The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  So, penning in the animal might be all that we can do, but we should try to do it with an awareness of the inveterately phallic power of that instrument. The pen is undoubtedly mightier than the sword, determining which animals are to be revered, which to be feared and which to be cut up, whether as food or for other purposes (we should remember that it is Descartes’ philosophy that licenses vivisection). And this power carries over into children’s books, where there has been a tendency to underwrite the accepted order of things. However, as we have also seen, children comprise a group seen as ‘other’ by those who determine what is orderly. Children, having been aligned with animals as not quite human, are, therefore, perhaps less likely to see the world from an orthodox perspective – especially as the whole process of anthropomorphising animals, and other ‘things’, has been shown to be unstable, unsettling the very hierarchy it seeks to underwrite. Finally, we have looked at some more explicit techniques whereby our tendency to pen in animals, unthinkingly, can be disrupted. This is perhaps the most important point to make: that although books can only ever represent animals textually, animals are not thereby only textual. If we lose sight of this, we might lose sight of them altogether, apart from as dodos. The Houyhnhnms and Kenneth Grahame might be appalled at the human animal’s ability to lie, to say the thing that is not, but that is precisely the essence of fiction: its ability to go beyond the Real into the realms of possibility, to worlds where, potentially, anything can have a voice.

  Notes

  1. Perry Nodelman, ‘Something Fishy Going On: Child Readers and Narrative Literacy’, in Crossing the Boundaries, ed. Geoff Bull and Michele Anstey (Frenchs Forest: Prentice Hall, 2002), pp. 3–16 (p. 7).

  2. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Children’s Literature and the Environment’, in Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London: Zed Books, 1998), pp. 208–17.

  3. Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (London: Macmillan, 1863), pp. 193–4.

  4. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan,2000), pp. 65 and 90.

  5. Alison Prince, Kenneth Grahame: An Innocent in the Wild Wood (London: Allison & Busby, 1994), p. 255.

  6. Moira Ferguson, ‘Breaking in Englishness: Black Beauty and the Politics of Gender, Race and Class’, Women: A Cultural Review, 15 (1994), 34–52 (p. 35).

  7. Anna SewelBlack Beauty:His Grooms and Companions. The Autobiography of a horse(London: Jarrold, 1877), pp. 13 and 33.

  8. Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories: The History of the Robins (1786; London: Grant and Griffith, 1848), pp. 122, 123 and 105.

  9. Anne Fine, The Chicken Gave It to Me (London: Egmont, 1992), pp. 87–8, 46 and 15.

  10. Kathleen R. Johnson, Understanding Children’s Animal Stories (New York: Mellen Press, 2000), p. 125. Intriguingly, J. H. Plumb notes the way that eighteenth-century children were themselves seen as ‘superior pets’: ‘The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 67 (1975), 64–95 (p. 90).

  11. Quoted in Marx on Economics, ed. Robert Freedman (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 65.

  12. A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926; London: Egmont, 2004), p. 7.

  13. Bruno Latour, ‘The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things’, in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. P. M. Graves-Brown (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 10–21 (p. 10).

  14. Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton, 1992), p. 107.

  15. Chris Raschka, Arlene Sardine (London: Scholastic, 1998), unpaginated.

  16. Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 331.

  17. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908; London: Puffin, 1994), pp. 13–14, 7 and 2.

  18. Anthony Browne, Gorilla (London: Julia MacRae, 1983), unpaginated.

  19. Akira Mizuta Lippit, ‘. . .from Wild Technology to Electric Animal’, in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 99–118 (pp. 101 and 99).

  16 Humour and the body in children’s literature

  Roderick McGillis

  Children’s humour depends largely on the body. Not entirely, but largely. Slapstick, caricature, parody, the grotesque, ridicule and the improbable in human predicaments concern the body, and so too does nonsense. A glance over Edward Lear’s limericks or Lewis Carroll’s Alice books will illustrate how often nonsense is associated with the body (long noses, wild hair, elongated bodies, collapsed bodies and so on). Reversals often deal with the matter of size: big and little, as we see in a number of recent films for children, like Big (1988), The Kid (2000) and 13 Going on 30 (2004). Even verbal humour may derive its effect from the body. Remember when we were kids, we often chanted ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names [or words] can never hurt me.’ We were, of course, wrong. Words do relate to and register on the body. Just take names, for example. Funny names are often a reflection of the body, by implication if not by denotation: Leonard Neeble, Norman Bleistift, Mr Gutzman, Fat Albert, Freckles, Bonnie McSmithers, Gertrude McFuzz, Nicholas Knock, Margery Meanwell – these names are metonymic of the kind of person who carries the name. And we do not need to look farther than the Harry Potter books to see that words, other than names, can have dramatic effects on the body, as when Dudley got a pig’s tail when Hagrid recited a spell of transfiguration.

