Remarks

It may be a mistake to think that reading has anything to do with literature, especially in childhood. Reading for grown-ups is conditioned by many non-literary kinds of appeal—snob appeal; pornographic appeal; the appeal of isolation and withdrawal in a crowded place; a tic-like pleasure in killing time by following print (about on a level with biting one's nails); the relief of distraction from unpleasant thoughts by the unravelling of a mental puzzle. Children are obviously susceptible to all these appeals, and to others, more specialized, as well.

Series and comic books appeal to the collecting instinct. It is highly satisfying to the young to have a complete set of anything; it is even better, in a world of difficult lessons, to have mastered an entire area of knowledge and experience chosen by oneself. ("Bet you haven't read all the Fives books; I have!")

The Nancy Drew series—revised to remove its more overt racism—continues to act as a rite of passage for many sub-teen girls. (Biggies, in England, used to capture both boys and girls.) There is a competition between friends to see who can read all the titles first—rather like the older marathon of reading all the way through the Bible, a chapter a night, without skipping any of the begats. The books are formulaic in construction, incorporating the same basic elements every time—a mystery, a clue, a chase, an attack, a capture, an escape, some classy social events, and triumph, accompanied by rich gifts.

One eleven-year-old, after reading twenty-seven Nancy Drew adventures, suddenly said, "You know, I always know what's going to happen in these books now; they're all the same": after which disillusion she read them only occasionally, as a kind of duty.

Yet the same child at age twelve still alternates the Ring trilogy, Jane Eyre, Go Ask Alice and Paul Zindel with her younger sister's Enid Blyton. Enid Blyton, imported from England, has achieved enormous popularity locally, for all its differences of language and culture; and, despite the modish revulsion of parents, children by the million in England and America go right on reading her.

Another appeal of the series is that it provides material for an in-group; all Enid Blyton fans or Nancy Drew followers read the same things and have endless opportunities for conversing about the books or challenging each other about them. Connected with this is the sense of support and confidence which a simple, formulaic plot inspires. Really exciting and original stories are often almost more painful than pleasant till they have been read or told often enough for a child to be able to surrender to the suspense in comfort, knowing that really everything is going to be all right.

When young children want to know at the beginning of a story if it will end happily, we are reminded that reading is an emotionally risky business, and self-protection demands that the risks be reduced to an acceptable level. A pattern repeated often enough, yet varied in each book or story with just enough skill for the basic similarities to be veiled gives the best of both worlds—the best of the expected and the best of the unexpected.

Perhaps the strongest pull of many books which seem to adults to be naive, ill-written, or clumsy may lie in their closeness to some fantasy essential to a certain stage of development. Yet that closeness must not be so great that it leaves no room for expansion.

I remember going back to Heidi after a lapse of many years and realizing with surprise that what I remembered with such pleasure simply was not in the book. I had, so to speak, done more than half of it myself. Across the skeletal plot and the sparse sentences, my imagination had grown a great vine of feeling, conjecture, and event; the fantasy evoked constituted the deepest level of appeal.

Is it not true that many of the perennial favorites are of this kind? that somehow they have the power of leaving spaces, of attracting a child...