Great Expectations: Children's Literature Criticism in The Year of the Child

If you were waiting, as I was, for a quantum leap in the attention that would be paid to children's literature in national journals and magazines, 1979. "The Year of the Child," was not your year or mine. For some reason, those long-awaited, synthesizing, legitimizing statements did not materialize. As far as his or her books were concerned, the child was hardly noticed.

Of course there were studies and editorials, either about the literature itself or the condition of childhood today, in those publications that normally specialize in children's literature criticism and the imaginative affairs of children. The standard reviews and survey articles on recent children's books appeared, as they do annually, in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and Saturday Review. Predictably, a long article on Maurice Sendak that surfaced in the Wall Street Journal (Dec. 20, 1979), lead into its clichéd summary of Sendak's work with a ticking off of the sales figures of popular Sendak books. On the other hand, the New York Times Magazine (Dec. 9, 1979) offered an intelligent and provocative condensation of Andrew Birkin's fascinating biography on J. M. Barrie. Arthur Schlesinger ventured an article, "Advice from a Reader-Aloud-to-Children," on the third page of the New York Times Book Review (Nov. 25, 1979) to chide the "shallow optimism of so much contemporary writing for children" and to revive the eighteenth-century, battle-of-the-books defense for reading the classics—aloud. One cannot disagree with Schlesingers point about exposing children to the classics, but anyone who reads very much contemporary children's literature cannot help but be puzzled and to wonder—aloud—which recent children's books Schlesinger has been reading.

Children's literature may be making gains in the literary stock market—at least in the eyes of the Times and the Journal —and surely anyone working in the field itself must appreciate the fact that it is being allowed to creep out from the back rooms it shares with Newgate Callendar into the front parlor of literary adulthood where the big folks are chatting. But, like Huck, I feel I've "been there before," and I'm itching for some new territory instead of the same old terrain.

As has been noted so often in these and other pages of journals devoted to the study of children's literature, children's literature languishes in a third world of literary acceptability. A major difference between children's literature and these other purgatoried bodies of writing, though, is that children's literature touches everyone at one time and to one degree or another, regardless of sex, sexual preference, class, politics, ethnic origin, or religion. One would think, therefore, that everyone would be interested in enriching what James Hillman calls "the imaginational language" of children. As Hillman goes on to maintain, "children's literature . . . is . . . a poiesis, a crafting or artificing [of] the imagination itself. It offers a psychic breeding ground for an individual's own poetic process, the fantasy imagery that is the basis of religious, artistic, scientific, and social life." (Children's Literature, 8 (New Haven: Yale, 1980).

Why, then, were these powerful, life-shaping qualities of children's literature overlooked in the articulation of the General Assembly of the United Nations' 1959 "Declaration of the Rights of the Child"? Why was a commitment not made on an international level to the quality of children's reading material on the twentieth anniversity of that declaration? What of the rights of the child to good, human books ? Instead, images still flit around the edges of the television screen of one of the few nationally aired shows in the celebration of The Year of the Child—a UNESCO-sponsored rock concert (which that organization is still trying to live down) that included a performance by Rod Stewart that could only be photographed from the waist up, while he rasped his song, gyrating in a skin-tight, leopardskin jumpsuit,"if you like my body and you think I'm sexy"—his gift to the children...