Tag: Children’s Literature

Wolves, dogs, werewolves and stories

In a  break from marking I was intrigued to find this image come up for me on Twitter (from Kathleen McCallum on Twitter but it’s on @nickswarb if you follow me). I am unsure – party because I don’t read Arabic – whether they are werewolves (predatory shape-shifters) or Dogsheads, Cynocephali, whose everyday shape ( and, according to this picture at least, behaviour) are a bit, well, dog-like. Are they from travellers’ tales or horror stories?

I think it’s time to look at wolves again – partly for a session I hope to be doing in Solihull (that birthplace of the Warg, at least, in my mind) on the BA in Early Childhood Studies and for my MA (Childhood Studies) module on Children’s Imaginative Worlds.

I’ll start from BBC’s Atlantis, the latest (as I write) dog/werewolf transformation (Hunger Pangs, Ser 1, Ep 11/13; this link is current, but iPlayer won’t last, of course).  It’s a children’s programme, prime time Saturday evening Doctor Who/Merlin fare, with the requisite hair growth, (partial) nudity, crouching and of course the scary eyes followed by lycanthropic shadows. We are in TV Trope land; werewolf as humanoid dog-beast, more or less acceptable stuff for families- as is the now famous American Werewolf in London transformation or the Being Human transformation that is its more horrific descendant. This (partially successful) filming from a Manchester student, Katie Blagden, neatly illustrates the modern elements of transformation.

Peter Stubbe, to whom I have referred before, is perhaps less so, and certainly the animation on LOL Manuscripts is quite creepy. Similarly, there are some werewolf stories that are either Bowdlerised into family form (see Red Riding Hood, passim) or are just not really OK (perhaps) for young modern audiences – too scary, too bloody. This blog is interesting. Sabine Baring-Gould also has some that may well have been repeated in families, or maybe in other meetings in the past, although I find them quite disturbing; the Book of Werewolves is linked in my blog side-bar. Look at Ch VI:

Gilles Gamier had attacked a little maiden of ten or twelve years old, and had slain her with his teeth and claws; he had then drawn her into the wood, stripped her, gnawed the flesh from her legs and arms, and had enjoyed his meal so much, that, inspired with conjugal affection, he had brought some of the flesh home for his wife Apolline.

Enough. Modern audiences at least would not consider this appropriate for children.

The only point so far to think about is who is the audience for the tales of Peter Stubbe and Gilles Gamier? Surely not really the children; I suspect they will have gone to bed before granny gets these out.  But is this a 21st-Century judgement? Two other sources should be looked at here, however, one more recent and theoreical, the other somewhat oblique.

The first (and recommended to “my” MA students [I hate the possessive here; “my dog, my boots,” as C S Lewis puts it] this next semester) is from Zohar Shavit’s essay in Maria Tatar’s thoughtful collection The Classic Fairy Tales.  And yes, both “classic” and “fairy” can be debated.

Up to the seventeenth century children were an integral part of adult society, sharing clothing, lodging, games and work. Unity prevailed between children and adults in regard to all physical and psychic needs…

Shavit goes on to suggest that the growing concept of childhood distinguishes in practice between child and adult in a great many spheres. I would contend that one of these is in storytelling. Both Shavit and Zipes explore how stories such as Red Riding Hood (we’ve met her before, of course!) are altered for new or differently defined audiences, but we have, in M R James, a fictionalised account of the storytelling context from someone who continued that tradition with his own material. In An Evening’s Entertainment, James records past occasions of storytelling as part of his framing for a story – but in doing so also salutes, wistfully, its passing. The story begins:

Nothing is more common form in old-fashioned books than the description of the winter fireside, where the aged grandam narrates to the circle of children that hangs on her lips story after story of ghosts and fairies, and inspires her audience with a pleasing terror. But we are never allowed to know what the stories were. We hear, indeed, of sheeted spectres with saucer eyes, and — still more intriguing — of ‘Rawhead and Bloody Bones’ (an expression which the Oxford Dictionary traces back to 1550), but the context of these striking images eludes us.

and a parody of the enlightened household follows, with the worthy, pushy parent explaining levers to his child, before we move to the old Squire and his parlour and the even older granny:

How different the scene in a household to which the beams of Science have not yet penetrated! The Squire, exhausted by a long day after the partridges, and replete with food and drink, is snoring on one side of the fireplace. His old mother sits opposite to him knitting, and the children (Charles and Fanny, not Harry and Lucy: they would never have stood it) are gathered about her knee.

