themselves; through surprise, revolt, lack
of respect, the child gradually wonders: why must I act this way? Why is it useful?
And if I acted diferently, what would happen? He discovers his subjectivity, he
discovers that of others. (Beauvoir 1947: 52)
Teenage years are the occasion, Beauvoir continues, for the strongest crisis: cracks
appear in the myth of essential unambiguity, leading the teenager to face their
responsibility and their subjectivity at its most ambiguous, and understand that
others are such as well. he hardest part of accepting one’s subjectivity, as a result,
is accepting “that it transcends itself necessarily towards the other” (id.: 81). his
movement – gaining access to the complexity of my subjectivity only insofar as I
am also gaining access to the complexity of that of others – characterises the advent
of ethics. Care, love, afection, empathy, or even considerations of the greater good
or of social justice, are thus not signs of an ethical stance; they manifest the ways
in which already-ethical people choose to be with others.
However, contemporary children’s literature, arguably, locates this acceptance
of being for and among others as a much earlier process than Beauvoir allows.
Many children’s books construct their implied child reader as able to cope with
24. his part of the Phenomenology of Spirit was specially singled out by Alexandre Kojève, who
introduced Hegelian philosophy to France in the early days of existentialism.
being thrown into the world among antagonistic others who are not necessarily
either evil, or triggers for empathy due to their diicult situations. his notion is at
the core of Sainsbury’s book on ethics in children’s literature. he interesting corol-
lary is that the child reader is addressed, therefore, as the bearer of a problematic
gaze on the other just as much as it is addressed as the target of a similar gaze. he
conlicts, the complexity, the convolutions of being-for-others – and what others
bring of pain and anguish – are central, I would argue, to the ethical claims of much
contemporary children’s literature.
Here again, the adult authority enjoining the child reader to an empathetic,
understanding reading of the other frequently betrays a degree of disempower-
ment with regard to the other; an inability to cope with the presence of the other.
Children’s literature becomes a way to expel, in literary form, the diiculty of deal-
ing with others. his is particularly visible in children’s books featuring foreigners,
which oten symbolise – with problematic ideological consequences – absolute
extraneity; absolute alterity.
How to cure your dad of his problem of others
his is the case for the German illustrated story Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden
nahm (“How I cured Dad of his fear of foreigners”), by Raik Schami and Ole
Könnecke (2003).25 In German, “foreigner” and “stranger” are the same word,
indicating all the more powerfully that through the igure of the foreigner we are
also presented with a fear of strangeness – of alterity. In this simple (even simplis-
tic) story, the irst-person narrator, an unnamed little girl, knows that her single
father is “scared of foreigners” (actually only, as the book states, Black African im-
migrants). At school she befriends a little girl from Tanzania, Bania, who invites
her to her birthday party. To “cure” her father of his irrational fear of Black people,
the narrator asks him to do magic tricks at Bania’s party – not revealing that Bania
and her family are Black. When Bania opens the door, the narrator’s father is at
irst petriied with terror, but soon the narrator and Bania successfully relax him
into doing magic tricks and, as the narrator concludes, “then I knew my dad would
never be scared of foreigners again” (Schami 2003).
his picturebook’s particular interest is its presentation of the encounter with
the (racial) other as an occasion of inexplicable physical terror. his terror is due
to the other’s gaze being perceived as coercive, which the picturebook resolves by
25. Never translated into English. Being unable to read German, I am here using the franco-
phone Swiss version translated by Carole Gündogar-Taithe, Mon papa a peur des étrangers (2003).
All translations mine, and therefore twice-removed from the original language.
showing that it can also be liberating. he implied child reader throughout the pic-
turebook, strongly aligned with the main female character, is construed as mighty
because it is addressed as both the “literary judge” of a situation of interracial ten-
sion and as the potential solver of these tensions through an active modiication
of someone else’s outlook on alterity.
he implied child reader is indeed shown the possibility that the attitude of an
authority igure towards alterity could be modiied thanks to a child’s viewpoint
and actions. his authority igure, the father in the story, is full of paradoxes; it
is, to recall an earlier analysis, very much a “divided adult” igure. he little girl’s
description of her father and of his “fear of foreigners”, accompanied with vibrant
illustrations, reveals that she sees him as both the bearer of positive authority, and
as the perpetrator of irrational racism:
My dad has always been tall / strong/ and clever / patient / funny/ and brave. Now
that Mummy isn’t here anymore, he does everything for me. …
But the thing is, foreigners scare him, especially Black people. … Every time we
walk past a Black person in the street, my dad’s hand contracts and squeezes mine
like a nut-cracker. One day, I saw him sweat when a tall African man got into a lit
with us. It surprised me, coming from my dad.
“Why are you afraid?” I asked him.
“Because I ind those people disturbing.”
“Why do you ind them disturbing?”
“here are many of them”, he replied. “hey’re everywhere/ and then they’re
dirty/ and loud/ hey speak languages we don’t understand/ hey’re diferent
from us, they’ve got thick features/ And especially, Black people’s skin is too dark.
Everyone’s afraid of the dark, because it’s worrying.” (Schami 2003)
he pictures constantly and amusingly ofer counterpoints to the father’s “explana-

tion” (Figure 7).
A child on a scooter responds to “hey’re everywhere”, a man sweeping the
loor to “and they’re dirty”, a music shop full of jazz CDs to “and loud”, a Black
ballerina on a poster clearly does not have “thick features”. While the little girl’s
father passes by all these visual cues without paying attention to them, she looks
attentively and smiles. he iconotext thus contrasts the intelligent, open child, re-
ceptive to what the world actually presents, and dwelling in the realm of the visual,
to the symbolically blind father’s diatribe in the textual space.
he father is clearly afected by the other’s gaze on him. He is not just the
passive recipient of racist clichés. His reaction to Black people, as the narrator
describes, is physical: “trapped” in the elevator, unable to lee from someone he
perceives to be an enemy, he undergoes a panic attack. His repulsion from “dark
skin” is clearly paralleled with childhood fear of the dark. his reaction is phobic
in the medical sense of the term: unfounded, permanent and uncontrollable. It
causes him, in a highly humiliating fashion, to lose control of his body. Sweat,
hand-squeezing, shaking, his body language visible on the illustrations is that of
an animal faced with a predator. he little girl, holding his hand, seems to be pro-
tecting and comforting him. his semi-authoritative role is later conirmed by her
saying that she would like to invite Bania around to her lat, but “he only thing
Figure 7a. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des étrangers
(2003) by Raik Schami and Ole Könnecke, translated by Carole Gündogar-Taithe 2003
© Raik Schami, Ole Könnecke and Carole Gündogar-Taithe. Reproduced by permission
of Carl Hanser Verlag München Wien.
Figure 7b. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des étrangers
is, I don’t want to scare my dad.” Later, at Bania’s birthday party, when her father,
petriied, sits on the sofa surrounded with Bania’s family, she says: “My dad was
squeezing my hand. I think he was still scared… My dad was still unable to say the
merest word. Every time I squeezed his hand, he managed to nod and smile. We
had to make him lose his fear. And I knew how” (Schami 2003).
he little girl acts exactly as a behavioural therapist would: by exposing her

father to his phobia and gradually easing him into accepting that there is noth-
ing actually threatening about it. Her tender physical support also recalls that of
a parent soothing a scared child. Turned both into a psychologist and a parent,
the narrator is the mighty child par excellence, superior in scope of action to the
authoritative adult – and yet not dismissive of the authority igure’s positive sides.
hroughout the book, a balance is eiciently struck between the growing might of
the narrator and her never fading afection for her father and trust in his authority.
She recognises the gaps in the authority of the paternal igure, and asserts herself
as an independent, potent agent.
he book ofers the portrayal of an adult agency aware of its own blinkers –
whether or not linked to apprehension about foreigners – and desirous to be shown
ways to take them of. he child igure is the bearer of an unhindered gaze. he
narrator’s father sees not what is there but a constant projected or imagined threat
to his person – a paranoid fantasy. He reiies foreigners endlessly, and in reverse, by
inding himself trapped in the racial other’s gaze, he is suddenly unable to perceive
himself as anything else than an object, even a prey, reiied to the point of physi-
cal and mental petriication. he narrator, by contrast, is quite impervious to the
entrapment of the others’ gazes, which her father feels so keenly.
It is clear from the text that her father’s fear comes in part from stereotypes and
an ancient cultivation of apprehension; in other words, from his time past. his is
all the more signiicant in a country like Germany where discussions of the racial
other are so clearly interlinked with relatively recent traumatic history. But the little
girl, building friendships for the future, inscribes herself outside such traditions,
and is therefore able to cultivate an independent gaze, diferent from her father’s
antagonistic one. By modifying her father’s outlook, she becomes mighty to the
point of modifying authority, namely time past; and more prominently, modiies
her time to come. In doing so, she constitutes herself as project, making value-
creating choices: her genial vision of the world, and her ways of communicating it
to her father, modify his outlook on the other.
he implied child reader, imperatively addressed by the didactic discourse of the
book as the desired recipient of its “moral”, is thus constructed as the potential ethical
judge of a sociocultural situation where cohesion between communities can exist if
both parties accept that they can and must modify the ways in which they look at
the other. hey are also addressed as the potential agent of this modiication. he
mighty child reader is the one who does not just “identify”, but “alterify”, accepting
both the coercion and the liberation that any intersubjective relationship conceals.
How I Cured Dad of His Fear of Foreigners is a decidedly optimistic tale; it puts
forward the notion that it is possible to look at the other in a way that does not
fully reify them into objects and allows for their projects to develop. Or at least,
that is the immediate conclusion. However, on closer inspection, there are many
ideological problems with Schami’s text. A prominent one is the manner in which
Bania, before the birthday party, tells her mother about the narrator’s father. She
presents him – having never seen him, but simply heard the narrator talk about
him – as an immensely “strong” man, “clever”, “brave”, charitable, “the best magi-
cian in the country” (id.). Bania’s mother takes the rumour one step further, telling
her husband that the narrator’s father is extremely strong, wise and funny, and “the
greatest wizard and healer of his people” (id.). Bania’s father concludes: “My good-
ness! And such a man wants to honour us with a visit! Rebecca, my dove, we must
welcome him as a person of his rank deserves” (id.). he family decides to welcome
him in “traditional costume”, but the illustration of the encounter does not present
any cultural coherence in the clothes and musical instruments (Figure 8).
Figure 8. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des étrangers
he Orientalism of this illustration is painfully evident; the improbable display

of rustic weaponry and ridiculous details (the helium balloon with a lion, the
ratchet, the green sunglasses) is uncomfortably reminiscent of the joyous array of
racial stereotypes in children’s literature of the colonial era. he white man being
welcomed as saviour and as “magician” by an unrealistically large and friendly
African family similarly raises uneasy questions.
We are faced, therefore, with a children’s book which encourages readers to
“deactivate” their hostile look towards the other – promising, in return, that the
other’s look is not going to paralyse them – and yet the book cannot help but look
at that other as racial other. It cannot help but replace this other in its imagined,
past-bound situation, that of a history of colonialism, of racial stereotypes, and of
Orientalist comic relief. he racial other, the foreigner, is made so kind, amusing
and harmless that the young narrator’s father’s terror is easily ridiculed. Bania’s
family’s otherness is drowned in clichés. he optimism of the tale mostly comes
from the fact that the other puts on a benign performance of otherness, without
being fully other. he happy, cohesive whole of the family is a theatre show of
quirky otherness, coherent and benevolent.
Apart from one child. here is one child in Bania’s family who is solely pres-
ent in the visual part of the book; one child who does not seem to be having fun
at all (Figure 9).
Figure 9a. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des étrangers
Figure 9b. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des étrangers
In a silent syllepsis (to use Nikolajeva and Scott’s term in relation to picturebooks,
2001) throughout the last part of the book, that child goes from spread to spread
looking bored, annoyed, unconcerned, embarrassed, and judgemental. He is not
in a “traditional costume”, but in Western-style clothes. He does not seem to be
enjoying the display, and only starts to smile when the attention turns to Bania’s
father. Quietly, on his own, he is the racial other who will not let himself be looked
at in situ, who will not let himself be labelled as exotic but friendly other. He alone
embodies the complexity of being-for-others and being-looked-at-as-other in a
situation which he rejects and aspires to transcend. He is noticeably indiferent to
the performance of funny diferences which the picturebook stages before reveal-
ing that they “don’t matter”. hat nameless single child resists this appropriation.
One runs the risk of overinterpreting this discreet illustrative counterpoint,
or of confronting the issue of authorial and illustratorial intention. However, the
disturbing presence of this little boy does call into question the joyous ethical
message of the picturebook, and subverts its primary didactic message. Otherness,
Figure 9c. Wie ich Papa die Angst vor Fremden nahm/ Mon papa a peur des étrangers
when the book ends, is not completely assimilated; Bania’s family has not wholly
become a gently exotic cohort of friends. his non-pliable child, who will not
espouse the contours of the White people’s dreams of peaceful multiculturalism,
remains a threat. By his closed face and recalcitrant body language, he also re-
mains impermeable to the empathetic gaze of the implied viewer. While the other
characters are easy to warm to – clothed in sunny colours, smiling and beaming,
and above all non-menacing – the little boy is cold-coloured, compact. We do not
know exactly why he is acting this way – or perhaps not-acting this way; we cannot
fully know him, and this unknowability is perturbing. Is he the only person who is
acting authentically in the matter of the reality of being-for-others, the only person
not playing a part to soothe the racist paranoia of the narrator’s father? Or is he
simply a party-pooper, a sulky preadolescent? Is he ashamed of his family? his
non-knowable other exists here beyond the ethical and the empathetic. He takes
part against his will in the general celebration of togetherness which Black and
White characters have achieved, but he exists at the same time within and outside
of it; he exists by resisting being incorporated into a tame, externally-imposed
vision of otherness.
his relic of unease towards otherness in the didactic discourse, this quiet
resistance to easy conceptions of togetherness, is rather common in children’s
books which seem to advocate precisely the opposite: the possibility of being-for-
others peacefully and contentedly. Such literary discourse cannot be, as Nussbaum
would have it, a direct education in empathising with others, understanding them
as similar to oneself, and establishing ethical guidelines regarding one’s conduct
towards others. his neat wish erases the fundamental diference between the
self and the other.
he didactic discourse can achieve a constant renegotiation and reorchestra-
tion of the encounter with others; and children’s literature does so in a wide variety
of ways. But even the most blissful tales for children about existing among others
and “making friends” can rarely do away entirely with the hurtful and threaten-
ing nature of every encounter with others. he joy of empathy, the pleasure of an
ethical gesture, have a direct connection to the originary pain of having found
oneself so clearly separated from others to begin with. here is no happy slotting
with an ideal other; that myth can only have been the result of too much drinking
on Aristophanes’s part.
he pains of living among others
We may attempt to cure dads of their irrational fears of foreigners, but beyond
those individual “victories”, can we ever achieve such feats more widely – in soci-
ety as a whole? he pains of otherness are not restricted to individual encounters;
otherness is a central feature of political discourse and we must accommodate
others in order to achieve social cohesion. his is, of course, a recurring question
of political philosophy – why should we live together? What makes us cohere
into nations, into societies? Why should I like my neighbour more than the for-
eigner who comes here on holiday? Biesta writes that these questions are central
to education:
We come into presence in a world populated by others who are not like us. he
“world”, understood as a world of plurality and diference, is not only the necessary
condition under which human beings can come into presence; it is at the very
same time a troubling condition, one that makes education an inherently diicult
process. (2006: 12)
Contemporary children’s literature appears obsessed with social cohesion, with

making people get on. As such, it is fervently aware of the “diiculty” and the
“trouble” of this “necessary condition”, but considers it, it seems, as treatable.
Didactic texts encouraging children to recognise that everyone’s roles and abilities
are indispensable to the whole are legion. Sainsbury argues that British children’s
books since 1945 have laid signiicant emphasis on the sense that the child has got
and must develop their social persona, their engagement with the community; or
“membership” or Mitsein, in her Heideggerian terms (2013: 74) – togetherness.
Membership, irst amongst the family, and by extension within other social groups,
is an ingredient in what she identiies as the ethical life, and it is correlated with the
emergence of freedom of will. he individual, it is understood, cannot achieve the
ethical stance if they are not embedded within a community. As Sainsbury notes,
“the subject needs to think for herself and unify with the other while retaining a
complete sense of self ” (2013: 96).
But this “uniication” is diicult to achieve. How can one think for oneself
while being “uniied” with a group? he adult authority behind much of contem-
porary children’s literature, I suggest, betrays both hope and disenchantment as
to the possibility of this double state. In the midst of optimistic messages about
the possibility of social integration and fruitful interpersonal relationship, the ab-
surdity of group cohesion, the sacriice of independent thought and of individual
freedom for the sake of the community can be questioned. hus many contem-
porary children’s books display dissatisfaction towards the quiet assent for social
cohesion – for the social contract – as an educational ideal. And some children’s
books denounce this assent more intensely than others.
One of those is Armin Greder’s award-winning and widely-discussed pic-
turebook he Island (2007), which narrates the struggle and eventual rejection of
an immigrant in an insular community. he iconotext is recognisably inscribed,
through textual and visual cues, within the Humanist and Enlightenment literary
traditions of homas More’s Utopia (1516), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719),
Jonathan Swit’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759); but it also
recalls darker island narratives such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954).
It is identiiable as a political fable, meant to highlight and critique a sociopoliti-
cal situation perceived as unfair. It is above all, however, a reductio ad absurdum
of what can happen when and if individuals melt into a whole – achieving, so to
speak, too much social cohesion, too much uniication, too much surrendering of
the self to the community.
Mickenberg and Nel (2011: 452) argue that “teaching by negative example, he
Island’s bleak resolution confronts us with a question: Would we treat immigrants
so cruelly?” However, Greder goes beyond this question, which given the extreme
nature of his fable would be bound to remain rhetorical. What he Island achieves
is a thought experiment in collectivism, which highlights both the philosophical
failure of perfect social cohesion and, at its heart, the disempowerment of the adult
citizen within society.
Following the prominent literary heritage of the island-narrative, the topos
of the island in Greder’s book allows for a perfect construction of an imagined
time, both ancient and future time of city-state independence. Ancient, because it
recalls the archetypal small community-unit inherited from Enlightenment dis-
courses about the origin of human societies, such as Rousseau’s. Utopian, because
the insular community is a manageable space of philosophical projection: within
such a closely-knit environment, though not technically insular, Plato is able to
imagine Kallipolis. homas More’s Utopia similarly integrates the geographical
space of the island into the fabric of his political treatise. he island is a space
hovering between past and future: between the primal unit of cohesion at the
origin of the contemporary village-world, and a literary and philosophical petri
dish in which to observe the future development of a scrap of civilisation. Greder’s
world is thus both yesterday’s world and tomorrow’s – in my vocabulary, both a
space of authority and of might – developing a political view for the future as well
as a retrospective contemplation of the past. his cyclical presentation of political
theory, in which past and future fuse, is illustrated by the chronologically incorrect
front cover, on which, even before the story starts, the island is already presented
as a fortress – the construction of which actually follows, the narrative tells us, the
departure of the immigrant.
his exercise in political extrapolation ramiies in hidden ways. In the margins
of he Island runs a side-story neglected (to my knowledge) by critics. Tiny pencil-
drawn vignettes emerge here and there, unrelated to the main story. Put together,
they compose the following narrative (Figure 10).
Figure 10a. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder © Armin Greder 2007. Reproduced
by permission of Allen & Unwin.
Figure 10b. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder © Armin Greder 2007. Reproduced
Figure 10c. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder © Armin Greder 2007. Reproduced
Figure 10d. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder © Armin Greder 2007. Reproduced
Figure 10e. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder © Armin Greder 2007. Reproduced
It is not far-fetched to interpret this discreet syllepsis as a symbolic continuation of

the main sociopolitical and philosophical theme of the picturebook. It forms, so to
speak, a visual metatext, relecting on the primary storyline and quietly prolonging
it. From the tools developed by humans to facilitate their everyday life emerges
a compact, tidily ordered society, comically represented by the sardine box. It is
a society destined to sacriice itself, decay, and ultimately break up the coherent
whole it idealises. his syllepsis appears to see into the future further than the main
storyline does. While the island succeeds, temporarily, in preserving its fragile in-
ternal cohesion by expelling the alien, the vignettes warn us unobtrusively that this
unsatisfactory, forced social unity might be destined to collapse. he picturebook
thus cleverly instigates a thought experiment within the thought experiment, its
political meditation taking one step further still. In both cases, it is the faulty and
dangerous social “contract” which is attacked, guaranteeing social glue through
the anaesthetic of consent.
he Island presents diverging adult understandings of sociopolitical order: the
degree to which one consents to the “sardine box” treatment – and consequently
becomes essentially disempowered on the political scene – determines the dynam-
ics of this conlictual relationship. While the central conlict within the picturebook
seems, at irst, to involve the powerless immigrant against the powerful islanders,
the narrative upturns this situation by gradually redeining – and dramatically
restricting – the power it confers to the islanders. heir superiority, numerically
and in terms of weaponry, is undeniable, but meaningless – ater all, Gulliver too
was tied up and held captive by the tiny Lilliputians. he iconotext reminds us of
this in two intervisual doublespreads showing the immigrant (tied up in the sec-
ond) being pushed away by pitchfork-wielding islanders – which, in turn, recalls
the sardines skewered by the more domestic fork. he essential sociopolitical law
of the island actually lies in the absolute forfeiture of freedom – and therefore the
disempowerment – of all its members, in the name of social cohesion and protec-
tion. All adult-adult relationships are envisaged solely in terms of whether the
characters are consenting or dissenting to the unspoken, inlexible social cohesion.
By testing the limits of the assumption that social cohesion is “good”, he
Island forces out the messier reality of human nature and human relationships.
Blinded by their sense of belonging to a well-oiled sociopolitical system, the
“people of the island” collectively express their consent to it, by mostly speaking
in a single, choral voice. But this collective identity, the visual narrative carefully
shows, does not preclude a discernible division of labour. Here bowler-hatted “city
bankers”, overalled working-class men, priests, schoolteachers, journalists and
stay-at-home women, cosily slotted into predetermined social and political roles,
are the archetypal cogs of Plato’s and Rousseau’s idealised small community-units.
Such supericially peaceful relationships, based on consent to and contentment
with the established social order, are crucial ingredients of social cohesion. But
these people are all, in Sartre-speak, in bad faith: they are the inauthentic automa-
tons who, like the famous café waiter in Being and Nothingness (1958), numbly
perform their daily duties for the community, hiding to themselves the possibility
of their own freedom.
In the character of the isherman the book condenses both the most important
and the most questionable aspect of this social “compactness”. he isherman is
the only villager who speaks out for the immigrant, albeit weakly, by proposing to
take him in. At the end of the story, his “bad” insight is punished by the sacriice
of his boat: he will never sail out of the village again, even small distances. Society
has swallowed him back in, reincorporating the one who had such a dangerous
open mind. It would be all too easy, however, to idealise the isherman because he
temporarily “saves” the immigrant or because he endures the wrath of his com-
munity. he isherman’s reasoning in doing so is based on a weak, non-committal
understanding of the concept of moral conscience as a basis for ethics. As the
people of the island attempt to send away the immigrant, the isherman objects:
“If we send him back, it will be the death of him and I don’t want that on my con-
science” (Greder 2007).
“Conscience” can here be understood as an instinctive reaction to human suf-
fering, in the sense that Rousseau (1755/1992) would attribute to pity. It would be,
in this case, a hint that there exists a kind of universal empathy on which to found
ethics. It could also be interpreted as the birth of an ethical stance, in the Kantian
sense: the ability to extrapolate from this decision to the rest of humanity, and
conclude that it is the right choice. But in fact the isherman’s reaction reads more
like a relatively selish desire to avoid the personal discomfort he would feel if he
had not expressed it. He is the only islander let who seems to have an embryonic
form of ethical relection in his relationships to other adults, and he displays it
solely, and reluctantly, when urgent matters of life and death arise. he picturebook
hints at a theoretical impossibility: the coexistence of “uniication” into an ideal
city-state, and the birth of true moral conscience towards aliens to that system.
he people of the island, as it appears, express violence towards the immigrant
so as to protect not themselves but the established social order. Greder evidently
takes great pleasure in poking fun at the islanders’ fears for their own safety. By
playing on intervisual references to famous paintings by Edvard Munch and John
Henry Fuseli, and on ghostly and daemonic imagery, the picturebook highlights
the completely imaginary and ictitious threat that the immigrant poses to the
islanders as individuals. he fear is revealed to be fanciful and fantasised. he
central conlict is displaced from personal to symbolic. he problem is not the
threat that this particular stranger represents for these particular islanders, but the
threat that individual agency in general represents for the concept of social cohe-
sion. hrough consent for an established order, the islanders have not empowered
themselves with security and protection. Instead, they have become subordinated
to the dream of social uniication itself; to the myth of a perfect relationship to
others within one single community.
he book lends itself to an existentialist interpretation: habituated rather than
authentic, the islanders, those adults of the social contract, are revealed to be ef-
fectively unfree. What is the place, in this system, of the dissenting adult, striving
for “true” freedom? In Greder’s picturebook, the voice of this rebellious but also
profoundly anguished individual emerges not through any character in particular
but rather in the dynamic relationship between word and image, as is oten the
case in sophisticated picturebooks. In the celebrated – yes – gap between the ver-
bal and visual lies here the complaint of an adult thrown into a world which glues
people together under factitious pretexts, an adult deprived of sociopolitical power
to modify this situation but one who nevertheless attempts to denounce consent
and call for dissent.
hough this call for dissent occurs through an address to a child reader, the
iconotext does not present an immediately appealing image of childhood. It repeat-
edly alludes to child cruelty towards one another, through portrayals of children
dutifully replicating their parents’ behaviour. he doublespread in which adults
are seen pushing away the immigrant with rustic weaponry is thus echoed by a
smaller image in which three children are seen bullying a fourth one in the same
way (Figures 11 and 12).
Figure 11. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder © Armin Greder 2007. Reproduced
Figure 12. he Island (2007) by Armin Greder © Armin Greder 2007. Reproduced
Note the separation between bullies and bullied by the gutter: the feeling of alien-
ation is reinforced by the materiality of the object-book, which creates an addi-
tional fault line between the baiting crowd and the dissenting individual. Further
along, the text conirms that the educational system on the island seeks to perpetu-
ate consent in the younger generations to their parents’ treatment of the immigrant.
he schoolteacher lectures “about savages and their strange ways” (Greder 2007),
and the stranger is turned by mothers into a bogeyman igure. he schoolteacher
concludes in the next panel that “the children are scared of [the immigrant]” (ibid),
which is hardly surprising. Consent for the sociopolitical system in place, it is
understood, is cultivated in children both through oicial educational practices
and through the imaginary tales told by authoritative adults. So far, so good – this
aspect of the picturebook simply shows how consent to lawed social organisation
inds itself replicated from generation to generation.
But importantly, the picturebook strongly distances the implied child reader
from this group of nameless, consenting child characters. he visual treatment
of these children, who are seen from the side or from above, seals them from
the child reader’s empathetic look just as completely as the other islanders. he
reader, instead, is made to merge viewpoints with the immigrant, giving rise to
two levels of political awareness. Firstly, and on a surface level, the reader is invited
to feel and endure – not to say identify with – the struggles of the stranger on the
hostile island. On this irst level of reading, the picturebook calls for the reader’s
indignation at, and gradual feeling of dissent from, the islanders’ political system.
Playing here on the well-established tropes of the political fable, the readers are
also encouraged to think of the laws of their own society through the exaggerated
lens of the ictional city.
More subtly, the child reader is enjoined by the text to perceive the immigrant’s
arrival in this foreign land as a recapitulation of the passage from “free” childhood
to the solidly regulated, hermetic and unfree island of adult society. he picture-
book’s transformative energy lies in the combination of these two levels of reading
experience, enticing the child reader and future citizen to distinguish precisely
between protection and subjection – between what the adult authorities pretend
to ofer the citizen-child and what they are actually ofering.
he visual perspective of the front endpapers of the picturebook efectively
places the reader on the immigrant’s rat, riding the black waves towards a dark
horizon tinted with a small line of pink sky. Of the island there is no other sign
than the block capitals of the title. Many times again in the rest of the picturebook,
the reader’s literal viewpoint is further fused with that of the (consequently invis-
ible) immigrant, using the graphic technique known as subjective camera. he
reader thus becomes the focus of the islanders’ angry looks twice, triggering the
Munch-ian scream of a woman. he last view, of the island-fortress, furthermore,
can only be from the standpoint of either the same or a diferent immigrant. his
child reader/immigrant’s blended viewpoint augments the reader’s dislike of the
islanders, but it also devalues the islanders’ fear – child readers are not likely to
perceive themselves as scary enough to justify such horror. his simple visual strat-
egy additionally creates an association between strangeness in the eye of society
and a child’s mighty critical mind – both are bearers of a threatening alterity for
the adult-ordered world.
his association between social alienation and childhood is strengthened by

