Last weekend
I was lucky enough to be invited to Turkey, to take part in a forum on Young
Adult Literature. When I got home, I thought of writing a post on the city where
I had stayed – the marvellous palimpsest that is at once Byzantium,
Constantinople and Istanbul. I certainly saw many wonderful sights: Hagia
Sophia, the Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque... but others have been there
before me, and besides, I will need time to digest those memories, not least
(oddly enough) because I forgot to take a camera. Probably it will be the
little things that stay with me: the unexpected cats that roam the square
between the mosques, a small child eating roasted chestnuts, the runic graffiti
scratched into the marble of Hagia Sophia by a bored Viking. Most haunting of all, the forest
of floodlit pillars (many culled from abandoned pagan temples) that support the
roof of the Basilica Cistern, next door to my hotel. Most of the pillars are
plain and austere, but one is carved with tear drops: no one knows why, or
where it came from. There’s a story in that, if one knew how to tell it.
But back to
the Young Adult Literature Forum, which was attended not only by Turks but also
by representatives from Germany, Sweden, Serbia, Spain and France. Some of
these countries have long traditions of children’s literature; in others it is
relatively new. Some have longstanding democratic traditions, while others have
had oppressive or authoritarian governments. (There is, I note, a strong correlation
between these circumstances.) It was interesting and salutary to find that the
topic that excited most discussion was whether children’s literature should be
used to instil moral “lessons” – a discussion that spilled over with seeming
inevitability into one about censorship.
It’s easy to
feel smug about such things. We like to think that in the anglophone world, at
least, whatever those stern Victorians may have thought about using books as an
instrument of instruction rather than of pleasure, we have learned better.
Books should be interesting and fun, surely, rather than exercises in finger-wagging?
Well, maybe.
Actually, while the language has changed, I suspect that many people still see
children’s books as instruments of instruction, even if the instruction is in “emotional
wisdom” rather than “moral lessons.” They still discuss characters
and stories in terms of the ways they model behaviour for children, the
examples they set. They still think of books as having a profound influence,
beneficial or otherwise. Scratch a Guardian
reader, find a top-hatted Victorian moralist.
Perhaps that is no bad thing. Books should
be capable of making a difference to their readers – yes, and of teaching them
too. It would be sad if they became simply a way of stimulating a pleasant aesthetic sensation, or of passing a tedious hour between games on the X-Box. That children’s books are talked of in
apocalyptic terms, and that they attract moral censors worried about children being
“corrupted," is a testament to their power. We may disagree with the censors’ analysis,
but their attention is an enormous back-handed compliment.
Viva didacticism!