CHILD'S PLAY

by Blaise Larmee

I look at Madeline's Rescue and my heart swells. What is it about children's books that is so magical? Reading a children's book is such a child-like performance. There is a tone of simplicity, a lack of pretension that seems "natural," that feels uncontrived. There is no "trying" on the page - no attempt to pull off some literary or artistic stunt. There is something vaguely "not right" about the drawings but they carry an abundance of confidence and style as well. There is an androgyny in the pages, a mix of the masculine and feminine that appears to be pre-adolescent, pre-sexual. In many ways they possess the qualities of a child's drawing - an off-putting combination of naiveté, whimsy, and simplicity. This space is safe, sensible. Every page shows a cause and effect, a this, and then that, a simple iambic rhythm that aligns the word-to-word of the page with the page-to-page of the drawings. The fields of yellow create a warm interior to hold the actions within, providing a space that is open and expansive, a large field with intuited but unemphasized borders. A playground. There is space for action (cause and effect) in the yellow spreads and space for exploration (play) outside of time in the color spreads. It is a controlled space, a mediated space. A space that has a semblance of freedom but still maintains control. In other words it is very parental, very adult, very unchildlike.





Are these false constructions? When I look at these images now they appear to be false memories of childhood, false spaces of childhood created by an adult. And yet for many children, including me, these are memories and spaces from childhood, ones I actually experienced visually and as read aloud to me. There was never any pretense of looking at another child's creation - not only was the mastery in the story and drawings evident, but books in general were always spaces mediated by an adult, be it a parent, a teacher, or the guy on Reading Rainbow. Books were something for the educated and sophisticated. Even when I started to read on my own I felt something intrinsically developmental about reading. It was a performance of adulthood, and like adulthood it encompassed nostalgia.




How much of my memory can be trusted? Childhood is a state of development which exists only in the past, as viewed in retrospect. Even as children it is experienced as nostalgia - a longing for a future in which to look back on the present. The resulting space holds a sort of timelessness, a hurried stasis. Hurried in its rush forward toward the present and static in its place outside the stream of time. Nostalgia is a false romanticization of childhood and yet nostalgia is a part of childhood. Unlike Peter Pan, being "grown up" is very important for a child. It is as important as it is for an adult to be child-like. Children's books often feature children having adult-like (as perceived by children) adventures while romanticizing the child's space at the same time (think "Neverland"). In Madeline's Rescue that space is Paris, which for every middle-class American evokes a certain kind of nostalgia for a time when being romantic was acceptable, a time from an imaginary past, an imaginary youth.





There is always a clear boundary between adult and child in the narrative of the children's book - an attempt to create a space that is only occupied by children yet still observed by adults - much like the actual experience of reading books (immersed in a private realm) curated by adults. To limit children's books to the realm of children is silly, since adults are obviously omni-present in this space. And yet the fact that they are still outside of mainstream criticism ensures their privacy, untouched and nostalgic. Or does it? Why should we care anyway? Madeline is a beautiful book but it is not precious. Or is it? How important is the past, is memory? Walking today I considered the "present moment" and it was nothing of interest, nothing I cared about. Passing houses, people, street corners, who cares? Isn't it only in the past that this moment takes form? Only in the past does it relate to a framework, of other things, other events. I think about Maggots and how "in the present" its creation seemed to be, but the present was concerned with "producing," with transcending the present, even nostalgizing it. Fort Thunder could only be in the past - how could it exist in the present?