the visual representation of the immigrant as nubile, entirely hairless and naked –
an image heavily loaded with religious and historical symbolism but also evoking
the vulnerability and purity of the infant. he childish attributes of the immigrant
continue to emerge, from his inability to work or carry heavy loads to his way of
eating. It is, of course, impossible to decide if this is the case because he has not
been furnished with enough to eat “properly” (let alone been ofered clothes). his
gives rise to the suspicion that the immigrant’s fragility may be willingly main-
tained by the islanders’ society, whatever that may suggest about the treatment of
the child by the adult world.
As Nel and Mickenberg (2011: 452) argue, he Island teaches by way of coun-
ter-example. he immigrant-child is by no means a role model of radical political
action: he is passive, cannot consent but does not dissent from the rest of that
society, and is eventually forced to leave it instead of changing it. he isherman
notes that he is consequently going to die, an interesting claim – being-for-others
is briely seen as a form of survival, albeit precarious, compared to solipsism.
By burning the isherman’s boat and erecting the fortress, the islanders express
their staunch refusal of ever having to modify their pre-established social cohe-
sion. here is no pink let on the horizon, and the political fable is brought to a
dystopian close.
Does this mean that the implied child reader is asked to conclude that the adult
society it will be entering is a matter not of choice, but of life and death? Not quite.
he book rather invites the implied child reader, about to be washed ashore on the
island of the adult social contract, to think outside of the (sardine) box; to recog-
nise the violence, dehumanisation, and lack of collective telos which accompanies
the creation of consent for the sake of content, and for the protection of society.
At the origin of this project is an adult agency whose dissatisfaction with the ideal
of social cohesion is counterbalanced by its inability to act directly upon it. By
accepting their own disempowerment and reinvesting their concerns into not-yet-
fully-integrated implied child readers, these adult agencies in political crisis redi-
rect their desire into the didactic discourse. he didactic discourse of he Island
denounces the falsity and ictitiousness of blissful portrayals of being-for-others.
Togetherness in the face of otherness
So is this Mitsein, this togetherness, this feeling of “membership” always impos-

sible? Of course, he Island is a denunciatory text. But How I Cured My Dad is not,
and yet it still hints at this impossibility. Much contemporary children’s literature, I
think, attempts to move beyond the ideal of an easy relationship to otherness and
to society. It oten represents clashes between individual and collective desires,

whether implicitly (as in the case of How I Cured My Dad of His Fear of Foreigners)
or explicitly (as in the case of he Island). here is a non-humanist streak to this
vision of otherness. If the didactic discourse of contemporary children’s literature
is so preoccupied with presenting tricks for togetherness and journeys towards get-
ting on with others, it is because it is not self-evident that we can all get on. Liking
others is not natural, and it is not easy.
Importantly, others can never quite be detached from their social and political
situations, from the sociopolitical quality of their otherness; a quality which is, of
course, conferred upon them by the gazes of others. Bania and her family are Black,
and because of that they are situated by the White gaze within a certain category
of otherness with its historical and political baggage. As Sartre writes in “Orphée
Noir” (1948/ 2011), Blackness arrests the gaze: it is visible, solid otherness. By
the fault of the White (French) colonising look, this diference of colour has been
turned into an ontological diference, and laden with sociopolitical values. Sartre’s
text endorses (to an extent) Léopold Sédar-Senghor and Aimé Césaire’s négritude,
a literary and political movement, born in the 1930s, that vocalised the reappro-
priation by Black people of their Blackness, the full acceptance of their diference,
in an efort to oppose White oppression frontally. Reiication is met with reiica-
tion. Sartre advocates, temporarily at least, the mutuality of this symbolic conlict
between the two racial others. his is, of course, very much a mid-twentieth cen-
tury approach to racial issues. But Sartre was indeed convinced that we cannot
perceive the other in any other way than as other, and that true solidarity is an
impossible ideal. To respond to an oppressive and objectifying look – for instance,
of White people towards Black people – a reciprocal movement of objectiication
is necessary. Full conciliation of otherness can never be attained; humanism is a
lie insofar as the other’s humanity, which I share, is not enough to deactivate the
threat s/he represents for me.
Contemporary children’s literature rarely presents such pessimistic portrayals
of otherness, but it frequently accepts that non-hostile human relationships require
a lot of work, efort and pain. As Nancy Bauer shows (2006), Beauvoir goes back to
a more honest reading of Heidegger than Sartre in her vision of Mitsein. And cer-
tainly Beauvoir does not take this copresence of others with oneself as a trigger for
ethical “concern” or “helpfulness” towards others. Empathy is no cure, either, for
the fundamental separation I may feel towards these beings who share my world.
Beauvoir’s view is that we cannot discard the possibility of Mitsein altogether, as
Sartre does. We have a duty to create, negotiate and orchestrate our being-for-
others through the recognition both of a fundamentally shared humanity and of
an ontological separation. his separation is further complicated by sociopolitical
and cultural circumstances which situate oneself and the other. For Beauvoir, as
mentioned several times throughout this volume, a large aspect of this achievement
is the recognition and acceptance of our fundamental ambiguity, which makes it
possible for us to be both objects of the other’s gaze and projects for the future; both
“thrown under” and “thrown forth”. It is possible to achieve mutual recognition,
but never perfect mutual recognition.
A large part of this process also implies a belief in social change: otherness
is socially situated. he evolution of the alterity of women, for instance, can only
occur once the category “woman” becomes stripped of its connotations as a simple
object of the male gaze. Many examples of contemporary children’s literature
uneasily attempt this change, in their efort to achieve and present mutual rec-
ognition between individuals and groups which have been othered from one
another: one can think, for instance, of feminist, queer, alterglobalist, antiracist
children’s books. By liting the socially and politically-woven veil which covers
others, such books present otherness as a sociopolitical construction. But under
this veil the other is revealed as fundamentally still other. he second stage in the
achievement of Mitsein will have to tackle the issue of living with that other. It
is an efort and a struggle, even in children’s literature which advocates tender
conciliation with others.
he presentation of otherness in contemporary children’s literature should
be probed – from an existentialist perspective at least – as to how far it ventures
beyond ethical messages and requests for empathy, beyond portrayals of simple
relationships with others. he Island is at one end of the spectrum, How I Cured
Dad of His Fear of Foreigners at the other. Both interpelate the implied child reader
as the bearer of a problematic gaze on the other, and as trapped as well in the gaze
of the other. Both address the child reader in its ambiguity as subject, object and
project. As such, both betray the adult hope that child readers will negotiate places
for themselves among others in society. But neither presents this negotiation as a
“illing-in” of the fundamental gap between oneself and others; and neither, even
the more wishful book, erases the painful nature of this process.
he highly situated nature of these two conceptions of otherness does not pre-
vent the emergence of independent action and speech. he lonely little Black boy of
How I Cured Dad of His Fear of Foreigners and the isherman of he Island are two
loci of resistance in which nests a resolutely anti-deterministic vision of individual
action. hese individuals are not entirely shaped by their situation. Like them, the
implied child reader is addressed as an imaginative being who might come to value
and desire the ambiguity of their condition. Beauvoir’s ethical turn – her transfor-
mation of the possibility of Mitsein into a necessity of Mitsein – hinges on the idea
that we should eventually desire to be ambiguous beings (see Deutscher 2008: 41).
he desire for ambiguity surfaces here as an aspect of the didactic discourse. he
adult authority, even when the books idealise the shared humanity of diferent
groups and support the possibility of social cohesion, can desire the child to remain
the imaginative and independent orchestrator of his or her relation to otherness.
And, what is more, to celebrate the diiculties, problems and paradoxes involved
as a symptom of a more fundamental disconnection between individuals – but a
disconnection which can be understood and worked on.
Ethical relection, in this light, may well be presented as an ideal outcome of
contemporary didactic texts for children, but to what purpose? Ethical judgements
should be made following careful deliberation and debate: this view corresponds
to a child-centred, liberal humanist approach to education. Sainsbury, indeed,
argues that “Children’s literature has the propensity to help young people decide
where they need to be and to consider where others need to be… through a range
of writerly tools it is able to stimulate moral agency and to negotiate the road from
life unexamined to life examined” (2013: 193). But is negotiation – with oneself,
with others – always the key to an ethical life?
Sartre, in line with Kierkegaard’s understanding of the ethical mode of being,
argues that all ethical “dilemmas”, all ethical deliberations are fake – the ethical
dialectic is simply the mode in which consciousness puts itself in order to avoid the
realisation that it has already made its choice. his freedom and responsibility of
choice is awesome and paralysing; it says something about who I am, it will be part
of my project; and therefore I want to push it as far away in time as I can, to avoid
determining myself through it. In his famous speech Existentialism and Humanism
(1948a), Sartre tells the story of a young man who asked him, in the midst of the
Second World War, what the right choice would be: looking ater his sick mother
or joining the Resistance. Sartre’s response is clear: there is no possible external or
internal deliberation on the matter. Whatever decision the young man takes will be
an ethical stance of its own: it will contribute to deining not just his life, but in fact
the course of humanity, because it will create a value with universal repercussions.
his decision will have deined, in its own, discreet way, the portrayal of “human-
ity” valued by the young man. In a Kierkegaardian fashion, Sartre is here saying
that the alternative, the “either…or”, is a deining ethical moment in an individual
life. here can be no a priori deliberation; and in fact any deliberation of an ethical
nature is a choice which is not yet accepting itself as choice.
he didactic discourse of contemporary children’s literature is, indeed, not
as clear-cut concerning relationships to others as it would seem from the overt
ethical agendas of the books themselves. It is certainly not easily receptive to a
Nussbaumian reading prescription, with social and political consequences. Even
when it asks us to look at the other diferently – and to shed our “fears” that the
others might be threatening us – children’s books hint at the fundamental diiculty
of being docilely reconciled with the “scandalous” presence of alterity.
he other within oneself
Yet another dimension of otherness in the adult-child didactic discourse demands

attention. hat dimension is the feeling of otherness, of disconnect, of distance
one can feel with oneself – this other in me whose emergence I can both fear and
desire. In existentialism, this dimension corresponds to the painful ontological
fact that one is temporally separate from oneself; one exists only insofar as one
understands oneself as incomplete, at a distance from what one should be. It is only
by accepting this fractured self that one can understand oneself as project. But this
disconnection also expresses itself in behaviours of bad faith. he woman who lets
herself be cajoled into bed, the waiter who plays at being a waiter, are characters
who have substituted for their authentic selves a character that they have created,
an other. Practice of bad faith protects one from exposing oneself to the look of
others; it also ofers a convenient and legible self-created other self.
his other behind which I sometimes hide is particularly eicient as a remedy
against the anguish of freedom and the anguish of time passing, which makes my
life what it is and nothing else. he unicity of existence – the impossibility to escape
what it turns out to be like – is a typical existential problem. One is constantly
tempted, as Grimaldi theorises, to imagine that something else must come, since
one does not recognise oneself in what is currently here. I believe that this is the
drive behind the didactic discourse. In this other which I think I will become, I
condense my more or less legible wishes. Meanwhile, I present to the world the face
of an other I know I am not – because this present I, I know, is not representative
of what I really am. I tend therefore both to represent myself as an other, and also
to imagine myself in the future as other (an other closer to who I should be). here
is little selfness in my existential condition, at least if I live it mostly in bad faith.
And even if I do not, it is a constant struggle to accept that this person who bends
under the gaze of others and who is not what I should be is indeed me, among all
the contingent events which have given rise to my unicity.
Children’s literature is, to an extent, a literature of bad faith. It addresses the
child as a mighty temporal other who may do in the future what the adult was
unable to do. Worse perhaps, its lucid portrayals of the impossibility of being-
for-others and being-in-the-world satisfactorily are constantly counterbalanced
by idealistic calls to solve all of these problems and to achieve plenitude. But the
very presence of these calls to an implied child reader redeems them from being
made solely in bad faith. hese calls denote, in part, an adult desire for a lost
indeterminacy which, through the child, can be partly regained. he desire for
indeterminacy signiies the adult faith that the child is an independent individual
who can do something not yet known. But too oten this independent individual is
obscured by the others which it constitutes for itself, as a strategy to avoid dwelling
with the reality and unicity of its situation. he reliance on convenient others by
child characters is accompanied by a didactic address to the implied child reader,
suggesting that such behaviours of bad faith should be made to collapse, as occurs
neatly in the text I now turn to.26
Double Act (1996), a children’s novel by Jacqueline Wilson, illustrated by Nick
Sharratt and Sue Heap, tells the sophisticated coming-of-age tale of twins, Ruby
and Garnet, who begin to write down “their” story as co-writers. Font changes
indicate switches from Ruby to Garnet. From the start, italicised Garnet is identi-
ied as the more thoughtful and meeker writer; Ruby, meanwhile, is the dominant
and bold one. Life separates them, not just as individuals but as writers; the bit-
tersweet ending sees Garnet departing to a boarding school and Ruby beginning
a new notebook. he novel subtly relects on the twins’ act of writing together in
parallel with that of living “one life” despite two distinct personalities. Of course,
this togetherness is all but satisfying.
he central characteristic of Double Act is that it sets up an illusion of double-
ness, both of oneself and of one’s life, whose main function is to stabilise and sim-
plify the heroines’ existences by expelling complex and undesirable traits into an
appropriate other or into a diferent life rejected as other. his doubleness is due, on
the most basic level, to Ruby and Garnet’s twinship; but beyond their monozygotic
resemblance, the appropriation of that contingent fact as deining their essence is
denounced by the narrative. In other words, Ruby and Garnet’s twinship is existen-
tially important as part of their situation, but no more than their having no mother,
or an annoying stepmother; it is what they do with that twinship – elevating it,
in particular through their writing, to the rank of a constitutive element of their
selves – which constitutes behaviours of bad faith. hrough their twinship, they
indeed seek to live a life of permanent duplicity, where all possibilities are doubled,
and all otherness reduced to convenient complementarity. Each twin writes the
other as an accompaniment, and sometimes a substitute, of themselves, and their
life in common as a double of the real. he narrative thus subtly denounces the
tendency to divide both the world and oneself into simpler, manageable fantasies.
While their engagement in writing provides the two heroines with control over
their lives, it also artiicially stabilises their selves into two complementary halves,
each apparently whole but both in fact illusory.
he heroines’ journeys, therefore, entails overcoming the illusion of an ideal
otherness with which to live an ideal double life. his happens in part through
life events, which gradually wrench Ruby and Garnet apart, and in part through
an increasingly mature engagement with writing, which leads to a better under-
standing of their independent lives and acknowledgement of their complexity and
26. his discussion is adapted from a longer piece on the motif of the double in Jacqueline
Wilson’s works, including two more novels (Beauvais 2015).
uniqueness. It is only when they successfully accept themselves as incomplete be-

ings, deprived of a perfect other, but also as meaning-makers in their own exis-
tences, that they mature both as writers and as individuals. Even though this text,
like many of Wilson’s works, is in appearance tender, unproblematic and gently di-
dactic, it reaches the diicult conclusion that one must develop mastery over one’s
tendency to reduce others to tame versions of oneself and that one must, literally or
iguratively, “write” one’s existence as a unique, responsible, self-directed project.
Ruby and Garnet are irst introduced to the reader in Ruby’s voice: “We’re
twins. I’m Ruby. She’s Garnet. We’re identical. here’s very few people who can tell
us apart. Well, until we start talking” (Wilson 1996: 1). It is no coincidence that the
distinction between the two “identical” selves only begins with language. he twins
are indeed “identical” physically (though Nick Sharratt’s illustrations give Ruby
messier hair than Sue Heap’s rendition of Garnet), but their voices difer. Garnet,
singled out as the “non-dominant” twin, “can’t get a word in edgeways” (id.: 2).
When she does, it is to contradict her sister. However, Ruby does not, at irst, ac-
cept Garnet’s divergent voice. he beginning of the novel is particularly dominated
by Ruby’s voice. Not content with writing about herself, Ruby writes about both
twins: she is obsessed with their togetherness, which she sees as so unproblematic
that she feels entitled to write about her sister – and therefore to write her of as an
active narrative voice, despite her claim that the Accounts book is shared. Faced
with Ruby’s proliic writing about both twins, Garnet engages in discrete but irm
rectiications of her sister’s words:
We’re going to be famous too someday, you bet. So I’ve started writing our life-
story already. It’s funny, Garnet is usually the one who writes stuf. Her writing’s
neater than mine. So oten I get her to do my schoolwork. She doesn’t mind.
Yes I do.
I was riling through one of the boxes of books upstairs and right at the bottom
there was this lovely fat red book. Ruby red, with a leather spine […] So I’m scrib-
bling away.
I’m not.
Yes you are. I keep letting you have a turn. And I’m not just writing about me, I’m
writing about us. Giving an account of ourselves. (Wilson 1996: 9–10)
he contrast between Ruby’s imperious voice (which efectively absorbs her sister’s
experiences into her own) and Garnet’s barely audible corrections is humorous but
profound. he italicised interstices of the dialogic text hint at a subversive strand,
coming from Garnet, which grows throughout the novel and inally leads to her
breakaway from the duo. Ruby, however, perceives their duo as perfectly balanced;
she constructs Garnet as her complementary double, her ideal Aristophanean
other. Her sincere conviction that Garnet is actually writing (when she clearly
is not), and her recurrent use of “us”, “we”, and “ourselves”, signal her inability to
detect in her sister’s denegation any potential menace to their harmony. She is
also unable to spot her sister’s greater talent at writing – she puts it down to pen-
manship. his oversight causes tremendous drama at the end of the novel, since
Garnet’s superior writing wins her a scholarship at an expensive boarding school;
a scholarship Ruby never doubted they would either both get, or just herself.
At the beginning of the story Ruby is thus clearly an assured and stable indi-
vidual, because she treats her sister – and writes her – as a non-threatening, but
polarised other, entirely part of herself but also complementary in its diference:
an ideal alter ego. Beyond the literal reading of Double Act as a story about twins, a
more symbolic interpretation of this behaviour functions, too, as a warning against
the tendency to fantasise that someone else – either real or imagined – can espouse
exactly the contours of one’s self. his ideal double, this fantasised other, retains
some traits of otherness, in that it is not exactly identical to oneself, but those traits
are kept safely away from evolving independently. In an imperialistic fashion, Ruby
needs Garnet to be both diferent and compliant. To conirm the existence of the
twinship, Garnet is “allowed” to write a few words here and there, and to express
discontent; but her comments are immediately absorbed into the “whole” that their
dialogue forms, further strengthening Ruby’s position. Garnet repeatedly begins
her interventions with “yes, but” (Wilson 1996: 15, 16, 51, 56, 64, 65); but Ruby
either ignores or contradicts her sister’s rectiications, which become incorporated
within Ruby’s hegemonic discourse.
Garnet is thus seemingly the lacking self, who needs Ruby’s dominant dis-
course to continue to exist; however, she is also the contradicting force, however
meek, in their duo. In a non-literal reading of the text, Garnet could be viewed
symbolically as the latent possibility for authenticity in an entirely factitious exis-
tence; as the questioning voice in Ruby’s behaviour of bad faith. Within the text,
she is also instrumentalised as a writer of some aspects of their lives, temporarily
“hired” by Ruby to narrate moments which Ruby does not want to narrate – for
instance, their mother’s death, or saying goodbye to their grandmother. “Ruby
doesn’t want to write it. She always leaves the worst bit to me. I don’t want to write
it either”, says Garnet (Wilson 1996: 45). But she still writes it, against her declared
will. Ruby thus writes and commands her sister as an illusion of ideal otherness,
both necessary to her world and completely subservient to her will. She will, of
course, experience a painful return to reality, as the illusion shatters.
What is the nature of this illusion? Strikingly, neither sister fully believes in the
“reality” described in their writing. Garnet’s doubts are heard throughout, but even
Ruby is not entirely conident about the truth value of the “Accounts” book. heir
writing, hyperbolic at times and understated at others, is oten self-aware that it is
an embellishment of their lives together, a discourse on their togetherness which
does not necessarily refer to an actual togetherness. In the book, their joint lives
thus unfold as a double of their real ones, oten concealed under a veil of artistic
licence. When Ruby lets Garnet write about their mother’s (real) death, she says,
“All right. But tell it quickly. he bit about Mum. Tell it as if it was a story and not
real so that it won’t hurt so much” (Wilson 1996: 18). Garnet, accordingly, creates
another “double” of their double act: speaking in the third-person voice, and be-
ginning with “Once upon a time”, she tells the “story” of their parents’ marriage,
the twins’ birth, and their mother’s death. Adding layer ater layer of ictionality
to their existences, the girls’ complex writing endeavour translates the desire to
ensconce in facticity and in predictability a diicult and unstable actual existence.
However, this imposed artiiciality is never perfect; Ruby cannot help interfering,
interrupting Garnet’s distanced narrative voice. She clearly cannot fully play along
with the “ictionality” of Garnet’s tale; like her sister, she has a dim awareness of the
inauthenticity of their voices. Ruby and Garnet are not stupid; they know that the
double life they are creating for themselves is in part illusory. hey know that their
reliance on one another and their convenient division of academic skills, personal-
ity traits and social abilities have been constructed. hey do not entirely mistake
this ideal picture of twinship for reality. Instead, they happily live on alongside
their double, and the stabilising copies of reality which they create for themselves.
In Le réel et son double (“he real and its double”, 198427) contemporary French
philosopher Clément Rosset provides a relevant theorisation of the nature of il-
lusion. Rosset argues that illusion is commonly misunderstood as a denial of re-
ality. Instead, he thinks, illusion signals the refusal of reality in its unicity (and
therefore its determinacy), and the consequent escape into a “copy” of reality: a
double. Illusion is a behaviour of bad faith. here is an “oracular” dimension to our
existences: we confusedly believe that they should develop in a meaningful and
orderly form. But our experience of reality is unsatisfactory and unsettling: even
though there is nothing inherently strange to our lives solidifying in a certain way,
we perceive it as strange, as fake, because we do not accept that it is quite literally
all there is to it, in its messiness and disorderliness.
We thus continue to act as if there was another life, one which feels real, in spite
of – but not in ignorance of – reality. In so doing, we act out the life we are actually
living, and “feel as real” the illusory double of that life. Rosset uses the example, from
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, of Charles Swann’s “illusion” concerning his lover
Odette de Crécy. Swann has been told by many people that Odette is a courtesan; he
uncontroversially knows it. And she indeed costs him money; he pays her monthly
to be his lover. his makes him, by all deinitions of the term, her client, and makes
her a courtesan. But Swann’s relation to this problem is paradoxical – and, according
27. All translations mine.