Grandmother: Now, my dears, you must be very good and quiet, or you’ll wake your father, and you know what’ll happen then.

And we are into James’ horrific story of human sacrifice, which concludes:

There! Off to bed you go this minute. What’s that, Fanny? A light in your room? The idea of such a thing! You get yourself undressed at once and say your prayers, and perhaps if your father doesn’t want me when he wakes up, I’ll come and say good-night to you. And you, Charles, if I hear anything of you frightening your little sister on the way up to your bed, I shall tell your father that very moment, and you know what happened to you the last time.

The door closes, and granny, after listening intently for a minute or two, resumes her knitting. The Squire still slumbers.

We have here a context that is to James’ audience both as part of their own mythologised past and the recogniseable context of James’ own delivery – the oral story.  But if we are to go back into Shavit’s reconstructed past, I think we have to ask:

When these stories were first told, were children present? And if so, were they the intended audience? 

I do not think we can be sure about the first question (hence all my “perhaps”), but we can be a tad clearer about the second: folk tales were for adults, too.

 

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean telt by hisself

Just some quick thoughts as a sort of review of David Almond‘s book, published by Puffin, 2011, which I used with my Y3 students reflecting on the literary representations of  learning to read. It could just as well have been for the Spirituality students next semester.

Spirituality
Almond moves through the issues of spirituality and transcendence in a number of works – perhaps most notably (until now) his masterpiece Skellig. Here again, themes (or at least images) re-emerge: wings, beetles, healing and decay, death and rebirth, as if to underline the similarity of the material. But this is a very different book: the narrator, moving through his life from infancy onwards (don’t worry; I will avoid a spoiler, since the final chapters are rather a page-turner) in the bombed town of Blinkbonny, reflects on his identity in a number of ways, most notably in who he is as a healer in his community. The storytelling is superb.
The premise of the book – that a child brought up in such unusual circumstances might grow up to be such an accomplished writer (despite his spelling – see below) gives the reader a lot to ponder. Is this a parable of “Becoming a Writer”? Is the folk-tale type about the Boy Overcoming Adversity? At one level, the child Billy has an upbringing that is difficult to comprehend: he grows up in near isolation, in a landscape and society destroyed by bombs, but has reasonable food, a supply of physical needs. I asked myself at various whether I should suspend disbelief (as one has to with Harry Potter, of course) about how well Billy grows up. Some entry into the fictional world Almond creates requires us to trust him in the improbabilities of the narrative, and some suspending of disbelief is certainly necessary, although some, perhaps, is not (and I’m avoiding a spoiler here): Billy is in the end faced with possibilities of escape and healing that are wholly consistent with his context.
So, this is a book about – hmmmm:  I fight shy of such a simple solution. David Almond deals with a tragic situation , with exceptionally complex characters in search of resolutions that do not neatly dovetail. And this, for me, is why this is a very deep exploration of spirituality: Billy and his mother Veronica seem to want one thing; Billy’s father, Wilfrid is desperate for another. The butcher seeks a realisation or a self-actualisation about himself as a father; the nurse seeks solace in seeking for the voice of her daughter among the dead. Not everybody gets what they want as they grapple with the “why” of the narrative. Or do they? The characters are all depicted from Billy’s point of view, from his erratic reportage and weird orthography. Maybe their search for meaning is realised.
Maybe I shouldn’t make such an immediate judgement.
Language
Billy, whose literacy education has been erratic, from his irascible and largely absent father to the planchette of his spiritualist neighbour, writes a curious phonetically plausible English. This is a taste of it:

But we kept on tryin & I kept on not lernin & 1 day hed had enuf & he got mad with me cos I wos so thik.

