Rereading Childhood Books

A Poetics

Alison Waller

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474298292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title and shortlisted for the ESSE book awards 2020, for Literatures in the English Language Childhood books play a special role in reading histories, providing touchstones for our future tastes and giving shape to our ongoing identities. Bringing the latest work in Memory Studies to bear on writers' memoirs, autobiographical accounts of reading, and interviews with readers, Rereading Childhood Books explores how adults remember, revisit, and sometimes forget, these significant books. Asking what it means to return to familiar works by well-known authors such as Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton, as well as popular and ephemeral material not often considered as part of the canon, Alison Waller develops a poetics of rereading and presents a new model for understanding lifelong reading. As such she reconceives the history of children's literature through the shared and individual experiences of the readers who carry these books with them throughout their lives.

1

The reading scene

What forms of knowledge about childhood reading might be reached through acts of memory? How do autobiographical accounts construct the remembered reading self? To answer these questions it is first necessary to examine the dynamic fulcrum that is the reading scene: a conceptual and narrative space, shaped and defined by remembering, in which individual encounters with texts take place. My purpose in this opening chapter is to determine how reminiscence, recollection, recognition, and reconstruction function in this space and how they are accounted for in adult responses to childhood books. A scene implies a fixed and relatively contained setting, in both spatial and temporal terms, whereas any act of remembering is, after all, glancing, momentary, and bound by the constraints of the mind and its ability to conjure the past in a meaningful way. That scene is always enriched by examining the strata of memories underlying it, however; in Walter Benjamin’s phrase ‘the probing of the spade in the dark loam’ (1932/1999, p. 611). One aim in this chapter is to examine the relationship between the surface of remembering in the now and the depths of remembered textual encounters of the past, paying particular attention to how the activity of excavation might be cast as more than nostalgic indulgence. Reader response theory has always acknowledged memory’s role in the transactional process of reading. For instance, Louise Rosenblatt notes that there is a complex ‘penumbra’ of readerly memory effects – a ‘mnemonic matrix’ – that inflects every act of reading (1978/1994, p. 58). While her concern is primarily with the evocation of a work of art through the literary operation of such features as ‘repetitions, echoes, resonances, repercussions, linkages, cumulative effects, contrasts, or surprises’ (pp. 57–8), my focus will be on the mental work undertaken by adults to revive such initial evocations through remembering. In some cases, the practice of rereading represents an additional instrument for digging up the past, unearthing substantial, often hidden, aspects of previous childly interactions with books.

My notion of the reading scene as theoretical apparatus for understanding how individuals represent, deal with, and sort the past is partly informed by recent work undertaken by scholars of memory working at the interface of the arts and sciences, particularly those interested in the spatial underpinnings of memory. I have drawn on some of the most salient of these theories to help articulate how elements of narrative accounts of remembering reading intersect with recognized structures of scene and background memory in cognitive terms. Mine is not a scientific enquiry though, and I do not propose to analyse accounts of paracanonical reading for particular truths about memory functions that correspond to scientific discoveries.¹ Instead, this chapter begins the work of integrating and analysing a range of autobiographical sources in order to understand common themes and strategies among adult ‘rememberers’. In the course of my discussion, I move between literary accounts, material from bibliomemoirs, and re-memorying parallel texts co-produced in interview, seeking insights into how the workings of readerly memory are translated into common discourses, and recognizing that different aspects of my mnemonic taxonomy will be foregrounded according to variations in motivation and intent across these sources. Memory operates as a narrative tool as well as a cognitive one, allowing memoirists and other remembering adults to shape accounts of their lifelong reading. These individual readers often reflect on what is and what is not easily recalled to memory, and what it means to recover certain readerly memories through the process of returning to books from the past. They recount textual features and also connect significant childhood books to particular ideas of the autobiographical.

To explore the role of readerly reminiscence and its disputed role in the history of children’s literature scholarship, I turn to one of the most famous literary accounts of childhood reading. Marcel Proust’s detailed interrogation of autobiographical memories of early reading provides some clues, not only to why many readers and critics consider such memories to be dangerously clothed in nostalgia, but also to how hidden fragments can yield other types of memory work in action, particularly processes of reconstruction. Further case studies produced from interviews with real readers and autobibliographical writings provide a more detailed map of the recollection, recognition, and reconstruction of paracanonical childhood books that I hope complicates the terrain. I begin this chapter by setting out the theoretical basis for the reading scene, the first element of my model of lifelong reading.

Memory and the reading scene

As a reader ages, his or her life is populated by a wide range of reading matter, as well as literary and non-literary events that inflect reading response. Encounters with books and with co-readers, playful re-enactments of stories and characters, and the development of a readerly identity are all part of lifelong reading and take place across the complex landscape of childhood and adult experience. Dynamic interactions with texts themselves, including those exchanges that take place after the initial encounter in the form of memories or revisitations, represent part of this activity. They occur across the life course and are influenced by its affairs. But such interactions also remain discrete from what I will term the ‘life space’ in the next chapter by dint of their particular nature as a form of internal, mental undertaking. In my model of remembering and rereading, then, the reading scene acts as a way to identify and contain individual moments of cognitive and emotional engagement with texts.

