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Back in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant grandly described the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed childishness”. But we live, we’re told, in an age desperate to reverse it. Grown-ups, apparently, aren’t what they used to be. At a time in their lives when they should be gratefully graduating into the world of mortgages, automobiles and serious books — that is, books about serial killers, adulterers and Nazis — they instead, as the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen puts it, “retreat into the dubious comforts of a pseudo-childhood”. He is quoted in a trenchant essay by James Grieg, from earlier this year, which identified the clearest embodiment of this trend: “People who identify as Hufflepuffs on their Hinge profile.”
It is a sign of how far our self-imposed childishness has gone that grown-ups today are unashamed to express passion for books aimed at teenagers — or, to use the ubiquitous but optimistic American expression — “young adults”. Only the very crustiest resist the trend. Would he ever write a children’s book, the late Martin Amis was once asked. “If I had a serious brain injury,” he is supposed to have replied.
It is not only that grown-ups have failed to put aside children’s books, but that their attitude to grown-up things remains childish. Those whose day jobs (like mine) put them in regular contact with older teenagers have been remarking for a while on the increasing demand that fiction be “relatable”. Rebecca Mead defined the attribute in the New Yorker as one possessed by “a character or a situation in which an ordinary person might see himself reflected”. It has increasingly become a stick with which to beat works, often classic works, featuring characters or situations with whom it’s harder to identify. Anna Karenina, for instance, or Hamlet: who among us is a haunted Danish prince or Russian adulteress?
Childishness, Kant said, is “the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance”, and Mead’s case against relatability echoes him. “To demand that a work be ‘relatable’,” she says, expresses the expectation that “the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer … expects the work to be done for her.” If you can’t relate to Hamlet, in other words, you should be open to the possibility that the fault is yours, not Shakespeare’s.
But might there be a way to read children’s books without reading them childishly? The best case for the defence was made by C.S. Lewis in his apologia for reading fairy tales. “They accuse us of arrested development,” he said, “because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?” I regularly return to the books of my childhood and find exactly what Lewis describes: “Being now able to put more in, of course I get more out.”
The book of my adolescence to which I have recently returned is one to which I really oughtn’t to be able to “relate” at all, so socially alien are its setting and characters. Its protagonist and narrator is a 17-year-old English girl, an aspiring novelist and already talented diarist called Cassandra Mortmain, living with her impoverished aristocratic family in a crumbling (and rented) castle.
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SubscribeAs Camus said, nothing is true which forces you to exclude. Readers read everything, from the Beano to Heidegger. No limits, no tramlines.
As Camus said, nothing is true which forces you to exclude. Readers read everything, from the Beano to Heidegger. No limits, no tramlines.
This “has to be relatable” thing is part of the continued dumbing down of the Western mind.
I remember being 17, randomly picking a book from the shelf of my local library, opening it and starting to read, then finding myself finally looking up, still almost euphoric and exhilarated by the experience, and noticing that I was now dark. It was Chekhov’s “The Steppe”, a story too short for a novel, too long for a short story, but a preschooler slowly being moved, in a cart drawn by oxen, across the Russian steppe was certainly not anything I could “relate to” in the 21st century Western sense.
I had a few similar experiences later, now being much older, one of them was when reading “100 Years of Solitude”.
What one relates to in works of art is that which transcends the surface of the work and awakens something new in the universality of one’s consciousness, not that makes one exclaim “Oh, that’s just like my Macdonalds on Jefferson Avenue”. I’m sure others expressed it much better than me but that’s how I see it.
I had a similar experience. I was in a library revising for my A levels. I was an avid reader and once I started reading a novel, I would read it to the end. I wanted a short novel to read on the bus, an hour’s journey. I knew I wouldn’t continue my revision until I finished reading the book. I looked at the fiction books on the shelves, it wasn’t a particularly large section and selected the shortest one. Years later, I was sitting in a lecture on existentialism and a book was being discussed. I recognised it as the short novel. It was the outsider by Camus, it was only then I realised the profound effect the novel had had on me. When selecting the book, I never looked at the title or the author, but I guess that is the impact of great literature.
You expressed that just fine: the point being that you’ve touched on something very important and in danger of being lost.
I had a similar experience. I was in a library revising for my A levels. I was an avid reader and once I started reading a novel, I would read it to the end. I wanted a short novel to read on the bus, an hour’s journey. I knew I wouldn’t continue my revision until I finished reading the book. I looked at the fiction books on the shelves, it wasn’t a particularly large section and selected the shortest one. Years later, I was sitting in a lecture on existentialism and a book was being discussed. I recognised it as the short novel. It was the outsider by Camus, it was only then I realised the profound effect the novel had had on me. When selecting the book, I never looked at the title or the author, but I guess that is the impact of great literature.
You expressed that just fine: the point being that you’ve touched on something very important and in danger of being lost.
This “has to be relatable” thing is part of the continued dumbing down of the Western mind.
I remember being 17, randomly picking a book from the shelf of my local library, opening it and starting to read, then finding myself finally looking up, still almost euphoric and exhilarated by the experience, and noticing that I was now dark. It was Chekhov’s “The Steppe”, a story too short for a novel, too long for a short story, but a preschooler slowly being moved, in a cart drawn by oxen, across the Russian steppe was certainly not anything I could “relate to” in the 21st century Western sense.
I had a few similar experiences later, now being much older, one of them was when reading “100 Years of Solitude”.
What one relates to in works of art is that which transcends the surface of the work and awakens something new in the universality of one’s consciousness, not that makes one exclaim “Oh, that’s just like my Macdonalds on Jefferson Avenue”. I’m sure others expressed it much better than me but that’s how I see it.
This article leaves out my favorite C.S. Lewis quote of all time: “a children’s book that can only be enjoyed by children, is a poor children’s book.”
As the Bible says, we are to “have the mind of a child” but also “give up childish things”.
This article leaves out my favorite C.S. Lewis quote of all time: “a children’s book that can only be enjoyed by children, is a poor children’s book.”
As the Bible says, we are to “have the mind of a child” but also “give up childish things”.
I have never read the book but I have watched the film many times. It is an excellent film and sounds as if it is quite true to the book. Fairy tales are incredibly important to society. I am currently reading Joseph Campbell’s the hero’s journey. Apparently, George Lucas used it when writing Star Wars, though they didn’t meet until after the three original Star Wars films had been produced.
I have never read the book but I have watched the film many times. It is an excellent film and sounds as if it is quite true to the book. Fairy tales are incredibly important to society. I am currently reading Joseph Campbell’s the hero’s journey. Apparently, George Lucas used it when writing Star Wars, though they didn’t meet until after the three original Star Wars films had been produced.
I devoured all the Narnia books as a child, and read them to my children as my mum had done to us. But the problem with them as adults is that CS Lewis didn’t want children to grow up – see The Last Battle
Read like a child then think like a child rest of one’s life.
Read like a child then think like a child rest of one’s life.