Understandable Children and The Enigma of Childhood

I asked for a review copy of Reinhard Kuhn's Corruption in Paradise: the Child in Western Literature (University Press of New England, 1982) because I thought it would say something about children's literature. I was wrong. The book deals with the children depicted by writers as diverse as Balzac and Nabokov, Beckett and Zola; but it seems that children's literature is not part of the "Western Literature" of the subtitle, for the only children's writer even mentioned is Lewis CarrollÂ—and that's a reference to his perverse attitudes to real children rather than to the children in his books.


Understandable Children and The Enigma of Childhood
I asked for a review copy of Reinhard Kuhn's Corruption in Paradise: the Child in Western Literature (University Press of New England, 1982) because I thought it would say something about children's literature. I was wrong. The book deals with the children depicted by writers as diverse as Balzac and Nabokov, Beckett and Zola; but it seems that children's literature is not part of the "Western Literature" of the subtitle, for the only children's writer even mentioned is Lewis CarrollÂ-and that's a reference to his perverse attitudes to real children rather than to the children in his books.
But in ignoring the children of children's literature, Kuhn's book has taught me a lot about them, and even more about some all too common attitudes to childhood.
Kuhn suggests that most writers for adults have been less interested in depicting children as they might actually be than in treating childhood in terms of how it is meaningful to adultsÂ-or rather, in how it is not meaningful to adults, for Kuhn believes that the greatest significance of children is, simply, that they cannot be understood by adults, that they are inherently enigmatic: The following chapters are reflections on the inscrutability of the child, on its paradoxical nature, in which I attempt not to resolve the enigma, but to ask questions that will lead to an understanding of why the enigma must exist ... . The child as presented by both Gide and Novalis is an unfathomable being, a stranger with whom adults cannot communicate although they are irresistibly attracted to him ... . It is possible to speak of the enigmatic child in generic terms ... .In summary, the enigmatic child is a stranger to this world, sufficient unto himself, incapable to communication and yet the bearer of important tidings. Thus it is his presence that is significant, even if we can never decipher its meaning.
The children in children's literature offer a serious challenge to Kuhn's conclusion. They are not enigmatic; the adults who write children's books clearly believe they have deciphered the mean of the children they write about. Children's novelists try to see children from inside, rather than to treat them from outside, in terms of their relevance to adults; they presume to tell us about what children think and feel and about how they respond to their circumstances. In children's novels, in fact, it is not children who are enigmatic: it is adults. As we see the world from inside a child's mind, it is not innocence that seems inscrutable, but the strange and bewildering perceptions of maturity. Furthermore, the adult novelists Kuhn describes either see the passage of children beyond childhood as a symbolic death, or else cause children to actually die before they suffer that metaphysical extinction. But in children's novels, the climax is often that moment when the main character develops a mature understanding of the world he lives inÂ-in other words, loses some of that enigmatic inability to see as adults do. Both children and adults who read children's fiction often speak of such novels as having happy endings, and so clearly don't see loss of innocence as death; it's no wonder that Kuhn doesn't get around to discussing children's novels, for their values are often directly opposite to the ones he wishes to discuss.
Kuhn's discussion of adult novels is often convincingÂ-and particularly interesting because, in revealing the similarities between the children of adult fiction, and in ignoring the differences from them of the children of children's fiction, he points to the real differences between these two different kinds of fiction, and to the real uniqueness of children's fiction as a separate genre.
But Kuhn does not just describe childhood as presented in adult fiction; he believes in it. He is so convinced that childhood cannot be understood that he attacks those who claim to understand it; As brilliant as Erik H. Erikson's probings of the childhoods of Gandhi and Luther may be, they remain psychological fictions. Jean Piaget's meticulous delineations of stages within childhood are intellectually provocative but artificial constructs ...
. The model of the child constructed and dissected by scientific discourse is an artificial one, less convincing in reality than as its literary counterpart (13-14).
