Speaking to Both Children and Genre: Le Guin's Ethics of Audience

There are precisely as many genres as we need, genres whose conceptual shape is precisely determined by that need.

(Adena Rosmarin)

Writers who claim that they write only for themselves deny that the influence of either genre or a readership guides the writing. These writers argue by implication that they neither communicate with readers nor observe generic traditions; they simply write to themselves. They are self-proclaimed literary isolationists. Jill Paton Walsh ("The Writers in the Writer" 4), Katherine Paterson (47, 50), P. L. Travers (63), Mollie Hunter (12), and Michael Steig (Bottner 4) all directly point to themselves as at least partial audience in their commentaries on writing for children, but they don't go so far as to claim that they don't write for children. Arthur Ransome made "the reiterated denial that he wrote for children" (Wall 30), but he ultimately "made a distinction between writing for children and writing to children" (30), claiming the latter occupation for himself. Peter Hollindale believes that Ransome is less interested in child readers than he is childhood ("Signs" 31), which Hollindale considers a feature of the genre of children's literature. In any case, writers for children who would deny both interest in and consciousness of form and audience argue that theirs is children's literature entirely by accident. However, a book becomes a children's book--intended by the writer or not--when critics identify generic features (text) and/or children find that the book speaks to them (context).

I'm more interested in the children's writer who claims both to write children's books and to write books for children--those writers who conflate text and context. When the children's author describes "writing to children," we are invited to see a rhetorical relationship between a writer and a reader; when the children's writer discusses "writing children's literature," we are invited to consider the text as a member of a particular genre or text type. We shouldn't be surprised when authors sound like rhetors at one moment, and the next moment--perhaps in the next sentence--they go on to talk about and even define their work in textual terms only. This authorial tendency to combine textual and contextual definitions of children's literature frustrates critics eager to distinguish clearly between "book people" and "child people." After discussing the blurring of these boundaries in general, I will show in particular how Ursula Le Guin, famous for blurring both the edges and ages of genre, creates a dialogue between the textual and the contextual as she attempts over time to define what she does. Ultimately I hope to show how Le Guin distinguishes between her audiences based on the ethics of both audience and genre.

Those authors who have primarily (though not solely) a rhetorical view of what they do see the text as a conduit for the delivery of their own message to real children. ¹ Beyond mere lecture, Betsy Byars, Mollie Hunter, Katherine Paterson, and C. S. Lewis all claim to engage in a dialogue with actual children. ² Byars's sense of audience comes, she claims, directly from her own children, who also give her the ideas for her books (7). Hunter, too, credits dialogue with her children for her success (8-9). Paterson makes her process and aim clear: "I write for my own four children and for others who are faced with the question of whether they dare to become adult" (109). C. S. Lewis is perhaps the most well-known critic of the cult of the generalized child: There needs to be, he says, a dialogue between an author and a child, a real person with whom one either actually consults or about which the author can predict responses based on the history of acquaintance. Lewis points out that the "participants modify each other" and form "a...