The relationship between childhood book and reading scene that I suggest reveals my debt to reader response theory, in which the virtual space between text and reader is a site for meaningful interpretation or communication. Rosenblatt suggests that this site, which she calls the ‘poem’, is a ‘coming-together, a compenetration, of reader and text’ (1978/1994, p. 12), while Wolfgang Iser argues that the activity of reading is a framework for, or process of, bringing the virtual text into being (1974, pp. 276–9). In each case, the ink on the page is less important than the event of the meeting between reader and text, a fact that seems to me even more pertinent in the lifelong reading act where the page itself may be faded, dog-eared, or torn, and the material book damaged, lent away, or lost, but the virtual space of compenetration continues to be activated through memory.

The reading scene is a theoretical concept – a virtual space in which these encounters and re-encounters, memories of books and memories of readings, are enacted. It also functions as a practical tool for organizing such mental work, in the form of descriptive accounts of remembered reading. Although it may seem rather contrived to combine two different senses in the same term, the overlaying of meanings point to the textual, narrative, and spatial qualities that cognitive reading processes and autobiographical accounts share when it comes to reading. The conflation also allows multiple meanings of the word ‘scene’ to come into play, referring to a sequence of action in a narrative or to the setting or place of that action, for instance. In her monograph Architexts of Memory (2005), Evelyn Endere explores the work of several ‘exemplary architects of mnemonic scenes’ (p. 3), including Proust, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, in order to argue for the crucial link between memory and subjectivity, both in imaginative writings and in real life. These authors, Ender suggests, create coherent and meaningful literary expressions of the phenomenon of remembering, and regularly offer up to readers beautiful or thought-provoking sketches for this complex aspect of human consciousness. The reading scene is a specific form of mnemonic scene, similarly reflecting and constructing inner processes – remembering and reading – that usually remain hidden from view. As we shall see, Proust is particularly skilled at creating both such scenes in relation to his childhood self.

The Modernist authors that Ender analyses often tie remembrance to a spatial context: memory gardens, childhood landscapes, or photographic and filmic visions. In doing so, they anticipate and articulate in imaginative terms aspects of more recent neuropsychological understandings of the cognitive functioning of memory, specifically ‘scene construction theory’. The premise of this theory is that individuals mentally generate and maintain complex and coherent visual scenes as part of their everyday processes of remembering and predicting the future. The hippocampus facilitates the construction of these scenes by ‘allowing details to be martialled [sic], bound, and played out in a coherent spatial context’ (Maguire et al., 2016, p. 433).² Charles Fernyhough explains that this mechanism for autobiographical memory can be understood as the ‘spatial backdrop’ against which specific past experiences are placed (2012, p. 154), and in stating this he demonstrates its links to the tradition of medieval architectural mnemonics, which created a ‘locus’ or imagined environment into which a rich set of memory images and thoughts might be placed (Carruthers, 2008, p. 166). Other psychological and neuroscientific insights also stress visual and spatial elements of autobiographical memory. Daniel Dennett’s work on consciousness (1991) highlights the importance of mental images, for example, showing how they create or recreate virtual sensations to help humans process the world around them without needing to be continuously in the act of perceiving or feeling. Ian Hacking (1995) argues that spatial tropes, in particular, can work as valuable metaphors for articulating aspects of autobiographical memory that other frameworks – such as linguistic models or notions of narrative – do not fully express.

The reading scene in its conceptual form presents a kind of cognitive backdrop then, allowing detailed description of specific phenomena and processes that are unique to decoding and responding to text as it is remembered or re-encountered in time and across experience. Reading scenes in their textual manifestations portray the scripts and processes underlying human memory functions in imaginative and structured ways. They need not always be the province of imaginative literature; they can appear in autobiographical accounts, such as the childhood memoirs I explore in this study, and can also be purposefully produced in discursive spaces, such as in interviews and other forms of re-memory work.

Memory is the major cognitive faculty at work here. However, memory is not a simple bridge between the self and the past. ‘The memory’ in its singular form has a number of symbolic connotations that transform it into either a cultural or metaphysical entity. Like the notion of the soul, it provides clues to the very nature of humanity and can be related to larger systems, such as a community, generation, or nation. It is sometimes represented in lay discourse as an active organ of cognition (the bit of the brain or mind that does our remembering) or as a repository of individual and subsidiary memories (again, often somehow a part of human physiology). Meanings multiply, leading prominent memory researcher Endel Tulving to bemoan the lax employment of terms for different concepts of memory ‘in the real world’, where, he argued, ‘powerful forces of history and tradition’ militate against ‘rational behaviour’ (2000, p. 37).

