(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Rundell is an English author, often writing children’s fiction.
She suggests that at some times in our adult lives reading children’s fiction “might be the only thing that will do” (Rundell 2019, 1–10). Specifically, Rundell advocates that adults read “texts for children that acknowledge the right of the child to have as rich a story as the adult writing it would demand for themselves” (pp. 11–2).
This kind of writing is generally dismissed as “not rich or odd or deep”: “childish” (pp. 1–10). But Rundell distinguishes childishness from something with “childhood at its heart”: “Children’s fiction is not written by children; it stands alongside children but is not of them” (ibid.). There is a notion that as we age we should read more mature and complex works; that to read children’s fiction as an adult is a regression. But if reading is to avoid becoming “something that we do for anxious self-optimisation…all texts must be open, to all people” (ibid.).
Fairytales, for example, were never just for children; they were “always designed to be a way of talking to everyone at once” (pp. 23–33). Through their use of “archetypes and bass-note human desires, and… metaphors with bite” they can yoke diverse people “into the same imaginative space” (ibid.). They’re about hunger—for power, justice, love, and change—and “blood-covered and gasping” optimism—“the life principle writ large” (ibid.). They record human vice without falling into pessimistic despair (pp. 53–64). They can reignite our feelings of “awe and hunger and longing for justice” (pp. 34–39).
Fairytales also trace our cultural evolution in how they remain alive, changing in retelling (pp. 23–33). Along with myths and legends, they found our world, so we need to “keep reading them and writing them, repossessing them as they possess us” (ibid.). They invite retelling, refashioning, and so involve us as co-authors.
At times we are powerless as adults, and children’s books, written for people without politico-economic power, can remind us of “what we have left to us, whenever we need to start out all over again” (pp. 40–2). They can’t right the world by themselves but can express truths in a better way than can abstract language, by resisting reduction, distilling “in their purest, most archetypal forms hope, hunger, joy, fear” (pp. 11–12). The genre had pedagogic origins, but as we mature they try to teach us something else: they speak of hope, hope that bravery, wit, empathy, and love matter—hope that we urgently need to hear.
This kind of fiction “offers to help us refind things we may not even know we have lost”, “how to read: how to lay aside scepticism and fashion and trust [ourselves] to a book” (pp. 43–52). It offers access to a time “before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra” (ibid.). By demonstrating that imagination is not optional, that it’s “at the heart of everything”, children’s books “give the heart and mind a galvanic kick” (ibid.). Rundell exhorts (pp. 53–64):
So defy those who would tell you to be serious, to calculate the profit of your imagination; those who would limit joy in the name of propriety. Cut shame off at the knees. Ignore those who would call it mindless escapism: it’s not escapism: it is findism. Children’s books are not a hiding place, they are a seeking place. Plunge yourself soul-forward into a children’s book: see if you do not find in them an unexpected alchemy; if they will not un-dig in you something half hidden and half forgotten. Read a children’s book to remember what it was to long for impossible and perhaps-not-impossible things. Go to children’s fiction to see the world with double eyes: your own, and those of your childhood self.