PART ONE
TRADITION OF INTERAGE KINSHIPS IN CHILDRENâS BOOKS
1
FROM SOLITARY TO SOLIDARY
INTERGENERATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN THE REPRESENTATION OF FULL LIVES
Clémentine Beauvais
A classic adult novel frequently follows the character from birth to deathâa biographical plot. For obvious reasons, such a plot would not work in childrenâs fiction.
(Nikolajeva 2005, 101)
In this chapter, I am interested in what happens to questions of intergenerational solidarity when a childrenâs book does undertake to represent the full lives of its main character(s). By full, I do not mean interrupted by premature death, but rather from childhood to middle or indeed even old age. Such books are quite rare primarily because, as Nikolajeva says, the concept violates some of the most fundamental narrative and ideological expectations of childrenâs literature. Yet such texts do exist, and the very fact that they run counter to the most evident expectations we may hold about a childrenâs book makes them theoretically interesting. The only genre within childrenâs literature to have developed specific narrative and aesthetic strategies for the representation of full lives is the biography, a varied category of texts which has known a remarkable comeback in very recent years. Additionally, a hodgepodge of isolated examples, from picturebooks to childrenâs and adolescent novels, follow fictional characters throughout full lives.
Reflections around intergenerational solidarity arise with particular intensity throughout childrenâs books depicting full lives, because in them, intergenerational relationships are notâand, indeed, cannot beârepresented statically. Vanessa Joosen (86) has analyzed the âseesaw effectâ of intergenerational relationships in childrenâs literature, showing that compassion and complicity among the very young and the very old can occur to the detriment of intermediary generations (âadultsâ). This age-related seesaw effect, intriguingly, seems to imply an evolution, throughout the life course, of oneâs attitude towards other generations. If a child character and an older character are portrayed helping each other while adults look on unmoved, it suggests that the child is expected to be, in the future, that selfish adult, and that the older character is assumed to have been, in their past, that selfish adult, too. Such lifelong dynamics in and out of intergenerational solidarity are made available by childrenâs books representing full lives, because they must show us, so to speak, the seesaw in movement.
In this chapter, therefore, I look at what childrenâs literature makes of the evolution of intergenerational solidarity as its protagonists themselves revise their vision of, and modify their attitude to, younger and older characters throughout life. What changes, and what remains, in the characterâs perspective on intergenerationality, and of their own place in the generational landscape of their world, as they grow old?
The first part of this chapter is devoted to theoretical reflection on what the lack of full lives in childrenâs literature means for the representation of intergenerational relationships, finishing with how we may define intergenerational solidarity as evolving throughout the life course. In the second part, I look at full lives in biographies for children. The purpose of exemplarity of the genre means that intergenerational solidarity is frequently presented as the handing down of values, which the child character gratefully receives from helpful adults, and that the aging character, in turn, has the duty to pass on. In such books, intergenerational solidarity is perceived as asynchronous: one will be generous towards the future generation as the past generations were once generous to one, but the individual cannot reciprocate to the older figure at the moment of giving. In the third part, I look at a more haphazard selection of stories that represent full lives, highlighting their more ambivalent portrayals of intergenerational solidarity. There, the synchronous nature of intergenerational solidarity is more evident, but also more fraught. I will not attempt to propose an all-encompassing theoretical framework of such works, which is impossible given the fragmentary nature of the corpus. Rather, I will suggest that representing full lives in childrenâs literature allows for an exploration of age-related topics that the wider canon tends to ignore. Among those are the fear of obsolescence, the impossibility of redemption, and ambivalence towards intergenerational others in the creation of oneâs existence.
INTERGENERATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN (MOST) CHILDRENâS LITERATURE: A STATIC CONCEPT
As a category of text bound to the Bildungsromanâand, in Roberta Seelinger Tritesâs famous analysis, the Entwicklungsroman for adolescent literature (passim)âthe childrenâs book, in theory, traditionally focuses on processes of growth. This does not rule out the portrayal of full lives, but in practice it is difficult to find examples of childrenâs books that take their protagonist from an early age to midlife and/or senescence. There exists a number of such books that, although originally published for adults, have been beloved by younger readers over the centuries. Herman Hesseâs Siddhartha (1922) is perhaps the most radical example; Charlotte BrontĂ«âs Jane Eyre (1847), though a more limited timespan, would arguably qualify. But those de facto crossover celebrities are red herrings; by far the most widespread type of texts that represent âfull livesâ to child or young adult readers are texts in which the life ends abruptly. From Werther to Augustus Waters, many protagonists do live full lives in childrenâs, young adult and crossover texts, but that is because they live fast and die young.