Some of his words look and feel like proper misspellings, and while some may not, arguing about Billy’s orthography is a pointless distraction. This makes the work a challenging read, but emphasises Billy’s background and allows Almond to create a genuine voice for Billy. The chapter “The World Within” towards the end of the narrative where Billy, weary of the role he finds himself in, expresses sadness and delight at what we might think of as a mystical spiritualty is as a powerful set of insights into spirituality and suffering as I have ever seen in a book for young people:

Its like I turn into the world and the world turns into me.
And when it’s a world of beests and dust & water & fish then its so fine. Its like I am dancing…
But at other times it is a world of pane & death and war. The bomin of Blinkbonny takes place within me. I see it clearly… I don’t want these things taykin plays inside me time & time & time agen. But ther is no way to close my eres & eyes no way to block it all out.
Mebbe this is how things become for God.

This unusual and inconsistent use of unorthodox spelling also allows a very subtle language play, where, for example, right is written rite but retains, from time to time, its sense of ritual as well. Almond knows what he is doing here, and with rite and childe and cum (this is a book for older readers, if we can make that distinction) he pushes language to express multiple meanings. As Billy’s life becomes clearer, there are times when his spelling also rights itself like a wobbly raft:

Like the stars the sand the sea is he astounding.
I watch him. I write him.

And this is an astounding book.

Soporific

I was asked today for the meaning of this word.

I have absolutely no problem supplying a definition – and equally no problem in being asked by a student to provide it. This is not a moan.

What I’m trying to ponder is two-fold: the possible complexity of my language and why a student whom I have known for two and a bit years should seek to ask me for a definition now.

I made a joke about how perhaps a two-hour class after lunch was itself likely to encourage sleep, and asked them to note the use of the word in The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.  But I was still nagged by the asking.

I don’t think I have changed my vocabulary, although I do know how to use words in different circumstances and with different audiences.  It is more than possible that I am pretentiously latinate (I know both of these are pretentiously latinate words), especially when cornered, although today was a very pleasant discussion with ten of the keenest of our students, those who had braved the rollercoaster of timetabling and stuck with our new module on reading.

Ah. There’s the key. These were students in a quiet, small group, who felt confident in expressing themselves, in asking questions, in asking for definitions. We talked about attitudes to reading, about phonemes and graphemes, Jolly Phonics and an article on under-ones and reading – and the meaning and use of the word soporific. We also looked at a number of research reports from NFER to PIRLS and an odd report on the latest stuff from Save the Children via the Guardian. And then one short excerpt from the PIRLS publication (Ch 6 on School Climate, linked here) struck me:

The PIRLS 2011 School Emphasis on Academic Success scale characterizes five aspects of academic optimism:

  •  Teachers’ understanding of the school’s curricular goals;

  • Teachers’ degree of success in implementing the school’s curriculum;

  •  Teachers’ expectations for student achievement;

  •  Parental support for student achievement; and

  •  Students’ desire to do well in school.

Do I have well-matched expectations for my students’ achievement? Do my students desire to do well? Or do I parade a faux-scholarship so that students can only ask me what the Hell I’m talking about in their penultimate semester, and in a small seminar group?

 

Gruffalo Hunting

Well now, this is an interesting project: Gruffalo hunting is the new Bear Hunt…

Outdoor nation makes some important points about children (and parents) and their thinking about outdoor exploration, suggesting this is an area worthy of some serious discourse analysis.

But starting from Outdoor Nation, we move to the blog In Search of the Gruffalo’s Child. This looks well worth following: personal, enlightening and still managing to link to Gruffalo-related material.

Alice Again

Preparing for the Summer School at which we discussed Alice in 2010, I find my thinking about children’s literature has changed. I will put the powerpoint here at some point after the class, and I don’t think it will be much changed; Alice’s dates, &c are unrevised, and I haven’t much else to say about Victorian education and childhood – but what I am thinking over is the notion of the sly joke, the remark way over the heads of the child audience, flattering or distracting the adult teller and/or the adult reader.

So the first (new – well, to this blog) question is:

How many audiences are there in Alice?

Crudely outlined, I can discern a basic five: children past; children present; adults past; adults present; scholars.  In fact this will fragment and kaleidoscope into all sorts of divisions: children in the past who were original audience (the Liddells – see below); the first children to read the first published editions; children before this present generation; the informal adult audience for the first stories; the adult readers of the first editions (Queen Victoria being one), subsequent adult readers – and this is where it gets even more complicated by a subdivision of adults who had and had not been child readers, and adults reading with and without children…. How to begin to think of ‘reader response’ with such a diverse audience? Perhaps the excellent Rob Pope English Studies Book is a place to start?