  From the beginning of children’s literature, the body has been a source of humour. Hugh Rhodes’ Book of Nurture and School of Manners (c. 1550) instructs children in proper behaviour, table manners, deportment in front of adults and so on. When the author cautions children not to eat with their fingers, not to spit over the table, or not to blow their noses in their napkins, it instructs and delights at the same time. Just the mention of a child picking his nose or burping in someone else’s face teases the young reader with descriptions of defiant behaviour. Since Rhodes, we have moved through the entire alimentary canal. We now have instructive books such as Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops (1993) and practical books such as Sylvia Branzei’s Grossology: The Science of Really Gross Things (1995) and its sequels and website. These books safely flirt with subversion, and teach with more than a dash of humour. But, as Rhodes’ Book of Manners still raises a laugh today, earnestness too may amuse.

  Whenever we have earnest instruction, as in Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (1845), we remind children of forbidden behaviour, and more often than not such behaviour has to do with the body – not washing or not trimming the nails or sucking one’s thumbs or setting fire to oneself or not eating until the body wastes away or whipping a dog and receiving like treatment in return. Whatever the type of humour for children, the body plays its part. Often the body finds itself incorporated (as it were) in language itself. And so let’s scan the history of humour in children’s literature with a view to seeing just how insistent the body is, and a starting place is the size of the body. For children, size matters.

  Religious writers for children in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries knew about the importance of size in the child’s world. I’ll begin with James Janeway, whose A Token for Children (1671–2) seems an unlikely work to include in a survey of children’s humour. Laughter, as we know from John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), was not something the Puritans took lightly. Laughter signalled frivolity and openness to wayward behaviour. And yet Janeway meant to entertain children even as he instructed them. What’s so funny about four- and five-year-old children spending their time praying and then dying before they reach their fifth or sixth year? What’s so funny about fire and brimstone? Perhaps not much. But Janeway did mean to give child readers pleasure by setting before them accounts of the ‘joyful’ deaths of young children. He humoured children with these short factual narratives, and he did so by showing the heroism of small children in the face of a reaper le
ss grim than welcome. They may have been little and weak, but their behaviour was larger than life. The humour here speaks to the body through the bodily humours and to the mind through its instinct for survival beyond this world. Humour here manifests itself in a spiritually healthy mind that steadies a sickly body.

  Isaac Watts also knew something about the importance of size and the pleasure children might experience contemplating things big and small. His Divine Songs (1715) shows that he understood that children would find interest and pleasure in small things, busy bees, flowers, puppies who fight and scratch, and a boy too lazy to get out of bed. Watts knew very well the importance of the body in ‘The Ant, or Emmet’. The child narrators take pleasure in treading ants to death by the ‘troop’ because they are so gigantic in comparison and because such little things are expendable.1 But Watts also believed that his young readers would find delight in contemplating the big and small bodies and good and bad humours. In ‘Against Pride in Clothes’, he finds pleasure in contemplating raiment finer than the clothes we wear: ‘Knowledge and virtue, truth and grace’ are ‘the robes of richest dress’. We might think that Watts argues for an inward transcending of the body, but when he remarks that ‘The Son of God, when here below, / Put on this blest apparel too’, he reminds us of the word made flesh.2 The body informed by knowledge, virtue, truth and grace is the unfallen body. The clothes metaphor and the focus on creatures of nature argue for a balance of humours, because the greatest pleasure will be found in good humour.