Rarely do we even see representations of âfull young livesâânamely, from childhood to late adolescence. J. K. Rowlingâs Harry Potter series (1997â2007) is a striking counterexample, but generally it is unfashionable to have characters cross the gap, especially within one book, between childhood and adolescence. Editorial categories may be to blame in part for that state of affairs, but there is also something more profound at stake; as Lydia Kokkola explores, adolescence has been historically and culturally set up as a âbuffer zoneâ (33) between childhood and adulthood, its fabled Sturm und Drang preserving the purity of childhood by contrast. The thresholds between childhood and adolescence, and between adolescence and adulthood, are everywhere hinted at yet often offstageâtheir crossing is made obscene.
This segmentation of protagonistsâ existences in childrenâs and young adult literature into short narrative timeframes means that we only get snapshots of intergenerational relationships. Those relationships are solidified; even when they are presented in nuanced ways, their descriptions cannot involve evolution and re-evaluation throughout the life course of the main protagonist, because the main protagonist simply does not have time to re-evaluate those relationships. There is little opportunity for self-reflectiveness about intergenerational relationships, since so little temporal distance is available to the protagonists. Most prominently, they lack the experience of being part of another generation. Whenever such retrospective evaluation occurs, it is generally given rather awkwardly, in the form of an epilogue, postface, or paratext. The infamously clunky epilogue to the Harry Potter series, in which the once-young characters are put in the position of (still relatively young) parents, is one such example, but we can also mention the very end of JosĂ© Mauro de Vasconcelosâs My Sweet Orange Tree (1968), in which Vasconcelosâsuddenly endorsing an authorial, rather than narratorial, positionâreflects upon his changed perception of the older protagonist, in the light, so to speak, of new evidenceâhis own evolved vision of intergenerational relationships. It is not clear whether this self-reflective ending should be seen as text or paratext, and this is part of the point: in childrenâs literature, reflections on how the protagonistâs later life modified their perceptions of other generations hover in an uneasy narrative space.
The tendency for childrenâs literature to present only âsnapshotsâ of intergenerational relationships is one of its elementary characteristics. It is narratively, structurally, and aesthetically âcorrect,â from the viewpoint of childrenâs literature theory, that intergenerational relationships should be thus reified. There is even clear ideological purpose to that reification; the teenage crisis, for instance, and what it implies of conflictual relationships with adults, has been quite rightly posited by Trites (passim) as a founding component of young adult literature, with both narrative and didactic purpose. The lack of retrospective evaluation of intergenerational relationships is one of those essential features that allow childrenâs and young adult literature to achieve poetic, ideological, and formal stability.
We know, of course, that it is not existentially accurate to think of intergenerational relationships, and especially of intergenerational solidarity, as static. One gains and loses a sense of connectedness with older and younger generations, and indeed with oneâs own generational contemporaries, as one grows and as one endorses the generationally specific roles that were once only witnessed from a distance. Furthermore, child perspectives on intergenerational solidarityâfor instance, knowing that flying a kite with a grandfather may be an equally enjoyable activity for the grandfatherâmay be eminently different to that of older people, whose enjoyment of said activity may be layered with their own memories of that shared activity with their own grandparent, with the joy of giving pleasure to the child, and yet also with a conflicting desire to sit down with a nice glass of Chianti and a good book.
Therefore, for a literature so eminently concerned with ageâaetonormative, as Nikolajeva (2010) has argued, and maintaining adulthood as an aspirational norm (see also Nodelman)âchildrenâs literature is also limited in its perceptions of the lifelong changes in interactions with generational others. This makes the very concept of intergenerational solidarity difficult to accommodate in such a literature. I am here defining the concept as mutual well-wishing and trust, evidenced by, for instance, reciprocal acts of help, kindness, or generosity between members of two different generations. It is difficult to accommodate intergenerational solidarity within narratives occurring over a brief timespan, because that exchange of favors is most often solely understood in specific contexts intensified by narrative necessity, rather than envisaged as existential, continuing, and evolving through time, subject to constant reconsideration, and tinged with memories of previous encounters.