He asks, as I do here, about readers (“The Reader… Which Readers?” Pope 1998:247), and rightly raises issues around how we theorise these readers, but behind all the readers we can come up with (and maybe many others I haven’t begun to name) are three girls and one male adult: Revd Duckworth, and Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell, the original hearers of the stories of Alice, the fellow-travellers in the rowing boat to Godstow, on 4th July 1862). Whatever we make of any subsequent readers, these four – and one in particular – are always with us.

Return of the Werewolves?

Sarah’s ever-inventive LOLManuscripts and ITV’s magnificent Broadchurch on the telly tonight made me make explicit some connections that are latent in a lot of thinking about werewolves.

Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves is full of relished detail, picking out bits of folklore from all over the place with Baring-Gould tenacity. The werewolf as outsider, cannibal, predator: “the younger they were, esteemed them the mair tender and delicious…” Outside the bounds of the villlage, a monster, Long Lankin. I’ve written about these before, for example, here. Sensational stuff, sensationalised stuff, too.

In Broadchurch we are confronted with a very rare sight: a man lost, confused, unable to deal with his own feelings, one minute a stupid, failure of a man, the next a killer trying hard to conceal his crime, and in a few moments reduced to a penitent, frightened prisoner. There is no werewolf here, no monster. A real life example, whereas fable demands a diametric opposite, some binary to be defeated.  If anything, the wholly believable fury of the murderer’s wife and the rage of the victim’s father made them for a moment less human – or at least, less covered by a veneer of politeness.   It is a tribute to the writers and cast of Broadchurch that they sustained that ambiguity, maintained such sympathy for all those flawed and suffering characters.

But what of the Fairy Tale? What of sympathy for the Big Bad Wolf? We don’t want to reduce the wolf to a nothing. The numerous rewrites of Red Riding Hood attempt some sort of reconciliation, whereby the wolf comes back to life and reforms, and retellings such as The True Story of the Three Little Pigs or The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig turn the wolf in turns into someone misunderstood, or victim of his own mauvaise foi, or victim of another (better, funnier) monster.

Only once have I seen something approaching genuine understanding. As part of a writing project in a school, the teacher (writing as the wolf from prison) sent a letter a day to the children and the children responded. They asked all sorts of questions, such as “Are you real?” and “Did you mean to eat the Granny?” One little girl, however, wrote in some detail, asking what life was like “inside,” asking if he was “on remand” – and ending “And have you met my dad?”

Children, Spirituality and Death

Not an easy topic for me in March, not an easy topic for anyone. With an added poignancy that this was a class on spirituality on Maundy Thursday, I ploughed on.

We looked at SeeSaw and at Cruse, and watched the moving Saying Goodbye charity video. We looked at the questions raised in children’s literature about how death is represented, from the goblins in Outside Over There to the skeletons in Funnybones, revisiting stuff I’d done on visual methodologies for the Hallowe’en seminar in 2011. A smaller class meant that the time I set aside for discussion was ample.  I gave a warning at the start.

The purpose was to look at the less comfortable sides of spirituality, to explore beyond trees and sunshine and quiet. If, as Andew Wright says

“Our spiritual lives are marked by a need to wrestle with questions of the meaning and purpose of life, of our origin and destiny, and of the ultimate nature and truth of reality”

then some of this is about where was I before I was born? and where am I after I die?

Can I evaluate the success of the class? Hmmm. If I’d placed it earlier, I was worried it would have unduly affected the students’ choices for their essays – and last week, Theo’s anniversary, I simply couldn’t have managed. Later would not have given it due weight, maybe, or would have made this look like a Finale.

What always strikes me about this module is the amount of personal disclosure the students do. Often we – I too, I mean – talk about our faith communities. Sometimes we discuss practice. Very frequently we discuss memories (a good topic for further research?).  This leads me back to my musings on anecdote: how personal should a class get?  Would that class be better or worse if it stuck to the research of others?