Cross-writing.pdf

From the Editors: "Cross-Writing" and the

Reconceptualizing of Children's Literary Studies

The Victorian satirist and evolutionist Samuel Butler once tried to de-

pict ancestral genes at cross-purposes with each other. These "former

selves," wrangling for "possession" of a single psyche, create a din of

jarring voices: "Faint are the far ones, . . . loud and clear are the near

ones. . . . 'Withhold,' cry some. 'Go on boldly,' cry others. 'Me, me,

me, revert hitherward. . . . Nay, but me, me, me' " (Butler 43).

The notion of "cross-writing" we advance in this special issue of

Children's Literature resembles Butler's dramatized crossover in one im-

portant respect: we believe that a dialogic mix of older and younger

voices occurs in texts too often read as univocal. Authors who write

for children inevitably create a colloquy between past and present

selves. Yet such conversations are neither unconscious nor necessarily

riven by strife. Instead of the competing ancestral voices that But-

ler posits, we stress creative cooperation. Most of the writers, artists,

and editors we consider in this volume manage to integrate the con-

flicting voices they heed. Their constructs involve interplay and cross-

fertilization rather than a hostile internal cross fire.

Cross-writing is not limited to texts written for children. In an

"adult" novel such as The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot's Mr. TuI-

liver is puzzled by the genetic "crossing o' breeds" that makes the

dark daughter to whom he gave his own mother's name so unlike his

blonde wife. Yet the man who sees everything in terms of contraries

cannot help his precocious child cross into a new order of reality.

The adult is at odds with the child in an inimical world that has no

room for Maggie Tulliver. In contrast, George Eliot's next child-man,

Silas Marner, who also gives his mother's name to the orphan who

has crossed his threshold, benefits from the reactivation of hitherto

dormant childhood memories. Like that other solitary, Robinson

Crusoe, whose family name was Kreuzner (crosser), Silas mends a

wounded psyche by reverting to a more elementary and childlike

world. Given its pastoralism, George Eliot's fable was at one time

deemed as suitable for child readers as Defoe's romance. Yet, as two

generations of American schoolchildren discovered to their chagrin,

vii

viii From the Editors

the book remains preeminently "adult." Despite its primitive setting

and fairy-tale elements, the novel relies on the authoritative voice

of an ultra-sophisticated expositor. This linguistically adroit narrator

brings out existential complexities that the tongue-tied Silas can by-

pass, but which her readers cannot read as merely a "simple twist

of fate."1

Indeed, it might be argued that any text that activates a traffic be-

tween phases of life we persist in regarding as opposites demands, yet

seldom receives, readings that should reflect a similar critical elas-

ticity. Whether addressing adult or child audiences, or both, such

fluid texts often rely on settings that dissolve the binaries and con-

traries that our culture has rigidified and fixed. Crusoe's island hut

and Marner's valley cottage offer blendings not possible in the civili-

zations each man has fled; and although the raft that acts as a tempo-

rary haven for Huck and Jim cannot remain immune to the divisive

communities that dot the river, the boy who plans to cross into still

open territories at the end of Twain's novel refuses to succumb to the

new form of enslavement that Jim accepts.

In transcending the binaries imposed by culture, Huckleberry Finn

thus anticipates that other strange pilgrim-navigator, E. B. White's

Stuart Little. Himself a cross between different species, the mouse-

boy resists the allurements of a human mate his own size, the pretty

dwarf child of Ames's Crossing. Instead, he prefers to pursue an elu-

sive bride of still another order, MÃ¡rgalo the Shelleyan (or Mater-

linked?) bird who never was on land or sea. Were he to find her, his

new family would be as cross-grained as that formed by the hunter,

the mermaid, and the furry and non-furry foundlings in Randall Jar-

rell's The Animal Family, an enigmatic fairy tale enhanced by Sendak's

equally enigmatic crosshatched drawings.

As a writer-artist whose ability to maintain contact with "the psy-

chic reality of my own childhood" shapes an original classic such

as Where the Wild Things Are (Lanes 247), Maurice Sendak's wonder-

ful understanding of the interplay between adult and child has also

made him a key interpreter of such diverse figures as the Grimms,

George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Melville, and many others. His

shrewd grasp of the "cross-writing" at work in Wilhelm HaufF's sly and

delightful Dwarf Long Nose even exceeds, as Maureen Thum points

out in the first essay in our collection, that of the story's translator.

