Notes toward a Marxist Critical Practice

The critical essays written for volume 18 of Children's Literature employ various psychoanalytic master narratives derived from Freud, Jung, Klein, Chodorow, and Kristeva that govern both current psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism of children's literature. Some of these theorists challenge and revise Freud's findings: feminist critics, for example, use psychoanalytic models to emphasize pre-oedipal relationships rather than oedipal confrontations as the prime mover of narrative structures. Even so, volume 18 remains curiously unconcerned with the problematic nature of the relationship between the psychoanalytic enterprise and the interpretation of children's literature. We suggest that this relationship can really be addressed only by opening a dialogue within the text between the historical condition of its production and the moment of its reception.

To the extent that children's literature itself investigates the efficacy of adult values, psychoanalysis in its commitment to questioning moral conventions finds within children's literature a natural discursive ally. Psychoanalysis can tell us something about the way language embodies such forces as displacement and condensation to direct generic conventions, but it barely informs us about the historical forces that determine these conventions. Psychoanalysis is part of, but not the whole, truth.

As a theory of utterance, psychoanalysis turns the literary text into a neat version of itself: the story of desire is always already in place. Whether through the notion of the "inner quest" or the notion of the alluring mother's body, psychoanalysis elides the particular context of the literary work—its inscription of its historical moment—in favor of a "universal" narrative. Yet it does not follow that the oedipal model of development or the pre-oedipal pattern of desire is a universal cultural phenomenon. In one sense, psychoanalytic and Marxist forms of criticism have similar trajectories: archaeological metaphors of uncovering and unraveling dominate both their practices. Psychoanalysis works to reclaim the reality of the unconscious as it affects the textual representation of language and desire. Marxism works to reclaim the reality of the text's "political unconscious" (Jameson 1981)—that is, the gaps, fissures, and ruptures that provoke and articulate the class conflict and economic struggle that the dominant ideology of the text, its hegemonic levels of meaning, would otherwise silence. Both psychoanalysis and Marxism work toward a theory of genre. "Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact" (Jameson 106). Even so, the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism remains problematic. Psychoanalysis is committed to universal truths of nature, whereas Marxism locates the concept of nature within the social and the political, where all meaning is ultimately produced, including that of psychoanalysis. A radical critical practice of children's literature should return psychoanalytic models to their familial and social ground: the historical and material conditions that produce children and children's literature.

Children's literature arises as a discursive practice from a distinct cultural context. For instance, Jack Zipes writes of the fairy tale: "Almost all critics who have studied the emergence of the literary fairy tale in Europe agree that educated writers purposely appropriated the oral folk tale and converted it into a type of literary discourse about mores, values, and manners so that children would become civilized according to the social code of that time" (Zipes 3). Books like Robinson Crusoe , Tom Brown's Schooldays , Swallows and Amazons became classics only after being ratified by the middle classes and their literary gatekeepers—publishers, librarians, and critics. The classic is not just born; it is that locus of invested value which the text for whatever reason becomes. Concerned as it is with edification and entertainment, children's literature is a logical site for the production and circulation of social ideals. Hence its frequently Utopian character.

We must recall that a child—the subject of the text and its implied reader—is also determined by the ideology of the literary marketplace. A child reader does not pre-exist; he or she arrives with and is created by the text. The position of the implied...