But the children of children's fiction are more like those scientific "constructs" than like the model of the enigmatic child Kuhn has constructed from adult fiction. Either the understandable children of children's fiction are not really childlike, only mere imaginings of deficient adult minds blind to the actual enigma, or else, Kuhn is wrong. Children are not enigmatic, except in the minds of selfenclosed adults who wish to treat childhood as an idea rather than attempt to understand its reality. I think Kuhn is wrong. I find the understandable children of children's fiction convincing, both convincingly human and convincingly childlike. And I do not believe that childhood is enigmatic, in any sense that matters: children do in fact understand themselves, do in fact try to understand the world they have been born into, and can in fact communicate quite successfully with those adults who are willing to pay them the respect of listening to them. And consequently, perceptive adults can in fact undeerstand childrenÂ-not as a group, of course, but on an individual basis, for anyone who pays any actual attention to children at all soon learns that they have no more in common with each other than do all women, or all blacks, or all interior decorators.
In fact, Kuhn's idea that all children are enigmatic is like the idea of some men that all women are wonderfully sweet and gentle and passive ... .In suggesting that children are better than adults, he makes them less than human, for he sees them as representatives of an idea rather than as people, and he praises them for what are in fact their inadequacies. He says, for instance, "Just as the acquisition of speech is a process of elimination and choice among the infinite number of sounds the child is capable of articulating, so the whole epistemological and emotive development of the human being is a reductive one" (7). Now, I suppose knowing that some sounds are meaningful to other people and that other sounds aren't is a loss of freedom, in comparison to believing that all sounds are equal; but we shouldn't forget that that freedom exists only for someone for whom none of the sounds are meaningful. In praising the enigmatic quality of infantile babble, Kuhn does forget that; what he is really saying is the childhood is enigmatic because it is delightfully devoid of meaningÂ-utter chaos. To praise children for being ignorant is dreadful insult to them.
Even worse, Kuhn's position is destructively life-denying. In claiming to admire childhood so much, he must condemn all the knowledge and the experience that replaces childhood ignorance as children grow up: knowledge of the passing of time and of death, knowledge of one's sexual nature, the ability to reason, the concern for one's fellow beings that one discovers beyond egocentricity, even the ability to communicate in a shared language. He must see those aspects of maturity not as something we grow toward, but as something we decay into.
Each selection appears in its entirety, complete with attendant footnotes and references, and original publication information is clearly stated. As important, however, are the superb headnotes that professor Dundes has prepared; they not only provide the transition from one selection to the next, but they set each work in its place within the study of folktales in general and the investigation of versions of "Cinderella," "Catskin," and/or "Cap o' Rushes" in particular. They also contain additional bibliographical citations and suggestions for further reading. Those who are inclined to skip headnotes and footnotes when they read are cautioned against that practice in this casebook.  Thompson (Folklore Fellows Communication #184, 1964) and the Motif Index of Folk Literature, 6 vols., revised and enlarged edition, by Stith Thompson (1966).
Equally recommended are Marie-Louise As his analysis of the works of so many different writers make clear, Kuhn's life-denying childism is not his along. Far too many adults think of childhood as an ideal state of existence, and believe it to be so exactly because children have no knowledge of the ugly truth about life. Kuhn suggests the danger in his own position in a reference to Leslie Fiedler: " As Fiedler has pointed out, the nostalgia for innocence, as represented by the yearning for the child, may well be suicidal" (59). I believe it is; to admire childhood because children don't know what life is really all about is merely a death-wish. But Kuhn's avoidance of children's fiction has taught me something that I'm delighted to learn: even though children's writers are sometimes accused of being childish, their fiction does not often share that suicidal nostalgia nor express that enigmatic ignorance. In fact, good children's fiction always takes children seriously, an therefore always reveals an understanding of childhood and of reality deep enough and true enough to admit that children share the intermingled pleasure and pain of the human condition.
Fortunately, many human beings find the depictions of childhood in children's fiction convincingÂ-including many children, whose own lives surely seem less enigmatic to themselves than they do to those adults who lack the maturity to pay any real attention to the real lives of children. In treating children as people, rather than as symbols of everything that mature consciousness is not, children's fiction speak important, subtle and difficult truthsÂtruths that many adult novelists and many adult readers seem, childishly, to prefer to ignore.