Undertones
Alan Brien
How To Read Donald Duck Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelar (Idea Books £1.95) The Thorny Paradise Edited by Edward Blishen (Kestral £2.95) What do children get out, or rather put into, books designed for them to read? I believe that they are attracted towards fantasy, because they have literal minds. Everything is equally possible. Lilliputians in a Brobdignagian world, they move every day among mysteries and magic, taboos and cryptic prohibitions, conundrums and codes, unexpected rewards and baffling punishments which make the fairy stories and folk tales appear only a shade more improbable than ordinary grown-up life. What ogre from the Grimms or Hans Andersen or the Arabian Nights matches the historic presence of a Hitler or a Stalin? Fee-fo-fi-fum, General Amin will drink the blood of an Englishman.
Children assume whatever they read must be true, unless reassured on oath to the contrary. I suspect that they would not be as shocked and incredulous as we tend to be when it is suggested that the old nursery classics conceal, just a layer beneath the surface, all sorts of forbidden wishes and archetypal fears. Indeed, they usually know this already, and are perhaps more willing than we to accept the kind of code-breaking pioneered by Maureen Duffy in The Erotic World of Faery — a guidebook to unconscious intentions which all children's story-tellers should study. Did we sense that a tale like The Sleeping Beauty disguises a father/daughter incest myth? (Indeed in Perraut's companion piece, The Donkey Skin, this is the situation, openly stated, made permissible because the princess repulses the king's advances.) But even those common readers who accept the sexuality of children, and agree that they often respond to a sub-text long obscured to parental eyes by diligent bowdlerising, reject the assertion of the kind made in How To Read Donald Duck that there are also political messages which get through. The two Chilean authors see the Disney comic as part of a sustained, international conspiracy to sell US imperialism to the Third World. Radical paranoia? Yet it is not a new charge — indeed 'made most cogently by that great opponent of -totalitarianism, George Orwell, in 1939. rt is all, he claims, "censored in the interests of the ruling class . . sodden in the worst illusions of 1910", adding "the fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no impression behind." And his opinion is backed up by one of the contributors to The Thorny Paradise, a symposium of children's authors on writing for children, in the essay by the historical novelist, Geoffrey Trease. In what he describes as the "Leaden Age" of the genre, before the last war, it was still largely accepted that —
The British must always win. One Englishman equals two Frenchmen equals four Germans equals any number of non-Europeans. A "loyal native" is a man, dark of skin and dog-like in devotion, who helps the British to govern his country. A "treacherous native" is one who does not . . the common people subdivide into simple peasants, faithful retainers and howling mobs. The Cavaliers were "A Good Thing". So were French aristocrats, except for their unfortunate handicap of not being English . . . War was glorious.
In a reply to Orwell, in Horizon of 1940, Frank Richards, creator of Billy Bunter and Greyfriars school, is happy to plead guilty to just such an indictment — 'qt. is an actual fact, in this country at least, that noblemen generally are better fellows than commoners . . . As to foreigners being funny, I must shock Mr Orwell by telling him that foreigners are funny." Richards proved himself an unexpectedly dab hand at controversy, unnerving even in Orwell a little, with his Chestertonian bravado in such remarks as — -A man can believe that the 'tenth possessor of a foolish face' has certain qualities lacking in the first possessor of a sly brain, without being a snob." And he ends by declaring that he trusts Orwell's hopes for a left-wing boys' paper would remain impossible.
Geoffrey Trease shares Orwell's hopes fdr some sort of children's literature which does not endlessly glamorise the status quo, emphasising that whatever is, is right. Yet, despite his own success at the task, and his conviction that we are now in the Golden Age, he does not seem really optimistic that many of his colleagues will march with him. And the collection, The
Thorny Paradise, does not suggest it is one of their priorities.
Even Nina Bawden, also a writer of adult thrillers and extremely intelligent, realistic novels about women at the end of their tether, ducks the issue. She reports -a kind of despair" when asked "What do you know about the problems of the child in the high-rise flat?" or -All writers are middle-class, at least by t'oe time they have become successful, so what use are their books to working-class/ deprived/ emotionally or educationally backward children?" She finds them unanswerable, at best irrelevant, and can only reply that she projects her imagination, and that her child reader does not "live in a slum or mansion."
Yet surely, Orwell and Trease and Nina Bawden's interrogators are right — most books, especially books for children, are a form of. propaganda. Why is it almost invariably one-way here, as it is the opposite way in the Soviet Union? And what can writers and readers do to adjust the balance? In Allende's' Chile, according to Do Dorfman and Mattelart, an attempt was made to produce progressive children's reading. Unforunately, they give little information about the comic, Cabro Chico (Little Kid) they produced to compete with Disney. All we are told is that the CIA-subsidised conservative paper, El Mercurio, denounced the project as "plot" to seize control of children's minds, to "brainwash" the new generation, and inject them with -subtle ideological contraband." If so, the authors demonstrate, it was part of a therapeutic, campaign to supply an antidote to not-so-subcampaign to supply an antidote to not-sosubtle ideological warfare in the US comics.
On the face of it, Donald Duck as a class enemy, and his adventures as parables designed to keep under-developed countries perpetually under, sounds like the mirror image of -Reds-under-.the-bed' hysteria. But the two professors gradually overwhelm such longdistance, armchair cynicism with a wealth of examples. Donald Duck is not the same innocent who appears on British and other
Western European bookstalls.
How To Read Donald Duck may be dismissed here as Marxist sociology gone beserk. It is taken seriously in junta-ruled Chile where all copies have been burned, and possession of it is a capital offence. Children's literature in the. period covered by Orwell and Trease embodied largely unconscious prejudices of its authors. Now, it knows what it is doing, at least where battle is openly joined between rival ideologies. Perhaps we shall begin to See a revolutionary. Frank Richards at work, though clearly it always involves fewer problems to write the conservative version. Children, like grown ups, find it easier to believe in heroes who come from a world they have never entered than from the house next door, or the factory down, the road. Only as conspirators, the few on the run against the many, are the opponents of society as it is permitted to arouse the imagination.
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