Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film

Winner of the 2023 Edited Book Award from the International Research Society for Children's Literature

Contributions by Aneesh Barai, Clémentine Beauvais, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Terri Doughty, Aneta Dybska, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Zoe Jaques, Vanessa Joosen, Maria Nikolajeva, Marek Oziewicz, Ashley N. Reese, Malini Roy, Sabine Steels, Lucy Stone, Björn Sundmark, Michelle Superle, Nozomi Uematsu, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, and Jean Webb

Intergenerational solidarity is a vital element of societal relationships that ensures survival of humanity. It connects generations, fostering transfer of common values, cumulative knowledge, experience, and culture essential to human development. In the face of global aging, changing family structures, family separations, economic insecurity, and political trends pitting young and old against each other, intergenerational solidarity is now, more than ever, a pressing need.

Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film argues that productions for young audiences can stimulate intellectual and emotional connections between generations by representing intergenerational solidarity. For example, one essayist focuses on Disney films, which have shown a long-time commitment to variously highlighting, and then conservatively healing, fissures between generations. However, Disney-Pixar’s Up and Coco instead portray intergenerational alliances—young collaborating with old, the living working alongside the dead—as necessary to achieving goals.

The collection also testifies to the cultural, social, and political significance of children’s culture in the development of generational intelligence and empathy towards age-others and positions the field of children’s literature studies as a site of intergenerational solidarity, opening possibilities for a new socially consequential inquiry into the culture of childhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781496831934

Book preview

PART ONE

TRADITION OF INTERAGE KINSHIPS IN CHILDREN’S BOOKS

1

FROM SOLITARY TO SOLIDARY

INTERGENERATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN THE REPRESENTATION OF FULL LIVES

Clémentine Beauvais

A classic adult novel frequently follows the character from birth to death—a biographical plot. For obvious reasons, such a plot would not work in children’s fiction.

(Nikolajeva 2005, 101)

In this chapter, I am interested in what happens to questions of intergenerational solidarity when a children’s book does undertake to represent the full lives of its main character(s). By full, I do not mean interrupted by premature death, but rather from childhood to middle or indeed even old age. Such books are quite rare primarily because, as Nikolajeva says, the concept violates some of the most fundamental narrative and ideological expectations of children’s literature. Yet such texts do exist, and the very fact that they run counter to the most evident expectations we may hold about a children’s book makes them theoretically interesting. The only genre within children’s literature to have developed specific narrative and aesthetic strategies for the representation of full lives is the biography, a varied category of texts which has known a remarkable comeback in very recent years. Additionally, a hodgepodge of isolated examples, from picturebooks to children’s and adolescent novels, follow fictional characters throughout full lives.

Reflections around intergenerational solidarity arise with particular intensity throughout children’s books depicting full lives, because in them, intergenerational relationships are not—and, indeed, cannot be—represented statically. Vanessa Joosen (86) has analyzed the seesaw effect of intergenerational relationships in children’s literature, showing that compassion and complicity among the very young and the very old can occur to the detriment of intermediary generations (adults). This age-related seesaw effect, intriguingly, seems to imply an evolution, throughout the life course, of one’s attitude towards other generations. If a child character and an older character are portrayed helping each other while adults look on unmoved, it suggests that the child is expected to be, in the future, that selfish adult, and that the older character is assumed to have been, in their past, that selfish adult, too. Such lifelong dynamics in and out of intergenerational solidarity are made available by children’s books representing full lives, because they must show us, so to speak, the seesaw in movement.

In this chapter, therefore, I look at what children’s literature makes of the evolution of intergenerational solidarity as its protagonists themselves revise their vision of, and modify their attitude to, younger and older characters throughout life. What changes, and what remains, in the character’s perspective on intergenerationality, and of their own place in the generational landscape of their world, as they grow old?

The first part of this chapter is devoted to theoretical reflection on what the lack of full lives in children’s literature means for the representation of intergenerational relationships, finishing with how we may define intergenerational solidarity as evolving throughout the life course. In the second part, I look at full lives in biographies for children. The purpose of exemplarity of the genre means that intergenerational solidarity is frequently presented as the handing down of values, which the child character gratefully receives from helpful adults, and that the aging character, in turn, has the duty to pass on. In such books, intergenerational solidarity is perceived as asynchronous: one will be generous towards the future generation as the past generations were once generous to one, but the individual cannot reciprocate to the older figure at the moment of giving. In the third part, I look at a more haphazard selection of stories that represent full lives, highlighting their more ambivalent portrayals of intergenerational solidarity. There, the synchronous nature of intergenerational solidarity is more evident, but also more fraught. I will not attempt to propose an all-encompassing theoretical framework of such works, which is impossible given the fragmentary nature of the corpus. Rather, I will suggest that representing full lives in children’s literature allows for an exploration of age-related topics that the wider canon tends to ignore. Among those are the fear of obsolescence, the impossibility of redemption, and ambivalence towards intergenerational others in the creation of one’s existence.

INTERGENERATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS IN (MOST) CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: A STATIC CONCEPT

As a category of text bound to the Bildungsroman—and, in Roberta Seelinger Trites’s famous analysis, the Entwicklungsroman for adolescent literature (passim)—the children’s book, in theory, traditionally focuses on processes of growth. This does not rule out the portrayal of full lives, but in practice it is difficult to find examples of children’s books that take their protagonist from an early age to midlife and/or senescence. There exists a number of such books that, although originally published for adults, have been beloved by younger readers over the centuries. Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) is perhaps the most radical example; Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), though a more limited timespan, would arguably qualify. But those de facto crossover celebrities are red herrings; by far the most widespread type of texts that represent full lives to child or young adult readers are texts in which the life ends abruptly. From Werther to Augustus Waters, many protagonists do live full lives in children’s, young adult and crossover texts, but that is because they live fast and die young.

Rarely do we even see representations of full young lives—namely, from childhood to late adolescence. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) is a striking counterexample, but generally it is unfashionable to have characters cross the gap, especially within one book, between childhood and adolescence. Editorial categories may be to blame in part for that state of affairs, but there is also something more profound at stake; as Lydia Kokkola explores, adolescence has been historically and culturally set up as a buffer zone (33) between childhood and adulthood, its fabled Sturm und Drang preserving the purity of childhood by contrast. The thresholds between childhood and adolescence, and between adolescence and adulthood, are everywhere hinted at yet often offstage—their crossing is made obscene.

This segmentation of protagonists’ existences in children’s and young adult literature into short narrative timeframes means that we only get snapshots of intergenerational relationships. Those relationships are solidified; even when they are presented in nuanced ways, their descriptions cannot involve evolution and re-evaluation throughout the life course of the main protagonist, because the main protagonist simply does not have time to re-evaluate those relationships. There is little opportunity for self-reflectiveness about intergenerational relationships, since so little temporal distance is available to the protagonists. Most prominently, they lack the experience of being part of another generation. Whenever such retrospective evaluation occurs, it is generally given rather awkwardly, in the form of an epilogue, postface, or paratext. The infamously clunky epilogue to the Harry Potter series, in which the once-young characters are put in the position of (still relatively young) parents, is one such example, but we can also mention the very end of José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s My Sweet Orange Tree (1968), in which Vasconcelos—suddenly endorsing an authorial, rather than narratorial, position—reflects upon his changed perception of the older protagonist, in the light, so to speak, of new evidence—his own evolved vision of intergenerational relationships. It is not clear whether this self-reflective ending should be seen as text or paratext, and this is part of the point: in children’s literature, reflections on how the protagonist’s later life modified their perceptions of other generations hover in an uneasy narrative space.

The tendency for children’s literature to present only snapshots of intergenerational relationships is one of its elementary characteristics. It is narratively, structurally, and aesthetically correct, from the viewpoint of children’s literature theory, that intergenerational relationships should be thus reified. There is even clear ideological purpose to that reification; the teenage crisis, for instance, and what it implies of conflictual relationships with adults, has been quite rightly posited by Trites (passim) as a founding component of young adult literature, with both narrative and didactic purpose. The lack of retrospective evaluation of intergenerational relationships is one of those essential features that allow children’s and young adult literature to achieve poetic, ideological, and formal stability.

We know, of course, that it is not existentially accurate to think of intergenerational relationships, and especially of intergenerational solidarity, as static. One gains and loses a sense of connectedness with older and younger generations, and indeed with one’s own generational contemporaries, as one grows and as one endorses the generationally specific roles that were once only witnessed from a distance. Furthermore, child perspectives on intergenerational solidarity—for instance, knowing that flying a kite with a grandfather may be an equally enjoyable activity for the grandfather—may be eminently different to that of older people, whose enjoyment of said activity may be layered with their own memories of that shared activity with their own grandparent, with the joy of giving pleasure to the child, and yet also with a conflicting desire to sit down with a nice glass of Chianti and a good book.