to Rosset, typical of illusion. He acknowledges that they are both indeed acting as if
they were a courtesan and her client; in appearance there is nothing to suggest that
they are not. But he does not question it further than that; as Rosset puts it, “it is
less an erroneous perception than a useless perception” (1984: 10): Swann is able to
see that they are in a mercantile relationship, while continuing to “feel” that they are
not. his leads to a stabilising doubling of the real – an illusion – but not a denial of
reality. Swann’s feeling is that the life he is actually living is a fake; a performance of
reality, a deceptive world of appearances. Meanwhile, the life he is not living (where
he and Odette are not in a mercantile relationship) is felt to be the “real” one. he
rejection of his existence in its unicity leads to a doubling of the real.
Examples of such “illusional” behaviour in Double Act are legion; there are mo-
ments when obstacles and problems, or the illusory nature of the young twins’ joint
aspirations, are clearly acknowledged, but then tidied away, so to speak, and not
properly taken into account. Ruby’s acknowledgement of her sister’s resistance to
act in a ilm, Garnet’s constant rectiications of her words, the dim awareness that
they might not be able, as they wish, to grow up to marry a pair of twins and live
together forever, do not seem to lead to any modiication in their behaviour. hey
continue to use these doubles as a means of balancing, managing and orchestrating
their lives by splitting them into twos, acting as if they had not noticed their actual
unicity. hey retreat to their initial bad faith, unwilling to interpret those signs as
possible triggers for authenticity.
But, as Rosset theorises, there are moments when the illusion collapses; when
life in its unicity, determinacy and rigidity “reappears”, and reveals the illusory nature
of the double. his is the typical moment of the catastrophe in classical tragedies,
especially when it signiies the fulilment of an oracle. Oedipus is stunned to realise
that his life went exactly as predicted – he married his mother and killed his father.
he unicity of this life suddenly reappears – a life from which he never escaped. He
may feel cheated, but there is nothing deceptive about his fate; it was never anything
else. Rosset’s sophisticated theorisation applies, of course, to everyday life; we ind
ourselves, at certain times, stunned to realise that our life is what it is, and just what
it is, having taken all the space, so to speak, of the “something” it was supposed to be
instead. hese are moments when we suddenly see how well we managed to perceive,
but then set aside, the illusory nature of the desires, beliefs and embellishments we
had clothed this existence with. hese moments, Rosset articulates, are of an oracu-
lar nature: “he expected event comes to coincide with itself, whereby comes the
surprise: because we were expecting something diferent, although connected, the
same thing but not exactly in the same way” (Rosset 1984: 41).
Such a moment (which is, of course, of high didactic power) occurs neatly in
Double Act. Ruby and Garnet’s “catastrophe” happens when Garnet learns that she
has obtained a scholarship to go to Marnock Heights, a selective boarding school.
It was Ruby’s idea to apply for this scholarship. Although it was always stated that
there was only one grant, Ruby remained convinced that each of the twins would
get one, despite Garnet’s rational worries:
I don’t see the point, as there’s two of us and only one scholarship.
We’ll wangle two, somehow. Once Miss Jefreys gets to know us. She likes us al-
ready. (Wilson 1996: 133)
Ruby… what if you get accepted for the scholarship and I don’t?
We’re both going to get a scholarship.
But what if we don’t? Would you go to Marnock Heights without me?
I keep telling and telling you, we’re going together. (id.: 139)
Ruby’s illusional behaviour is evident, and amusingly in tune with Rosset’s theo-
risation. Ruby knows that there is just one scholarship (in Rosset’s terms, she
acknowledges the unicity of this “reality”), but she continues to act as if, “some-
how”, they could give the twins two scholarships. She lives here entirely another
existence, conjured up in part by the repeated mantra (“I keep telling and telling
you”) that the world she writes and speaks is identical to the one within which
she evolves. Tragically for Ruby, having used Garnet as a complementary double
for years for self-stabilisation and validation, she does not realise that Garnet has
been, all this time, an individual in her own right, and a writer in development.
he letter which carries Miss Jefreys’s message (very akin to the messenger’s fate-
ful letter in Oedipus-Rex), stuns both Ruby and Garnet. It leads them to disbelief
in the face of reality, a textbook illustration of Rosset’s conceptualisation: when
the world appears in its unicity, one irst feels cheated and duped, even though it
was always clear that reality would be like this – in this case, just one scholarship.
Ruby becomes, appropriately, “silent” as a writer: Garnet takes over the narrative.
We couldn’t believe it. We thought Miss Jefreys had got us mixed up.
“She means me,” said Ruby. “She must mean me.”
“Yes, it can’t be me,” I said. “Ruby will have got the scholarship.” (Wilson 1996: 142)
he impression that reality is not what it should be for Ruby and Garnet is of course
ironic; the reader receptive to Wilson’s careful foreshadowing has had plenty of
time to understand that Garnet was always the better writer and the more studi-
ous of the two. A non-literal reading of the text would here highlight the likeliness
between this moment and an existential epiphany, whereby one’s behaviour of bad
faith suddenly collapses to give space for a more authentic sense of self.
Ruby’s discovery of her twin’s independent existence – of her twin’s unicity –
and, therefore, of her own independence and unicity, leads to a symbolic change
in her behaviour: she chooses to reject her double, and exaggerate her own, full
and neat uniqueness. She stops writing in the Accounts book, picking, instead,
another notebook of her own, which will be “all about Me” (id.: 160). She cuts her
hair entirely, so that she cannot be mistaken for Garnet anymore. hus she briely
plunges into another illusion – another “double” life whereby she acknowledges her
twin, but acts as if she didn’t, and pretends that she can be a complete individual in
solipsism. Only at the very end are they are reconciled. Ruby sticks into her note-
book Garnet’s irst postcard, symbolically acknowledging her twin’s independent
life and independent writing. Finally reconciled with life as it is, namely, with their
being not an interdependent pair of twins but two diferent individuals with dif-
ferent aspirations, Ruby is able to end the tale with a lucid and tender statement:
“We’re still Ruby and Garnet, even though you’re there and I’m here. We’re going to
be Ruby and Garnet forever” (id.: 188). he two sisters thus eventually “vanquish”
the other that they had created for themselves: they learn to let go of that ideal,
complementary double. hey accept the complexities and the idiosyncrasies of
their own personalities, and the illusory nature of the twinship which artiicially
stabilised their senses of self.
heir journey, importantly, is punctuated by their engagement with iction – or
rather, autoiction – and the epiphany is brought about through the interruption of
a third party – an other, a reader – who evaluates this engagement from the outside,
bringing in the notion that they are two distinct selves. Ruby’s catastrophe indeed
comes from Miss Jefreys’s appreciation of Garnet’s writing as better than Ruby’s.
Miss Jefreys’s judgement reads like an evaluation of the twins’ Accounts book:
“[Ruby’s] written work is lively if a little slapdash… If she could only apply herself
more vigorously then I’m sure she could reach a far higher standard. … [Garnet’s]
essay was outstanding – extremely sensitive and mature” (Wilson 1996: 140–141).
his is Ruby and Garnet’s irst encounter with a “real” reader: someone who takes
the time to assess and appreciate their prose, but also, through their prose, their
selves. Garnet is rewarded for her work, studiousness and sensitivity, while Ruby
is shown, for the irst time in her life, that her sister’s heretofore derided qualities
made her, in this situation, the “better” twin. Miss Jefreys appears to be a clairvoy-
ant reader, in the sense that she has exactly and lucidly decoded the illusional and
oppressive reliance of Ruby on Garnet, and Garnet’s dependence on Ruby, simply
through their writing; just like the reader of the novel has done up until then. In
this respect, however, her action is also symbolically violent: by looking at them
and at their work, by judging and categorising them so, she emerges as the threat-
ening other whose observation has to be accepted if one is to mature among others
in the world. To the credit of the story, this external validation, however painful,
is presented as necessary.
Double Act thus ends with a maturation from a dualistic, illusory world onto
a wider social sphere shared by others who will assess and categorise the sisters,
refusing to accept their tranquil complementarity as constitutive of their existences.
he novel is characterised by a “centrifugal” force, to go back to Grimaldi: a move-

ment away from the narcissistic centre of the young heroines’ lives, and towards
the outside world, and the unknowable other. he twinship, which pulled Ruby
and Garnet inward and allowed for complacent or therapeutic simpliications of
their daily experiences, has collapsed; and now they can inally reach out to others,
in person and through their own writing. In the novel the irst reader is an adult
character in a position of authority; this is, as Lesley Colabucci and Linda Parsons
note (2008), a common motif in narratives of child writers. Miss Jefreys’s “valida-
tion” of the heroines’ eforts is not without didacticism. Nonetheless, the reader as
the ultimate other to conquer remains the horizon towards which the narrative tend.
his complex address to the reader, which gradually develops over the course
of the novel, reduces possibilities for the reader to identify with Ruby and Garnet.
Double Act, however endearing and afectionate, subtly presents heroines moving
away from identiication with their fantasised and illusory doubles, and towards
complex, unpredictable others. his encounter, as presented by the novel, is not
ultimately an opportunity for self-centred exploration, comfortably balanced over
one or several constructed doubles: it is a risk, a leap into the unknown.
As the heroines shed their illusions over the stabilities of their own lives and
the easy responses of their created doubles, the readers are gently enjoined to
consider, in turn, the impossibility to ind their own doubles in ictional texts.
However enthralling and appealing, Jacqueline Wilson’s text appear here to tug
the reader away from narcissistic contemplation of their own selves under a simple
disguise; to wean them gradually from the enthusiastic feeling that they are “ind-
ing themselves” in the text. In so doing, Double Act accompanies its readers on
the way to a sophisticated and mature readerly position. It entices them to become
readers who will tackle a text to ind an other, not a double; to ind complex and
new experiences, not just idealised versions of their own existences. As such, they
will have achieved a form of mutual recognition, beyond mild tolerance and be-
yond empathy, and they will have reached an ethical stance towards otherness
qua otherness. Interpellated so, the child reader is enticed, in turn, to “write” her
existence responsibly and in full acknowledgement of its unicity, its compactness.
Wilson’s text is only mildly didactic; unlike he Island, unlike A Rule Is To
Break, it does not portray too much of the personal and interpersonal “scandal” of
being-in-time and being-for-others. Or, at least, it downplays this “scandal” with
great care. But Double Act does throw forth the child reader into accepting a solid
and unique existence among others. In the absence of bad faith, of excuses, of
masks, of twins to live one’s life in one’s place, the child reader is asked to take re-
sponsibility for the parts of this world that will be afected by his or her actions. he
child reader, whom the adult so desires to be mighty, has to commit to the world.
part iii
Commitment
One does not write for slaves.

Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? (1950: 48)
“An exigence and a git”
Committed children’s literature
Political literature for children
hrough children’s literature, adults commit to children. hey commit to their

superior time let, they commit to their might. But in doing so, they also commit
children: they commit them to the world. his is a more dramatic move than it
sounds. For the adult, positing a mighty child reader – a child project, an existing
child, a child with power over the world – is the equivalent of throwing the world
into the unknown of the child’s project; of entrusting the world to the child. his
leap of faith is characteristic of the didactic discourse. It appears at its strongest in
examples of politically committed literature for children.
I have already analysed books which could be said to belong to this category –
most prominently he Island and How I Cured My Dad of His Fear of Foreigners.
Despite their prescriptive nature, these books create an ambiguous didactic dis-
course where indeterminacy is always hoped for, in the form of the implied child
reader’s might. he present chapter continues this relection by theorising com-
mitted literature for children and delving into its particular complexities. An ex-
istentialist notion par excellence, commitment in art and in literature articulates
the concepts I have been operating with since the beginning of this volume – prin-
cipally time, otherness, prescription and unpredictability. he most prominent
literary iction “for adults” has moved beyond political commitment since the
1950s – at least in the sense that Sartre and his contemporaries understood com-
mitted literature. But contemporary children’s literature, both by deinition and
in practice, remains close to a vision of the literary work as political and ethical
discourse for a receptive and agential addressee.
Books for children that can be deined relatively uncontroversially as (politi-
cally) committed children’s literature are traversed by “active ideology”, in the words
used by Hollindale in his canonical 1988 article on ideology in children’s literature.
hey correspond to what another scholar, Robert Sutherland, had previously cat-
egorised as the “politics of attack” and of “advocacy” (1985) of the children’s book.
Such texts for children can emerge as prescriptive, sometimes “indoctrinatory”, in
that they are explicitly ideological and political pieces, overtly displaying the adult
party’s superior knowledge, and transmitting clear imperatives from adult to child.
he production and distribution of these books plays a part in their being

described as “committed.” he publishing ethos which subsumes politically com-
mitted children’s literature is an important element which, albeit extratextual, ac-
companies some of the beliefs and power dynamics in this type of literature. Such
books are oten produced by independent publishers whose editorial lines clearly
announce their sociopolitical agendas, such as Talents Hauts in France (femi-
nist) or Manic Press in the United States (anarchist). Frequently, they gradually
acquire a pool of faithful authors, readers and reviewers, who create networks
of exchange and distribution over the Internet. Online they are supported by
politically committed blogs which share and publicise their books, award com-
mittees which show a preference for them, and speciic political publications
(alterglobalist, feminist, or Marxist, for instance) which review them. his is
not to say that they are not reviewed in traditional media: committed children’s
literature does attract the attention of the press; I have already alluded to the
interest raised by A Rule Is To Break (2012).
here are national and cultural diferences in the relative prominence of such
literature and its publication. he abundance in the francophone world of very
small publishing companies with strong political slants makes it possible for ex-
tremely polemical books to be published. In France, some publishers, such as
Rue du Monde (Communist, alterglobalist and ecologist), have been successful
enough over the years; without modifying their editorial lines, they have grown
to be very well-distributed and renowned. Smaller publishing houses, such as
L’ Edune or Pour Penser à l’ Endroit (“hinking the Right Way Up”), are not very
visible in bookshops but known and valued by politicised librarians, teachers, and
parents. here can be a remarkable discrepancy between the “fame” of the house
among children’s literature experts and interested adults and parents, and the
general public’s knowledge. In extreme cases, such as that of the micro-publishing
house 2 Vives Voix, the books can only be published thanks to crowd-funding.
he fact that many esteemed authors and illustrators frequently produce political
children’s books makes such literature relatively mainstream, encouraging bigger
publishing houses to bank on such editorial lines. L’école des loisirs, arguably
France’s most prestigious children’s publisher, has published several narratives of
historical revolutions. Other large publishers, such as Père Castor, Flammarion,
and Gallimard occasionally present very politicised titles in an otherwise high-
end of mainstream catalogue. Publisher Actes Sud, though overall not very politi-
cised, has recently increased its production of politically committed children’s
literature, and launched a new collection of revolutionary historical novels,
“hose who said no”. Switzerland and Belgium present a fairly similar picture.
Although the production of such publishing houses is comparatively small, they
oten venture into polemical territory, and commission and translate politically
“An exigence and a git” 149
committed books. Children’s books from Québec appear tamer, perhaps due to
the publishing industry’s dependence on state funding in Canada.
In the United Kingdom, politically committed books for children are cur-
rently very rare (again, I am not talking about books for teenagers, which are fre-
quently political). Even with publishing houses which emphasise the controversial
or at least “alternative” content of their catalogues – Frances Lincoln and Barefoot
Books, for instance – politicised texts are, at best, relective of multiculturalism
and mildly liberal-humanist. Radicalism in contemporary books in the UK is more
oten found in aesthetic experimentations than in the “message”. However, this
was not the case only thirty years ago, when such picturebooks as David McKee’s
Tusk Tusk (1978), Babette Cole’s Princess Smartypants (1986) or Anthony Browne’s
Piggybook (1986) were published. It is diicult to explain why publishing houses
in the United Kingdom currently display such caution towards strongly politi-
cised children’s books, but it could be linked to the lack of independent publish-
ing houses. he almost systematic absorption of new UK independent publishers
within bigger companies, with imperatives of marketability and wide audiences,
could explain the general avoidance of “niche” consumer practices which small
publishers would be targeting.
In the United States, where there are many independent publishers, politically
committed children’s books are legion, and have always been. Such picturebooks
as Click, Clack, Moo! Cows hat Type and its sequels, by Betsy Levin and Doreen
Cronin (2002a, 2002b, 2004) have strong political agendas. he United States has
a long tradition of politically committed Letist children’s literature, thoroughly
analysed by Julia Mickenberg (2006). Its alter ego, Rightist children’s literature, is
on the increase; it has been explored by Michelle Ann Abate (2009, 2010; see also
Mickenberg’s review of Abate’s book, 2012). Spain and South America do not pale
in comparison. Publishing houses with a strong political ethos include the pres-
tigious Ekaré in Venezuela, and Barbara Fiore in Spain – the latter also an active
translator of politically committed international books. Cinco Puntos, with a foot
on either side of the US-Mexico border, produces political (albeit variably radical)
bilingual children’s picturebooks, such as ¡Si, se puede! Yes, we can! Janitor Strike
in L.A. (Cohn & Delgado 2005), which aim to awaken American children to the
culture and history of the Hispanic community in the United States.
he way a society rewards its books reveals much about what it wants to re-
ward in itself. As Junko Yokota (2011) demonstrates, many awards seek to pro-
mote high quality children’s books with a social or political edge. Other forms of
endorsement of political children’s literature desired by publishers may include,
for instance, sponsoring or support from NGOs such as Amnesty International.
Committed children’s literature, loosely deined, beneits from supportive presti-
gious award bodies, such as the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, which frequently
bestow awards or honours upon books with a political slant. he Jane Addams
Peace Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, and numerous smaller awards with
speciic selection criteria (ecological, antiracist, feminist) similarly provide good
platforms for the discovery and promotion of such books. Politically committed
literature for children is nowadays a well-established type of writing.
he didactic discourse of committed children’s literature
his type of text presents an exaggerated form of the paradox of “post-Arcadian”

contemporary children’s literature which I have been discussing. On the one hand,
texts which rely on the overt attack or defence of a particular ideology can quite
easily be accused of being coercive, insofar as the not-very-well-hidden didactic
adult is clearly seeking to instruct and control the implied child reader. On the
other hand, such children’s books must be perceived by some people as “pow-
erful” in some transformative sense. If authors, publishers, parents and teachers
are “wasting time” creating, producing, distributing those books because of their
particular sociopolitical agenda, what kind of power do all these agents attribute
to such works? he adults must somehow, somewhere, assume that the child will
respond to their call as an agent: they must trust the child as able to achieve what
the adult is asking them to do.
his may sound like a very weak form of “trust”, more aptly called “obedi-
ence”. But it is not, precisely because of the essential theoretical parameter dis-
cussed earlier: the child’s temporal otherness. Children’s literature is a discourse
of latency. When the overtly ideological adult asks the child to do something,
they are implicitly asking the child to carry it into another temporality: the di-
dactic adult is not just talking to a present child but also to a future adult. hey
are doing so because the child’s is a temporality that they cannot access, by virtue
of being adults. Committed children’s books are intrinsically paradoxical, but in
not in the same way as their “elder brothers”, committed books for adults. hey
are both undeniably didactic, sometimes prescriptive, but committed children’s
literature implicitly locates its transformative action within the child’s futurity,
where adult power stops. Such books are concerned with politics, deined as
everything that pertains to the running and organisation of human communi-
ties. his supplementary feature makes the scope of the child’s action especially
tangible. What is at stake in them is the modiication, not solely of certain aspects
of one’s life, but more ambitiously of “the world” – understood as the speciic
and maximal community units described within the books, which can be cities,
nations, the universe – or a farmyard, in the case of the Click, Clack, Moo! Cows
hat Type series.
In committed children’s literature, the keyword is “potentiality”, a notion

which is not present in quite the same way in committed literature for adults.
Committed children’s literature relies indeed on the diferent temporality-for-
action, so to speak, one that an implied child audience allows for. Kimberley
Reynolds calls “radical children’s literature” (2007) all works for children which
seek to trigger transformation, either openly or inconspicuously, in society and
culture, though political commitment is not the main form of radicalism that she
studies. Reynolds underlines that politically active texts, aesthetically subversive
picturebooks, and borderline works of children’s literature for which the authors
did not “sit comfortably within the literary establishment of other cultural institu-
tions” (Reynolds 2007: 16) can potentially modify politics, arts, and philosophies
of the future. Nuancing the idea that children are solely willed by adults to repli-
cate socio-cultural patterns, Reynolds insists on children’s symbolic importance:
they are endowed with potential. he recurrence in her study of such words as
“potential” or “future” speaks of her awareness of the importance of intratextual
and extratextual temporalities when considering radical children’s literature. Her
intuition, with which I align, is that the adult detects in the child a form of time-
bound power relative to the future. Committed children’s literature foregrounds
this assumption particularly powerfully.
Studies from diferent viewpoints unveil the importance of committed children’s
books, and many hint at the aspects developed in this volume: the uncomfortable
balance between adult authority and child might. Michelle Abate’s examination of
American partisan picturebooks (2009) which also forms part of her monograph on
Rightist children’s literature in the US (2010), and Angela Hubler’s (2010) analysis of
feminist political novels for children underline current interest in the ways in which
politically committed children’s literature seeks to recreate the world. Hubler rejects
ideological criticism when it operates solely at an abstract level. Political children’s
books, she argues, are meaningful on a social scale precisely because their impact
goes beyond ideological debates. Adopting a “materialist feminist” standpoint, she
says that politicised feminist novels for children “represent the development of
political consciousness, map structures of oppression, and assess possibilities for
social change” (2010: 65). Abate’s article and book similarly analyse the success of
overtly political books in the US, which enact actual political battles at the level of
children’s iction. She highlights “the rise of partisan parenting” (2009: 81): giving
such children’s books to one’s ofspring becomes a political act, turning children’s
entertainment into an area of re-creation of the world.
he vocabulary employed reveals that the adult agency in the children’s book
is not the sole or even the main power-holder. It is a very ine balance, as illustrated
by Margot Hillel’s careful tightrope-walking exercise when she argues that politi-
cally committed children’s literature is a way “of empowering child readers too,
developing political awareness, giving them a role model and permission to take
an active part in political campaigns” (2007: 248). he precarious equilibrium in
this sentence between assertions of adult power (“permission”, “giving”, “model”)
and of child potential (“empowering”, “awareness”, “active”) shows precisely the
diicult coexistence of what I call “authority” and “might” in the children’s book.
Philip Nel and Julia Mickenberg have made an important contribution to the
increased attention to “radical” children’s books, from both an aesthetic perspec-
tive (which is not primarily my concern) and a pedagogical one. heir deinition
of radical children’s literature (2008), supported by Zipes’s (2008), is etymologi-
cal: “radical” literature goes back to the roots of sociopolitical and cultural issues
in order to expose and criticise them. Radical texts “intend to create a liberated,
informed, questioning, activist child” (Mickenberg & Nel 2008: 1). heir collec-
tion of “tales for little rebels” conirms not only the prominence of such works,
but that they have always existed. Deining “politics” as the power of efecting
change, Mickenberg and Nel insist that it is impossible to keep politics out of
children’s literature: there is always a power of efecting change in children’s lit-
erature, whether “radical” or not; in my vocabulary, the didactic situation set up
by children’s literature means that there is always a reliance on the child as future
agent. his is a maximal deinition of “commitment” to which I will go back at the
end of this chapter.
heorising committed literature
Committed literature is a problematic corpus with a long and controversial history.

he term loosely applies to a large number of literary texts which display awareness
of their historical situation and attempt to mirror it, highlight its shortcomings,
and demand changes. he term itself is a product of the early and mid-twentieth
century. Benoît Denis (2000) indeed reserves the expression “committed literature”
(littérature engagée) for speciic texts of the early twentieth century which commit
the whole of the author’s political and social being. Before then, Denis argues, po-
litical literature should be better deined as “literature of commitment”, in the sense
that literature, for authors such as Swit, Voltaire, or Dickens, was never completely
disconnected from politics. here was a prescriptive and edifying dimension to
literature that responded to the need of making political comments about the
world. In the twentieth century, however, and in the wake of Modernism, political
commitment became more individualised, and detached from the deinition of
literature. hus there arose a conception of commitment as an active decision of the
author to attach his literary works to a speciic political position. Furthermore, this
politics could be detached from governmental power, and less subject to censorship
than it previously was. Committed literature is, Denis remarks, now quite obso-
lete – but commitment incarnates itself now in “minor”, non-canonical art forms.
Denis points to photography, comics, science-iction, indie writing; I see children’s
books, evidently, as part of this category of newer forms of committed literature.
Sartre famously makes positive claims about this type of literature, and these
claims are eminently applicable to problems inherent to children’s literature. he
politically committed writers of the twentieth century, for Sartre, are plagued by
the ineluctable discrepancy between their bourgeois status and their desire to ad-
dress, through literature, the proletariat. Such concepts relect the importance of
Marxist philosophy in the theorisation of committed literature in Sartre’s landmark
essay, What is Literature? (1950). his essay, in terms of literary theory, was already
regarded as obsolete in Barthes’s time; in his numerous works on contemporary
literary theory (1964, 1973), Barthes proposes that committed literature does not
belong to the writer but to the reader and to the critic. It is now, Barthes says, the
critic who orchestrates and organises political commitment, unearthing it from the
works, discussing it and critiquing it. hus begins committed criticism, a politically
and socially aware metalanguage which will constitute the core of 1970s and 1980s
power theories. Commitment, it appears, was at the end of twentieth century let
in the hands of the critics.
But this dismissal of Sartre’s valorisation of committed literature may have
been premature. here is much to be found in What is Literature? which can in-
form current analyses of children’s books. he triangle of anguish, responsibility
and freedom constitutes the core of existentialist philosophy and of existentialist
perceptions of committed literature. But the consequent claim to be emphasised
here is the centrality of the audience. Sartre wants the writer to write for, not just
write. Children’s literature being characterised by a special kind of address, and its
very name transitive, the question of “writing for” is particularly pertinent to it.
For Sartre, writers are not pure spirits: they are embedded within their situa-
tion, and they must strive to relect that situation through their writing, with high
awareness of their audience. Sartre presents the audience-bound dimension of com-
mitted literature as characterised, irst, by a “free” author addressing a “free” reader,
and, second, by the ineluctable failure of this address due to a divided audience.
he actual audience of such literature is, against the writer’s wishes, the intellectual
bourgeoisie; but its virtual (desired) audience is the proletariat. Frustratingly for the
author, the committed novel, though written “against” the bourgeoisie and “for” the
proletariat, is read and praised more by the former than the latter. Committed writ-
ers are therefore primarily split writers, cursed by the recognition of the failure of
their own enterprise: they want an audience which mostly remains virtual, and they
dislike their actual audience. Sartre’s avowedly committed literary project, which
made him a hegemonic literary and philosophical writer in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury and earned him the Nobel Prize that he did not accept, is traversed by a frus-
trated desire to address an audience who has little use for it. However, the writer
retains his belief in the possibility of changing the world.
Sartre’s doctrine is normative, even prescriptive: the duty of the writer, of any
writer, is to “reveal” the world (1950: 14) which already contains in itself a “plan”
to modify it – knowing the world is subordinated to changing it (Goldthorpe
1992: 149). As Sartre explains, just as no one may ignore the law and be deemed
innocent if found in breach of it, “he function of the writer is to act in such a
way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he
is innocent of what it’s all about” (Sartre 1950: 15). his sentence, read through
the lens of children’s literature criticism, takes on a signiicance that Sartre never
intended. Ignorance and innocence, two central features of symbolic childhood
reiterated throughout children’s literature, are hereby invalidated. In this view,
the implied child reader of committed children’s literature would be purposefully
constructed by the book as outside of innocence and ignorance: “thrown forth”, in
the typical existentialist movement of consciousness, into the world – and forced
to take responsibility for it.
his responsibility entails recognition of the reader’s freedom by the writer.
In Sartre’s view, it is logically impossible that authors may not consider their in-
tended readers as free agents. “One does not write for slaves”, he states (1950: 48).
his statement is developed by Beauvoir: “Every man needs the freedom of other
men and, in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant” (1948: 71).
his notion undergirds my theorisation of children’s literature, in opposition to
the idea that adult in this art form is all-powerful, always on the brink of becom-
ing “tyrannical”.
Consequently, responsibility for the world is shared by the two parties through
the (categorical?) imperative of the book’s “calling”:
You are perfectly free to leave that book on the table. But if you open it, you assume
responsibility for it. … If I appeal to my reader so that we may carry the enterprise
which I have begun to a successful conclusion, it is self-evident that I consider him
as a pure freedom, as an unconditional activity. (Sartre 1950: 35–3628)
28. his passage is slightly mis- and under-translated by Frechtman. he original states: “Si j’en
appelle à mon lecteur pour qu’il mène à bien l’entreprise que j’ai commence” (“If I appeal to my
reader so that he may carry…”), thus laying more emphasis on the singular, individual readerly
agency than does the plural of the translation. he translation also elides “pur pouvoir créateur”
(“pure creative power”) between “pure freedom” and “unconditional activity” (Sartre 1948a: 55).
Reading is “directed creation” (Sartre 1950: 33), where the author is a “guide” (id.)
but where the reader must negotiate the voids of the texts. he relationship between
author and reader is one of mutual enhancement of each other’s freedom, based on
a request for the other’s freedom. he work of literature is therefore “an exigence
and a git” (Sartre 1950: 46, original emphasis): an act of trust in the freedom of
individuals. Sartre summarises, “To write is thus both to disclose the world and to
ofer it as a task to the generosity of the reader” (id.: 45). he adult-child encoun-
ter, which unfolds over the author-reader encounter in the politically committed
children’s book – the encounter I called didactic in the previous chapter – is char-
acterised, by logical necessity, as a reciprocal recognition of freedom.
As Rhiannon Goldthorpe notes (1992: 154), there is an obvious “untheo-
rised tension” between the impossibility of relationships with others in Being and
Nothingness and “the imperative that impels consciousness to will the freedom of
the other” in What Is Literature? his tension is similar to the paradox of the adult-
child power dynamics. he empirical diiculty of relating to others as freedoms
rather than as objects is counterbalanced by the idealistic wish to get over this dif-
iculty through, in this case, literature. One can be simultaneously dejected at the
hurtful “scandal” of others, and still optimistic that it can be overcome by inding
a means of appealing to their freedom.
he utopian dimension of this phenomenon is evident. Sartre always recog-
nises it, explicitly, or else implicitly through his typical use of hyperbole: “So both
of us”, he writes of the reader and the author, “bear the responsibility for the uni-
verse” (1950: 46). Later, following a lyrical description of a society “without classes,
without dictatorship, and without stability” (id.: 123) where literature would inally
emerge at its most sublime, he acknowledges: “To be sure, this is utopian. It is
possible to conceive this society, but we have no practical means at our disposal
of realizing it” (id.). his pull between idealism and pragmatism is equally at the
core of children’s literature, where the adult constantly oscillates between recognis-
ing the child as a normal, disappointing, imperfect person, and seeing it still as a
utopian symbol of hope and promise.
here is thus no innocent relationship to the world in Sartre’s theorisation
of committed literature. he writer can be embarqué, “carried along” rather than
engagé, but in both ways s/he is unveiling something about the world, and that
something is already a position adhered to. he writer, like all other individuals,
is “condemned” to choose a side. Sartre insists that there is no need to ponder
endlessly the legitimacy of the writer as a commentator on politics and society. He
rather insists on the writer’s responsibility: the writer, he says, is not an expert in
the matters that s/he puts forward; s/he may not be expected to understand fully
the sociopolitical situation s/he is in and s/he is mirroring. he writer like any
other individual is attempting to make sense of the world and of his or her own
project in it; and this sense and this project do not require any particular expertise.
hey do require, however, an acute understanding that they express a choice with
respect to the world, a choice that leaves neither writer nor reader politically and
socially innocent. As the committed author, as the reader of committed literature,
I am committing myself in some way to the world.
Politically committed children’s literature adheres to the essential elements
of Sartre’s theorisation, yet one more issue emerges here. hese books, because
they are, like all children’s books, didactic and aetonormative, are relections of
the world not solely qua world but insofar as it is organised by adults. he child
addressee’s status as reader and as a being in the world is thereby doubly relected,
doubly questioned. As reader “addressed as freedom”, s/he is an agent, a continu-
ator and a transformer of the adult project. S/he is the project who can grat itself
onto the adult’s project. But the crucial diference is that while the young reader’s
situation is unveiled to him or her as insuicient or unfair by the adult, it is pre-
sented as one that the adult helped to create. In politically committed children’s
literature the synthetic adult authority is both the unveiler and the “situater” of
the child’s state in the world. Nowhere is the ambiguity of the adult’s status more
palpable and more problematic.
And nowhere is it as striking as in children’s literature which clearly chooses
a political position and didactically addresses its reader, with the hope that they
may remedy a perceived lack – or indeed, in the case of conservative children’s
literature, that they may perpetuate a given situation which is in danger of chang-
ing. With politically committed children’s literature, the didactic gaps between
the speaker’s and the addressee’s knowledge, and the equivalent ones between the
speaker’s and the addressee’s abilities to rectify the world, are vast. he child reader
is faced with a strongly didactic adult voice, but is also understood as the mighty
“healer” of that adult’s lacks and shortcomings. More oten than not, politically
committed children’s literature is indeed an “exigence and a git” insofar as what
it demands of the child is just as diicult as what it bestows upon it.
Anguish and hope in the committed children’s book
he politically committed work of children’s literature relies on a balance, more

