Wavering
Reading the headline, I was right revved up to be all uppity snobbish with impunity about this business of creating simplified versions of classic literature for the classroom.
My first reaction was, oh, Jesus, more dumbing down, more premasticated food for the minds of our youth (cf. ‘yout’), yadayadayada…
And then, well damn it, I actually read the article (that’ll teach me not to keep looking at things that undermine my views).
Jeffrey Goldstein, a psychologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands who specializes in children and media, said he thinks the series is a useful way of making the classics accessible to kids who might otherwise not be able to read them. “It’s extraordinarily important for children to feel that they have access to literature,” said Mr. Goldstein. “As a teacher you want children to enjoy reading and feel connected to other people who have read these books.” The substitution of contemporary shorter words for 19th-century English words is less important than the fact that kids are being exposed to classic literature that their parents might have read, he added.
So then I’m thinking, hey, that’s kind of cool, kind of noble, and I go maudlin like I do every time I see someone looking out for the other guy – hoisting him up, bringing him into the fold.
And I can appreciate the benefits to a sense of self of having read a great work, being in on the allusions, able to make the connections…
But then I’m, like, well, no, hang on… simplified? Does that mean what I think it does? Does that mean that they’re reducing these classic tales to their plots, sanding cobwebs off the language, erasing the author’s voice?
And I’m back to where I started: thinking what’s the point of diluting a work, dismantling its integrity in the name of… what? Particularly in this market glut of books for kids.
And reminded of when I tried to get my children to read Dickens, and being informed that there was no point, Ma; they’d already seen the cartoon.
· · • · ·
Comment
- I think simplified by who matters a lot more than how much. Also why, and like that. The values the simplifiers bring will replace in some degree the values the story held in the original, so it will matter a lot what those values are.
Being all devoted to edifying kids is great, but simplifying Dickens would necessitate a devotion to a lot of other things as well, some hard to name precisely. You have to keep the devotion Dickens had, as you pare away the language and structure. That means you have to recognize it.
All too much of children’s “simplified” literature is castrated, lobotomized, eviscerated before it gets to them.
It’s like translation nah? You have to have an intuitive grasp of what the original was after and about, to bring it into the next form. Translation as y axis, simplification as x.
— vernaculo May 25, 12:12am # - As long as it is explained to the kids that these are but pale reflections of the originals, I think it can do more good than harm. Those who would never touch Charlies books will at least get to understand the stories and might be interested enough to go for the real thing.
Every film version of a great book is simplified for the screen and just look at how sales of the original go up after a movie release.
The Readers Digest has been doing it for years. I say make comics out of the classics and get them even younger!
— Adrian May 25, 1:02am # - The fear you identify—the simplification, the patronage, the erasure—has been glitteringly promoted by critical theorists for the last (at least) forty years under the auspices of Academe. The methods and results are similar to what we see in the pedagogical marketplace: contextualisation in contrast to art/beauty/content/style/universalism…blah-blah.
Not that these concerns should ever be separated. Aesthetically: Ethically.
And: -—, : I’ve learned plenty from de-construction :—
Any companionship with ‘classical’, ‘canonical’ stories or ideas is welcome. Necessary.
Comic books/abridgements included.
Any way to talk (to) through the generations as time whisps past….
— moj May 25, 3:13am # - Yeah! That was what I meant to say!
— Adrian May 25, 6:28am # - ”...when I tried to get my children to read Dickens, and being informed that there was no point, Ma; they’d already seen the cartoon” -Gail
“Any companionship with ‘classical’, ‘canonical’ stories or ideas is welcome. Necessary. ”-moj
You rode right over that without a backward glance.
Companionship is one thing, usurpation another. Supplanting the original living gift with a watered-down proprietary one, or worse no gift at all, is plagiarism of the worst sort.
It’s soul-stealing, parasitic, and it diverts the magic.
“As long as it is explained to the kids that these are but pale reflections ” -Adrian
The responsibilities of children’s literature – or story-telling to children generally, which would include all narrative tales whatever their medium – are in the work of writing precisely not being “explanation”.
You can “explain” things to children until you’re blue in the face; they work with what’s in front of them. They also prefer candy, or candy-flavored vitamins, to brussels sprouts. There’s money to made there, to be sure.
Stripped of its subtle grace and complex empathy, reduced to the still-considerable excitement of its plot-line, Oliver Twist isn’t what Dickens wrote.