Therefore, for a literature so eminently concerned with age—aetonormative, as Nikolajeva (2010) has argued, and maintaining adulthood as an aspirational norm (see also Nodelman)—children’s literature is also limited in its perceptions of the lifelong changes in interactions with generational others. This makes the very concept of intergenerational solidarity difficult to accommodate in such a literature. I am here defining the concept as mutual well-wishing and trust, evidenced by, for instance, reciprocal acts of help, kindness, or generosity between members of two different generations. It is difficult to accommodate intergenerational solidarity within narratives occurring over a brief timespan, because that exchange of favors is most often solely understood in specific contexts intensified by narrative necessity, rather than envisaged as existential, continuing, and evolving through time, subject to constant reconsideration, and tinged with memories of previous encounters.

THE BIOGRAPHY FOR CHILDREN: INTERGENERATIONAL SOLIDARITY AS AN ABSTRACT CONCEPT

Biographies for children, as I have discussed elsewhere, form an undertheorized, though currently thriving, genre that encompasses a wide variety of works. The genre is comprised of biographies and autobiographies of real people, although fictional (auto)biographies of characters set up as historically significant may also be included, as well as works inscribed within the nineteenth-century tradition of fictional biographies of things or animals, such as Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), which I have no space to tackle within this chapter (see Pickering). Biographies are among the oldest kinds of children’s literature, with historical, narrative, and aesthetic ties to other literary genres, including hagiography and memoir. I am working, within this analysis, on the assumption that the biography for children de facto has an exemplary purpose, in that the presentation of eminent individuals is at least partly intended to elicit admiration in the young reader. The inspirational nature of the genre is still a clear overall purpose of that corpus, as evidenced by the proliferation in recent years of biographies of influential women (see, for example, the hugely popular series Little People, Big Dreams). This definition suffers nuances, not least that the aspirational nature might be counterbalanced by the presentation of their contribution to knowledge or the history of ideas; however, straight-forward counterexamples, such as biographies of evil people, are exceedingly rare in children’s literature.

Biographies for children, particularly preoccupied with the question of what makes an exemplary existence, generally put emphasis on those aspects of a person’s early life that may predispose them to lead said existence. This is where, often, formative experiences are described in relation to older, parent or mentor, figures whose patient understanding and help accompanies the child. There is clear didactic content in such relationships in the simplest sense of the word—that is, an adult leading a child towards knowledge—but also a markedly child-focused view of the adult as intensely concentrated on the child’s success. Narratively as well as ideologically, the intergenerational relationships in such books tend to focus on the handing down, by adults, of intellectual, moral, and physical tools to enable the child’s self-realization.

I will take here as an example the Chinese-box treatment of such child-adult relationships in the building of a great existence, in Nikki Grimes and Bryan Collier’s Barack Obama, Son of Promise, Child of Hope (2008). This picturebook biography of the former US president, which devotes time to little Barack’s education, is framed by a fictive relationship between a mother narrator and a child narratee; the (black) mother tells the child about Barack Obama’s life, himself presented in a close relationship to his mother.¹ The double layer of child-adult intimacy, clustered around the great man’s achievements, is reinforced still by another intergenerational relationship it implies—that of its own possible reading event by a parent-child couple together. The implications are clear: as the great man was helped by the benevolent, caring mother, so the child can be great, if protected, assisted, and loved by an adult.

Other biographies present the same theme in reverse, underlining, instead, the existential weight of an absent parent. Amy Novesky and Isabelle Arsenault’s Cloth Lullaby (2016), a highly stylized biography of Louise Bourgeois, emphasizes the death of Louise’s mother, triggering the protagonist’s grief, which leads to her own success as an artist. Louise, left alone, undertakes to piece her life together, using the legacy of her mother’s craf, symbolized alternatively by spiders, rivers, constellations, and tapestries. While Cloth Lullaby is decidedly darker than Barack Obama, Son of Promise, Child of Hope, and stamped throughout by loss—of the mother, of a sense of self, of the meaning of existence—it relies on a similar kind of premise: that the adult’s role in the child’s life is that of a giver, hander-down, protector, and helper. As far as those biographies are concerned, the child at the time of blossoming is in a position primarily of receiver. This is not intergenerational solidarity, but a one-directional duty of care from the adult to the child. Nurturing, it is understood, flows overwhelmingly in one direction.