or less well-struck, between adult peremptoriness in issuing the command, and a
hopeful address to the implied child reader’s freedom. his can translate as an exis-
tential relection upon the adult’s place in the world and his or her relation to oth-
ers as a trigger for political action. his existential relection appears particularly
clearly, for instance, in a Spanish picturebook, Jesus Cisneros and José Campanari’s
¿Y yo qué puedo hacer? (“And what can I do?”29) (2008). Partly because it features
an adult protagonist whose stream of consciousness we have access to, this picture-
book provides a clear example of an adult agency plagued with distrust for society,
and by anguish of an existential nature. his adult agency is not solely reducible
to the main character, but it is expressed particularly well through him. he pic-
turebook betrays the adult desire to elicit in the child reader a gradual awakening
to responsibility and authenticity: a gradual recognition of might. his desire is
indeterminate to a degree, but it is also given shape in some ways: the reader is
presented with a clear line of action for social changes on the scale of the city, and
a critique of the individualistic, solipsistic tendencies engendered by consent for
the sociopolitical status quo. he picturebook’s primarily social message is also
inherently political – it is recognisably Socialist. he didactic tension between
prescription and liberation is always present.
¿Y yo qué puedo hacer? is a contemplative urban tale. Its sepia colour scheme
conveys the quiet, slightly old-fashioned, relective mood of the story. he pro-
tagonist, Señor Equis (Spanish for “Mr X”), lives on his own with an unnamed
dog. Señor Equis is extremely sensitive to the world around. He gets a presumably
deformed idea of current afairs through his reading of newspapers at breakfast.
Sad news “gives him the chills from his big toe to the tip of his nostril”, and his
whole body becomes literally loaded with concerns – graphically represented, in
a typically postmodern fashion, through the use of newspaper cuttings to form
his body; a vast negative space, around him, is a recurrent graphic strategy at the
beginning of the picturebook. Equis is plagued by a constant question: “And what
can I do?” It is only when he inally voices this question out loud (by accident) that
people start answering it, and Equis discovers how he can help, on his own local
level, neighbours and passers-by. As Equis’s engagement with the world increases,
so does the space devoted to visual material on the page – the vast emptiness of his
solitary life slowly evolving towards a last people-illed doublespread.
Equis’s existential epiphany is well underway in the paratext of the story. He is
irst shown on the front cover, standing under a barren, rootless tree, looking not at
it but towards the past (the let hand-side of the image), to which he is linked by a
leash which runs all the way onto the back cover where it is tied to a dog who meets
a seagull. Trees abound in the picturebook. he tree is a recurrent symbol in art,
as well as in philosophy, and especially as regards modern relection on identity,
thought, consciousness, and conscience: in short, the self. For René Descartes,

philosophy is a tree, the roots of which are metaphysics, the trunk physics, and
the branches the other sciences. his outdated simile has the advantage of placing
metaphysics at the basis of all intellectual relection, and at its very deepest, the
Cartesian cogito. By featuring a distinctly rootless, lealess tree on the front cover,
the picturebook omits this essential foundation, leaving the individual detached
from metaphysical understanding, his further intellectual ventures ungrounded,
condemned to stay barren or shed the few leaves they grow. he tree’s absolute
loneliness on the cover also increases the motif of solipsism in the picturebook’s
starting-point: this is a narrative of intellectual groundlessness and social solitude.
his seemingly negativistic symbol also evokes another philosophical tree –
Sartre’s phenomenological description of knowledge and, consequently, conscience
as projection into the world, developed in Nausea (1963). When an individual sees
the tree and wants to know the tree, he cannot know the tree inside his conscious-
ness; he cannot take it in. Consciousness, for Sartre, has no internal, transcendental
I, it cannot fuse with itself to know itself, it is consciousness-for.30 To know, to
be conscious of, we stumble outwards. Equis does not yet know the tree – he is
not looking at it, but at the past, perhaps engaged in what Morris calls the “pre-
existential nostalgia” (1966: 144) of nonresponsibility. But the tree is there, liter-
ally on Equis’s way: the cover hints that he will have to consider it, to consider it
all: rootless and lealess as it is. his consideration is above all a consideration of
existence: he will have to consider himself in all his groundlessness.
Interestingly, furthermore, Equis is also paradoxically looking at the future
at the same time, since the leash with the dog and the gull runs all the way to the
back of the picturebook, cleverly exploiting the materiality of the object-book.
he message here is that encounters with alterity are necessary and unavoidable;
in line with existentialist thinking, solipsism is never a durable option, and Equis
will have to consider the other too. hese front and back covers tell us all we need
to know about the picturebook: however hard one tries to shut oneself from them,
subjectivity and intersubjectivity are always in one’s way.
he rootlessness of the tree foreshadows Equis’s realisation of the necessary
baselessness of all human actions and their uselessness in the grand scheme of
things – in other words, their being surrounded with nothingness. hese irst two
stages of knowing the tree will lead to the existential epiphany which rests exactly
on these premises: we throw ourselves into the world without roots, we create
30. In a philosophical schism from Husserl, in he Transcendence of the Ego (1960), Sartre asserts
that there is no I “in” or “behind” consciousness. he individual is only, so to speak, “in-relation-to”.
his constitutes a pivotal moment in his philosophy, which preigures the ontology in Being and
Nothingness.
values, and these values are our projects that give our life meaning. But they are
also, ultimately, little pokes at the nothingness that we are clothed in.
his is the paradox, and trigger of anguish, which Equis will soon encounter. It
is not a pessimistic or nihilistic realisation. As the story progresses, the trees in the
picturebook gradually multiply and start producing increasingly luxuriant leaves,
indicating some form of nourishment derived from the rediscovery of individual
agency. he existentialist projection into the world creates and multiplies values
out of nothingness – Equis and the world will lourish as he realises that each of his
decisions is a decision for the world. Accordingly, hardly have we opened the pic-
turebook than we see on the endpapers Equis again, sitting on a heavily-chartered
terrestrial globe, under an umbrella.
Equis lives in “one of these cities full of people” (Campanari & Cisneros 2008)
without collective glue. His semi-accidental fall into activeness – he lets slip the
question “And what can I do?” – has an exponential efect, as he gradually inds
more to do in the city. Like Equis, readers are invited by the iconotext to perceive
themselves as responsible agents. But the picturebook insists that it begins on
a microcosmic scale, with the realisation that I is the basic entity from which
all world-constructions derive. he question which forms the title of the book is
revealing: since “¿qué puedo hacer?” would suice to ask “What can I do?”, the
redundant “y” (and) and “yo” (I) double the insistence on the active subject. his
question also illustrates the inextricable engagement of this I with the world in the
form of the active verb “to do”, presenting “I” as both a lonely, singular entity – the
being-in-the-world – and as a participant in world-creation – a value-builder.
Señor Equis under his rootless tree is a perfect representation of the existen-
tialist individual, trapped in the nausea-inducing tension between meaning and
meaninglessness. He is Mr X, the meaningless Everyman, an inexcusable, baseless
basis for all of his actions. But he is also made by the narrative to be the one in the
spotlight. Just as the existentialist individual feels anguish at being unable to envis-
age their own nothingness, so there would be no story without Señor Equis. He is
at once absolutely ordinary and absolutely irreplaceable: he is, the story tells the
implied reader, just like you in the world; no one else can be you, but you are chill-
ingly surrounded with the “nothingnesses” (what Sartre calls négatités) of what you
can sense you are not and what you will one day – albeit unimaginably – cease to be.
Discussing the role of education in bringing about an awareness of respon-
sibility and thereby authenticity in young learners, Michael Bonnett and Stefaan
Cuypers (2003) argue that we become desensitised to the reality and the dimen-
sion of our own freedom. Day-to-day concerns, hearsay, rumours occupy us, and
increase our impression of powerlessness in the world. By acquiring a sense of
responsibility, and thereby entering a dynamic process of valuing, the youngster
will engage in a relationship with the world:
hings matter to us in relation to our authentic concerns, that is, those concerns
for the expression of which we are willing to accept personal responsibility, and
that constitute our sense of our own existence… It is only by expressing them and
feeling the world’s response, either actually or through acts of the imagination,
that we discover what our thoughts really mean and what the world means to us.
(Bonnett & Cuypers 2003: 330, original emphasis)
“Feeling the world’s response” is exactly what Señor Equis does; until he does so,
he does not act authentically. Revealingly, he acquires authenticity by asking a
question – and by “mistake”. he existentialist epiphany, for Sartre, occurs because
the individual is a questioner of being, and a inder of nothingness. he value-
building dimension and the instability of this act are highlighted in the book,
which encourages the implied child reader to voice their questions – even though
the answers might pull them far out of their comfort zone. Furthermore, whatever
Señor Equis might do, loneliness, anguish and concern about the world and one’s
role in it are ineluctable. Being a transformative agent – understanding that one’s
actions involve the whole of humanity – entails accepting failure.
he world, the book tells us, is an essentially unknowable and untrustworthy
mess in which we attempt to see patterns and create meaning. By forming Equis’s
body out of newspaper cuttings, printed, moreover, backwards, the iconotext de-
constructs the meaning pieced together by print and narrative, questioning the
information displayed within the picturebook itself. It is beyond narrative that a
solution is to be found; not in the orderliness of print, but in accidental slips of
the tongue and considerations of what is not. he picturebook inscribes the tem-
porary resolutions of Equis’s anguish within a malleable, self-originating sense of
agency. Equis can never know the world and make it fully his, just as Sartre can
never know the tree by “digesting” it; what his body takes of the world – words
cut and pasted – are just shreds of knowledge, resulting from an active conscious-
ness throwing itself dizzily into existence. his recomposed knowledge triggers
destructive interrogations. As Señor Equis’s question – “And what can I do?” is
still “inside” him, so to speak, it is actively blocking his senses: “But the question/
covers his eyes/ lodges itself inside his nose/ enters his ears/ and Señor Equis/ can-
not see or smell or hear…” (Campanari 2008).
But inally the question is voiced. In the morning, as he opens the window, “he
can see the clear sky, smell the lowers on his neighbour’s balcony, hear the song of
the birds” (Campanari 2008). he question rolls of his tongue and is immediately
answered by his neighbour on the third loor. his incident marks the sudden en-
counter of two subjectivities, and the end of Equis’s solipsistic period. In this new
development, Equis’s anguished conscience gives birth to a question about his role
in the world, and because of this question he inds himself immediately met by
another subjectivity. From an existentialist perspective, it is in this kind of event,
marked with profound lack of control of one’s body, that we feel intersubjectivity
most strongly: by inding ourselves trapped in the glance of others.
his encounter of subjectivities gradually becomes a recurrent event in Equis’s
life, and the picturebook ultimately welcomes it in all its unpredictability. In the
inal doublespread, Equis’s size on the page, compared to earlier spreads, has de-
creased. Surrounded with people in a park full of trees, he is now fully aware of
his own existence in the world and of the consequent importance of others. But
there is no sign that his previous encounters have led to any further development
into close relationships – he is still alone, his body language still meditative, vast
swathes of emptiness still separating people. he reader is let with a bittersweet
conclusion. To act authentically, one must build one’s values from nothing, clash
against other subjectivities and create meaning out of these encounters; but this
is no guarantee of ever inding meaning, or even a meaningful relationship. he
picturebook’s repetitive structure hints at the Sisyphus-like nature of this exis-
tence, which gains and loses meaning as it evolves, with no other goals than the
ones it creates for itself.
But the picturebook is not “hopeless” and does not present life as purely mean-
ingless. he narrative deines future changes in society as, primarily, the transforma-
tion of destructive feelings into constructive decisions at the level of the individual.
hese decisions, the picturebook tells us, have recognisable repercussions onto the
workings of the city, of the human community. In other words, they are political.
It is by turning anguish into meaning-making and value-building in one’s own life
that sociopolitical change can occur. he picturebook’s political commitment thus
arises as a result of an existential crisis, or at least of an existential relection. Here,
this political commitment is, as mentioned above, recognisably Socialist. he main
value Equis creates by acting as he does is care; subsequently to his existentialist
epiphany, he chooses to attend to the welfare of others. But this creation of care as a
central value of sociopolitical organisation, the picturebook suggests, will not solve
each individual problem and will not end loneliness and anguish. Similarly, for
Sartre, any political ailiation chosen is understood to be just as baseless and also
value-creating as any other. Uncertainty, Sartre argues, is the inalienable element
of political engagement for social transformation. One can adhere to a party, and
thereby create values one wants for the whole of humankind; but
If I ask myself “Will the social ideal as such, ever become a reality?” I cannot tell,
I only know that whatever may be in my power to make it so, I shall do; beyond
that, I can count upon nothing. (Sartre 1948a: 41)
his is the deinition of the project of the adult of politically committed children’s
literature. his project is uncertain: it is the hope that one’s didactic address may
lead to one’s values being given wider scope through the intervention of the mighty
child reader. Nothing can be counted upon other than the notion that one is doing
as much as possible. he Socialist political agenda of And what can I do? is an ex-
ample of transformative anguish: it is not a necessary result of it.
he political child and the apolitical adult in committed children’s literature
It could be objected that Y Yo presents solely an adult character, which suggests

that the child reader cannot be led to recognise him or herself as mighty now.
he picturebook would thus be reinforcing an aetonormative understanding of
political power and social action as a property of adulthood. But in that respect
the picturebook is uncharacteristic. Most committed children’s books present the
politicisation of child characters, and point at places for the implied child reader
to watch child might “in action” and underline its supremacy over adult authority.
In fact, these politicised children are oten contrasted with apolitical, apathetic,
uncommitted adults, whose authority is thereby relentlessly questioned.
A striking example of this phenomenon can be found in the Canadian picture-
book La carie (2008) (“he Cavity”, translated in English as he Tooth), written by
Avi Slodovnick and illustrated by Manon Gauthier. he Tooth relates an anecdote in
the life of a little girl called Marissa, who needs to go to the dentist to have a tooth
removed. Ater her mother tells her that she will get a coin if she puts the tooth
under her pillow, Marissa gives the tooth to a homeless man on the street, telling
him the same thing, and thinking he will get money if he does so. Although the
man smiles at the little girl, the picturebook’s last page provides a striking example
of dark humour in children’s literature, as the last sentence announces, “Now all he
needed was a pillow”. In their brief analysis of this picturebook, Mickenberg and
Nel (2011) understand the picturebook as a heart-warming fable on individual acts
of goodness. But what could have been an idealistic and saccharine tale is turned
by this inal twist into an actively committed story, meant to raise the child reader’s
awareness as to their adult-imparted beliefs – and, in the process, to shed them.
he committed work of art for children here seeks to trigger dissatisfaction in the
young reader as to the adult-organised world s/he has been thrown into, in order
to extend the act of reading into relection about iction and reality, and ultimately
motivate the reader to act – in ways that the adult authority in the book cannot
fully anticipate, and therefore out of the adult’s control.
Marissa in he Tooth is presented as acting authentically, in existentialist terms.
Leaving the dentist’s, the little girl makes the independent and (she believes) fully-
informed decision to let go of her mother’s hand in order to run to the homeless
man and to give him her tooth. he text highlights Marissa’s eforts to do so:
Marissa tried to get closer to the sitting man, but, squeezing her hand tight, Mum
was holding her, like before.
So Marissa, pulling with all her strength, freed herself and walked towards the
cardboard box. (Slodovnick 2008)
he supericially kind but restraining mother, who does not pay attention to the
homeless man, let alone give him any money, allows here for a critique of bour-
geois sociopolitical order and its associated voluntary ignorance of injustice, from
which Marissa temporarily escapes both symbolically and literally. In an interest-
ing Chinese-box treatment of the highly charged motif of hand-holding, Marissa
is presented in the whole picturebook as holding a monkey doll, though it is never
mentioned in the text. his representation both signals the future replication of
Mum’s treatment of Marissa in Marissa’s treatment of her own children, and
constitutes a gentle reminder that the civilised world of the city-centre is still a
“jungle”. But hand-holding, in he Tooth, is a liminal, ambiguous act of parent-
child proximity: both a tender gesture and a restraining order, it highlights the
problematic overlap of love and imprisonment which children’s literature critics
are so fond of pointing out.
Marissa’s decision, which she makes against her mother’s will, shows a re-
sponsibility for the world, all the more exemplary as it comes from an awareness
of the injustice of a situation, also acquired against her mother’s will. It is therefore
a value-creating action – in Sartre’s view, Marissa supericially appears to be the
exemplary moral agent which committed literature can represent in order to create
emulation in the reader.
But she is in fact a subtler character than that. Her act is, crucially, a useless one.
By giving her tooth to the homeless man, Marissa believes she is doing something
useful, whereas she is in fact only doing something which has meaning for her in
her (adult-orchestrated) situation. It is only because she believes in the tooth fairy,
and it is only because in her “world” everyone has a pillow, that she thinks this
gesture is a useful one. In the world beyond her, it is not. And though she leaves
oblivious of this fact, and even rewarded by a smile from the old man, the reader
is provided, in the last spread, with the chilling realisation that Marissa’s gesture
was of no use to the man.
here is here a sophisticated diference between intention and efect in evalu-
ating the “goodness” of an action, and this diference is set up to spur the young
reader into going further than Marissa in a potentially similar situation. Marissa
collapses as role model, to leave room for something better to emerge – and that
something better is the mighty child’s actions. his is where he Tooth is represen-
tative of the sliding into children’s literature of the Sartrean ideals of committed
literature for adults – the picturebook becomes a clear call to the reader to act upon
what they have just read. hey cannot not take it as their responsibility to address
this situation; they have become the committed reader; they are requested to act.
he impact of this request depends on two cleverly orchestrated narrative ef-
fects. he irst one is timing. he iconotext waits, so to speak, for the protagonist
and her mother to leave the stage before spelling out the crucial problem with
Marissa’s action. And even once they have let, the reader is further separated
from them by having to turn the page to reach the dark punchline of the story
(Figure 13):
Marissa opened the little orange envelope and dropped her tooth in the box.
“Put it under your pillow tonight,” she said to the sitting man. “And tomorrow,
you’ll ind money there.”
First the man looked surprised. hen he smiled, warmly, and greeted Marissa and
her mother who briskly walked away.
All he needed now was… [end of penultimate spread]
Figure 13. La carie (2008) by Manon Gauthier and Avi Slodovnick © Manon Gauthier
2008. Reproduced by permission of Les 400 Coups.
A pillow.
his last image, unframed and loating in the middle of a white page, is a cold
reminder of the double inefectiveness of Marissa’s gesture: it is imbued with, and
surrounded by, nothingness. he bed evokes the comfortable space of meaning
constructed by Marissa (from false belief, as shall be argued), but its emptiness
highlights the inability of such cosy concepts to truly accommodate real people, the
real others, and their needs. Importantly, the picturebook does not insinuate that
it is Marissa’s “fault”, or anyone else’s – if anything, this last picture may reveal the
limitations of the existential project, the nothingness that lies coiled in the heart of
being, to echo Sartre (1958: 45). Marissa has now let the space of constructiveness
which the picturebook opened up for her: she has thrown herself into the world,
acted upon it authentically, but her action’s limitations are graphically and textu-
ally shown to the reader.
Whether or not this conclusion is eventually considered by the reader as in-
evitable, the careful timing of the narration allows for a desire for something else
to hatch and spread as the last page is being turned, and as the reassuring closure
promised by the penultimate spread slips between the reader’s ingers. his desire
is reinforced by the noteworthy last-minute change in narrative perspective. While
the whole picturebook has been recounted through the eyes of Marissa, the last
sentence unexpectedly shits to the perspective of the homeless man. his has the
primary efect of further alienating Marissa and her mother from the narrative, and
the secondary – and powerful – efect of leaving the reader suddenly alone with
the homeless man, without Marissa’s sunny naïveté to cling onto, or her mother’s
bourgeois stifness to oppose easily. Forced to confront the man’s feelings and
thoughts directly, forced to draw their own uncomfortable conclusions, the reader
is asked by the text to reject identiication with the protagonist. Worse still, we are
asked – since the text earlier tricked us into thinking that Marissa’s gesture was
good and meaningful – to take responsibility for Marissa’s action, even though we
have now discovered its inherent uselessness. In other words, the text intends its
reader to crave corrective action, which in a minimal sense would give the home-
less man the comfortable bed, and in a maximal sense remedy wider sociopolitical
problems leading to homelessness. Hovering in an awkward in-between readerly
position, the reader should desire changes to the situation.
Importantly, the committed picturebook’s “mirroring” of the situation in the
real world makes no secrets of the artiiciality of this real world. he young reader
is “thrown into” a mode of existence stripped of adult-imparted beliefs; in Sartre’s
vocabulary, the picturebook is “unveiling” the world to him or her, and then di-
rectly asking them to reconigure their whole belief system to take into account the
new knowledge and understand their impact on their own actions. he Tooth relies
on the reader’s ability to extract themselves from a double false belief – a double
lie, to put it more candidly – while remaining aware, and even empathetic, of the
characters’ reasons for remaining entrapped in this double lie. At its core lies an
adult-imparted belief, illustrated by Marissa’s mother’s insistence on the existence
of the tooth fairy; but this belief appears metonymous of a wider human reliance
on ictions of blissful sociopolitical rewards.
Once in the elevator, Marissa asked:

“Mum, is there really a tooth fairy?”
“Yes, of course, my darling!” Mum replied, a tender smile in her eyes.
(Slodovnick 2008)
In this elevator a complex, and in appearance benign, adult-imparted myth is

elaborated. Eager to reward her daughter ater her temporary sufering on the
dentist’s chair, the mother unhesitatingly resorts to the myth of the tooth fairy as
a guarantee of material reward. It is clear in this story that Marissa deserves her
tooth fairy money, perhaps all the more because she has not simply lost a milk
tooth but has had it painfully extracted. he bountiful and elusive fairy stands in
for Marissa’s gradual acquisition of self-control and endurance of pain, in short,
maturation: there is a reward, she is told, for such strengthening of character. his
delusion, however, is not in itself problematic: as every adult reader is aware, this
belief is only temporary, and Marissa will learn, in good time and probably without
too much distress, that the tooth fairy does not exist.
But by breaking free from her mother’s hold and giving her tooth to the home-
less man, Marissa breaks away from the usual scope of this benign myth and incor-
porates, in a naïvely child-centric manner, but authentically and responsibly, the
whole world in this belief. he sudden incursion of a wider sociopolitical issue in
a belief that is generally restricted to a child’s mind asks uncomfortable questions
regarding the interpenetrability of belief, speciically constructed in childhood,
and the reality of the adult world. Marissa’s charitable act, resting solely on belief,
is sanctiied by two adults: her mother, who assures her that the tooth fairy indeed
exists, and the homeless man, who waits until she leaves the story before sharing
with the reader the irony of this action. Marissa is thus never shaken out of her
conviction that her gesture will bring about a change, however small, in the home-
less man’s material condition.
It is therefore let to the reader to feel suddenly the palpable, nauseating con-
tingency of things. Discussing Sartre’s Nausea (1960), Maxine Greene describes
this unpleasant epiphany:
he terrible nausea experienced by the man who yearns for an orderly, intelligible
universe and discovers that existence escapes the boundaries of language and sci-
ence is the product of the consciousness disclosed in the novel. hat nausea can
only become signiicant, however, if the reader gives to it some of his own revul-
sion at contingency and arbitrariness. (1974: 67)
he reader must participate alone, and go further than Marissa. he reader must
perceive, against the apparently general consensus in favour of it, the inapplicabil-
ity of Marissa’s belief outside of the benign parameters of childhood naïveté. In
this anguish-ridden moment, the reader is addressed as freedom; as mighty. hey

are also addressed as contingent in themselves; there is no reason why the reader
should have a pillow (on which they may even be resting their head as this story is
being told) and that this man in the story should not. he universe is not “orderly”
nor “intelligible”; it is arbitrary. Whether this triggers revulsion or not, the reader
is asked to abandon soothing ictions.
But Marissa’s belief, interestingly, is not directly destroyed by the text; and this
might be the mark of an intrinsic diference between adult committed literature
and committed literature for children. he existence of the tooth fairy is never actu-
ally questioned in the text or in the pictures. Instead, the text cleverly displaces the
problematic dimension of Marissa’s act onto the existence of the man’s pillow. By
doing so, the text ensures that the dual audience of the picturebook is eiciently
addressed. For an adult co-reader or older child reader presumably aware of the
nonexistence of the tooth fairy, the irony of Marissa’s belief is revealed as twice
removed from reality. Her gesture is tangled in a double ignorance: one due to
adult-imparted ictions of magical creatures, the other to a naïve reliance on the
belief that everyone, homeless or not, must have a bed and a pillow. For the younger
child reader who still believes in the tooth fairy, the last spread allows at least for
the emerging realisation of this second level of ignorance, but it could well entice
the adult co-reader to raise gentle doubts as to the existence of the tooth fairy,
thus providing the child with a key to unlocking the picturebook’s other level of
meaning. he Tooth is an example of a politically committed picturebook in which
careful handling of the dual audience’s difering knowledge, beliefs, and experience
paves the way for potentially constructive interaction.
It would be unfair to conclude, despite this insistence on the uselessness of
some beliefs which the picturebook provides, that he Tooth is solely a cynical
“unveiling” of adult-enforced ignorance on children. Even though the problems of
knowledge and ignorance and of belief and reality are tackled in the text in order
to spur the young reader into action, he Tooth is also a fable about the potency of
symbol and iction in interpersonal relationships. he homeless man’s smile, and
his tactful pause for Marissa’s departure before he spells out the problem with her
gesture, testiies to the value of myth as a form of social glue. his encounter of
two gazes, this meaningful though useless exchange, is the beginning for Marissa
and for the young reader of recognising the existence of social injustice. And this
recognition is all the more valuable as, the text tells us, the homeless man is wilfully
ignored by most passers-by (Figure 14).
Figure 14. La carie (2008) by Manon Gauthier and Avi Slodovnick © Manon Gauthier
2008. Reproduced by permission of Les 400 Coups.
Marissa, as for her, instead of reading a book or taking a game, looked outside
the window at the hustle and bustle of the street down there. he man was still
there, sitting on the grid.
Most passers-by didn’t seem to notice him.
Marissa’s ignorance of the uselessness of her gesture is counterbalanced by ev-

eryone else’s feigned ignorance of the man. Her gaze on him symbolically brings
him into existence: his being-with-others is characterised by their indiference,
which is just as violent as being frozen by the looks of others. In this picture the
creative potential of the child’s gaze is highlighted by the use of colour: in the grey
world of the big city, only the homeless man is brightened up by colour as Marissa
looks at him. Looking at the image more closely, it becomes apparent that the
busy passers-by have been drawn on tracing paper, coarsely cut out, and stuck to
the page, leaving a halo of lighter grey around their frames as if to highlight their
remoteness from the world, which they slide across without acknowledging its
disturbing components.
he picture brings Marissa and the homeless man closer through the encoun-
ter of gazes, and in this intimate exchange the reader, who shares a similar view-
point to Marissa, is invited to witness the emergence of warm, counter-hegemonic
interpersonal relationships. It is no coincidence, of course, that this reciprocal gaze
is shared by two representatives of social and political subalterns, the child and the
homeless person: the possibility for true sociopolitical action, the text tells us, lies
with those who are not trapped in translucent bubbles of self-interest.
his beauty of the encounter, of the meaningful exchange of gazes, enhances

the realisation that more could be done to turn it into a useful act. his encounter
is an enchantment, an inexplicable desire to know the other. he homeless man,
for reasons that are never explained – because they are not explainable – suddenly
becomes the centre of gravity of Marissa’s mundane aternoon, culminating in her
symbolic git. But the last page leaves the reader with disenchantment – indeed
even disappointment – as the hollowness of this gesture is revealed. And this dis-
enchantment is used to open up a space of desire where the mysterious impulse to
know the other would be crowned with the ability to understand the other and his
needs without the rose-tinted glasses of adult-imparted beliefs. It is here, in this
interstice of the iconotext imbued with desire for change, that the young reader is at
liberty to imagine – though always unpredictably, and in a way which evades easy
answers – a more satisfactory solution to the problem of the necessary unknow-
ability of the other. It is here that the committed text becomes “powerful”, because
it is here that the adult authority which inhabits the narrative slides away to ask
for the rise of the mighty child reader’s constructive gaze.
Politically committed writing for children expands beyond Sartre’s theorisa-
tion in that it asks the child reader to detect their adult-created “situation” within
the world mirrored in the text; while at the same time forcing the reader to accept,
in line with existentialist thinking, that responsibility for that world must be taken.
It is a unique form of committed writing in that the reader is addressed not as a
currently equal freedom but as a freedom currently restricted by the adult world.
hat world is unfair and that world is problematic; and the addressees themselves
are shown to be in that world. To transcend their situation, the children readers
must modify the world; and they must do so in a way unavailable to the adult.
But sometimes (some would argue, oten) such children’s literature goes be-
yond this hopeful, open call to the young reader’s freedom; sometimes the scale of
the world-changing enterprise, the scope of the skills required and the collapse of
adult knowledge in the hope for the rise of the mighty child leads to the creation
of a more violent kind of committed text, which shames the reader or locks them
into a situation characterised by guilt.
Going on a guilt-trip: Ecological children’s literature
Margot Hillel writes:

Many books for children and young adults are likely to make their readers feel
guilty about any number of political issues – laying the burden to clean up the
world’s environment on children, for example. (2007: 251)
Indeed this particular type of committed children’s literature stands out for its
frequent transfer of guilt and shame from adult to child. “Green” or ecological
children’s books are perhaps particularly prone to this problem because of the “im-
possible” scale of their enterprise. heir ideological standpoint oten requires an or-
ganic, animist vision of the world and the environment, where adults and children
are equally part of, and therefore equally responsible for, the natural world. In this
worldview there is little space for consideration of anteriority, of cause-and-efect.
he children’s eventual inheritance of the Earth means that they are born always
already responsible for it. hey are and have always been perpetrators of ecological
violence. hese books therefore oten address the child reader, paradoxically, both
as mighty agent and as an authority regarding the environment. Namely, environ-
mental degradation becomes part of their situation, of their facticity, as well as of
their project – their might; and this tension is irresolvable.
here have been countless vocally ecological books for children since the
advent of environmental anguish in the 1970s, but the perception of childhood
as uniquely related to nature is of course more ancient. Lisa Sainsbury, in her
thorough theorisation of the ethical aspects of environmental children’s literature,
argues that “ethical concern for human and environment is encapsulated in child-
hood reminisced and potentialized” (2013: 99). his is precisely what can be cause
for worry: in such books, the signiier “child” is made to carry, so to speak, too
many temporal signiieds; not only is it a place-holder for futurity, it is also oten
one for past-bound culpability. Sainsbury looks at books which do, as she nicely
puts it, “philosophy by stealth” (2013: 108) through a “subversive subtext” (id.),
leaving aside more openly pedagogical books. As she rightly senses, the latter are
more diicult to encapsulate within an ethical project, principally because they
can oten be seen as moralising and instructional. But they are precisely the ones
which interest me, because they are, in the surest sense of the word, “committed
literature”: the intention behind such texts is to spur the child reader into a type
of action which cannot quite be predicted by the text itself.
However, that hoped-for action is oten so vast that there is little chance that
the reader will be able to address it. Here the temporal otherness of the young
reader is presented clearly: in its didactic role, the adult authority addresses the
implied reader both as extraordinarily mighty in the future and as guilty in the past.
I will take the example of a picturebook by French publisher Rue du Monde, Quand
nous aurons mangé la planète (“Once we have eaten up the planet”, 200931), by Alain
Serres and Sylvia Bonanni, textually very simple but graphically sophisticated. his

picturebook epitomises the tension of much “green” children’s literature. In such

books, the child is put in the impossible position of being at once the killer and
the saviour of the whole Earth, at once authoritative and mighty.
What such books allow us to see is an extreme form of the existential pain of
the adult. Such books are characterised by a disempowered adult authority, faced
with a paralysing vision both of what they have contributed to create and of the
action that would be required to address it. Both adult authority and implied child
reader, in such books, are put into an intense state of wait – the adult waiting for the
child to rectify the situation, and the child even more absurdly being led to wait for
itself to turn into a messianic igure. In other words, such books present to children
the spectacle of their own might in a way that can easily become unmanageable,
and therefore petrifying.
Quand nous aurons mangé la planète is based on the anonymous saying that
once we have eaten up all of the planet’s natural resources, the only thing let will
be gold and it cannot be eaten or breathed. he complete text of the picturebook
reads as follows (one line per doublespread):
Once we have swallowed up the last icebergs of the icecap,
Once we have ished the last ish in the ocean,
Once we have drunk the last water drop in the last of the clean rivers,
Once we have picked the last fruit,
Once we have felled the last tree,
Once we have cut, tailored, sewed the last skin of the last animal,
Once we have sold the last of the bubbles of pure air,
All we will have let will be silver, but silver cannot be eaten.
All we will have let will be gold, but gold cannot be breathed.
Unless that day there is somewhere on Earth, hidden in the hollow of a cave, a
child,
he last of all children, arms full of birds, pockets full of seeds of life.
(Serres 2009, passim.)
In parallel, Silvia Bonanni’s collages reutilise scraps of paper, fabric, photographs

and newspaper to form “recycled” images, in a highly colourful and dreamlike
bricolage which counterpoints the text. While the words spell out a curse, indeed
even a prediction of the future state of the planet, the images break down the
certainties of this prophetic discourse. hey blend the versimilar with the highly
stylised, and the joyous, sometimes garish colours make it diicult to adhere to
the catastrophist message, while the general feeling of unreality which they convey
arguably weakens the reader’s belief in the text’s eventual realisation.
From the cover image, it is clear that the “we” of the title encompasses children as
well as adults; it is even suggested that only children may be responsible (Figure 15).
Figure 15. Quand nous aurons mangé la planète (2009), Alain Serres and Silvia Bonanni
© Silvia Bonanni, Éditions Rue du monde 2009. Reproduced by permission of Rue du
Monde (France).
In this hallucinatory picture, the little girl-ogre has the world on her plate. his is
a literal transcription of the desire of such literature to “throw the world into the
child’s hands”, as discussed throughout this volume. Armed with a fork the size of
Africa and with a toy penguin, she stares straight at the reader in a state of imbecilic
shock. She looks like a criminal taken red-handed, shamed and ashamed.
Shame is a central example in Sartre’s explanation of the diiculty of being-

with-others. Shame is a particular moment where the “problem”, the “scandal” of
existing alongside others is made palpable: that problem being that one is suddenly
objectiied and therefore blocked as project:
I am ashamed of what I am. Shame therefore realises an intimate relation of myself
to myself… Yet… it is in its primary structure shame before somebody. I have just
made an awkward or vulgar gesture. his gesture clings to me; I neither judge it
nor blame it. I simply live it. … But now suddenly I raise my head. Somebody
was there and has seen me. Suddenly I realise the vulgarity of my gesture, and I
am ashamed… By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of
passing judgment on myself as an object. (Sartre 1958: 245–246)
hrough shame, one’s nature becomes ixed by the other; one is deprived of one’s
transcendence, of one’s being-for-itself, and turned into a being-looked-at-by-
another. Shame, among other phenomena, reveals the tension between one’s ab-
solute freedom and constitution of one’s project, and one’s being-seen by the other
as a thing, a non-project. his recognition is necessary; no refuge is to be found in
solipsism; consciousness cannot be “shut of or separable from the world, even as
a iction for analytical purposes” (Williams & Kirkpatrick 1960: 25). he individual
must learn to accept their being-for-others. Shame bears with it the baggage of
facticity, of the pretence that we are content with the conventions of the world.
Sartre then adds:
hus the Other has not only revealed to me what I was; he has established me in
a new type of being which can support new qualiications…. But this new being
which appears for the other does not reside in the Other; I am responsible for it
as is shown very well by the education system which consists in making children
ashamed of what they are. (1958: 246)
Sartre does not develop his thoughts regarding the educational system, leaving the
interpretation of this sweeping statement completely open. I would suggest that the
criticism here depends on the meaning of “are”. What one “is”, in Sartrean thought,
is the existing being, before one begins to create one’s life – and thus “give oneself ”,
so to speak, an essence. His criticism might target a perceived tendency of the
educational system to perpetuate facticity by predisposing children to accept and
replicate sociocultural conventions, and to lay on them a “shaming” gaze when they
attempt to situate themselves as projects, namely to realise their freedom. he little
girl on the front cover of Quand nous aurons mangé la planète is publicly shamed
to be seen eating the Earth; that is to say that she has been frozen in a “moment”
which will deine her, in the eyes of others, essentially. he drastic implication is
that this child has always been eating the Earth. Eating the Earth is in her essence:
she is suddenly revealed to herself through the gaze of the reader as an Earth-eater.
And therefore, following Sartre, she is responsible for this blame. She deserves it.
But problematically, the little girl-ogre is also staring back, trapping the implied
young reader in her own gaze. And shaming them in return? It is not far-fetched
to think so. he very large format of the book makes the little girl’s face lifesize,
giving the uncomfortable impression that this cover is a mirror. he young reader
stares and shames the girl but inds in return her own shaming stare. he young
reader thus also becomes the objectiied child, the child predetermined by some
form of human “essence” to be the Earth-devouring ogre. It is, as Sartre says, an
act of recognition. In the little girl’s gaze, the young reader might recognise him-
or herself as blamed and as responsible. Shame is here shared, and the committed
book in general tends towards universality – towards encompassing the reader
within the rest of humanity, for both its miracles and its faults.
he problematic shaming of the child reader continues throughout the picture-
book. his spread illustrates particularly well the implication of the child reader
as Earth-devourer (Figure 16).
he mirror at the top of the page relects a horriied wide-eyed child struck by
shame. Kimberley Reynolds (2005a: 3) observes that, as a general rule, “children’s
literature is a uniquely focused lens through which children and young people are
asked to look at the images of themselves made for them by their societies”. his
“image of oneself ” for the child reader who identiies as such is here a peculiarly
damning one. he iconotext’s intention that the child reader should recognise itself
in this portrayal is unambiguous. he hand reaching out to the “last water drop
of the last clean river” for the sole purpose of wetting a toothbrush is positioned
where one could expect a child reader to be holding the book, and it is roughly
lifesize. In case this is not clear enough, there is another child at the bottom of the
page, of whom only the back of the head and the outstretched hand can be seen.
his younger-looking child is also directly involved in the depletion of water sup-
plies. It is, similarly, a child’s hand which “picks the last fruit”. It is a little girl and
her mother who are seen wearing (absurd amounts of) fur. A little girl again tries
to eat money from a plate. From page to page, the picturebook joyfully shames
children, and, through various graphic and textual strategies, the child reader, for
what their essence is perceived to be.
he last two doublespreads suggest that this will happen unless a child saves
the world. Unexpectedly for an openly Communist and atheistic publisher, the
messianic dimension of the iconotext is obvious. he child saviour, asleep, born
“in a cave”, near a lamb and an egg-laying hen (strangely, since all animals are said
to have been killed), a big ire and a valley of leaves, and a tiny Earth rolling on
the loor, is a parody of a Christic igure. His or her arrival makes little narrative
sense. Even taking into account the parabolic nature of the story, it is impossible
Monde (France).
not to wonder how this one child can have found the extra birds and the “seeds of
life”. What could s/he possibly have done to deserve to be a free, meaning-making
child, the mighty child? Especially when all other children, reader included, are
shown to be ininitely trapped in their essences and cannot but eat up the Earth.
his “last child” crystallises all desperate adult hopes and dreams, and ulti-
mately symbolises their failure. I am tempted to take an ironic approach to the
tale’s ending: perhaps the Technicolor dream it delineates, led by a messianic ig-
ure, precisely denounces the utopian tendency to see the child as endowed with
transformative potential, and as a substitute for the adults’ action. It is impossible
to settle the matter without entering the mineield of authorial intention. However,
what may validate this interpretation is the book’s back cover, an ominous “ater”
to the front cover’s “before”. he little girl is absent, her plate is almost empty: the
Earth has been eaten up. he glass does not contain the ish anymore, or any water;
the penguin is lying on the loor, looking dead, and the tree is cut. he sun has been
replaced, in the now-ultramarine sky, by the moon (Figure 17). he pessimism of
the story comes through forcefully, though the paratext, in the form of the sum-
mary, claims that “his is a story that gives children the desire to make the Earth
go round just a little bit better.”
As Hollindale points out, this pessimism tinged with hope is characteristic of
many environmental books for children:
Although much of the emerging literature is pessimistic… there is oten a quite
diferent and more challenging attitude involved in its presentation to children.
Otherwise, why write it? Not to make children miserable, surely. Paradoxically, a
literature of warning is written out of hope. (Hollindale 2011: 96)
Indeed, this “pessimism” is and must be tinged with hope, by virtue of the fact that
it is addressed to children. “Why write it”, indeed, if there was no hope that the
child might act upon it? However, this “hope”, in particular cases, mostly forces the
reader to turn back to the adult authority and see it as disempowered, hopeless,
and desperate. If I am uneasy reading this iconotext, if the portrayal of childhood
and of environmental catastrophe disturbs me, if I feel that the child reader is
being coerced into accepting shame and responsibility for the world, it is because
such books show adult disempowerment at its pinnacle. As a result, the rise of the
mighty child is here simply too large to be realistic.
In other words, such books are not disempowering for the child: they are too
empowering. hey set up expectations of might on the child’s part which are impos-
sible to follow. Another interpretation of the shamed child, therefore, is that it is the
child who will not live up to the didactic adult’s desire; who will not “abolish the
wait”, in Grimaldi’s terms. he mighty child will then collapse and give rise to the
“real” child. And this is the shameful “essence” of the child, revealed presciently by
the adult: the child is, under the cover of a temporal other, an other like everyone
else. here is no reason why they should be better-equipped to address these issues
than anyone else.
Monde (France).
he adult’s shaming of the child occurs over two moments here. he child is
shamed both in participating in environmental change and in being the messianic
igure that will never come; both aspects are perceived as inevitable, and both are
presented as part of the child’s essence. It is not far-fetched to see in this double
shaming the simple relection of the failure of the adults’ project: their shame at
having contributed to environmental catastrophe, and their shame at being unable
to address it. More profoundly, and on an existential level, this becomes a metaphor
for another individual crisis of shame: the shame of being entirely responsible for
one’s own situation, solidiied and unsatisfactory, and the shame of having so little
time let to hope to rectify it in any satisfactory manner. Is this perhaps, as Fred
Inglis lyrically puts it, “a way of berating the present for not having lived up to the
intense purity of longing and the unrealisable aspirations which childhood set as
a standard for the adult world?” (1971: 131).
Committed literature for children can be, just as it is in Sartre’s view, a call for
the freedom of the young reader, the expression of a desire to let them act unpre-
dictably and fruitfully, transcending the situation that the adults themselves have
helped to create. When it does so, it is Sartrean committed literature redoubled, so
to speak: potently betting on the child’s temporality, beyond the adult’s power, it
can be an intensely hopeful and joyous form of literature. But it can also be a call
for an impossibly mighty child, translating the unbearably enhanced adult sense
of disempowerment. In this case, committed literature for children shames, in the
portrayal of the child, the careless past authority. It highlights the impossibility
for the future adult to live up to the hopes placed in it by this authority. It is the
literature par excellence of an ambiguous adult consciousness, trapped between
regret for past actions and optimism for future ones. hrough committed litera-
ture, this adult consciousness expresses and attempts to resolve, as Grimaldi would
put it, the fundamental tension of being always in a state of waiting, of disquiet,
always dissatisied with what has been done compared to what was promised. But
of course this also occurs, though to a diferent degree, in literature for children
that is not politically committed.
Contemporary children’s literature as a form of committed literature
We slide here into the notion that committed children’s literature might encompass
more than those books which display “active ideology”. Since children’s literature is
aimed at children, its very deinition makes it a literature of “overlap”: a literature of
transition between the adult’s authoritative message and the child’s future-bound,
more or less exacting application of this message. If one accepts the view that all
children’s literature is ineluctably didactic, and that the didactic is a form of desire
for the future, then it is diicult to think of children’s literature as ever uncommit-
ted. he adult’s engagement in the didactic discourse signiies an implicit relection
on the future, and on the ways in which the child addressee might be a part of
that future. In late modernity, with the decrease in child mortality, the increase in
future career and life options, the liberal discourse surrounding education, and the
changing perceptions of the child, children’s literature for a large part has become
increasingly committed.
his commitment is not always, of course, intentional – and as such it diverges
from Sartre’s conception of committed writing. In Sutherland’s term (1985), all
texts display “politics of assent” – Hollindale’s “passive ideology” (1988) – in other
words, a commitment by default to unquestioned and transparent values. his cor-
responds, in Sartre’s vocabulary, to littérature embarquée, literature “carried along”
passively by its unquestioned values. Uncovering those hidden values is a common
activity in contemporary critical discourse very much driven by the hermeneutics
of suspicion, both in literature for adults and for children. Following Hollindale’s
article, John Stephens’s work on language and ideology (1992) provided a sophis-
ticated toolbox for decoding hidden ideology in children’s iction. Concurring
with Marxist criticism, Stephens locates ideology throughout form and content of
literary works. His theorisation of ideology identiies a triad within which ideology
operates: “discourse” (the linguistic and structural properties of the work), “story”
(the actions of the ictional characters), and “signiicance”, the elusive “message”
which arises from the reader’s synthesis between the irst two elements, and varies
not only from reader to reader but also according to readerly and critical practices.
Studies of ideology in children’s literature are oten concerned with “passive”
ideologies: they attempt to unearth the values and assumptions which structure
children’s books and – potentially – child readers’ minds. Adult “power” over
children on numerous levels – political, physical, emotional – is oten detected,
as is the transmission of middle-class values, or racial and sexist prejudices. It is
worth interrogating the degree to which this is becoming a critical relex rather
than an honest analytical exercise. In a recent article, critic and children’s author
Catherine Butler (2013) attacked a number of children’s literature scholars who
had unshelled passively ideological biases from her own young adult novel. While
acknowledging some of them, Butler in turn analysed their analysis and uncovered
what she perceived to be the critical biases of her own critics: the tendency to look
for and ultimately ind, at the cost of analytical rigour, ideological “problems” in
children’s books.
Reviewing Stephens’s 1992 book, Audrey Beisel and Ian Wojcik-Andrews
(1993: 221) stress that in children’s literature,
[w]hether it be a liberal or Letist agenda looking to articulate a socialist vision
through the lens of a humane and caring curriculum or a conservative, right-wing
rejection of both that vision and its humane embodiment in a democratic cur-
riculum, the triumvirate of language, ideology, and children’s literature shapes and
organizes the socialization of the child into the adult.
heir (possibly sarcastic) bias towards the “humane” “Letist agenda” is a refraction
of current tendencies of post-1970s children’s iction and criticism. he detection
of sexist, racist and classist ideological assumptions (Paul 2005), the “increasing
awareness of how literature could afect social attitudes” (Pinsent 2005: 192), cou-
pled with a weakening of the nuclear family (Reynolds 2005b), have triggered the
emergence of what could be called an unexamined “liberal humanist” ideology in
children’s literature.
his denomination stands for, broadly, a belief in multiculturalism, equality
and freedom of choice. But beneath the apparent uncontroversial benevolence
of this ideology lies the problematic agenda of imposing it on child readers as
the dominant opinion of adult writers, librarians and critics. Jack Zipes (2001)
is one of the harshest critics of such covert ideology, which, he believes, causes
transnational cultural homogenisation by preventing young readers from chal-
lenging socio-political norms. Stephens similarly wishes to see in Australian chil-
dren’s literature a departure from “an ideology of liberal conformism” (2003: vii).
Nodelman (1994b: 174–175), also reviewing Stephens’s book, uncovers the fallacy
of this passive ideology:
As believers in the power of ideas to change lives, we tend to assume the liberal
humanist view that reality is a place in which individuals have the power to deine
and control their lives… But liberal humanists remain blithely unconscious of the
contradiction at the heart of these assumptions.
Sarland notes the ambiguity of current liberal humanist assumptions both within
children’s iction and within children’s literature criticism, and denounces a prob-
lematic “liberal humanist consensus” (2005: 36), especially in the works of scholars
Fred Inglis and Peter Hunt.
his liberal humanist ideology is thus perceived as a middle-class desire to
tame child readers into unthinking acceptance of the hegemonic sociopolitical sys-
tem. Nodelman (2008: 169) developed this accusation, saying that children’s litera-
ture limits freedom by subjecting the young reader to democratic ideals. Nodelman
denounces what I would call a form of Platonic noble lie in children’s literature.
On the one hand, adult authors and critics willingly admit that displaying liberal
humanism as an ideal form of political ideology is a wishful misrepresentation;
on the other hand, they “view it as beneicial for children” (Nodelman 2008: 217),
namely, beneicial for social order.
his noble lie, Stephens (2003) argues, “[constructs] an ideology of childhood,
which is to some extent common to Western societies because these principles
are also basic tenets of Western liberal humanism” (ix). It is a political ideology,
seeking to enforce respect of and obligation towards a political organisation per-
ceived as valuable: an axiom of modern children’s literature, Stephens notes, is
that democracy is always preferable to other political systems, or to tyranny. his

sounds obvious to contemporary Western readers, which aptly proves Stephens’s
point. hus omnipresent liberal humanist values are ideological assumptions –
which belong to Sutherland’s “politics of assent”, and to Hollindale’s second and
third categories of ideology. Because they inculcate contentment towards safety
and a socially constructed sense of freedom, there is a discrepancy between what
we could call the (not always very clean) realpolitik of adults and its deformed,
idealised representation within children’s literature, which contributes to con-
structing content and consenting citizens. Insofar as citizenship and the future of
society hinges on this construction, children’s literature is always a form of political
speech, and sometimes a form of political noble lie.
In the latter case, children’s literature can be said to be an instrument of the
social contract. If it is so, can it still be described as committed? Politically speak-
ing, no – at least not in Sartre’s categorisation of committed literature, which is
recognisably Marxist and would thus dismiss what we could call contractarian
literature as serving the self-replicating agenda of the bourgeoisie. Furthermore,
children’s littérature embarquée does not fulil Sartre’s criterion of a fully commit-
ted writing, whose entire project must be political.
But in other ways, contemporary children’s literature corresponds to Sartre’s
theorisation of commitment. Like committed literature, it creates an impression
of disconnection between speaker and addressee as well as an ofer to bridge it.
Children’s literature hinges upon the hope of a future peopled with active agents –
who are currently its readers. But these active agents whom the adult is trying to
address are currently dwelling in an symbolically diferent temporal sphere, which
has a non-negligible impact on the type of power they can be assumed to possess.
Intrinsic to this notion is the impossible address to a desired audience, which is
central to the frustrating endeavours of committed literature in Sartre’s theorisa-
tion. Denis presents this diiculty as follows: “To a certain extent, to write for also
means to write in the place of” (2000: 59); a remark in Jacqueline Rose’s spirit,
followed by a question equally relevant to children’s literature critics: “How can
he [the writer] be sure to be truly read by those to whom he addresses himself?”
(2000: 60). Children’s literature is traversed by the impossibility to forecast exactly
what the child (and future adult) will do with the command once the speaker is no
longer “alive”; once the book has been closed.
Moreover, the notion of responsibility, which is central to committed writing
in Sartre’s theorisation, is equally important in the creation and distribution of
children’s literature. Sartre’s writers must be held accountable for their writings;
they are their works, and their works are their attempt to reach out to an audi-
ence in order to prepare the future in the way they see most it. But requests for
authorial, editorial and medial responsibility in children’s literature are similarly
inescapable. Children’s literature remains commonly censored from the inside as

