The Descent into Light: A Post-Romantic Image of the Child

The Descent into Light A Post-Romantic Image of the Child "Where the blackness is blacker than any. Like a great open mouth, like a jaw. You must do what you can with your gumption And your sunflower hat and your traw." (The King of the Squirrels' advice to Bronwen in Bronwen, the Traw, and the Shape-Shifter by James Dickey, 3: 2) 1 That literature for children should contain an element of hope is an almost universally held precept among commentators on this genre. The demand for hope is not, however, necessarily a demand for a happy ending. A number of child protagonists descend into an underworld of fear, disillusionment, illness, or death itself, and only some of them emerge individually triumphant . This raises the question: hope for whom? Is it hope for the character in the story or for the child reader or for the adult reader who wishes to be assured of the triumph of humankind over the forces that beset it? In my judgment, one powerful post-Romantic theme in children's books is the child's journey through darkness to find a light that will illumine the human consciousness —adult or juvenile. Many authors have flung their young heroes and heroines into such a quest. In George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind there is the classic instance of Diamond's journey in the night-black hair of the North Wind to the other side of death. Ultimately he does not return from the last of these journeys, but before that he has taught his parents to accept death as a part of life. In the present century, David, in Randall Jarrell's Fly By Night, reaches a subconscious resolution of his loneliness during his nightly dream floating through his everyday landscape, and Maurice Sendak's Ida, borne through the night on her mother's billowing yellow coat descends into a seaside cave where she rescues her baby sister, learning in the process to accept the status of responsible member of the family. In each of these adventures, the child who braves the darkness receives the gift of enlightenment. One recent example that serves well as a focal point for this important theme in children's literature is James Dickey's Bronwen, the Traw, and the Shape-Shifter. Scholars of Dickey's work generally place him in the Romantic tradition and point out how he has changed and carried that tradition forward. Arthur Gregor gives this view succinctly when he says in his essay "James Dickey, American Romantic": 64 The facets of the sacred— reverence, magic, and the terror that often follows a deep engagement with itare qualities that distinguish James Dickey's work and set it apart in the contemporary scene. Rapture and terror, ecstasy over the beauty of the terrible and faith in the ultimate supremacy of light are the ranges of his essentially romantic vision. . . . [It is] the transformation itself and its passions that Dickey is centered in. ... In this passion and conviction he belongs firmly in the tradition of the great romantics, . . . however different his manner and language. (7778 ) But as these scholars are writing on Dickey's work for adults, they mention his attitudes toward childhood only incidentally, and those attitudes represent an evolution of Romantic thought. In Bronwen, the Traw, and the Shape-Shifter, a gentle mockepic of 494 lines, Dickey, who says he likes "to mythologize my children and grandchildren" (flyleaf of the paper jacket) , writes of his young daughter Bronwen' s mythological dream journey to the island of the flying squirrels, where, with the help of a magically charged garden traw, she overcomes the shifting shapes of the malignant force that the All-Dark sets on the small creatures of the world. Before her test, Bronwen knew that the All-Dark would find her As it did in its, path every night; It would come as though coming behind her And blank everything else out of sight. (1: 10) The All-Dark, which hangs "like the wrong side of brightness" (1: 12) , "lies like a great bed of nothing, / . . . And is everything there that is there" (1: 13), has blinded Bronwen with a fear...