  At least one later writer for children saw the potential for laughter in the humour of Watts, and took this humour in a more modern direction. Lewis Carroll used Watts’ poetry as an opportunity for the humour of displacement, substituting a lobster for a sluggard and a little crocodile for a little busy bee. Whatever else these displacements signify, they substitute either a little thing for a big thing or a big thing for a little thing, even though the big thing carries the qualifier ‘little’. And so big things and little things inform much of children’s literature. We have Big-endians and Little-endians, great big enormous turnips and little engines that could, Big Sarah and Little Tim, Big Bad Wolf and Little Princess, Big Anthony and Little Pony, and just plain Big or Little. Carroll’s play with big and little bodies inaugurates the spirit of parody in children’s literature, and we continue to have books that turn on size, as demonstrated by Florence Parry Heide’s The Shrinking of Treehorn (1971) or Terry Pratchett’s Truckers trilogy (1989–90) or his tiny Nac Mac Feegle people in The Wee Free Men (2003). Size and the changing of size interest children because children understand their own powerlessness and they enjoy contemplating the possibilities of power.

  As early as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Swift has a big guy raising a guffaw by secreting his gigantic evacuations in the corner of his Lilliputian dwelling or by putting out a fire in the miniature royal palace in a manner unappreciated by the Lilliputians. Gulliver’s means of fire suppression by urination only works because of his size. Later we have Alice growing large and crying not just a river, but a veritable sea. The humour here derives from the large body’s effluence. Bigness is brash and we might even say juvenile. Take, for example, Dav Pilkey’s Kat Kong (1993), an obvious parody of King Kong. Here the bigness takes a linguistic turn, relying on our preparation for and delight in pun and parody and platitude. Note, for example, that Kat Kong’s captors wrap him in a giant burlap bag, and on their way to the city of Mouseopolis, they are careful ‘not to let the cat out of the bag’.3 On the other hand, in the delicate lives of the small, as in Mary Norton’s Borrowers series, we have gentle rather than brash humour, and the books’ linguistic comedy depends upon clever turns not groaners; in The Borrowers Afield (1955), Pod does not understand the word ‘ethics’, and he remarks that the word ‘Sounds to me like something you pick up in the long grass.’4 Pod mistakes an abstraction for an object, thereby enforcing the prominence of the material in books for the young. Words can become things, as in Andrew Clements’ Frindle (1996).

  Humour that derives from big bodies often results in not-so-subtle fun. As Susan Stewart suggests, the big body may serve as ‘a metaphor for the abstract authority of the state and the collective, public life’.5 Sometimes such authority is benign as is the case with the giant Hagrid in the Harry Potter stories or the helpful bigness of adult or child characters in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926); sometimes such authority is fearsome as in the many threatening giants from those that Jack slays to the civilised ones we have in Narnia at Harfanger. Big may be funny or fearsome, but it is always readily available for observation. Take, for example, the eponymous character John Henry in Julius Lester’s 1994 version of this American folktale. While still a ‘brand-new baby’, John Henry jumped from his mother’s arms and started growing. We read that John Henry ‘grew and grew and grew. He grew until his head and shoulders busted through the roof which was over the porch.’ This made John Henry laugh so loud that he scared the sun, and it ‘scurried from behind the moon’s skirts and went to bed’.6 John Henry is a force of nature as well as a representative of a people. Here is bigness to be proud of. On the other hand, we can have the bigness of Jack Prelutsky’s ‘The Dragon of Death’, in Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (1976). As its name suggests, this dragon signifies something terrible. Here is enormity big enough to make the mountaintops tremble. This dragon has seven tails, seven mouths and seven heads. It is timeless. And so we have the sublime, always an aspect of large-scale objects and creatures. The sublime, like bigness itself, is both terrifying and exhilarating, and always on the edge of humour. Largeness that scales the sublime may teeter into the grotesque.

  As far back as Rabelais’ Gargantua (1534), we have examples of the big body as the grotesque body. And often the grotesque is a feature of how that body functions. Consumption and evacuation, ingress and egress, the comings and the goings, the processes of the body, its kinetic activity are the stuff of play and humour. Eating can provide opportunity for fun, as the description of Gulliver’s dining in Lilliput illustrates: he has 300 cooks and 120 waiters. Eating still provides occasion for humour as Robert Munsch’s More Pies (2002), or the old lady who swallowed a fly, indicates. And so the alimentary canal is a source of humour based on bigness. Humour associated with the alimentary canal is attractive to the young partly because adults often discourage discussion of what goes in and what comes out of our bodies. Talk of eating and evacuating is serious business. Eating and evacuating have to do with matters of desire in that we eat what we think will satisfy us (cravings come to mind), and we evacuate at the call of signals from within that may be uncomfortable, but nonetheless pleasurable. Pleasure performs its peristalsis. Food and waste are intimately connected, as are life and death. This may be one reason why food, so often in children’s literature, is life itself. We have many instances of cannibalism or the suggestion of cannibalism in stories for the young – think of the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ or Sendak’s Wild Things cheerfully saying they will eat Max up, and in turn Max’s similar offer to his Mother. Humour of this rather excessive kind serves to remind us that Eros and Thanatos occupy both ends of the same canal.