well as the outside, and judged according to political and ethical criteria much
more than any other type of literature. he sole recognition of an audience of
children triggers a particular ethical and political relation to the work of art, and
the immediate observation of the book by a speciic interpretive community, to
take Stanley Fish’s term (1980), which creates a web of negotiated discourse around
its meaning. Because this community is intensely concerned with childhood, and
because childhood is intensely permeated with social, political and ethical ideals
(as well as existential concerns), there is little space outside of commitment in
contemporary children’s literature. Writers, illustrators and publishers, whether
or not deemed controversial, are frequently called upon to justify or explain their
purposes and projects for the child readers they address.
Children are synonymous with the future, and this future that they repre-
sent is thus also, through them, the “property” of a number of (oten conlicting)
adult groups – parents, teachers, politicians. Children’s literature is thus an area
of heightened adult responsibility where those adults who do not feel the need
to explain their political inclinations and ethical and religious beliefs are much
more likely to be asked to do so than if they were writing for adults. he simple
deinitional transitiveness of children’s literature – that it is for children – suices
to create an externally-enforced notion of responsibility and accountability for
one’s work which, in Sartre’s theorisation, is internalised by the committed author.
he diference between an externally-imposed responsibility of children’s liter-
ature creators and an internally-imposed one in creators of committed literature is
philosophically important, but both have similar efects. One can write for children
with no particular social, political or ethical relection at irst, but the process of
getting published, distributed, reviewed and interviewed will trigger this relec-
tion. he categorisation of one’s book as a children’s book is enough to put one’s
book under speciic political and ethical scrutiny. he power of children’s-literature
interpretive communities, which orchestrate the distribution of children’s books,
means that they will impose labels, emit judgements, and ask questions of the au-
thors and publishers. hese labels, judgements and questions will rarely lose sight
of the fact that the book in question is intended for children and thus engages the
creators’ responsibility with regard to their vision of society present and future.
De facto, therefore, creators of children’s literature, whether or not interested in
cataloguing their work as politically committed, are required to commit in at least
one minimal way – to the ield of children’s literature as a space of speciic political
and ethical responsibility.
So beyond children’s literature that is committed in the active sense of the
word – such as the books discussed in this chapter – it is my impression that all
children’s literature in contemporary times can be deined as committed in the
passive sense of the word – committed by an extremely inluential interpretive

community, by virtue of being children’s literature, by the fact that it concerns
children, who by deinition stand for a future of yet unrealised political and ethical
possibilities and for current vulnerability. he synthetic adult agency at the heart
of children’s literature must be committed in one of these two ways. hese percep-
tions necessarily hang upon the belief that children’s special status, which justiies
a special literature, also requires a particularly overt type of writerly commitment.
here would be no need, arguably, for this precaution and no requirement for
this particular responsibility and accountability of children’s literature creators if
children were not envisaged as intensely potent and potentially world-changing
rather than just as malleable and easily inluenced. he responsibilisation of chil-
dren’s literature creators, which leads to a recognition of this type of writing as
committed, expresses a more abstract belief in the might of the child reader, who,
if exposed to particular injunctions, may carry them into unknown territories.
Unknowability resurfaces here again, because fear, anguish and interest regard-
ing the “committed” work of children’s literature creators would not exist if child
readers were genuinely believed to be solely passive receptacles to their messages.
We might hear that “unsophisticated child readers” may ind it diicult to “dis-
tance themselves” from the text and “unquestioningly re-enact” what happens in
such or such controversial work of children’s literature. And these worries are cer-
tainly true to an extent: perhaps teenage readers will indeed be encouraged by Judy
Blume’s Forever (2005) to have (extremely clinical) sex. But this cannot explain
the anguish surrounding works where any literal re-enactment is impossible –
such as, prominently, works of fantasy. In those cases, the discourse is slightly,
but signiicantly, diferent – young readers may be enticed to reproduce “some”
aspects of the works, transferring them, through play, for instance, to their usual
environment. hese include particular triggers of adult terror, such as violence
against oneself or other people, sex, and risk-taking behaviour. But there is oten
no easy transferability of these particular ictional elements to the child readers’
real environments – there is no Hunger Games television show for child readers
re-enact the killing of other children – and yet it is still suspected that they might
do something with the violence portrayed.
Do what, exactly? Adults are not sure, but they posit that it might have some
impact. his interesting indeterminacy of the threat represents the “negative”,
“dark” side of what I have been discussing so far – the “positive”, “hopeful” in-
determinacy which adults also celebrate in the symbol of the child. he threat,
on the one hand, and the hope, on the other, are that children may be led to do
something with the adult’s words that the adult cannot predict. And yet both are
still connected to the adult’s words; it is assumed that this unpredictable behaviour
will in some way derive from it. his indeterminacy, whether negative or positive,
whether smothered or celebrated, is at the core of children’s literature just as it is at

the core of committed literature. It assumes on the part of its addressee a potential
for independent action, a potential I call might, and it also recognises that this
potential can be activated by the words of the authoritative speaker.
Understanding modern children’s literature as a form of committed writing –
I would like to emphasise again that it only rarely corresponds to all of Sartre’s
criteria – is a fruitful way of thinking about the ambiguity of the didactic dis-
course of that type of literature. Notably because this discourse is problematically
both prescriptive and liberating; always already addressed to a speciic audience,
it constitutes a potentially conlictual encounter between speaker and addressee.
It is therefore a fruitful way of theorising the call to the mighty reader – the reader
who in the future will prolong and enhance my own project. It ofers conceptual
tools towards understanding this relation as a reformulation, through the literary
endeavour, of the complexity of being-for-others and in time. It also opens up a
diferent kind of questioning as to the speciic relationship between adult and child,
and the central feeling which governs – or should govern – this relationship: love.
he pedagogical romance
Love
Adults love children. Well, this may be a generalisation; many adults love children.
heir own in particular, those of others sometimes, and, in the abstract, children
in need, children in poverty, children in hospitals, children in commercials. Our
society worships children, to the extent that those who self-deine as “childfree”
(childless out of choice) are frequently regarded as abnormal. he adult who does
not love children or does not want any of their own is automatically suspicious:
their lack of instinctive afection for the younger generation must denote a deeper
lack of empathy for one’s fellow humans. Misanthropy, it seems, is inherent to
“pedophobia”. Children’s literature is replete with loving Miss Honeys and unloving
Trunchbulls, whose varying degrees of afection for children are exactly indicative
of their goodness or villainy in general.
his afection for children, and suspicion towards those adults who do not
feel it, cannot be simpliied. he special symbolic status of the child as temporal
other conditions the amount of love one will feel towards children – on both an
individual and a social level. Love for children is a prominent means of channelling
existential anxieties regarding the passing of time. he adult who “loves children” –
and the hidden adult of children’s literature, for all its despotic tendencies, “loves
children” – is partly in love with the symbolic status of the child as a place-holder
for the future. heir love for children is a love for the mighty child. he child em-
bodies for the adults the possible return of indeterminacy in their own existences.
Meanwhile, the adult who does not feel the urge to procreate or to treat chil-
dren as special has perhaps understood the illusory nature of this love; the fact
that it is premised on a symbolic dressing-up of a category of people, rather than
on the objective qualities of the individuals who make up this category. hey may
have displaced their existential anxieties onto other objects – Grimaldi’s categories
still leave them with much to choose from, not least of which religion, politics,
art. here is no ethical “hierarchy”, of course, between those diferent strategies of
consciousness; we can emit no judgement as to the best way of coming to terms
with one’s initude and fundamental ambiguity. Some people may prefer to collect
train sets, or write three-hundred-page academic volumes on existentialism and
children’s literature.
Adult love for children is a complex phenomenon, always connected to in-

dividual anguishes concerning time and otherness, and thereby pertinent to an
existential relection on children’s literature. It is also connected to a more general
questioning about love itself, which from an existentialist perspective is all but
an innocent feeling. Contemporary children’s literature expresses adult love for
children in all its complexity – showing its pains as well as its pleasures. his love
never escapes the didactic, though it is also shot through with awareness of a
future departure of the child addressee from the didactic. Just like the fox in he
Little Prince, the didactic adult knows the child is soon going to leave the didactic
situation and explore another region of the desert on their own. I call the articula-
tions of this time-bound adult love for children within the didactic discourse the
pedagogical romance.
he pedagogical romance deines the loving, desire-infused space of tensions
between the seductive symbolic child igure, the real child, the textual adult author-
ity (“hidden adult”), and the real (existentially disempowered) adult. Astride the
symbolic and the real, the factual and the ictional, the personal and the political,
the pedagogical romance constructs a relationship across generations. It is where
meaning-making potentially occurs. he essential point is that it is a relationship of
interdependence. If the conversion of authority into might fails, if the relationship
becomes constrictive and prevents the child project from emerging, then the pain
is equal for both parties. It makes no sense to postulate that the adult igure, unless
clinically sadistic, can draw any gratiication or reward from smothering the child’s
project entirely. In the “romantic” relationship between adult and child, the former’s
project must both encompass the latter’s and set it free. here can be an encounter
of desires only if these two desires have space to be deployed.
his is certainly a controversial point, with which some sociologists or histo-
rians of childhood would disagree. In his 2001 book Inventing the Child: Culture,
Ideology, and the Story of Childhood, Zornado strongly argues that the Western
world is characterised by both constant violence and general numbness towards this
violence; and that this violence is caused, singularly, by the oppressive treatment
of children by adults in this civilisation. Zornado calls “poisonous pedagogy” the
tendency of educators to set children up to fail, and therefore to have to look outside
of themselves to the pedagogue as a bestower of knowledge – yearning for their
support, approval, and love. Zornado’s claims are fearlessly ambitious: he associates
slavery, the Holocaust, the Columbine massacre and the atomic bomb with parent-
ing practices in the Western world. Zornado thinks (linking this phenomenon to
the Book of Genesis) that pedagogues have a tendency to train children to yearn
for the pedagogue – constantly trying to reassure themselves that they are doing
things right in order to deserve the adult’s love. He cannot fathom an adult-child
relationship of love that would not conceal psychological, if not physical violence.
And he is right: no encounter with alterity (particularly loving encounters)

can ever be totally devoid of violence. Critiques of the adult-child relationship as
painful and violent seem to imply that non-coercive relationships can exist – but
what if they cannot? Such critiques also generally fail to cover the possibility that
the child might equally be an entrapping entity towards the longing, incomplete
other that the adult represents. In this light, Zornado’s argument is reductive be-
cause his ideal concept of love is non-conlictual:
I have no doubts that parents love their children. What concerns me is the way in
which the dominant ideology structures the expression of that love. For the child
that love is oten a lonely, violent, painful, humiliating experience that has more to
do with the adult’s exercise of power and authority than with the adult’s exercise
of compassion and understanding. (Zornado 2001: xvii)
By putting all the “pain” on only one side of the equation, Zornado negates the
complexity of the adult-child relationship and of adult-child love. He does not
allow for the possibility that both parties may be alternatively engaged in triggering
and stiling the other’s freedom. Replace “child” with “adult” and vice-versa in the
above text, and you will obtain a similarly extremist condemnation of the reign of
spoilt children in contemporary society. Not, of course, that there are never any op-
pressive pedagogical practices and profoundly violent psychological and physical
damage done to children within changing frames of educational discourses. But
arguments which constantly identify adults as perpetrators of symbolic violence
upon children neglect to explain how such situations could ever be perceived as
satisfactory for the adult.
From an existentialist perspective, love is a highly problematic relation to oth-
ers to begin with, because it activates a both possessive and longing look. Possessive,
because we instinctively want to own the other, to keep it for ourselves. But also
longing, because I suspect that this particular other has something that belongs
to me. In Sartre’s words, “the other holds a secret – the secret of what I am… he
other is for me simultaneously the one who has stolen my being from me and the
one who causes ‘there to be a being which is my being’ ” (Sartre 1958: 386). But
importantly, the other who threatens to “own” me also conirms my being, albeit
partly “corrupted”. In my terms, the child igure conirms the adult’s being and the
adult igure conirms the child’s. Both projects, at the irst stage of interaction, are
equally threatened by ownership and equally reasserted as beings.
Sartre’s idea that the other has the “secret” of who I am – however elusive
this “secret” can be – provides unlikely but fruitful links with psychoanalysis. For
Jacques Lacan (1975), the other contains the elusive objet petit a which both is
and triggers desire; and the child gazed upon by the adult has the a. he secret of
that secret is of course, as in Kung-Fu Panda, that there is no secret. Desire desires
desire, in the Lacanian view, endlessly throwing further the desirer from the satis-
faction of their desire, and providing them instead with objects of fantasy bound
to disappoint. he narcissistic parent of the Freudian tradition projects onto the
child, loading it with an excess of unfulilled and unfulillable desires and con-
demning it ultimately to disappoint the parent. Parental love can here be deined
as the conviction that the child holds the key to the parent’s being. As such, the
child, in both Sartre and Lacan, “possesses” the adult: founds it the adult’s being,
and contains in it the key to their existence. However illusory and desperate the
quest, the pedagogical romance is dynamised by the suggestion that “something” is
there. In my vocabulary, this suggestion translates as the didactic desire to see the
mighty child emerge: because only the mighty child could tell the adult what they
are holding so secret about the adult’s being. In the particular case of the adult-
child relationship, this secret has a temporal dimension: it will only be revealed in
the future. Tragically, it might only be revealed when the adult is dead. he child
makes the adult wait for the secret to be revealed.
But for the child it is the didactic adult who is the keeper and the deployer of
secrets; it is the comparatively old and immensely authoritative adult who orga-
nises the unveiling of the world through education. he conviction that the adult
must know, so typical of early childhood, succeeded by the gradual realisation that
they do not, which is a leitmotiv of children’s and young adult literature, suggests
that the child too is looking to the didactic adult as one who bestows secrets. Both
child and adult, I argue, are looking outward to their temporal other with the desir-
ous look that stems from the conviction that this other owns something that be-
longs to them. he pedagogical romance is the space where these two convictions
clash or click, and the interdependency of the two entities begins. Should the adult
betray the child in the didactic discourse – either by not providing the knowledge
required, or by providing knowledge felt as untrue – then the child’s response is
likely to be that of a spurned lover: an outright rejection of the adult’s message.
All loves are far too complex not to involve an interactive structure and a form
of discourse traversed with desire for the other, for her knowledge, and partly for
his annihilation of the other. he presumed violence against the child in the adult-
child relationship is counterbalanced by a network of expectations, beliefs and
desires towards the adult trapped in the child’s gaze. Sartre insists on the theoretical
and practical impossibility of envisaging one’s being-for-others as non-conlictual.
he other’s sole existence makes me other, and vice-versa; the other is a contingent
but inevitable impediment to my freedom and my for-itself. “Unity with the other
is therefore in fact unrealizable”, concludes Sartre (1958: 387–388). If I try to attain
this uniication, chaos ensues:
his project of uniication is the source of conlict since while I experience myself
as an object for the Other and while I project assimilating him in and by means
of this experience, the Other apprehends me as an object in the midst of the
world and does not project identifying me with himself. It would therefore be
necessary… to act upon the internal negation by which the Other transcends my
transcendence and makes me exist for the Other; that is, to act upon the Other’s
freedom. (id.: 388)
his ideal is the ideal of love: a perfect encounter of two freedoms. But in theory
this encounter subjects the other’s freedom to one’s freedom. he other’s freedom,
as Sartre notes, makes me vulnerable, precisely because it makes me. Finding one’s
freedom trapped into someone else’s is the equivalent of becoming that someone’s
creation; of being turned into a value.
Sartre sees love not primarily as the desire to possess someone as thing, but
rather someone as freedom. And yet – because of the frustrating aspect of desire
which makes one yearn for lack rather than for totality – the lover wants the be-
loved’s freedom as a declaration of captivity:
he lover demands a pledge, yet is irritated by a pledge. He wants to be loved by a
freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free. He
wishes that the Other’s freedom should determine itself to become love… his
captivity must be a resignation that is both free and yet chained in our hands.
(Sartre 1958: 389)
his means that the lover willingly accepts that this makes them the object and the
unique occasion of the beloved’s love, but only insofar as the beloved is desired
to be trapped in a cyclical enactment of freedom, with the lover as the objective
limit of their freedom. his relationship is impossible: there is no solution to the
riddle of one’s being-with-others, even through love. But there is an enmeshment
of illusions, which Sartre spells out:
My uneasiness stems from the fact that I assume necessarily and freely that being
which another makes me be in an absolute freedom. “God knows what I am for
him! God knows what he thinks of me!” his means “God knows what he makes
me be.” I am haunted by this being which I fear to encounter someday at the turn
of a path, this being which is so strange to me and which is yet my being and
which I know that I shall never encounter in spite of all my eforts to do so. But
if the Other loves me then I become the unsurpassable, which means that I must
be the absolute end. In this sense I am saved from instrumentality. … hus I am
reassured; the Other’s look no longer paralyzes me with initude. It no longer ixes
my being in what I am. I can no longer be looked at as ugly, as small, as cowardly,
since these characteristics necessarily represent a factual limitation of my being
and an apprehension of my initude as initude. (Sartre 1958: 391)
Disastrously, romantic love is characterised by the conlation of its problem with its
solutions. I want the other to freely surrender their freedom; to make me into “the
world” without objectifying me; to turn me into his or her irst and most essential
value while letting me be my own project; ultimately, and in short, to make me
into another freedom. Spangled with illusions, and with the constant and repeated
performance of these illusions, romantic love is a conlict, the conlict par excel-
lence of the necessary perils of intersubjectivity.
Can the adult-child relationship be likened to romantic love? Yes, though of a
speciic type because of the time-gap at its heart. he pedagogical romance, con-
trary to romantic love, is characterised, as reiterated throughout this volume, by a
speciic type of discourse – the didactic discourse – afected by this time-gap, which
signals a perceived diference in knowledge and, on each side, a desire to inculcate
knowledge and to draw it from the other. Adult-child love is evidently framed
by diferent ideologies, fears, symbols and sociocultural tensions than romantic
love. It is a love which has been relatively recently (if one takes Philippe Ariès’s
view, 1962) made to be seen as evident, “natural” or “instinctive”, “universal” and
constantly reiterated: faced with a child, the adult is expected to be struck by love
at irst sight. It is also, obviously, a desexualised form of afection (in the minimal
sense of “sexual”). here may be socioculturally engineered gender diferences in
the performance of this love as well. But the central points raised by Sartre – the
presence of the secret, the yearning for knowledge, and above all the impossible
appeal to the other’s freedom – are similar.
Pedagogy is both pleasurable and painful – and sometimes more one than the
other – because it is a space where the adult’s fascination with the child as future-
bound, unpredictable freedom is counterbalanced by the child’s fascination with
the adult as authoritative, as possessing and potentially bestowing accumulated
knowledge. he child keeps a secret which can hatch and take light, like Magritte’s
bird, within a completely unknowable future: it is intensely desirable. he adult is
close to the ideal beloved who has seen one as the ultimate and primary value of
their freedom; as the whole world. On either side of the relationship, each party is
simultaneously set free and disempowered by the necessity for their own freedom
to impede, and yet be trapped by, the other. he articulation of these tensions
means that the pedagogical romance is made of anguish and of jouissance just like
any other love; but with the added problems, irst, that it is both past- and future-
bound; and second, that it is characteristic of generational transmission, namely
cyclical and virtually ininite.
Both child and adult should experience the pedagogical romance with their
freedom and project as unscathed as possible, and as enhanced by the interaction
as possible. he failure of ideal intersubjectivity is not a negative conclusion but
a motive for the continued relection about generational transmission, with its
singular dynamics of desire and temporal tensions. here can be no pleasurable

pedagogy on just one side of the “couple”; there can be no pain for one that does
not impact the other.
In this space of uneasiness, of failed and successful communications, of dis-
appointments and investments, there will be oppression, but also resistance. By
invoking the child’s potency, the adult relinquishes their own; by leaning on the
adult’s authority, the child’s project inds itself inevitably anchored in another’s.
hese illusions and disillusionments arise again and again from generation to gen-
eration, highlighting the faith in both lovers that the other might just be the one
who will contain their own freedom while setting them freer.
All education is a failure
Hell, therefore, is not quite other people. In the scheme of the didactic relation
between adult and child, we do not ultimately encounter the other’s gaze as com-
pletely reifying, because the other is gazeless: it is the future emergent project.
It cannot return our objectifying glance, it cannot trap us in it. Intersubjectivity
is reduced to a minimum, because we are talking to another subject across the
“cultural time-gap”. It is an encounter of desires, a stitching-together of projects.
hese projects should ind their realisation “beyond the grave”. here emerges
again the image of an adult dimly struggling with initude. Beauvoir talks of work
and of political action as ways of targeting aims on the very long term. She argues
that the lack of certainty regarding the outcome of one’s project should never lead
to pessimism, or to an impression of failure. he aim is envisaged
beyond one’s own death, through the movement, the league… insofar as we have
no power over the time that will low beyond its achievement, we must not expect
anything from this time towards which we have worked; other men will have to
live through its joys and its sorrows. (1947: 159)
Note Beauvoir’s insistence on the fact that “we have no power” over this time be-
yond our grave; we simply have the power to be, in a humble manner, the person
whose discourse and actions served as a springboard for future discourses and
actions. Again, the didactic discourse of the adult will never directly control the
project of the child, but without it this project could not be deployed.
Beauvoir adds: through the other, I can have access to futurity; my project
can be carried forward. But I must accept the freedom of the other in doing so; I
must embrace the unpredictability of the process. Pyrrhus et Cinéas ends with her
plea to recognise the beauty of generational transmission in all its indeterminacy:
It is in uncertainty and risk that we must assume our actions; and that is precisely
the essence of freedom; […] it signs no pact with the future. […] What the other
will create from me will belong to him and not does belong to me. I act only by
assuming the risks of this future. (Beauvoir 1947: 312)
his fantasised future, whereby one’s project is continued by an other while still
allowing this other to act freely, saturates Beauvoir’s vision of childhood. Adults
can “sign no pact with the future”, even through very prescriptive children’s litera-
ture. hough responsibility is not eschewed (we “assume the risks of this future”),
this future project will not fully belong to me. he pedagogical romance rests on
the “risk-taking” behaviour of the loving adult, who wills the child to take up their
project freely, and thus accept that they could do anything with it.
he idea that one may will the other to freely carry forward one’s own project
is the touchstone of Beauvoir’s ethics. She states, somewhat paradoxically, not
just that willing the other free is necessary to one’s own freedom, but also that
one cannot help but will the other free. “Tyrannical” adult-child relationships, it
would seem, must contain at their core the adult desire for the child’s freedom;
not just altruistically, but also because the child’s freedom is a condition of the
adult’s freedom, and “possibilizes”, in Sartre’s term, future developments to their
own projects. An unfree child, for Beauvoir, is thus the creature of an unfree adult:
If my son is a determined being who endures my action without resistance, I am
determined too, I do not act; and if I am free, my son is too. But then my action
cannot be transmitted through the generations as if it was slipping through quiet
waters: upon this action, other men will act in their turn. (Beauvoir 1947: 243–244)
Adult and child are linked through the pedagogical romance; one cannot destroy
the other’s freedom without losing their freedom in turn. Beauvoir thus pinpoints
the contradictory adult desire both to control children and to let them “slip away”
to preserve their freedom. hese claims about childhood are implicitly claims
about adulthood; more precisely, about the adult displacement of existential con-
cerns over time and otherness onto the treatment and education of children. Adults
replicate upon children the existential tensions which characterise their own situ-
ation; they crystallise onto the child, that temporal other, their own conlicting
tendencies towards bad faith and towards freedom.
his paradoxical adult prescription is not in itself a “bad” thing. Adults rou-
tinely oppress children, but they also routinely oppress one another. heir relation-
ships to children simply condense speciic aspects of their relationships to other
adults. he educational enterprise, as a mode of being-for-others, cannot escape
the problem of alterity and the burden of freedom: “In the rearing of the child,
as in any relationship with others, the ambiguity of freedom implies the outrage
of violence; in a sense, all education is a failure”, says Beauvoir (1948: 142). his
“failure” is only symptomatic of a “fact” of existentialist ontology: there can be no

spotless relationship to others. No rapport to otherness fully succeeds, because
we are inherently detached from the elements we seek to make an impression on,
and temporally distinct from the selves we aspire to be. herefore there is nothing
intrinsically “wrong” in the power relations that are established between adult and
child; they are characteristic of any interaction with others. Adults, in Beauvoir’s
vision, act as they do towards children because childhood applies speciic existen-
tial pressure onto their own concerns. hey are not (or not just) ruthlessly oppres-
sive instructors, intent on moulding children into compliant and indolent adults;
they are themselves ambiguous beings who may desire children to be free just as
they seemingly seek to restrict their freedom.
In this light, it is worth probing the statement that “all education is a failure”.
Beauvoir is here talking about the adult-child educational relationship. She has just
detailed what makes up the ambiguity of this relationship: the mixture of adult
power and adult subservience that it implies. Childhood, she tells the reader, is
a situation which is common to all men and which is temporary for all; therefore,
it does not represent a limit which cuts of the individual from his possibilities,
but, on the contrary, the moment of a development in which new possibilities are
won. he child is ignorant because he has not yet had the time to acquire knowl-
edge, not because this time has been refused him. To treat him as a child is not to
bar him from the future but to open it to him; he needs to be taken in hand, he
invites authority, it is the form which the resistance of facticity, through which all
liberation is brought about, takes for him. (1948: 141)
Beauvoir’s words oscillate between progressive educational thought and the vo-
cabulary of traditional pedagogy. By highlighting the fact that childhood is “com-
mon to all men” and “temporary”, Beauvoir sets it irmly apart from other types
of otherness – such as the men/women dichotomy developed much later in he
Second Sex. his pre-empts, notably, her relections on old age, which she would
abundantly theorise towards the end of her life. Age-related otherness is a speciic
type of alienation which requires its own theorisation. As she says, childhood is a
“moment”, and there is no bemoaning the lack of knowledge which accompanies
it – there simply has not been time for the child to acquire it. his theorisation
of the child not as lacking, but as whole in their development, is characteristic of
progressive education; the point is not to “ill” the child with knowledge, nor to
address their “ignorance”, but to understand it as a positive feature of a being-in-
becoming. his being has time let; they have a future which the adult has no access
to. Getting closer to traditional pedagogy, Beauvoir then states that the child “calls
for authority”, a striking statement coming from an existentialist thinker, but ab-
solutely in tune with the ambiguous nature of the phenomenon she is describing.
his call for authority is necessary because it sets the boundaries of otherness
which must be espoused by the child’s growing aspirations and movement towards
freedom; and here we return to child-centred educational thought. here would
be no liberation, no freedom, if these boundaries had not been set by the adult:
the child needs to feel the temporal otherness of adulthood just as the adult feels,
keenly, the temporal otherness of childhood.
his is how a process of mutual recognition occurs: the child calls for an au-
thority which will open the world for them and, by giving them awareness of their
situation, will also highlight routes towards potential liberation. As Beauvoir’s
work on childhood suggests, we can envisage a profoundly child-centred didactic
discourse, aiming at the development of moral freedom in the child, which still jus-
tiies the presence of adult authority. In fact, from a Beauvoirian perspective, that
is the only ethical way to think about childhood and education; childhood being
the site of the primordial ambiguity of existence, the didactic discourse must ad-
dress this ambiguity. here is no bypassing the complexities of intersubjectivity and
initude; all education should be a failure, namely, it should introduce the child to
these complexities, and fail to inculcate a universally applicable response to them.
his is, notably, also the view of a number of contemporary educational think-
ers who could be qualiied as neo-existentialists, and who are attempting to over-
come the divide between “progressive” and “traditional” education. Biesta thus
refutes the progressive argument that education might be without violence. As he
claims, “Education entails a violation of the sovereignty of the student” (2006: 24,
original emphasis). he purpose of education, he argues, is to create a relational
subject, who will react to encounters with the others who share their world. he
adult teacher, in this respect, is for the young learner both a source of “risk” and
“trust” (id.: 22) – of risk, because no one can predict what will occur when the
educative act has taken place, and of trust because
[t]rust is by its very nature without ground, because if one’s trust were grounded,
that is, if one would know what was going to happen or how the person you have
put your trust in would act and respond, trust would no longer be needed. (id.: 22)
he trust of the child towards the adult must be “without ground”; indeed, it is by
necessity without ground, because there is never any certainty that the adult will rise
to the task that they have assigned themselves. In return, however, I would argue
that the adult’s trust in the child, and the amount of risk it involves for the world and
for others, is equally without ground. We are talking about a relation characterised,
to a large extent, by the impossibility ever to predict its outcomes for either party.
Evidently, the adult-child relationship can still be intolerably oppressive.
Beauvoir experienced it through the event which, by her avowal, changed her
life: the death of her childhood friend Zaza Mabille. Ater years of repression and
manipulation by her family, especially her mother, Zaza dies; inexplicable even
from a medical perspective, this death ends the Memoirs and, with them, the era
of Beauvoir’s “dutifulness”. Beauvoir’s resentment towards the Mabille family, who
according to her were responsible for Zaza’s death due to their rigid education, led
to her breaking further away from her own family and the conventions of bour-
geois life. his is an example of a “successful” education: one that so succeeded
in maintaining the child in a state of fearful abiding by conventions – a state of
existential paralysis – that she literally stopped existing. Sally Scholz notes, com-
menting on Beauvoir’s vision of education, “we fail the child when the violence of
education is so stiling or so limiting that it creates a mystiied being” (2010: 409).
Beauvoir’s implicit plea to educators to recognise the complexity and the whole-
ness of childhood probably stems, at least partly, from the lethal “success” of the
Mabilles’ education of Zaza.
Beauvoir’s conceptualisation of education tacitly defends the possibility for an
ethical relationship, characterised by love, between adult and child, and forward-
facing and free. Its many problems and failures are representative of a relationship
between an authoritative, past-bound being struggling with the incompleteness
of its own existence (the adult) and a potent, future-bound being struggling with
the “secret” awareness of a higher order of complexity in the world (the child).
Children’s literature is always in some way a symbolically violent type of discourse,
because it both imposes representations of the world on the child, and asks the
child to do something non-representable with them in the future. he ambiguity
of this command – and the fact that it inds its realisation in a temporality inac-
cessible to the adult – stresses not just adult authority and oppression, but also the
adult desire to recognise, access and celebrate the symbolic power of the person
who will make something happen. hat person is the child, and the child stands
for futurity and for liberation.
It is a mistake, as Beauvoir shows, to strip the child from its childness (I am
here using Hollindale’s term), its symbolic status as temporal other. Beauvoir’s
works allude to the speciicity of the igure of the child in the existential characteri-
sation of otherness; to the presence of childhood in the adult’s existential project.
his sometimes wishful, sometimes pessimistic symbolic speciicity is not reduc-
ible to the simplistic pedagogical injunction to let children be “free”, as if freedom
were anything else than a turbulent negotiation with others and with time. It is
not reducible either to the request that adults should “love” children tenderly and
sellessly, as if love were anything else than the deeply disturbing possibility that I
might be possessed by the other before I manage to possess them. he pedagogical
romance is a necessarily failed love story; it is too deeply imbued with time-bound
concerns and too focused on an unknowable and rebellious other to be the peaceful
and humane feeling Zornado longs for.
Pleasure and jouissance of the pedagogical text
But there is no need to be sombre about the pedagogical romance. he pleasurable

