The Case of "Peter Pan" or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (Language, Discourse, Society Series)

The Case of Peter Pan (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between. To say that the child is inside the book-children's books are after all as often as not about children-is to fall straight into a trap. It is to confuse the adult's intention to get at the child with the child it portrays. If children's fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp. There is, in one sense, no body of literature which rests so openly on an acknowledged difference, a rupture almost, between writer and addressee. Children's fiction sets up the child as an outsider to its own process, and then aims, unashamedly, to take the child in. None of this appears explicitly inside the book itself, which works precisely to the extent that any question of who is talking to whom, and why, is totally erased. We do see something of it in the expanding industry of children's book criticism, but mostly in the form of a disavowal-the best book for children is a book for adult and child, or else in the form of a moralism (another version of the same thing) -the best book is the book which does the child most good, that is, the book which secures the reader to its intent and can be absolutely sure of its effects. Let it be said from the start that it will be no part of this book's contention that what is for the good of the child could somehow be better defined, that we could, if we shifted the terms of the discussion, determine what it is that the child really wants. It will not be an issue here of what the child wants, but of what the adult desires-desires in the very act of construing the child as the object of its speech. Children's fiction draws in the child, it secures, places and frames the child. How often has it been said recently that what is best about writing for children is that the writer can count absolutely on the child's willingness to enter into the book, and live the story? (Townsend, 1971, p. 13). This is to describe children's fiction, quite deliberately, as something of a soliciting, a chase, or even a seduction. Peter Pan is certainly all of these. Recently we have been made at least partly aware of this, as J. M. Barrie's story has been told and retold, as the story of a man and five small boys, whom he picked up, stole and possessed (Dunbar, 1970;Birkin, 1979). Barrie eventually adopted the Llewellyn Davies boys around whom he built the story of Peter Pan, staking a claim to them which he had already ## Peter Pan and Freud Who is talking and to whom? We have been reading the wrong Freud to children. We do not realise that Freud was first brought up against the unconscious when asking how we remember ourselves as a child. The unconscious is not an object, something to be laid hold of and retrieved. It is the term which Freud used to describe the complex ways in which our very idea of ourselves as children is produced. In 1897, two French psychologists, V. and C. Henri, published a monograph of adult recollections of childhood and were baffied by a number of apparently meaningless memories. Freud found their very 'innocence ... mysterious' (Freud, SE, III, 1899, p. 306). 1 Setting himself to analyse one of his earliest recollections, he found that the event he remembered had never taken place. The importance of the memory was not, however, any the less for that. For what it revealed was the unresolved conflicts affecting the way in which he was thinking about himself now. The most crucial aspect of psychoanalysis for discussing children's fiction is its insistence that childhood is something in which we continue to be implicated and which is never simply left behind. Childhood persists-this is the opposite, note, from the reductive idea of a regression to childhood most often associated with Freud. It persists as something which we endlessly rework in our attempt to build an image of our own history. When we think about childhood, it is above all our investment in doing so which counts. The very ambiguity of the term 'children's fiction' -fiction the child produces or fiction given to the child?-is striking for the way in which it leaves the adult completely out of the picture. Childhood is not an o~ject, any more than the unconscious, 12 ## Rousseau and Alan Garner Innocence of the ch£ld and of the word 'Now ifhe'd read rocks, instead of books, it might have been a different story, you see.' Alan Garner, The Stone Book, 1976, p. 44. Let there be no other book but the world ... The boy that reads does not think, nor gain instruction, he only learns a parcel of words. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-11 Peter Pan and Freud....Pages 12-41 Rousseau and Alan Garner....Pages 42-65 Peter Pan and Literature for the Child....Pages 66-86 Peter Pan and Commercialisation of the Child....Pages 87-114 Peter Pan, Language and the State....Pages 115-136 Back Matter....Pages 145-181 Jacqueline Rose. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 155-171.