Apologies for the lack of posts this week, and particularly for not covering yet the pressing issue of free speech and intolerance, on which my views are entirely in accord with Andrew Sullivan's. I'll come back to it next week.
This article, on a more parochial but far from trivial issue, appears in The Times today.
THIS WEEK the Royal Society of Literature asked various authors for their top ten recommended books for schoolchildren. Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, generated some derision for a list that included Ulysses and The Waste Land. Yet while Professor Motion’s choices are ambitious, they are not absurd. His aversion to the idea that great literature is “elitist” is right, and ought to be asserted against some of his fellow authors.
The reason that Ulysses is unlikely to appeal to a child is that it works by allusion rather than narrative. But so does Through The Looking-Glass, which we think nothing of giving to children. The notion that Alice is merely a “sort of thing” in the Red King’s dream alludes to longstanding debates in metaphysics. Moreover, Professor Motion recommended Ulysses not in isolation but alongside Homer’s Odyssey.
Philip Pullman and J.K Rowling also recommended works that stretch the reader while being compelling stories, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Robinson Crusoe and Wuthering Heights. Unfortunately their contributions are where the wisdom of the exercise ended.
According to the RSL, some authors declined to take part on the ground that “children’s characters were so different that it wouldn’t be right to dictate to them”. Nick Hornby worried that “any kind of prescription of this kind [sic] is extremely problematic”. The poet Wendy Cope ventured truism and non sequitur: “There are children who love reading and there are people who go right through life without ever finishing a book.”
The novelist Ben Okri suggested that books were a sorry substitute for real life: “Read the world. It is the most mysterious book of all.”
In short, there are prominent and prize-winning authors who are incompetent to deal with children and do not understand what books are for. The power of literature lies not in its faithfulness of description of a world that readers are familiar with, but in its illumination of enduring human concerns.
Good writers retain popularity not because of arbitrary pedagogical preference but because they see more, and better. The notion that children on a stereotypical inner-city council estate would fail, because of their background, to be enriched by Dickens or Defoe is worse than an impoverishment of the imagination. It is snobbery.