Clearly, this treatment echoes what critics have identified as the role of the helper, the parent or the person in loco parentis in children’s literature more generally. It also recalls a Rousseauist view of education, in which the carer is placed in the position of a gardener (Rousseau’s Jean-Jacques in Emile is a tuteur, which can mean both a tutor and a gardening-stake around which a plant coils). As such, there should be nothing especially noteworthy about this perception of transgenerational help. Yet this is not the full story, because, of course, in the biography the child character ultimately grows into an adult, then (potentially) an older person. And it is then their turn to repay the favor.

Here intergenerational solidarity arises in biography for children, where it acquires a presence, importance, and conceptual vigor so strong as to become quasi-philosophical. For, eminently, the grown man or woman of the biography for children is most often, in turn, placed in the role of the inspirator, helper, protector, carer, and giver. Having received the attention of adults as children—or having suffered from that lack of attention—they are placed in the position of someone who has, so to speak, contracted a kind of existential debt. It is striking, in biographies for children, that many of them end with the middle-aged or elderly character in a mentoring position for much younger characters, or that the whole story is framed by a didactic situation in which there is in effect a didactic narratee. Those narratees or child characters are frequently fictional, sometimes plucked out of the great historical figure’s created universe (as is the case, for instance, with Peter Sís’s 2014 The Pilot and the Little Prince), sometimes real (for instance, the children who died with Janusz Korczak in Philippe Meirieu and Pef’s 2012 biography of that figure), and at other times wholly invented, present verbally, and/or visually among the pages (for instance, in Doreen Rappaport and Bryan Collier’s 2001 Martin’s Big Words).

Of course, to those intradiegetic relationships and addresses, we must add the extradiegetic parameters of the reading situation itself: the very act of proposing a biography—namely, the narrative of a full life—to a young reader can be considered in itself as a handing down of values and knowledge from an experienced elder to an individual still in development. While the didactic situation is certainly not necessarily authoritarian (as I have argued at length elsewhere, there are many gaps in such texts, allowing the reader to see themselves on different tracks to that exemplary model), most acts of intergenerational generosity in such texts are non-reciprocal.

If, that is, by reciprocal generosity we mean generosity towards the same person that is being generous to us. But while there is rarely any reciprocity between two given characters of different generations in the biography for children, intergenerational solidarity is ineluctably present and indeed even arguably an essential aspect of the genre. It is, however, to be averaged out over a whole life course. In other words, in the biography for children, intergenerational solidarity works as an abstract concept, a kind of guiding philosophical principle, whose effects are understood to be distributed across an individual’s existence. As the child has benefited from the adult, the adult will later benefit new children. Intergenerational solidarity works over a length of time rather than within a given moment.

As befits the genre, this vision of intergenerational solidarity as asynchronous is quite traditional, if not conservative—rarely does a younger person help an older person—yet it also makes the statement that human existence is defined by a transgenerational debt of solidarity. While not, properly speaking, progressive, that statement is certainly future-oriented. There is true exchange, ultimately, between young and old, but that exchange is asynchronous, occurring at an incommensurably greater distance of time and space than that traditionally allowed by the briefer timespans of other stories for children. More significantly, perhaps, there is nothing regulating that exchange but an unspoken trust that it will indeed occur, that the selfish receiving, in earlier life, will turn into selfless giving, in later life. This is what I mean when I say that intergenerational solidarity is forever present abstractly in the biography for children. It exists as a self-evident, but delayed, moral imperative, rather than as a concrete necessity pressed onto the characters by narrative contingency.

In keeping with the seesaw effect, it is not unusual to see the intermediary stages of characters’ lives—adolescence or young adulthood, the time of blossoming into the great historical figure—as a time of solitude. Ensconsed in self-reflectiveness, characters may go traveling, choose to stay alone, or plough through episodes of doubt and lack of motivation. It is only once they have experienced, to keep Kokkola’s term, that buffer zone (33) of trouble or solitude that the solitary protagonist can become solidary towards younger generations.

The biography for children presents an intriguing example of intergenerational solidarity in children’s literature because the uncommonly long timespan of is narratives exacerbates the didactic imperative, present in other children’s literature in much more condensed forms, that children once grown older should help children just as they were once helped by older individuals. Intergenerational solidarity over the life course becomes, in the biography for children, a kind of genre expectation, both intra- and extra-diegetically. The genre thus allows us to observe, with, of course, many nuances and variations, how children’s literature addresses young readers as current benefiters of adult help and care, and always-already, by necessity, also as future