THE BIOGRAPHY FOR CHILDREN: INTERGENERATIONAL SOLIDARITY AS AN ABSTRACT CONCEPT
Biographies for children, as I have discussed elsewhere, form an undertheorized, though currently thriving, genre that encompasses a wide variety of works. The genre is comprised of biographies and autobiographies of real people, although fictional (auto)biographies of characters set up as historically significant may also be included, as well as works inscribed within the nineteenth-century tradition of fictional biographies of things or animals, such as Anna Sewellâs Black Beauty (1877), which I have no space to tackle within this chapter (see Pickering). Biographies are among the oldest kinds of childrenâs literature, with historical, narrative, and aesthetic ties to other literary genres, including hagiography and memoir. I am working, within this analysis, on the assumption that the biography for children de facto has an exemplary purpose, in that the presentation of eminent individuals is at least partly intended to elicit admiration in the young reader. The inspirational nature of the genre is still a clear overall purpose of that corpus, as evidenced by the proliferation in recent years of biographies of influential women (see, for example, the hugely popular series âLittle People, Big Dreamsâ). This definition suffers nuances, not least that the aspirational nature might be counterbalanced by the presentation of their contribution to knowledge or the history of ideas; however, straight-forward counterexamples, such as biographies of evil people, are exceedingly rare in childrenâs literature.
Biographies for children, particularly preoccupied with the question of what makes an exemplary existence, generally put emphasis on those aspects of a personâs early life that may predispose them to lead said existence. This is where, often, formative experiences are described in relation to older, parent or mentor, figures whose patient understanding and help accompanies the child. There is clear didactic content in such relationships in the simplest sense of the wordâthat is, an adult leading a child towards knowledgeâbut also a markedly child-focused view of the adult as intensely concentrated on the childâs success. Narratively as well as ideologically, the intergenerational relationships in such books tend to focus on the handing down, by adults, of intellectual, moral, and physical tools to enable the childâs self-realization.
I will take here as an example the Chinese-box treatment of such child-adult relationships in the building of a great existence, in Nikki Grimes and Bryan Collierâs Barack Obama, Son of Promise, Child of Hope (2008). This picturebook biography of the former US president, which devotes time to little Barackâs education, is framed by a fictive relationship between a mother narrator and a child narratee; the (black) mother tells the child about Barack Obamaâs life, himself presented in a close relationship to his mother.1 The double layer of child-adult intimacy, clustered around the great manâs achievements, is reinforced still by another intergenerational relationship it impliesâthat of its own possible reading event by a parent-child couple together. The implications are clear: as the great man was helped by the benevolent, caring mother, so the child can be great, if protected, assisted, and loved by an adult.
Other biographies present the same theme in reverse, underlining, instead, the existential weight of an absent parent. Amy Novesky and Isabelle Arsenaultâs Cloth Lullaby (2016), a highly stylized biography of Louise Bourgeois, emphasizes the death of Louiseâs mother, triggering the protagonistâs grief, which leads to her own success as an artist. Louise, left alone, undertakes to piece her life together, using the legacy of her motherâs craf, symbolized alternatively by spiders, rivers, constellations, and tapestries. While Cloth Lullaby is decidedly darker than Barack Obama, Son of Promise, Child of Hope, and stamped throughout by lossâof the mother, of a sense of self, of the meaning of existenceâit relies on a similar kind of premise: that the adultâs role in the childâs life is that of a giver, hander-down, protector, and helper. As far as those biographies are concerned, the child at the time of blossoming is in a position primarily of receiver. This is not intergenerational solidarity, but a one-directional duty of care from the adult to the child. Nurturing, it is understood, flows overwhelmingly in one direction.
Clearly, this treatment echoes what critics have identified as the role of the helper, the parent or the person in loco parentis in childrenâs literature more generally. It also recalls a Rousseauist view of education, in which the carer is placed in the position of a gardener (Rousseauâs Jean-Jacques in Emile is a âtuteur,â which can mean both a tutor and a gardening-stake around which a plant coils). As such, there should be nothing especially noteworthy about this perception of transgenerational help. Yet this is not the full story, because, of course, in the biography the child character ultimately grows into an adult, then (potentially) an older person. And it is then their turn to repay the favor.
Here intergenerational solidarity arises in biography for children, where it acquires a presence, importance, and conceptual vigor so strong as to become quasi-philosophical. For, eminently, the grown man or woman of the biography for children is most often, in turn, placed in the role of the inspirator, helper, protector, carer, and giver. Having received the attention of adults as childrenâor having suffered from that lack of attentionâthey are placed in the position of someone who has, so to speak, contracted a kind of existential debt. It is striking, in biographies for children, that many of them end with the middle-aged or elderly character in a mentoring position for much younger characters, or that the whole story is framed by a didactic situation in which there is in effect a didactic narratee. Those narratees or child characters are frequently fictional, sometimes plucked out of the great historical figureâs created universe (as is the case, for instance, with Peter SĂsâs 2014 The Pilot and the Lit...