H_James said:
_Lizard23_ said:
I'd add the whimsicalness of Hilaire Belloc to that list.
I'd say Hilaire Belloc wrote with too much adult cleverness to be properly children's literature.
Okay, you didn't think I was going to let that sit, did you?
Belloc is a good example of someone who is accessible to both children and adults in different ways. In fact, there are probably adults who never progress past a childish understanding of his work, and children for whom it provides a catalyst for development of new thought - remember that moment at which you suddenly "got" irony, or the simultaneous existence of two meanings?
The division of literature into "children's" and "adults," with "adult" assumed to be the more sophisticated of the two, is a poor reflection of reality. For one thing, children's literature serves all states of the growing brain. For another, not all adults are equally sophisticated readers; and not even all sophisticated readers enjoy everything of merit that is out there, or never enjoy "trash." (I should perhaps remark here that I believe there is such a thing as "good trash," and that all generalizations are false at some level. Including that one, yes.)
If you compare Enid Blyton to Virginia Woolf, or Danielle Steele to Diana Wynne Jones, you get very different results because you are not comparing similars. An interesting exercise is to compare the "for adults" and "for children" works of top artists (I'm not talking modern adult authors trying to take advantage of the "crossover" phenomenon, all too many of whom are second-raters to begin with and most of whom are responding to market demands not to artistic needs) who has consciously done both - C.S. Lewis, for example; Joan Aiken; Fred Gipson; or A.A. Milne.
While it is true that some books require a minimum level of maturity to access, the very best literature can be read in different ways at different ages. My experience is that the very best (in the sense of most widely enjoyable, most rereadable, most multi-layered) literature is most likely to be shelved in the sections set aside for young people, and that this is not an accident. One does not have to be able to grasp the entire effect of a work the first time one encounters it in order for it to be "for" you at that age. In fact, a book that is not fully understood the first time can haunt the reader and call him back for multiple readings, discovering new things every time, and thus become a favorite and a life influence. This can happen to adults, but it happens routinely to people whose brains are not done growing.
There is also a genre which relies on providing two levels of meanings, one more accessible to small children and one more accessible to adults - the picture book intended to be read aloud. Since preliterate children demand (and probably need, for developmental purposes) to be read the same story again and again and again and again and again, the writers and artists responsible for them habitually create them at two levels of sophistication, one of which goes straight past the primary audience to provide a buffer against boredom for the adult re-reader. One of the results of this is that the child is exposed to multilayered productions before he can read for himself. Thus, a work with the primary purpose of amusement can become, spontaneously, an instrument of enlightenment and mental growth - for the child, or the adult, since some adults don't get the reading habit until they perform the service for their children.
Anyway, on the topic of ULs about this or that work being "really" about some form of child victimization, I think the commonness of such stories is based on a couple of negative aspects of modern life. One, is a widspread inability to interpret text systematically. Think of all the songs that are heard in a way that is at variance with the content of their lyrics - "You Are My Sunshine" is about abandonment, "Good Night Irene" is about a disastrous marriage, and "Born in the USA" is about a poor working class slob who gets screwed over by his country. In the case of radio rock songs, this can be excused a bit by the fact that lyrics don't always make straightforward grammatical sense and are easy to mishear when mixed with the guitar riffs; however, we tend to interpret ambiguous lyrics in accordance with our desires, prejudices, and fears, and the prevalence of child victimization in these interpretations is ominous in the extreme.
I believe that the root of such ULs lies, not in the lyrics, but in a generalized distrust of and disrespect for children. Our society does not recognize children as independent human beings with wills, needs, and minds of their own. We see them as parasites on the body economic, as helpless victims, as pictures of innocence in an age which does not believe that innocence exists, as blank slates to be written on by the nearest adult - as anything, in fact, but what they are: essential members of the race involved in the tricky and complex process of maturation, which each one has to complete on her own.