dimension of love, despite the ambiguity of the feeling, should not be overlooked.
Children’s literature is very much about pleasure – shared, communicable, life-
airming pleasure. What does this pleasure consist of? he children’s story, says
Nodelman, occurs “between the pleasure of not knowing and the mastery of ind-
ing out how much you didn’t know” (2000, 4). he pleasures of children’s litera-
ture for the reader, as he sees it, stem more from the exciting mistakes, mishaps
and misunderstandings incurred by innocence than from the inevitable access
to experience of the books’ closures. It is as uninteresting to observe the child-
become-adult as it would be to pore over the daily routine of Mr and Mrs Darcy.
Nodelman (2000: 3) states: “Most children’s books end quickly, shortly ater the
point at which wisdom is gained, for the activities of the wise are simply less inter-
esting to contemplate than those of the unwise.” Children’s literature is pleasurable,
in other words, as long as it remains thrown forth, in movement: as long as the
teachings of experience are longed for, but without being quite there – as long as
it remains unpredictable.
Roderick McGillis, in his response to Nodelman, distances himself slightly
from his friend’s view by arguing that there can be pleasures in the attainment
of experience. Distinguishing between “elemental pleasure and alert pleasure”
(McGillis 2000: 16), he argues that the former, sensual, narcissistic, lifelong one
turns the book into a solitary game. he latter has to be learnt: it stems from the
realisation that “our pleasure necessarily depends on something outside ourselves,
something other than ourselves” (id.). his second type of textual pleasure, which
characterises the “alert reader”, opens out to the world and to alterity. It relies
not just on the satisfaction of immediate desires through pleasure, but on the
stretching-out of desires into extra-textuality and into the recognition of others’
needs and individualities. While elemental pleasure, McGillis posits, is intuitive
and can occur to any reader, alert pleasure necessitates not just learning to read,
but “reading to learn”, which means “reading self-consciously, taking on our own
authorial status” (McGillis 2000: 18). We see here emerging an interesting divide
between readers who ind textual pleasure impossible outside of transgression, of
reading “against” the text’s overt teachings; and those who cannot encounter that
pleasure without being made by the text to become experienced.
his divide is recognisably artiicial: most readers probably experience both
thrills at the same time. he pleasures of pedagogy stem both from gaining knowl-
edge and from resisting it; both from “reading to learn” and from learning to read-
against. he pleasurable pedagogical text, arguably, allows the reader to defer some
of the delight of experience, wisdom, and knowledge to the utmost end of the text,
and to be gratiied immediately in multiple little ways in the process. he children’s

text, as a pedagogical enterprise, may thus be only successful when it manages to
contain both the pleasure of the process as subversively counter-educational and
the pleasure of the closure as satisfactorily educational. he child’s project emerg-
ing out of this tension is kindled, not stiled, by pedagogy. Margaret Higonnet,
joining Nodelman and McGillis, contends that the children’s text produces “not
a pride in superiority but a pride in growth” (Higonnet 2000: 36). Growth is, par
excellence, the uncertain space-time of potentiality, the existence of which activates
the pleasures of pedagogy.
Barthes’s distinction between pleasure and jouissance exposes a divide between
comfort and loss. he text of pleasure is related to “a comfortable reading practice”
(Barthes 1973: 23). he text of jouissance “puts one in a state of loss, which dis-
comforts…, makes historical bases vacillate…, creates a crisis in one’s relation to
language” (id.). He further elaborates on this crisis of language: “pleasure is speak-
able, jouissance is not” (1973: 31). Jouissance destroys subject positions. he reader
looking for both pleasure and jouissance is a reader looking for their own identity
both to be conirmed and to be lost. hough for Barthes, there are texts which
are only texts of pleasure, and others which incite to jouissance, I argue against a
categorisation of literature which condemns paraliterature and children’s literature
to being texts of pleasure only. Pleasure may be a more predictable efect, perhaps,
of such texts; but the unpredictability of jouissance, its surprising “that’s-it-for-me”
dimension, means that it can be found at the most unexpected moments.
his aspect is reconcilable with children’s literature: there should be no reason
to think it oxymoronic that a didactic text, even a very prescriptive didactic text,
should also be a text of pleasure and jouissance. Sartre posits that what he calls
“aesthetic joy” is central to the “accomplishment” of the political work of art. He
does this in 1948, decades before Barthes’s jouissance, but “aesthetic joy” is an in-
terestingly similar concept: the clet subject is once again at its core. I lose myself
a little in aesthetic joy because I catch a glimpse of what I could or will be – what I
am not-yet. Aesthetic joy expresses the reader’s awareness that they are internalis-
ing “that which is non-ego par excellence” (Sartre 1950: 44), namely, the world “in
its totality both as being and having to be, both as totally ours and totally foreign”
(id.: 45). he creative work turns freedom into a categorical imperative and the
ultimate function of freedom is to make being arise. his move is didactic while
being entirely jouissif, “creative”. Contrary to texts which appeal to easy emotions,
and which Sartre rejects, the text of aesthetic joy re-presents to the reader the
parameters of their freedom.
he pedagogical impulse in children’s literature ofers this level of constraint
and incitation to create both pleasure and jouissance, and to represent freedom.
he texts ask the reader to conirm their status within symbolic childhood, as
child-icon, as object and subject of change. But because the child is also project,
and because pedagogy is about getting the child to enact this project, the text also
commands the child to be lost, and perceive their identity as stretching into the
unknowable. Pedagogy is pleasurable when a text inds interesting ways of telling
the child about who they are; it becomes jouissive when it inds interesting ways
of enjoining the child to be something else than that.
Aesthetic devices in children’s literature thus mingle pleasurable familiarity
and a frisson of alienation. he comfort of inding some norms conirmed and the
gentle shock of inding some contested cause an oscillation from the lull of pleasure
to the transgression of jouissance. he pedagogical nature of very didactic texts
makes them particularly prone to eliciting both readerly sensations. Because it is
not solely an aesthetically challenging experience of reading, but also one which at-
tempts to unsettle the ideological and emotional world of the implied child reader,
it seeks to establish and destroy subject positions. he resulting feeling can be one
of pleasurable alienation, as one realises the instability of what one thought were
unbending conventions.
he use of humour is extremely common in children’s literature’s attempts to
trigger both pleasure and jouissance. Humour serves a speciic pedagogical pur-
pose: it creates both familiarity and displacement, interrupting intimacy with sur-
prise. By bringing closer together adult and child, and metonymously adulthood
and childhood, it helps their projects to merge. And yet humour does not appear
to be, at irst sight, an easy pedagogical device to resort to, because it is by nature
an exclusive experience of communication. For adults and children to laugh about
the same thing – and at the same time, in the case of the picturebook reading – a
special bond must be established. Children are, more oten than not, excluded from
adult jokes, and make up their own childhood cultures with humour incompre-
hensible to adults. Since humour is based on an understanding – of the context
and of the punch line – shared by speaker and addressee, there is an oscillation
between pleasure and jouissance in being able to comprehend the settling and the
unsettling characteristics of this mode of interaction across the cultural time-gap.
his phenomenon occurs neatly, for instance, in a French illustrated no-
vella, La princesse qui n’aimait pas les princes, by Alice Brière-Haquet and Lionel
Larchevêque (“he princess who didn’t like princes”, 2008). A little gem of humour
and poetry, La princesse reprocesses the fairy-tale topos of a king’s quest for his
daughter’s future husband. A colourful cohort of hopeful princes pours in from the
entire universe, but they are all rejected by the princess. Displeased, the king calls
for a fairy to help his daughter make a choice – but when the fairy arrives, the two
young women fall instantly in love, move in together and live happily ever ater.
he pleasures and jouissance of this lesbian fairy tale rely on a careful equilib-
rium between challenged authority and preserved authority, opening up a new but
essentially ordered sociopolitical system. It is a desirably alien new world, with its
own parameters – its own facticity – and its own possibilities for change – its own
futurity. he picturebook strikes a narrative and aesthetic balance, visually and
verbally, between the conventional and the revolutionary, the unpredictable and
the expected. he challenged authorities in La princesse are plural, allowing for a
critical exploration of convention. he clear attack on heteronormativity is paral-
leled by a rejection of aetonormativity; it is reinforced by a refusal of patriarchal
expectations and by a rejection of stereotypical masculinity and femininity.
Mirroring these challenges to conventional sociocultural values, reformative
formal strategies dwell on a visual and verbal levels, through a humorous handling
of narrative tropes. Intertextual and intervisual joy of recognition subsumes the
multimodal text – but it is permanently combined with alienation. he success of
the book relies on the recognition of a number of fairy-tale conventions in both
text and pictures – such as “once upon a time”, the trope of hopeful princes, the call
for a good fairy, the necessity of marriage, the expectation of a happy ending. hose
are eventually not completely reversed but signiicantly modiied – just enough to
“alterify” the reader towards a complicated but appealing otherness.
Both strengthening and threatening recognition, cleverly woven into words
and pictures of La princesse are humorous references to canonical igures, more
or less evident to the child reader. On the pictures appear Elvis Presley (Brière-
Haquet & Larchevêque 2008: cover), Prince Charles and Oscar Wilde (id.: 8), the
Little Prince (id.: 15), Tarzan (id.: 17), and Harry Potter (id.: 20) – this vast collec-
tion of male characters tacitly challenging archetypal fairy-tale maleness. Quoting
almost directly from Jean Racine’s Phèdre, the princess’s words when she falls
for the fairy delocalise Racine’s words from an old-fashioned, tragic portrayal of
forbidden heteronormative love to inscribe them within a resolutely modern, de-
dramatised form of love. hese intertextual strategies allow La princesse to address
child and adult readers by playing on existing tropes while promoting revolution-
ary re-creation. his unsettlement culminates in humour: the jouissance of inding
these norms unsettled inds its purest expression in laughter. It is likely that the
adult co-reader’s and the child reader’s recognitions of these particular characters
will be diferent – but the reading event may condense their perspectives through
explanations to one another. Just as in he Tooth, this book anticipates its own
reading event. It optimises its double audience, showing desire to create interaction
between the two implied readers.
For each challenged authority in this humorous book, there is a counteractively
preserved authority: that is where the comfort of pleasure arises. Although the
story subverts traditional fairy-tale topoi, it is structurally faithful to the genre, and
preserves the happy ending of true love – contrary, for instance, to Babette Cole’s
Princess Smartypants (1996). Furthermore, on a political level, the governmental
order of the kingdom is not threatened by the princess’s choice; it is on a socio-

cultural rather than an executive level that the princess’s homosexuality is regis-
tered. hese strategies lead to singular dynamics in addressing the child reader as
a political agent, and opening up a potential space for transformative citizenship.
La princesse belongs to a category of transformative picturebooks where political
changes derive from a paradigm shit in sociocultural values. his “sot” strategy
allows for a gradual change of the child reader’s worldview, justifying the unfold-
ing of a desirably alien society. “Mutations” within the well-oiled political system
operate this paradigm shit. he localisation of this particular mutation within a
young female, in a traditionally aetonormative and patriarchal genre, powerfully
presents to the child reader the legitimacy of contesting authority.
Pedagogical pleasures and jouissance thus come from contesting some forms
of adult authority while conirming others as legitimate. Because the implied child
reader is presented with unsettled authority igures, they are enjoined to consider
authority as it is – a form of time- and experience-bound power. his validates
the child’s might in contesting and challenging this form of power. But this might
could not be deployed out of nowhere. It is by leaving other forms of traditional
authority legitimised that the implied child reader is given a platform onto which
to deploy their might into the world. Pedagogical pleasure sits at the carefully-
balanced point of encounter between titillating threats to authority (which allow
for critical questioning and for the mighty child to emerge), and reassertion of
other forms of authority (which root this might and give it impetus). he child
“twice clet, twice perverted”, as Barthes (1973: 23) would have it, is the child suc-
cessfully pleased by the tension at the heart of the pedagogical discourse: the child
made mighty.
Spud subversion
A large part of a text’s jouissance lies in language: in the seizing, chopping-up and
bursting-out of language. As explored in the second part, “big words” borrowed
from the dominant discourse become subversive weapons for the mighty child.
But some picturebooks go further than others in the jubilatory exploration and
explosion of language which accompanies the upturning of the hegemonic dis-
course. Toby Speed and Barry Root’s celebrated, partly non-mimetic picturebook
Brave Potatoes (2000) relies on a highly humorous, virtuoso use of language,
which marries the sense of mutual understanding developed earlier with an irrev-
erent attitude towards words. Textual jouissance dwells in the ecstatic, nonsensical
presentation of a “revolutionary” movement, playing on the full aural sensuality
of the words: alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, onomatopoeia, thrown together in the
picturebook’s text like the vegetable victims into the chowder. his creative use
of language addresses the child as the dweller of a linguistic world, and therefore
of an ideology, open to changes.
Mickenberg and Nel (2011) provide this convenient summary of the picturebook:
In Toby Speed and Barry Root’s Brave Potatoes (2000), the potatoes unite and
knock murderous Chef Hackemup into a big vat of soup, then liberate the surviv-
ing vegetables. In addition to conirming some children’s suspicions about veg-
etables (they’re revolting!), the book ofers a comic but airmative lesson in the
power of collectivity. (Mickenberg & Nel 2011: 448)
Speed’s use of language saves the book from being as ludicrous as its title makes it
sound. Much of the picturebook’s “comic and airmative” value resides in its ability
to integrate both adult and child references and modes of discourse within the text.
he picturebook’s intertextual and intericonic references to Lewis Carroll’s poem
“he Walrus and the Carpenter” (1871) makes it join the tradition of nonsense,
jubilatory children’s verse, but also acts as a counter-example to the tale: what if
the oysters had rebelled, like the brave potatoes, instead of following the devil-
ish duo? he child reader of the book (more likely perhaps to have encountered
Carroll’s poem in its Disney version) is presented with an alternative vision of the
comic poem.
he terrifying chef Hackemup, who does not have any potatoes for his chow-
der, thus declares:
“I think I see, I think I spy
spinning spuds against the sky!
Future hash and curly fries.” …
Of goes
Hackemup
with a bag
to pack’em up./
“Have you heard the story yet
of Idaho and Juliet?
A spud by any other name
is still a spud, and tastes the same.” (Speed 2000)
he reference to the game of “I spy”, and to potato-based children’s favourite

dishes, is set of by mock canonical references to Shakespeare which address the
adult party in the reading event. he text attempts to trigger synchronous laughter
in the two parties, augmenting the connection between adult and child. Barry
Root’s energetic pictures, though oten more illustrative than truly interacting with
the text, conirm this melting-pot of adult and child visual culture: it marries comic
intericonic references to Edward Hopper with Mr Potato-Head-inspired visions
of the spuds. Meanwhile, the alliterative text and the rhyming provide, to spin the
culinary metaphor, the textual sauce that links all of these references together.
Carrying the reading forward, it contributes to the urgency and dynamism of the
picturebook and frequently culminates, as when the vegetables are stacked into the
big kitchen, into climaxes of humorous and linguistic jouissance:
“Get in the line, potatoes!
Now the end is near!”
he cabbages are quaking. he onions are in tears.
“Better follow orders! Prepare to meet your fate!
It’s too late
to be anything
but dinner on a plate!”
But potatoes never listen.
Potatoes have no ears. (Speed 2000)
he inal line, in all its glorious absurdity, echoes Carroll’s poem once again (the
oysters, as for them, don’t have any feet) and ofsets the mock pathos of the descrip-
tion of the vegetables and chef Hackemup’s mock apocalyptic tone. Besides being
funny (especially as the potatoes clearly have arms, eyes, noses and mouths) it also
reiterates a leitmotiv of political children’s literature: resisting by pretending not
to hear the oppressor. Taking action, the potatoes get rid of the chef and low out
into the streets, holding lags and banners and running forward into the future,
chanting that they “will never be” potpie, potluck or frittata, while stunned humans
watch them from windows.
here is nothing particularly subtle or sophisticated about this representa-
tion of revolution. Brave Potatoes does not address the child reader as politically
knowledgeable by presenting realistic sociopolitical situations to modify. It does
not equip the child reader with a more or less rational course of action to resist
authority rather than resorting to pure collective violence. But it is transgressive
through jubilation, a pure experience of pleasure, distributed through text and
image and experienced by both adult and child, at diferent moments or at the same
time, in an equally gratifying reading event. Brave Potatoes inscribes social trans-
formation into an immediate, sensuous, age-neutral relation to text and image.
hough incontestably pedagogical, it presents above all a shit from the authority
of the dominant discourse to the potency of its destruction.
Adulthood reloaded: he pedagogical romance as a form of play
here is but one small step from asserting the ludic nature of the pedagogical
romance to claiming that its didactic discourse has similar philosophical features
to play. he player, Grimaldi says (1992: 364), uses games to assuage the temporal
strain of his condition in the world; playing is one of the strategies of conscious-
ness to deal with the fact that it is constantly ahead of itself, constantly “thrown
forth” and waiting. his is not just because playing has an anaesthetic function,
and can make us avoid boredom – that lack of action which triggers subversive
thoughts about one’s existence. Play also articulates, within the temporal paren-
thesis of the game, the phenomenological temporal tension of one’s condition.
Absorbed in play, we desire both to win and to continue playing; winning will
bring satisfaction, but it will also end the game. he result is the be-all and end-all
of the game, and motivates it constantly, but paradoxically the diiculties of the
game are there to delay this result.
Playing therefore sets up a reassuring metaphor of the existential condition,
whereby each new card game, each new turn of the roulette is “like a new distribu-
tion of destiny” (Grimaldi 1992: 368). Each new game is an adventure, one which,
like life, is restless, busy, in waiting, and tends towards an endpoint. But, unlike
life, this endpoint is representable, it is palpable, and we are certain that the player
will reach it. he end of each game is a “small death”, in Grimaldi’s vocabulary: the
individual has the short-lived but intense impression of having achieved that some-
thing s/he was waiting for, of having acquired a sense of completion. But soon a new
game calls; this satisfactory state is already broken; the cards must be shuled again.
For individuals who are not in bad faith, the determinacy of existence, the solid-
ity of the real, the unicity of existence are painful. hey are constantly looking for
ways, therefore, of “reloading” their life, of starting anew with a new set of param-
eters. he child is for the adult one of the ways in which existence can be “reloaded”.
he didactic discourse addressed to children brings the adult close to a situation of
existential gambling, to a form of play. he adult is provided with the kind of trepi-
dation that precedes the desire to know where the marble will stop on the roulette,
while desiring it, as soon as it has stopped, to be launched into its hectic race again.
To paraphrase Montaigne’s famous thought about playing with cats, who,
in the “game” of the pedagogical romance, is the player, and who is the played?
Predictably perhaps, I would advocate that these roles are not easily attributable to
adult and child parties. It would be all-too-easy to claim that the adult is the player,
and the child the pawn; the adult the wheel-turner, and the child the marble. But
in fact the didactic situation is more complex than this. he children’s book forms
an intermediary stage between the two parties; between the adult voice and the
wished-for mighty child. It addresses the child reader both as conditioned by adult
authority and as able to act outside of it. To spin the roulette metaphor, the child
is the one whose hand is on the wheel, who is holding the cards. But it is the adult
who has placed the child in the casino room to begin with (in blatant violation of
regulations concerning the frequentations of such establishments by minors). he
child, furthermore, is playing “for” the adult, in the sense that the adult is ardently
concerned about the future developments; the adult wants to reap some of the po-
tential beneits of the game. But the adult dimly knows that the game may very well
end long ater their own temporality. he adult may never know which number
the marble chose, which player won the game. herefore the game is also played
“for” the child, teaching the child to play, and hoping that they may be rewarded
in a future inaccessible to the adult.
hus the game of the didactic discourse is open, but it has rules. It is governed
in some respects by an authority igure, that of the adult, who is also addicted to the
game because of a dim hope that it may be the way through which indeterminacy
is reintroduced in the world – an indeterminacy long lost under the sedimentation
of commitments and choices which deines adulthood. But the game also relies
on the presence – and the desire to play along – of the child, who will both follow
the rules of the game and witness their future efects. he particular poetics and
aesthetics of the children’s book, which comprise its pedagogical and educational
value, are part of the game, spell out the rules. I hope it is not lost on the reader
that the very presence of the game must indicate a degree of enjoyment, of absorp-
tion, of delight, of urgency and of nervousness. here is no contradiction in the
idea that the didactic discourse emanates from an authoritative adult voice, from
which it then playfully escapes in the hands of the child.
he didactic project is an investment on the part of the adult, a gamble; and
a risky one, for which there might be no return; but which still appears like an
attractive venture precisely because what it does not yet show of its gain is more
appealing than what it already shows. It is the tempting nonexistence which gives
value to the process: there is value in asking the child to process something of
the adult that the adult is not aware of. And one of the reasons why it appears
so addictive – one of the reasons why the adult faced with a child, in children’s
literature and beyond, oten cannot help but resort to prescriptions, commands
and imperatives – is that the child is the being who can still play. he child is the
being-in-becoming through whom, symbolically, new possibilities of a pristine,
untouched existence may emerge; the being through whom indeterminacy could
be regained; through whom adulthood could potentially be reloaded.
Conclusion
“If I were a prince or a legislator,” says Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the very irst
page of he Social Contract (1762/1968), “I wouldn’t waste time saying what wants
doing”. In other words: I would do it. His is the cry of a disempowered citizen, and
his political treatise is born of a desire to act upon this disempowerment. Like he
Social Contract, like many works of human culture, much children’s literature is
born of a feeling of individual disempowerment, whether on a political level or
on an existential one. Millions of pages are written, millions of hours “wasted”, to
try to breach the gap between what one is and what one should be, between the
disappointingly solid present and the appealingly indeterminate future. Children’s
literature is not, of course, the only human activity haunted by existential crisis. It
is not the only strategy found by human consciousness to relect upon or hide the
fraught relationship to time and to otherness which characterises our condition.
But the ways in which children’s literature does so are unique, multifaceted and
complex, and just as worthy of their own scholarly attention as the better-trodden
works of poetry, philosophy, art and “adult” literature.
Children’s literature addresses not just a person but also a temporality, not just a
subject but also a project, not just a now but also a thereater. It is a literature targeted
at people who will continue to exist once the speakers are dead. It is permeated
with anxieties about existence which philosophers have long identiied, and which
sometimes have nothing to do with childhood itself – or at least, with concerns or
care for actual children. he adult-child relationship is a lens through which we
can observe the adult, both as an individual and as a social category, dealing with,
problematising, and expressing profound discomfort about its existential condition.
But of course I would not like to be accused of optimistically overanalysing the
discourses of extremely prescriptive children’s books. Yes, I do acknowledge that
children’s literature can be (and oten is) relentlessly prescriptive, despotic, authori-
tarian, and the most prescriptive examples are oten simply that, and nothing else.
here are some texts which ofer nothing but a harmonious world, puriied of all
contradiction and deliberately excluding anything that might disturb the illusion
once established, and these are the texts that we generally do not like to classify as
literary. Women’s magazines and the brasher forms of the detective story might
be cited as examples. (Iser 1974: 284)
If Iser omits to cite children’s literature alongside “women’s magazines” and “the
brasher forms of the detective story”, it might be because this type of literature
is probably even more remote from his understanding of the “literary”. Indeed
children’s books do oten try to place before their readers a “harmonious world,
puriied” of the inconvenient truths of otherness and time passing; they do try
to perpetuate a multifaceted “illusion” of safety, orderliness and nostalgia for
childhood. heir discourses oten map out a desired future for the child; they
ask readers to adhere to their unspoken agendas using a myriad of manipulative
ruses. his didactic discourse oten sounds benign, progressive, gentle, encour-
aging social acceptance, social cohesion, social negotiation. It says, sometimes,
that happiness is possible and that the others can be non-threatening. It sets
adulthood as a norm, and makes the child wait for the rewards which this adult
normalcy will bring.
hese things are true; but they are not the whole story. As David Rudd notes,
there is an inherent instability to the children’s book which, despite attempts “to
make children’s texts more sober, realistic, class speciic, gendered and moral (‘mo-
nological’, in Bakhtin’s terms)” – in other words, more prescriptive – resists and
remains: “there is inevitably a recognition – even if it is only to nip it in the bud – of
behaviour that disrupts such ixity of purpose” (Rudd 2013: 26). And even when
such instability appears perfectly concealed, the placid stability of the children’s
text remains a strategy of a deeply divided adult volition. Both the stabilising and
the destabilising tendencies in the children’s book are a sign of anguish, and ac-
knowledging this anguish is liberating to a degree. he adult authority in children’s
literature is dissatisied, anguished, frustrated, because it is in part powerless, and
children’s literature is underscored by this crisis of adult powerlessness. It con-
denses the (both intentional and unconscious) wishes of an adult agency unable to
cope with the diiculties of being-for-others, unable to accept the stubborn unicity
of existence, unable to ind that elusive self that they were promised they would
be at some point. Children’s literature translates the wish that the child, somehow,
will be able to resolve all this in the future. But this future must therefore remain
indeterminate, and the child must remain, for the adult, always an ambiguous
mixture of threat and hope.
he child is constantly looked at by the adult through a translucent veil of
symbols; it is an ambiguous temporal other, not quite the same other as another
adult. he child addressee of the didactic discourse stands for a mostly unknowable
future, a dream of a time to come when we will coincide with ourselves and under-
stand others. One implication of this look is a positive, optimistic, joyful relation-
ship to the child. he child is a mighty other, a future project, it is an other who can,
who will. he other, coexistent implication is a violent, authoritarian relationship
to the child, precisely for the same reason. Children’s literature articulates both
Conclusion 207
aspects, oten simultaneously. All education, in children’s literature and beyond,

