what I’m getting at here is that being a child is an experience defined by marginalization—by powerlessness, not being taken seriously, not being believed.
when you are a child you are aware of the terrible things in the world and terrified by them, and you feel everything so intensely. Before you learn to manage your emotions, they are consuming, incandescent experiences that are almost impossible to access again as an adult. You are small but your emotions and experiences are as large and as vivid as anyone else’s, but they are not taken as seriously as everyone else’s. You recognize that adults condescend to you and dismiss you.
As a child, you know that the world ought to be fair, that people ought to be helped, and you ask “Why?” And you ask “What is the point?” And as you become an adult you learn to repress those things. The answer to every question you ask as a child is “Because you have to” or “Because that’s the way it is,” and these are bullshit answers and we all know it, but defending an authoritarian relationship to someone weaker is easier than defending things about our world that are indefensible if we look at them honestly.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Lucy first enters Narnia, she is not believed. Narnia has so much about it that makes it THE quintessential children’s book series, the archetype for children’s book series, and it all centers around how Narnia cannot be understood by adults.
Imitators have reduced this down to something about the Wonder of Childhood, something about how children are innocent and special that means only they can see magic because only they are able to believe in it. This is Not Correct. Books that do this are saccharine and awful because this is fake and we all know deep down that it’s fake.
Here’s the truth. Children do not live in an idyllic fantasy land where bad things aren’t real, adults do. For kids who have dealt with grief, abuse, trauma of all kinds—and let’s be real, that’s most of us—it’s condescending and idiotic to treat children as if they’re innocent about the evils in the world. Almost every child experiences evil early and is unable to communicate that experience to adults, whether this is in the form of a relatively innocent childhood fear or deeply damaging abuse.
There is much that has been said about how the Narnia books are about the trauma of World War 1, but most of that can also be said about how Narnia is about childhood in general—the traumatic nature of the return to the Real World is left unstated, because it is understood by the audience. Children have a vivid inner world that they do not have the vocabulary to explain to adults, and this is what Narnia is about.
There’s a reason why Neil Gaiman’s children’s books are so memorable, and it’s the same reason that they scared the living shit out of adults. There’s a reason why Where the Wild Things Are and Shel Silverstein’s poetry have had such a long cultural shelf life. These are not cozy, comfy stories that affirm adult perceptions of the childhood world as flat and innocent; they are troubling and ambiguous.
There’s also a reason why the children’s books that are so important often piss adults off. The best example I can think of is the Captain Underpants series. I never read any of them and yet I remember the extraordinary disdain people had for those books; they were the poster child for What Terrible Thing Has Become Of Literature.
And sure, maybe to an uncritical adult eye the adventures of misbehaving kids thwarting the rules of the world with poop jokes has no value, but I would argue the opposite—the poop jokes are, in fact, fundamental to the anti-authoritarian message. Adult attempts to suppress the scatological sense of humor children have hold a very important message about power.
Because here’s the thing: poop and farts are funny because they’re taboo, and especially so to children because we are constantly telling children what they Can and Can’t say. It’s not about poop, it’s about how adults betray themselves every time they get in a tizzy about a seven year old saying “turd,” because the fact that “turd” gets such a reaction means that uptight adults don’t have the power over kids that they want kids to think they have.
Scatological subjects embarrass adults, and the more uptight and controlling those adults are, the more devastating the embarrassment is. Kids are super conscious of the power dynamics in all their dealings with adults—how could they not be? And the explosion of raucous laughter that results from an elementary school teacher saying something that sounds sort of like “doody” wouldn’t happen if elementary school teachers weren’t constantly trying to reassert and solidify their position of power.
They, too, can be mortified and laid low by a humble “doody,” and if it did not have the power to do so, they wouldn’t try so hard to stop the kids from saying it.
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