Like Sendak's own Max, whose mother sends him away for being too

wild, HaufF's boy-protagonist Jacob is repudiated by his biological

From the Editors ix

mother when he returns to her in an alien shape. And yet, like the

boy in a wolf suit, the deformed Jacob can adopt a maternal iden-

tity. As one who has learned to feed others, he follows the career of

the misshapen herb-fairy he now physically resembles. For his part,

Max also tries out the adult identity of one more powerful than he.

As undaunted by the monsters he unleashes as his mother had been

by her own wild thing of a boy, he fashions a self by blending child

and adultÂ—the rebel rumpus dancer and the authoritarian grown-up

who can keep wildness in check. When this Mowgli-like wolfboy and

king of the jungle returns to maternal domestication and restraint,

his recrossing ratifies the blending he has achieved.

One of the delights of teaching children's literature is to ask col-

lege students, those recent "adults" still in contact with earlier selves,

how their present, more analytical reencounters with texts such as

Where the Wild Things Are or Charlotte's Web ratify, alter, or complement

their childhood responses. Their accounts vividly confirm the duality

of such texts. One reader notes that the terrible claws and gnashing

teeth of the Wild Things had never disturbed her as a child, when she

trustfully regarded the creatures as "incredibly kind and unthreaten-

ing." Pondering about this discrepancy, she adds a long postscript:

Perhaps this was because I focused more on Sendak's illustra-

tions than on his verbal description of the Wild Things. I always

thought they were heading towards Max to welcome him when

his boat arrived. The most remarkable thing in comparing my

responses, then and now, is the realization of the willing suspen-

sion of disbelief that I extended to the book when I was young.

There is a different gratification in reading children's books as an

adult. One marvels at the wit of an author who can delight the

child's parents as much as the child. While the development of

analytic faculties has afforded me the opportunity to enjoy chil-

dren's books from fresh perspectives, I also like to believe that I

could sit in my room and have a wild rumpus with some terrible

looking beasts.2

Using Charlotte's Web for their comparison of childhood and adult

readings, two other students recall near-opposite responses. Whereas

Andrea M., a psychology major, remembers that she and all the other

students in Mrs. Murray's first-grade class had joyfully identified with

Wilbur, Douglas M., an English major who was first exposed to the

book in "Mrs. Hutching's third grade classroom," privileges Wilbur's

Ï‡ From the Editors

two caretakers, Charlotte and Fern. In rereading the book at age

twenty, Andrea realizes that her investment in Wilbur's survival had

totally obscured the importance of Charlotte's role; she even recalled

"being slightly angry at Charlotte for leaving Wilbur all alone." Now,

however, Wilbur seems less important to her than the spider's "so

enviable and admirable ability to accept the natural course of life."

Douglas M.'s impressions also underwent a radical revision. Al-

though as a third-grader he had regarded Fern "as a heroine, not

only in the beginning, but throughout the story," as a grown-up he

faults her for failing to "fling herself at her father" a second time,

when Mr. Arable assures Homer Zuckerman that this "wonderful"

pig would yield "some extra good ham and bacon" (126). Yet the self-

pitying Wilbur himself now seems diminished: "he is not 'Some Pig,'

'Terrific,' or 'Radiant,' and thus did not really qualify to be saved

while all other pigs are slaughtered. As an adult reader, you start to

wonder why Charlotte went through all the work to save a pig who

never considered the fragility of her own life until death became

readily apparent." If the six-year-old Andrea and the eight-year-old

Douglas once regarded Wilbur as a threatened fellow-child, both now

preeminently identify themselves with the nurturance and wisdom of

the adult Charlotte.

Charlotte's ability to metamorphose a "humble" pig into a radiant,

special child through the criss-crossings of her intricate web is, of

course, inseparable from White's own craft as a cross-writer. Although

adult and child readers of his text express discrepant priorities, it is

the web that allows both constituencies to believe in talking animals

and in a spiderly interest in pigs. Whether read as an assault on the

credulity of adults for whom advertising has replaced religion or as a

Thoreauvian document that celebrates continuity and renewal, Char-

lotte's Web will continue to appeal to the child in us all.

White is a humorist, as are Hauff, Kipling, and Nesbit, the writers

taken up in the first third of this collection. Like the New Yorker

ironist who so strongly identifies with children and animals, Hauff

uses indirection to question the norms imposed on the young by

their elders. Yet if the deceptively conventional and benign surface

of his children's stories allows Hauff, as Maureen Thum shows, to

evade adult censorship, Kipling's invention of a genre of his own in

the Just So Stories opens up a meeting place for father and daughter,

an adult survivor and a deadÂ—but ever living and infinitely renew-

ableÂ—child. Moreover, as U. C. Knoepflmacher demonstrates in his

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