Reading the Child in Children’s Literature: An Heretical Approach by David Rudd (review)

David Rudd’s provocative Reading the Child in Children’s Literature is made up of two theoretical strands: one a series of Lacanian interpretations of more or less classic works, coalescing in a broad account of Lacan’s relevance to children’s literature, and the other a series of criticisms of notable scholars from a position grounded in Bakhtin. The two strands, though woven together, are tenuously connected: there is no necessity in the progression from tearing down with Bakhtin to building up with Lacan. Moreover, one strand is substantially more compelling than the other. For while the Lacanian material is excellent, the critiques of scholarship are often phrased more antagonistically than the argument warrants. With respect in particular to Jacqueline Rose, Maria Nikolajeva, and Perry Nodelman, the narcissism of small differences is on generous display.

Most of Rudd’s readings rest on the interplay of Lacan’s Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary (or RSI, which, pronounced in French, sounds like word “heresy” and so provides the book’s subtitle). In a nutshell, the Symbolic is the sphere of social and linguistic convention in which signifiers are linked to other signifiers; the Real is the material stuff of existence, inexplicable in the conventional terms of the Symbolic and therefore able to interrupt it; and the Imaginary is the flow of constructed narrative that gives structural meaning to the other two spheres. A quick look at Rudd’s reading of Louis Sachar’s Holes (71–79) can serve as a sketch of the schema’s application.

Rudd asks readers to see Holes’ protagonist, Stanley Yelnats IV, as locked in the Symbolic, enacting a dysfunctional pattern symbolized by a palindromic name that goes back and forth, divorced from both internal meaning and the external world. Hit on the head by the Real in the form of a falling pair of shoes, and subsequently sentenced for stealing them, Stanley is sent to a facility where signifiers are twisted or ignored: (not) Green (not) Lake, where the rec room is a wreck room and the denizens, good and bad, reject their given names and the histories thrust on them by society. There, Stanley comes into closer touch with the Real—with his body and with dirt—and earns a new name, Caveman (i.e., not-convention), a name that predicts his conflict with Mr. Sir (i.e., convention itself). More importantly, Stanley meets a boy named Zero. Illiterate and without papers, Zero has no foothold in the Symbolic, and for this reason is able to become the placeholder to Stanley IV’s roman-numeral existence, “allowing patterns to emerge” (75) and enabling Stanley to count higher, or count for more. In effect, Zero’s unknown history provides Stanley his missing Imaginary, and the resultant influx of meaning allows him to discover his autonomy and break his family pattern. The two boys together reach the locus of phallic power, the rock called God’s Thumb, where the three spheres can be reordered and Stanley can shoulder responsibility. This is Rudd at his best: drawing out details, parsing them in Lacanian terms, and aggregating them into an illuminating reading of a complete text.

The Bakhtinian framework for the book’s second strand depends upon the idea that textual meaning arises between text and reader in the form of a dialogue (22–23). Thus, a book will be read differently according to what Stanley Fish calls the reader’s interpretive community. Moreover, a text will speak to a reader in more than one accent, calling itself into question; even the most didactic works of children’s literature often make the mischief they condemn seem attractive (32). On this basis Rudd criticizes, for example, Jacqueline Rose’s singling out Peter Pan as a text that works against itself; in Rudd’s view, all texts do this. The central target, though, is Perry Nodelman, and particularly Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult. This is the subject of Rudd’s fourth chapter and implicitly...