Children's Literature and the Posthuman

Animal, Environment, Cyborg

Zoe Jaques

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136674914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An investigation of identity formation in children's literature, this book brings together children's literature and recent critical concerns with posthuman identity to argue that children's fiction offers sophisticated interventions into debates about what it means to be human, and in particular about humanity's relationship to animals and the natural world. In complicating questions of human identity, ecology, gender, and technology, Jaques engages with a multifaceted posthumanism to understand how philosophy can emerge from children's fantasy, disclosing how such fantasy can build upon earlier traditions to represent complex issues of humanness to younger audiences. Interrogating the place of the human through the non-human (whether animal or mechanical) leads this book to have interpretations that radically depart from the critical tradition, which, in its concerns with the socialization and representation of the child, has ignored larger epistemologies of humanness. The book considers canonical texts of children's literature alongside recent bestsellers and films, locating texts such as Gulliver's Travels (1726), Pinocchio (1883) and the Alice books (1865, 1871) as important works in the evolution of posthuman ideas. This study provides radical new readings of children's literature and demonstrates that the genre offers sophisticated interventions into the nature, boundaries and dominion of humanity.

Part I Animal

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble & I believe truer to consider him created from animals.

—Charles Darwin, Notebooks, 1838

1 Creature

DOI: 10.4324/9780203581490-1

“What impertinence!” said the Pudding. “I wonder how you’d like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1872

I said farther, That if good Fortune ever restored me to my native Country, to relate my Travels hither, as I resolved to do; every Body would believe that I said the Thing that was not; that I invented the Story out of my own Head: And […] our Countrymen would hardly think it probable, that a Houyhnhnm should be the presiding Creature of a Nation, and a Yahoo the brute.

—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, 1726

The word “animal” is deceptive in its singular simplicity. As Jacques Derrida articulates in his 1997 lecture, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”¹, the act of naming living beings as “animal”, a right which accords with Adamic man's dominion over non-human others, is a practice that grants power only through the prioritizing reduction of language: “The animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to another living creature” (392). Derrida goes on emphatically to restate the case against singularity, drawing attention to the limitations of such wording:

There is no animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of “living creatures” whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity. (415)

The construction of the definite “animal” is here conceived as a violent homogenization, a “sin against rigorous thinking” and a “crime of the first order” (416), yet it can also provide a powerful route to thinking through the complexities of human-animal relations. Erica Fudge, who titles her 2002 book with the singular Animal, argues that the word has a transformative power in drawing attention to the complexities of our lived relations with non-human others:

I want to make the word “animal” in all its singularity an uncomfortable one. I want to argue that the abstract term is exactly what is both necessary, and deeply problematic in a culture where meat eating, pet ownership, animal experimentation and anthropomorphic children's books all sit comfortably together. […] Doesn't the impossibility of thinking in terms of “the animal” spring from a recognition of the impossibility of living with them as we do? (164–165)

Fudge's reference to the “impossibility” of our “animal” dominance here recalls Jacqueline Rose's take on the “impossible relation between adult and child” which children's fiction “hardly ever talks of” (1), and brings to mind parallels with the equally reductive word, “child”. It is perhaps no accident that children and animals share a rhetorical and restrictive linguistic stereotype; the expressions “behaving like an animal” or “acting childishly” operate as negative, regulating metaphors in everyday speech, applicable only to (adult) human behavior which operates outside of the civilized or socially acceptable.

If the term animal is awkward or impossible, drawing attention to its own limitations through its constant but simultaneously abstract (mis)use, then what might the word “creature” offer instead? Derrida, in articulating the “sin” of the appellation animal, asks us to “envisage the existence of ‘living creatures’”, indicating that this latter phrase offers a greater multiplicity and diversity than its homogenizing cousin. Charles Kingsley, in his mantra on the value of the human child with which this book begins, also suggests a dislocation between the terms animal and creature, albeit for distinctly different ends to those of Derrida, when he claims that there is a “priceless capability in that creature” which “is better than all the dumb animals in the world” (“Massacre”, 259). More recently, J. K. Rowling has drawn upon the flexibility of the word “creature” in her depiction of one peculiarly complex being within her magical bestiary; the role of “Kreacher” the house-elf in the later volumes of the Harry Potter series offers a rare instance of the text advocating benevolence toward non-human others, shown most acutely in Dumbledore's call to kindness:

I warned Sirius when we adopted twelve Grimmauld Place as our Headquarters that Kreacher must be treated with kindness and respect. I also told him that Kreacher could be dangerous to us. I do not think Sirius took me very seriously, or that he ever saw Kreacher as a being with feelings as acute as a human's-

—(Order of the Phoenix, 733)

The elderly wizard connects the human and the “Kreacher” here, using the “like us” method of equality to advocate compassion by drawing attention to how the house-elf has “feelings as acute as a human's” (italics mine). Yet this means of aligning the creature (as distinct from the animal²) and the human is overtly anthropocentric, emphasizing how dangerous he might be “to us” if not appropriately handled and thus simultaneously reinforcing a “difference” model that excludes Kreacher from humanity (and thus, implicitly, positions him as inferior). The creature gains importance here only in relation to the post-Enlightenment body of the human, who stands as the point of reference in debates about how other beings should be treated. The plasticity, or Derridean “plurality”, of the creature can thus be every bit as vexing and conditioning as that of the animal because of its inverse mutability, for it simultaneously suggests the imaginary or fictional (and thus, often, the hybrid) while also either ironically connecting the human with the animal (as in “fellow creatures”) or separating the two into distinct units (as in Kingsley's dislocation of the “priceless” human creature from the “dumb” animal).

This chapter's central interest comes in teasing out the complexities of this multifarious and thorny “creature” in early children's literature, and in particular exploring how the ontological mutability of such beings foreground, address and variously challenge the emergence of posthuman concerns in early children's fantasy. The chapter focuses on two “classic” texts that usefully expose the complications of undermining human authority in fiction for young readers, by addressing the creatures of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Lewis Carroll's Alice books (1865, 1872). These texts might seem to provide an unusual starting point for a work on posthumanism in children's literature. Gulliver's Travels, although infamous for its satirical destabilizing of human rationality, was not written explicitly for a young audience (although the use of the word “for” is notoriously tricky as a signifier of children's literature³). Alice, on the other hand, was conceived (at least initially) for a specific and specified child reader, yet Carroll's texts might seem unlikely champions for posthuman ideals—much of the fame of Wonderland, at least as a children's book, rests upon the case “that it has no moral, and does not teach anything” (Sunderland Herald). For the majority of critics, it marks “the turning point at which fantasy and imagination banished dry didacticism” (Lewis C. Roberts, 360). Both Travels and Alice are rather awkward exemplars of what we might tentatively term “crossover fiction”. The initial reception of both texts showed that they would appeal to adult and child readers alike, with Travels “enjoyed from the Cabinet-council to the Nursery” (Gay, 182) and Wonderland considered “a delightful book for children—or, for the matter of that, for grown-up people” (The London Review). Yet despite this initial broad celebration, Travels was also found “too severe” (Gay, 182) in its satire of humanity, and has subsequently tended to be marketed for children primarily in an abridged form, while many critics have found the complexities of Alice too challenging for young readers, suggesting that it is “the adult who delights in them the most” (Ross, n.p.). This tension concerning what constitutes appropriate childhood reading is, of course, based upon the well-rehearsed sense of a disjuncture between the adult and the child, but it also makes Gulliver and Alice “distinctive”, highlighting them as texts that function particularly rather than indicatively.⁴

I would, however, argue that the way in which these texts have been revised or read to represent specific modalities of being in children's fiction—be that through adaptations to make a text more “child friendly”, as in the case of Travels, or through a critical history which promotes a “children's Alice” as one which is nonsensical and moral-free—reveals a great deal about the wider complexities of exposing young readers to works that dispute the centrality and superiority of human rationality. While the fantastic landscapes of these texts are peopled with a number of “impossible” creatures, in keeping with anthropomorphic traditions dating back to Aesop, what makes them particularly troublesome and challenging is their representation of human protagonists as mutable creatures themselves. Such a depiction is hardly unique even in early children's fantasy—Kingsley's water-baby Tom, for example, experiences similar bodily metamorphosis—but Swift and Carroll unsettle their readership by making the return to humanity, and thus a “real world” dislocation from other creatures, a thoroughly disjointing and unsatisfying movement. While the protagonists are discombobulated by the creatures around them, and represent the confusions inherent to humans who have their superiority continually questioned, the narratives esteem such discomfort and hierarchal plurality, even as it distresses the central human characters, critiquing humans who have become too arrogant and “reasoned” to appreciate their own limitations. Alice and Gulliver reverse the reference points implicit in Rowling's creation of Kreacher, whose value is embodied only through his ability to affect humans adversely, so that human suffering is not located as the greatest ill. The haunting spectre of the creatures the protagonists encounter on their respective travels thus troubles the close of both texts, yet the editorial or critical history of adapting or reading these books as texts for children has undercut, revised or overlooked the radicalism of these animalized ghosts. This chapter argues that Gulliver's Travels and Alice, without the respective editorial tinkering or misguided critical focus on a moral-free “play” for child readers (as if play is not radically subversive itself), offer sophisticated interventions into debates about humanity's relationship to other creatures and suggests that attempts to read or market them as “children's books” has removed or ignored that philosophical sophistication. As such, I use these texts to foreground the complex relationship between children's fiction and posthuman philosophy that is explored throughout the rest of this book, and demonstrate that there is no easy, uncontested or indeed “evolutionary” movement from humanism to posthumanism in the rendering of the multifaceted creatures of children's literature.

CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL: GULLIVER'S TRAVELS REVISED

In the middle of the eighteenth century, twenty-five years after Swift first published Gulliver's Travels, John Newberry created one of the very first periodicals ever published for children, calling it The Lilliputian Magazine (1751). This title, offering an early instance of Swift's tale being associated with childhood reading, at the same time aligned young readers with one of its curious and fantastical “creatures”. Children here become a diminutive “Lilliputian” populace, fantastically removed from the fully human—as “little people”.

The publishing history of Guilliver's Travels underscores this innate connection between young readers and the Lilliputians. Children's editions have since the eighteenth century prioritized retellings of the first, and to a lesser extent the second, size-distorting book. In her exhaustive survey of 55 editions of Gulliver's Travels “published specifically for children or [...] recommended for them by specialists in children's literature” (83), M. Sarah Smedman found that 31 of these editions, 1727–1985, exclude the third and fourth voyages. If one narrows that date range down to 1800–1850s, just before the “Golden Age” of children's literature, then eight out of ten children's editions reprint only the first two books. These early tales of the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians continued to be the most canonical parts for children in later periods too; Andrew Lang, for instance, includes only “A Voyage to Lilliput” in his 1889 Blue Fairy Book. Modern illustrated editions tend to do the same, as demonstrated by Beverley Birch's version for Hodder Children's Books (2002) or Geraldine McCaughrean's creative retelling Fig's Giant (2005), and film adaptation has also concentrated on the giant and miniature travelling doctor. Editions published for children in translation are similarly abbreviated; Heinz Kosok's study of seventeen German editions of Gulliver's Travels for young people published from 1915–1985 found that “only two […] attempt a presentation, with a number of cuts, of the complete work” (138–139). This publication history discloses that, from the early nineteenth century onwards, the later voyages of Gulliver have been considered uncomfortable reading matter for children, or at the very least there has been an editorial preference for the more light-hearted satire of Books One and Two.

The obvious association between diminutiveness and children may well explain why so many editors and publishers focus on just Lilliput and Brobdingnag. As Smedman points out, even the earliest readers would have been familiar with size-distorting stories, which she suggests are “situations universally appealing to children” (79). Interest in the miniature and gigantic continues in modern children's fiction, such as E. B. White's Stuart Little (1945), Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952), Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who (1954), or Roald Dahl's The BFG (1982) and the Minpins (1991).⁵ Yet when John Newberry identified children as Lilliputians, at least by implication, in his children's magazine, he side-stepped a challenge embodied in Swift's first book. Neither adult nor child readers are expected to identify with the creatures they encounter, be they great or small, but to see with the eyes of Gulliver. A similar narrative strategy operates when Alice's journeys through Wonderland or the Looking-Glass are experienced largely from her perspective. Many editions of Travels intended for child readers thus retain the first-person narration of the original, and those that revise into the third-person invariably focus on Gulliver as the central protagonist. Thus, his mutability, and subsequent shifts in perspective, offer the greatest opportunity to examine humanity and its place in the rest of the world. Encounters with fantastical others, while potentially destabilizing and subversive, are less transformative than a perspective shift that makes humans themselves subject to othering. By reading as the variously mutable Gulliver, then, child readers experience the possibilities inherent in his fractured and destabilized humanity and by extension are encouraged to re-evaluate the fixity of associated species boundaries.

What we might call the “posthuman potential” of the first two books of Travels—those commonly included in editions for you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Child, the Book and the Posthuman Ethic
• PART I Animal
• PART II Environment
• PART III Cyborg
• Conclusion: A Question: Who Are You?
• Bibliography
• Index