is therefore indeed a failure, but this failure can be a happy one.
he adult’s look on the child is indeed violent. But what about the child’s look
on the adult? As a reminder, the “problem” I have when another adult looks at me
is that this look solidiies me in the present, as a situated being now, and refuses to
see me as continuing into the future. It does not see the self I am building for myself
and which necessarily will be more tomorrow. Trapped in that look, I want to say,
“Wait! Just wait! I’m not quite ready yet!”. But, of course, I will never be ready, and
these looks endlessly freeze me in moments which become deining. he didactic
situation of the adult-child relationship is diferent. It requires an understanding
of the adult’s legitimacy as didactic speaker, and this legitimacy is located in the
past. hus adults sense that children look at them in all their time past, all their ac-
cumulated baggage of experience. his look may be respectful, admiring, wishful,
gratifying, even deferential. But it is also existentially unbearable. Caught in the
look of the child, the adult is led to self-deine not as the self who is – an already
painful experience – but worse, as the self who was. he anguishing implication
of that look is the conirmation that one has been already; one is perceived as
complete and rounded, and therefore as inished. In other words, as good as dead.
Arguably, this anguish of being dead in the eye of the beholder is perhaps eased
in the case of an adolescent’s gaze. he teenage gaze reveals adults to themselves as
they always were – not inished, not perfect, not fully authoritative. In the emer-
gence of this questioning subjectivity the adult’s authority is threatened. While this
may be unsettling, it is perhaps simply so because the adult is witnessing a trans-
formation from the temporal other that is the child to a “normal”, synchronous
other: another adult. At least the adult is not as good as dead anymore. Glanced
at by the child, the adult runs the much greater risk of perceiving one’s authority
as synonymous with inality. his constant awareness of inality, which arguably
subsumes the educational endeavour as a whole, is a perturbing addendum to the
problem of others, from the point of view of the adult, in the didactic discourse
towards the child.
his admittedly tentative analysis of the adult’s imagination of the child’s look
as symbolically “murderous” can provide an explanation for the desire for unpre-
dictability which permeates the didactic discourse. he children’s text paves the
way for unpredictability just as it appears to be controlling the future. his latent
need for uncertainty, for an unknowable future, is directly opposed to the one thing
one can be certain of – death, of course, as the ineluctable par excellence.
A perhaps typical analysis of transmission and education would be to assume
that education actually soothes the authoritative adult’s fear of death, or at least
minimises its efects, by ensuring the handing-down of knowledge, skills and val-
ues developed and reined by the elders. In this view, education represents the
continuation or perpetuation of culture, and the didactic discourse is a discourse of

predictability. It would aim to channel and mould the child, to set desired outcomes,
to prepare the adult’s death as carefully as possible: to anticipate, to plan, to control.
But even if this is, on the surface, the efect and perhaps even the conscious
intention of the educational endeavour, I analyse the didactic discourse between
adult and child as doing exactly the opposite. It is precisely because death is syn-
onymous with predictability – because that is the only attribute of death – that any
truly powerful opposition to it involves invoking its exact contrary: unpredict-
ability. Adults, perturbed by their own authority which makes them symbolically
“dead” in the eye of the child, cling to the desire that their address to the child might
have unpredictable efects. It becomes symbolically possible, through the didactic
discourse, to counter the certainty of death by opening up pathways for the child.
Within this framework, adult “power” in children’s books can only oscillate
between authoritative representations of the future, and calls to the mighty child
for a future which would not be authoritative – and can therefore only be unpre-
dictable. Unpredictability is profoundly human; arguably, it characterises only the
works of a consciousness. Beauvoir mentions the “shock of the unpredictable”
(1948: 59) which characterises all human encounters. Grimaldi also contrasts the
“time of physics”, which is the time of predictability, with the “time of life”, which
is the time of “creation, and consequently of unpredictability” (1992: 114, original
emphasis). Biesta concurs: the unpredictability of others’ behaviours is the condi-
tion of one’s existence: “one needs others who take up ones’ beginnings, always
in new and unpredictable ways, in order to come into the world” (2006: 40). he
future, in all its desirable unpredictability, is the locus of human aspirations. Even
when adults are apparently asking children to replicate what they themselves did
when they were young, even when adults are apparently asking children to further
the endeavours they will not have time to inish, they are oten placing before them
ways of escaping what has been predicted.
Children’s literature tells the story of an adult pain. It asks disturbing questions:
how can we bear to live in a world where there are children? How can we toler-
ate their look, which freezes us as inished when we see ourselves as in waiting?
How can we be satisied with the idea that there are beings who will exist when
we do not anymore? How can we be content that they will replace us, as if we
were, indeed, replaceable? he notion of the child as future replacement for – and
therefore symbolic killer of – the adult is thoroughly explored by Reynolds and
Yate (1998), notably through an exploration of the Greek myth of Cronus. he
“adult’s fear of the child as usurper” (152), they argue, recurs throughout children’s
literature, but killing of the children never works; the adults’ eforts never to see
their place usurped are always countered. hese stories unveil, the authors argue,
“both disguised expressions of adults’ fear of and rage at their replacements and
Conclusion 209
the inevitable punishment for acting out the fantasy of destroying them” (id.: 153).
We want, through our addresses to children, both to live eternally and to die in the
knowledge that they will do better than we did. An existentialist reading of chil-
dren’s literature focuses on such paradoxes. It highlights what strategies didactic
texts for children have put in place to appropriate the child’s time let, to ensure
the continuation of the adult’s project through the imagined mightier child, and
to negotiate one’s acceptance of inality both through planning for the future and
through ensuring that the future escapes all planning.
I am not, of course, lamenting the fate of adults. My theorisation is not com-
passionate, and I am not asking anyone to shed tears over the existential crisis of a
symbolic authority which is the synthesis of a great number of comfortably privi-
leged adult agencies. I am, rather more clinically, interested in the philosophical
implications of this crisis. Existential anguish is not simply an emotional process;
existentialism is not a psychology. here is no “cure” to anguish as if it were an
aliction of the psyche. What interests me is the ensuing emergence of strategies
of consciousness. he didactic discourse of the adult towards the child should be
recognised as one of these strategies, and contemporary children’s literature as
one of its neatest expressions; I have no judgement to pass as to whether or not
this is an ethical move.
his existentialist theorisation is thus not “in defence of adulthood”, but rather
in defence of the complexity of the human condition, of human relations towards
others and towards themselves. I want the paradoxes of the adult-child relation-
ship and of children’s literature to be respected and preserved, not “solved” as if
they were riddles. hese paradoxes delineate the ininitely sophisticated processes
of relection, both conscious and unconscious, which human beings deploy in
order to make sense of their existences. Children’s literature is one of the facets of
this process of relection: it is an existential project which deserves philosophical
consideration. It is full of pretty masks behind which to hide anguished adults,
and of secret exits through which to escape the too-neat, too-determinate tunnels
it constructs. It posits that it will be read by someone who will do something with
it. What this something will be, it cannot quite say, but certainly not something
as tidy as a bird hatching from an egg. It desires something diferent, something
unplanned, something freer.
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Name index
A F I
Abate, Michelle Ann 149, 151 Fish, Stanley 72, 77–78, 80, 182 Iser, Wolfgang
Alanen, Leena 10–11 Freire, Paulo 47 implied reader 10, 80–82
Ariès, Philippe 7, 190 on didacticism 71–72,
Arizpe, Evelyn 73–74, 80–81 G 205–206
Galbraith, Mary 96
B Gauthier, Manon 162–168 J
Barthes, Roland 69, 153, Genette, Gérard 9 James, Allison 8, 20, 23
197, 200 Greder, Armin 123–129
de Beauvoir, Simone Grimaldi, Nicolas K
on ambiguity 19, 27–29, 97, on miserliness 33, 40 Könnecke, Ole 113–121
104–105, 112, 132–133 on strategies
on childhood 104–108, 112, of consciousness 50–55, L
192–195 88, 185, 203 Larchevêque, Lionel 198–199
on freedom 92, 154, 191–192 on time 24–26, 30, 35, 208 Latimer, Bonnie 98
on the other 103–108, on transmission Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín
110–112, 132–133 86, 103–104, 135, 143 3, 15–17, 85, 110
on the spirit of seriousness on wait 44–49, 53–55, 84,
32 100, 104–107, 176, 178 M
see also ambiguity, childhood, see also consciousness, wait Magritte, René 1–2, 44, 54, 190
freedom Gubar, Marah 15–17 McCallum, Robin 96
Biesta, Gert 87, 97, 111, 122, McGillis, Roderick 6, 196–197
194, 208 H Mickenberg, Julia 123, 131, 149,
Bonanni, Silvia 170–177 Halpin, David 47–48 152, 162, 201
Booth, Wayne 71, 109 Hargreaves, Roger 76 Milne, A. A. 23, 44
Brière-Haquet, Alice 198–199 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Browne, Anthony 74, 77, 28, 112 N
79, 149 Heidegger, Martin Nel, Philip 123, 131, 152, 162, 201
reportedly reading Nikolajeva, Maria
C he Little Prince 21 on aetonormativity 3, 16–18
Campanari, José 157, 159–160 on time 24 on children’s literature theory
Cavalho, Bernardo 59 on others 103, 123, 132 5, 30, 40, 51, 85–86, 90, 93
Christie, Jana 90 see also Mitsein on identiication 96, 110
Cisneros, Jesus 157, 159 Hillel, Margot 98, 151, 169 on picturebooks 72, 120
Cook, Daniel T. 7, 85 Hollindale, Peter on time and chronotope
Cunningham, Hugh 7, 11 ‘childness’ 195 23, 25–26, 86
‘cultural time-gap’ 8, 71 see also aetonormativity,
D on ideology 147, 176, chronotope
Denis, Benoît 152–153, 181 179, 181
Nodelman, Perry Rosset, Clément 139–141 Serres, Alain 170–177

on children’s literature Rudd, David 17, 206 Seven, John 90–91
theory 2–3, 8–9, 58, 62, Shelton, Dave 52–53
85, 110–180, 196–197 S Sipe, Lawrence 73–74
on ‘hidden adult’ Sainsbury, Lisa 72, 108–109, Slodovnick, Avi 162–168
see hidden adult 113, 123, 134, 170 Smedman, Sara 47
on picturebooks 72–73, 80 de Saint Exupéry, Antoine Speed, Toby 200–202
Nussbaum, Martha 21, 28–38, 40 Stephens , John 96, 179–181
109–110, 122 Sartre, Jean-Paul Styles, Morag 73–74, 80–81
on bad faith 32, 45, 127 Sutherland, Robert D.
P “century of ” 21 147, 179, 181
Pantaleo, Silvia 73 on choice 134
Prout, Alan 8, 19–20, 23 on commitment 75, 147, T
153–156, 161 Trites, Roberta Seelinger 16
R on existence 22, 57, 99,
Reynolds, Kimberley 20, 40, 158–160, 165 W
48, 151, 174, 180, 208 on the look 107, 173–174 Watson, Victor 70–71, 73
Root, Barry 200–201 on others 27, 92, 112, 132, Wilson, Jacqueline 136–143
Rose, Jacqueline 187–190
children’s literature as on time 44–46, 54 Z
‘immobilising’ the child see also bad faith, committed Zipes, Jack 152, 180
20, 22, 25, 51, 70, 88 literature, existentialism Zornado, Joseph 186–187, 195
legacy in children’s literature Schami, Raik 113–116, 118–121
research 15–18 Scott, Carole 72, 120, 150
Subject index
A Arcadian children’s literature temporal otherness of

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat 20, 25, 34–39 6, 15–20, 22–25, 56–58, 71,
52–53 see also puer aeternus 104–108, 150, 170, 194
A Rule Is To Break 90–94 atemporality 23–25 child
adolescence see teenager author and adult see adult-child
adult-child relationship committed 150–156 relationship
as ambiguous 46, 57, 59, implied 7–10, 78 eternal see puer aeternus
205, 209 intentions of 73–74 as object of desire see desire
as didactic 78, 83–90, 207 authority power see power, might
as a problem of others challenge to 198–204 reader see reader
103–108 deinition of 2–6, 19, 56–57 temporality see time
as love 186–195 in the didactic discourse children’s literature
theorisation of 3–6, 84–90 Arcadian see Arcadian
15–19, 46 disempowered 106, 169–171, children’s literature
see also didactic, love 178, 186 Beauvoir’s experience of
adulthood 6, 22–26 in education 193–195 105–106
see also adult-child see also power, might committed see committed
relationship, didactic, literature
hidden adult B deinition of 7–10
adventure 51–56 bad faith 32–34, 43, 45, 127, and didacticism
aetonormativity 16–18, 58, 108 135–141 see didactic
alterity Being and Nothingness 27, 45, ecological see ecological
in picturebooks 54, 99, 127, 155 children’s literature
92, 130–134, 158 see also Sartre and ethics 108–109, 112–113,
in the reading experience being-for-others 123, 131–135
109–114 see problem of others existentialist approach to
see also problem of others Brave Potatoes 200–202 33–34, 43, 46, 49–52,
ambiguity 56–58, 89–90, 135, 153–156,
Beauvoirian deinition of C 163, 182–183, 205–209
97, 104–105 Case of Peter Pan (he) 15 and gaps see gap
childhood as origin of see also Rose as guilt-tripping 169–178
111–112, 192–195 childhood and hope 46–49, 169
see also Beauvoir, Beauvoirian approach to and identiication
problem of others 104–108, 112, 192–195 see identiication
anguish in the didactic discourse and love see love
of adults regarding children’s 85–89 paradoxes of 4–5, 56–57,
literature 183–184 and hope 46–48 72, 82, 89, 99–100, 150,
existential 27, 33–40, and subjectivity 96–97 170, 209
43–44, 153 symbolic 7–11, 40–41, and pleasure 196–200
social and political 55–56, 71, 85, 88, 154, 170 and power see authority,
128, 156–162 might, power
status of the child in features of 38–39, 43, 46, experience 4–6, 19, 46, 69–71,
94–104, 108 70–72, 70–75, 77–91, 94, 78, 83–84, 86–87, 96, 196
as strategy of consciousness 190–198 see also authority
49–54 see also education, knowledge
theory 2–7, 15–20, 62, disempowerment F
70–72, 74–75, 85–86 of the adult 3, 7, 57–58, 65, facticity 54–55, 170, 173, 193, 199
chronotope 23, 25–26, 36, 43 113, 124–131, 205 freedom
commitment of the child 17–18 Beauvoirian deinition of
existential 22, 47, 56 of child and adult 27–28, 92
political see committed 176–178, 190 of the child 188–197
literature see also power existential 103, 106, 112,
readerly 82, 163–164 divided adult 58–59, 63, 127, 134–135, 159
committed literature 147–156, 114, 206 of the reader 72–81,
163–169, 202 Double Act 136–143 153–156, 178
children’s literature as
178–184 E H
consciousness ecological children’s literature Harry Potter 58, 100
as divided 59–60, 88–89, 169–178 hidden adult
97, 178 education deinition of 2, 4, 9–10, 55
Sartrean deinition of 158 ethical 109–111, 122–123 disempowered 19–20,
strategies of 33, 35, 43, existentialist 159, 173, 185–186
45–51, 88–89, 185, 203 187–188, 191–195 evolving 40
and wait 45, 49, 53–55 and hope 47–48 miserly 34–36, 46
see also wait see also didactic, knowledge scheming
cultural time-gap 8, 71 empathy 108–113, 121–122 see also adult-child
see also gap empirical research 73–76, relationship, authority,
79–80 Nodelman
D eternal child see puer aeternus hope
death eternity 49–51 and education 46–49,
of adult 45, 84, 100–101, ethics 161–169
191, 207–208 existentialist 27, 103–105, invested in the child 6–7,
of child 20, 48 111–113, 132–134, 192–195 19–20, 40–41, 44, 88,
as completeness 31, 35, 56 and literary criticism 71–72, 106–107, 155, 176
Depressa, devagar 59–65 108–109
désir et le temps (Le) 44, 49 Ethics of Ambiguity 27, 97, G
see also Grimaldi, wait 103–105 game see play
desire see also Beauvoir, ambiguity gap
ambiguity of 43–46, 56, 59, existence see ambiguity, between adult and child
82, 131–134, 165, 178, 192 existentialism, problem 8, 11, 88, 190–191
child as object of 49–51, of others, time readerly/ didactic
70, 97–98, 187–191 existentialism 21, 24, 95, 71–83, 156
didactic 83–90, 97–101 103–104, 112, 135 between self and others
literary 69–71 and children’s literature 103, 106, 133
for predictability 30–36, 4–6, 43–44, 54–55, 107, 209 between self and self
39–41 see also ambiguity, 24, 45, 205
for unpredictability 49, 78, commitment, committed gaze 95–99, 113–117, 121,
79, 94, 99 literature, consciousness, 132–133, 168–169, 191
see also didactic, love freedom shaming 28, 168–178
didactic Existentialism and Humanism see also look
children’s literature as 134 Golden Age see Arcadian
3, 85, 178 see also Sartre children’s literature
deinition of 83–90, 98–101, extra-textuality 98–100, 196
150–152, 203–208
Subject index 225
I as objectifying 28–29, 38, P

identiication 96, 110–111, 95, 104, 142 paradox(es)
143, 165 as shaming see gaze as central to children’s
ideology see committed love 45, 163, 185–195 literature theory 4–5,
literature 56–57, 72, 82, 89, 99–100,
illusion 189–191 M 150, 170, 209
Grimaldi’s theorisation membership see Mitsein of the existential condition
50–53 Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter 27, 45, 55–57, 103, 105, 192
Rosset’s theorisation 136–142 105–106, 195 of the puer aeternus 22, 25
see also bad faith see also Beauvoir pathos(es) of consciousness
imagination Mr Tickle 76–77 51–56
readerly 72, 75 mansplaining 83–84 pedagogical romance 185–196
as a strategy of consciousness might pedagogy 86, 186, 190–198
50, 57, 88, 160 deinition of 3–4, 6–7, 19, critical 47
temporal 8, 11, 24, 26, 30, 39, 55–57 picturebook theory 72–82
49, 71 conversion of authority into philosophy 157–158
implied reader see reader 79–82, 89, 100, 151–152, of education 47–48, 71, 170
indeterminacy 157, 186, 200 of existence
of childhood 22, 57, 79, 88, and political action see existentialism
100, 135, 184–185, 191 117, 124, 147, 162, 183–184 political 122–124,
of the future 47, 94, 148, 204 as stiling 170–171, 176 130–133, 153
of reading 75, 77, 82 see also authority, power play 77–78, 139, 183, 199–200
intentionality 7–10, 72–79, miserly adult 32–40, 57 as bad faith see bad faith
179, 206 Mitsein 123, 131–133 as strategy of consciousness
investment 7, 48, 70 mutual recognition 110, 112, 45, 203–204
Island (he) 123–131 133, 194 pleasure 122, 128, 196–200
political
J N criticism 18, 109–110,
jouissance 69, 190, 196–202 Nausea 158, 166 151–153
normativity see aetonormativity engagement 45, 98,
K nostalgia 19–20, 24–26, 34, 161–162, 191
knowledge 40, 88 literature see committed
acquired by the child reader nothingness 54–56, 88, literature
165–169, 196 158–160, 164–165 philosophy 122–124,
as adult property 6, 19, 38, “nothingnesses” 55 130–133
81, 91, 147–148, 186 see also Being potential 6, 20, 22, 35, 46–48,
existentialist deinition of and Nothingness 83–84, 89–90, 105, 107, 114,
158, 160 183–184, 194
as lacking 54–55, 69–72, O see also might
75–79, 81–87, 93–94, 188, object(s) power
190, 193 child as 94–100, 107, 198 dynamics of the adult-child
see also didactic, education of desire/ of the wait relationship 3–4, 6,
40, 49–50, 52–56, 187–190 18–20, 46, 57–58, 81–83,
L objectiication 85–86, 95, 99, 150–155,
liberal humanism 91, 134, of one’s aims in life 178–182, 187, 193, 200
180–181 see bad faith in literary theory 16–19,
Little Prince (he) 21–41 of the other 27, 29, 36, 73–74, 77, 96, 153
look 86, 104–105, 117, 132–133, political 126–128, 161,
as potentially 173–174 191, 201
non-objectifying see also gaze, look, subject see also authority,
107–108, 112, 117–120, Orphée Noir 132 disempowerment, might
130–132, 168, 186–189, otherness see aetonormativity, princesse qui n’aimait pas les
206–208 problem of others princes (La) 198–200
problem of others Romantic child 20, 25, 41, of committed literature

adult-child relationship as 57, 110 see committed literature
5, 58, 92, 103–108, 112–113, see also puer aeternus emancipatory 96
188, 192, 207 rhythm 25, 27, 35, 44, 56–65 picturebook 72–82
deinition of 27–29 reader-response 81–82
project S Tooth (he) 162–167
child as 95–100, 107–108, serious man see bad faith trust in the child 150, 155, 194
133, 198 shame see gaze
didactic 75–76, 83, 85–87, situation U
89, 117, 161, 184, 186–192 deinition of 22, 24, 44, unpredictability 4, 47, 88, 98,
existential 27–29, 31–35, 89, 56, 92, 105–106, 152–156, 101, 147, 161, 191, 197, 207–208
104, 133–135, 156, 173 192–193 utopia 48, 123–124, 155, 176
see also might didactic 76, 78, 83, 85, 93,
publishing 8, 148–150, 182 99, 152, 169–171, 194, 207 V
puer aeternus 20–41 and ethics 109–113, 119, violence
puer existens see mighty child 132–133, 163–165 of the adult-child
sociology of childhood 5, 10, relationship 64–65,
Q 17, 88, 20, 186 186–188, 194–195
Quand nous aurons mangé subject 29, 95–100, 105, 112, of encounters with the other
la planète 170–177 123, 197–198, 205 92, 128, 131
see also object, project see also problem of others,
R pedagogical romance
radical children’s literature T
151–152 Tales of Beedle the Bard (he) W
see also committed literature 89 wait
reader time child’s place in the process of
committed see committed and the didactic 70–71, 78, 29, 40, 43–50, 52–55, 57,
literature 86–87, 99–101, 193–194 84, 94, 100, 171, 176, 188,
implied 2–4, 7–10, 40, general discussion of 15–65 203, 207
47–48, 55, 56, 58, 85–86, let 6, 18–19, 32, 40, 44, 47, Grimaldi’s description of
92–93, 96–100, 112–114, 57, 63, 78, 108, 147, 178, 43–46, 49–50, 105–106
130–133, 162–164, 171–178, 193, 209 Wie ich Papa die Angst
183, 199–200 passing of see anguish vor Fremden nahm 113–122
and ethics 109–112, 143 past 6, 19, 78, 117, 207 What Is Literature? 153–155
and freedom 69–80, 154, and power see authority, see also Sartre,
156–157 might committed literature
in literature ‘for adults’ running out of 5–6, 23–25
69–70, 96 and space see chronotope Y
and pleasure 196–199, timeliness see puer aeternus Young Adult see teenager
201–202 and wait see wait ¿Y yo qué puedo hacer? 157–162
real 9–10, 81–82, 142, waste of 2, 38–39, 48, 87, 205
165–167, 173–174, 180–182 teenager 9, 79, 112, 207 Z
recognition theory Zoo 79–81
see mutual recognition children’s literature 4–5,
réel et son double (Le) 139 15–18, 22
see also Rosset

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he Mighty Child

Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition (CLCC)

John Benjamins Publishing Company

the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

he Mighty Child : Time and power in children’s literature / Clémentine Beauvais.

© 2015 – John Benjamins B.V.

Childhood and the future 43

Part II. Otherness

“Gaps”, desire, and the didactic discourse 69

Deining the adult-child didactic relation 83

Problems of others 103

Part III. Commitment

“An exigence and a git”: Committed children’s literature 147

he pedagogical romance 185

Figure 1. “La Clairvoyance”, by René Magritte (1936) 1

In the middle of an unfulilling adolescence I perceived to be unbearably long,

Among Magritte’s corpus of usually cryptic paintings, “La Clairvoyance” stands

he hidden adult, the adult agency in children’s literature, is an eminently am-

mighty, agential children. My theorisation is irmly adult-centred, as is my deini-

My theorisation in this volume is adult-centred, and my focus is on the adult in-

Finally, readerly practices displaying awareness of a child audience consist of the

I am not including in my deinition children’s readerly practices or reading choices.

Time is therefore always disappointing

Nicolas Grimaldi, Le désir et le temps (1992: 250)

A series of footnotes to Rose

Tongue-in-cheek, Alfred North Whitehead famously declared: “he safest general

However, Gubar’s grouping of these two models is problematic, though it per-

the concept of childhood in contradistinction to adulthood. Adulthood is indeed

he temporal otherness of childhood

7. Gratefully following Alexander Freer’s suggestion.

he Little Prince, between untameable others and untimely selves

Martin Heidegger reportedly lauded Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Le petit prince

about adulthood masquerading as a children’s book. On the contrary, it is very

he very timely puer aeternus

he much-theorised puer aeternus – the child character “locked in time” – can be

he associated chronotope of the puer aeternus of classic children’s iction is,

11. All translations of Cartier mine.

he thorny scandal of otherness

he rose’s desire to be hidden by the screen ater experiencing shame betrays a

“Not a second for repose”: Untimely others

he curse of the lamplighter is a delightful case study in the fundamental difer-

of the street-lamp. his fondly remembered past paints a nostalgic portrayal of a

“Serious men” and miserly adults

he geographer logically and callously concludes that he cannot possibly chart

he fox as didactic adult

An existential analysis of children’s literature is one which interprets the children’s

Existential wait and the child as hope

Hope for the end of the wait

An entirely hopeless children’s book might indeed probably have to be categorised

“Decisive steps”, “uncommitted” – we are here talking about a postponement of

Nicolas Grimaldi reinterprets, in Le désir et le temps (1992), the myth of the

1. Illusions of present eternity: portrayals of current plenitude.

1. Illusions of present eternity, portrayals of current plenitude: he construction

3. Illusions of promised plenitude: portrayals of departure and adventure: Such

Promised plenitude with polar bears

An example of the pathos of promised plenitude in contemporary children’s lit-

he unknowable end of the wait

he symbolism of adventure, for Grimaldi, is replete with allusions to the un-

Children’s literature is on the one hand governed and organised by an authori-

he rhythmical otherness of childhood

he temporal otherness of childhood in the pathos of “promised plenitude” is

adult authority in contemporary children’s literature (and, as will be argued later,