While I do not pretend to avoid such dangers completely, some attempt at rational definition seems sensible to allow for more precise discussion. The terms ‘memory’ and ‘memories’ encompass a range of more discrete cognitive phenomena, including long- and short-term systems and different faculties such as procedural memory for unconscious actions and declarative memory for conscious recall. I am mostly interested in autobiographical memory in this book, although semantic memory or memory for facts – such as remembering the name of an author – does play a role in accounts of childhood reading. This faculty is usually contrasted with what psychologists and philosophers call ‘episodic memory’, or memory for events. There is some slippage, however. If, for instance, an individual’s account relates the moment in which he or she first recognized an author’s name as the creator of a particularly significant childhood book, the episode itself is important as is the fact recalled. Since there is a tendency to think of remembered human experience in terms of a sequence of events, autobiographical memory can easily be conflated solely with episodic memory, but the remembering self may also recall information about that self – such as the fact that he or she was a voracious reader – in the form of ‘autobiographical semantic memory’. Autobiographical memory can be further broken down into what William F. Brewer terms ‘personal memories’ and ‘generic personal memories’ (1986, p. 26), although I prefer the terms ‘specific autobiographical memories’ and ‘generic autobiographical memories’. Both place the rememberer at the centre of his or her autobiographical memory, a characteristic known as ‘autonoetic consciousness’ (Tulving, 1985, p. 3). Generic memories – such as Jamila Gavin’s recollection of ‘gobbl[ing] up detective fiction’ as a teenager, recounted in her youth memoir Walking on My Hands: Out of India (2007, p. 66) – cannot be connected to any particular instant of the rememberer’s early life. Specific memories – such as the account Nina Bawden includes in her ‘almost’ autobiography In My Own Time (1994) of reading Jane Eyre aged eight and conjuring an imaginary madwoman in the house next door (p. 22) – relate to mental images of discrete episodes from his or her past experience.

Autobiographical memory is clearly at work in the lifelong reading act in a variety of ways. There is a difference between the manner in which childhood books are remembered when a memoirist purposefully narrates his or her youth or an interviewee is asked to consider broadly significant texts from the past and the way specific elements of those texts might be recalled or recognized through the conscious reaching for more detail via memory work or rereading. Other forms of declarative memory are required to specifically recall the titles of paracanonical books as well as the details of plot, character, setting, and language that might be retained over time and revisited in the reading scene. Mnemonic cues prompt remembering adults to recall a favourite character, incident, or turn of phrase. Triggers range from an interviewer’s question to a glimpse of an illustration to a real-world event that chimes with a fictional one. It is likely that readers will recall more content, more readily, when there is what Daniel Schacter calls an ‘affinity between encoding and retrieval processes’ (1996, p. 60). In other words, if some aspect of the backdrop for the original reading experience (a place, a feeling, an image) reappears or perhaps is consciously excavated through discussion with the researcher, then part of that original may be re-experienced vividly and with some success in reliability. It is interesting, then, to interrogate why certain details emerge in any reading scene, and to ask what conditions in the past and present might have encouraged these to surface.

Just as memory is not the only cognitive faculty at work in reading (which also encompasses perception, attention, language skills, and so on), the reading scene is not a direct analogue for the mind in the act of remembering reading. The reading act is only one part of the mental activity that goes on for an individual at any given moment. The virtual zone of exchange that reader response theorists construct does not always encompass unconscious processes, such as the turning of pages, for example, nor the sociocultural context in which such a mind is embedded, although Iser acknowledges (and so does Rosenblatt) the importance of the ‘individual mind of the reader with its own particular history of experience, its own consciousness, its own outlook’ that undertakes the activity (1974, p. 284). In a model of remembering and rereading, those contexts are similarly mapped in the external life space, feeding into each textual encounter, and I shall explore them in the next chapter; however, they are also more expressly reproduced in the reading scene, since a remembering adult may recall the circumstances of reading as readily as the details of the text that was read. A childhood book can be a ‘magic object causing memory’, as George Shannon puts it (1986, p. 180), leading adults to remember intricate details about their earlier reading lives and experiences. The actual retrieval of the original text and an encounter with it relies on complex psychosomatic mechanisms, ones that I cannot hope to lay out with any authority here, but many accounts of remembered reading and rereading, from Proust’s to the interview responses of my participants, elegantly allude to the processes involved and analysis of these is illuminating in its own right.

Historically, such acts of reminiscence have provoked debate about what exactly produces appropriate forms of knowledge about childhood reading and what constitutes a reliable source. Proust’s famous description of childhood reading presents an excellent case of remembrance as a form of reminiscence. Although he was neither a writer for children nor a British child, as a commentator on reading and the workings of memory he is dif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Excavating
• 1 The reading scene
• 2 The life space
• 3 Affective traces
• 4 Rereading attitudes
• 5 Transforming, misremembering, forgetting
• Conclusion: The lifelong reading act
• Appendix: Participants
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page