What the Walt Disney Corporation has done to the work of A.A. Milne is a crime against nature.
— vernaculo May 25, 8:46am # - Concise as ever, G. I was lucky and DEVOURED literature (some of which I should read again as I was so young) when I was a kid, and I think you hit the nail on the head when you mention the author’s voice. I was in love with george Eliot’s voice not her plots (although have to admit to having had big crushes on Jude and julien Sorel). I am reminded of a similar trend in the music world, now widely accepted, which involves taking all the slow romantic movements from symphonies out of their context for easy listening. A friend and great cellist said to me once that it was like taking all the great screen kisses out of films and putting them on a long video. yawn. As with music, to me at least, it is the stillness and the silence around the movement that makes the plot exciting.
ps can you help me out with some provencal flower translations on my blog?
— ruth May 25, 2:26pm # - All you had to do was bring up that Disney, ‘Pooh.” I’m voting with the snobs on this one, although I have vivid memories of standing in a grocery store some time in the ‘fifties, enthralled with a comic version of ‘The Cound of Monte Cristo.’
There was a whole series, called Illustrated classics, which I gather are now highly collectible, in the way that every artifact from that era has become, no matter how kitschy.
Here’s a link to a book about them, with mention and cover from a French comic of ‘Les Miserables.’ Sacre Bleu!
http://www.classicscentral.com/introduction.htm
— wizmo May 25, 2:42pm # - Oh, c’mon now, this ‘Disney/Milne’ tactic is simple button-pushing for the egghead crowd that cares about issues such as this. There are always travesties in the marketplace.
There is a great privileging going on here about both the ‘written word’ and about ‘authorial pre-eminence’ which is perhaps slightly misplaced when discussing the importance of stories for children. I’ve found that the most meaningful storytelling I’ve done has been oral and imaginative – either relating established tales through memory and invention, or freely borrowing and mixing up elements from various ‘official’ sources.
Also: how many books haven’t I read – how many authors are still unsavoured – to which and whom I make reference and appreciate within my wider discourse about literature (history, society, etc.)?
Your children may have a similar relationship to Dickens or Milne as I have to Tolstoy or Balzac. These represent deficits, surely; but are they fatal?
— moj May 25, 4:05pm # - Oh, and make no mistake – I’m a proud and full-fledged member of all egghead associations..!
— moj May 26, 12:50am # - Well, I think we can all agree that Disney is as notorious as certain governments in its penchant for re-writing (hi)stories, and never a terribly good measure of anything, story-wise, except perhaps how lucrative formula can be.
And I’ll agree that there’s nothing “fatal” in the idea of digested classics for kids, quite the contrary if it turns our yout onto the pleasures of reading.
But, still, as far as keeping the canon alive, I can’t see that simplified versions are doing much more than sustaining the characters as icons in our collective imagination. Though slowly robbing them of nuance, and of the words of the mind that brought them to life in the first place.
Which, to me, isn’t the same thing as borrowing from a source, or several sources, to create a so-called new tale.
God, how many times has Romeo and Juliet been re-hashed? (Which was itself a re-telling.)
While the re-hashings in no way detract from the original, they are still pale substitutes.
I suppose it’s interesting too to wonder why we feel the need to perpetuate certain works (that most people only ever read in school, and often feel glad to be done with). Are we admitting that all the great stories have already been told?
— gail May 26, 8:34am # - One of the basic assumptions of this kind of corruption (and I do think of it as corruption; adaptation is one thing, this is something else entirely) is that the assumption is that it’s the “story” that matters most. Which I tend to disagree with. Dickens’ work (or the work of any other ‘classic’ author, Dickens’ place in the canon still being disputed in many circles) did not become ‘classic’ because of the story alone; the stories are tightly bound to their execution, and that is one of the primary reasons we continue to read them at all.
Now, there are people with genuine learning disabilities, and those disabilities are in fact biochemical. Those people may literally be unable to read the more complex classic works of even a straightforward guy like Dickens. The danger of these other versions floating around is that we may eventually wonder why we bother with the originals at all, since these are so much easier. (Not everyone agrees with Dr. Bloom that reading is the search for a difficult pleasure.)
I also object to Charlie being classified as “for children”, but that’s another kettle of fish entirely.
— August May 28, 2:06pm #
commenting closed for this article