  Evacuations of one kind or another provide an opportunity for humour, and the bigger the evacuations, the greater the risible effect. Perhaps a nice example is the story of Tom Thumb, the little guy swallowed accidentally by a cow. Tom escapes harm when the cow emits a gaseous explosion sending Tom flying into the outside air (or in a cowpat, depending on the version). The fun in poop appears to have staying power as a variety of recent books will show; the most egregious must be the Danish picture book, Pigen der Ikke Ville Pa Potten by Henrik Hohle Hansen and Charlotte Pardi (2000). The protagonist of this book is as anally retentive as they come and her willed constipation ultimately results in a prodigious evacuation. Perhaps Naja’s eventual evacuation can best be characterised by mentioning another title, Jurassic Poop (2006) by Jacob Berkowitz. Books for children have had, and continue to offer their readers, an
excremental vision.

  We have big bodies supplying humour throughout books for children. Take Giant Snap-em-up, for example, a character in ‘Uncle David’s Ridiculous Story’, the ninth chapter of Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839). He engages in the funny business of snapping up little boys, the chubbier the better, and eating them as a ‘side dish’ with his dinner. Like his buddy, Gargantua, Snap-em-up has a prodigious appetite; he is all-consuming. And like Gargantua, he is funny precisely because he is so large. In a famous joke, the story’s narrator tells us that Snap-em-up ‘was obliged to climb up a ladder to comb his own hair’.7 The nonsense here is an important container for a humour that is fundamentally violent (the same principle is at work in both Lear and Carroll). The humour in ‘Uncle David’s Ridiculous Story’ reminds us that unpleasant and painful experiences may also be humorous; the humour offers relief from the unpleasantness. The cannibal Snap-em-up can’t even comb his own hair without a support. After such nonsense as preparation, we are primed to enter his home and find the dead bodies of six boys, see an ‘enormous cook’ ‘brandishing’ a large knife, and hear the giant talking of whipping children to death and of having ‘a good large dish of scalloped children at dinner’.8 We laugh.

  Such excess in the aid of humour is apparent throughout much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature for the young. Take, for example, the ostensibly innocuous Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1783) by Dorothy Kilner. Here we have an example of humour that delights in the gruesome and the excruciating. Our mouse narrator delivers a visceral description of the crunched bones and flattened body of his brother, the unfortunate mouse named Softdown. Softdown and his world may be small, but the description of his death is big. Caught in a trap, Softdown finds himself removed from the trap by the footman John. John ties a thread to Softdown’s tail, and then allows the mouse to swing from the thread. To the mouse narrator, John is a pitiless monster. Watching the brutal treatment of his brother, our narrating mouse wishes he were big so that he could thrash the tormentor. But he is small and must stand and watch as John crushes Softdown with his foot, and then kicks him into the ashes as a leaving for the cat. But the narrative does not leave the incident here. The mouse narrator informs us that his blood ran cold as he recollects the spurt of his brother’s blood and the crunch as his bones break. Is this passage funny? I think it is, to a certain extent. It moves in the direction of humour in its excess. There are surely affinities with the Hanna and Barbera Tom and Jerry cartoons. True, the Softdown incident reminds us of the body’s fragility, and of the power of bigness. A certain nostalgia lurks in the desire of the narrating mouse either to restore his brother (to rescue him) or to deliver just punishment to the inhuman monster who crushes him. The narrative quickly moves on to turn the incident into a learning experience. We understand that Softdown’s death serves a purpose; it returns the mouse and his remaining brothers to their duty. And so if we felt humour in the viscerally described death scene, we can realise that the humour provides us with a necessary distancing from the death so that we can take in the lesson this death delivers.