After Jacqueline Rose, What Is Left?: The Play of Identity and Representation in Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it . . . .

—Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary

Since its publication in 1984, Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction has been something of a thorn in the side of many who work with children's literature, although not all: Karín Lesnik-Oberstein has been prominent in assenting, while others, notably Perry Nodelman, have become partial apologists for Rose.¹ For many, though, there remains a concern with the way Rose addresses problems of identity and representation—specifically, a concern that representations of the child have been rendered so suspect as to leave a literature actually for children struggling to escape from its apparent impossibility.

I am going to do something a little unusual in this paper and reapproach this problem through its consideration within a fiction for adults. Russell Hoban is probably better known for his sixty works for children (notable among which are The Mouse and His Child and the Frances the Badger series) than for his sixteen novels for adults (the most acclaimed of which is Riddley Walker). Turtle Diary is clearly informed by Hoban's work in children's fiction and features a children's author as one of its two protagonists. Though not overtly about children—it is centred, rather, on relationships with animals—the book's commentary on children's literature and its analogies between animals and children suggest that this story, ostensibly about two adults trying to decide whether to free some turtles from the London Zoo, is also about children's interests, their representation, and the implications of these for the construction of adult identity. It speaks thus to certain of the theoretical concerns that would occupy Rose almost a decade after the novel's publication in 1975. In Hoban's engagement with these concerns, however, he also recognizes and explores—in a way that Rose does not—the practical consequences of a line of inquiry that ends in impossibility. In the process, he addresses a question often implicit in objections to Rose: "After impossibility, what is left?" (Owen 258).

If Turtle Diary can be read as a "response" to Rose, however, it is a response of a very different order. As a fiction composed of its protagonists' private (and frequently contradictory) thoughts—"disconcertingly intimate," Christine Wilkie calls it (46)²—Hoban's novel is not obliged to reconcile its parts monologically the way a work of theory is. Its value to us here lies rather in its free-ranging, pointedly disunified exploration of the complex tensions within which relationships to an Other are negotiated in lived experience. It is, in a sense, a document of intellectual deviancy and perversity. (It might even be called a work of anti-theory, though on the understanding that much going by that name has been concerned to trouble theory from within and not simply to oppose it.³) Each of its protagonists is engaged in a struggle to find a basis for ethical and personally meaningful action in the face of just that impossibility described by Rose— in essence, the impossibility of overcoming the self's interests in producing representations of an Other. Taking impossibility, thus, not as a terminus but as a starting point, Hoban situates his adult protagonists' self-theorizing within a context of "real world" implications and consequences both for the self and for the Other—whether that Other is the child, the animal, or children's literature itself as an Other to the theory that interpellates it. In considering these texts side by side, this paper considers how Hoban's exploration of these impossible relations suggests ways in which impossibility might be recast as provisionality, and how it points to the recovery...