Place and Space in English Modernist Children's Literature and Its French Translations Barai, Aneesh
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Modernist Repositionings of Rousseau's Ideal Childhood: Place and Space in English Modernist Children's Literature and Its French Translations Barai, Aneesh For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/7903 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] 1 Modernist Repositionings of Rousseau‘s Ideal Childhood: Place and Space in English Modernist Children‘s Literature and Its French Translations Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Aneesh Barai Queen Mary, University of London 2 Abstract It is a little-known fact that several modernists wrote for children: this project will focus on T. S. Eliot‘s Old Possum‟s Book of Practical Cats, James Joyce‘s The Cat and the Devil, Gertrude Stein‘s The World is Round and Virginia Woolf‘s Nurse Lugton‟s Curtain. While not often thought of as a modernist, I contend that Walter de la Mare‘s short stories for children, especially The Lord Fish, take part in this corpus of modernist texts for children. These children‘s stories, while scarcely represented in critical circles, have enjoyed a wide popular audience and have all been translated into French. Modernism is often considered an elitist movement, but these texts can contribute to its reassessment, as they suggest an effort towards inclusivity of audience. The translation of children‘s literature is a relatively new field of study, which builds from descriptive translation studies with what is unique to children‘s literature: its relation to pedagogy and consequent censorship or other tailoring to local knowledge; frequently, the importance of images; the dual audience that many children‘s books have in relating to the adults who will select, buy and potentially perform the texts; and what Puurtinen calls ‗read- aloud-ability‘ for many texts. For these texts and their French translations, questions of children‘s relations to place and space are emphasised, and how these are complicated in translation through domestication, foreignisation and other cultural context adaptations. In particular, these modernists actively write against Rousseau‘s notion of the ―innocent‖ boy delighting in the countryside and learning from nature. I examine the international dialogue that takes place in these ideas of childhood moving between France and England, and renegotiated over the span of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This study thus seeks to contribute to British modernist studies, the growing field of the translation of children‘s literature, and children‘s geographies. 3 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to all the people who have helped and encouraged me over the years. I would firstly like to thank my supervisors Doctor Kiera Vaclavik and Professor Eddie Hughes for their endless patience and insight, and for all their support in opening up new opportunities for me. I am also very grateful to Professor Kim Reynolds and Professor Michael Moriarty for their interest in my project and for their generous advice. I would like to sincerely thank my parents, my siblings, their families and children and Aakash Suchak for their support and encouragement, in life and in learning. Most of all, I would like to thank Nozomi Uematsu, for her daily company, kindness and love, and for her invaluable suggestions for the chapter on queer childhood. I would like to thank all of these people, and many more, for helping me to get where I am today. 4 Table of Contents Introduction Modernist Children‘s Literature and Its Translation into French 6 Chapter 1 Theories of the Translation of Children‘s Literature 41 Chapter 2 ‗A landscape as still and miraculous as that of a dream‘: 73 Woolf, de la Mare and Dreaming Nature Chapter 3 ‗Children and cats in the alley‘: 118 Eliot, Baudelaire and Urban Childhood Chapter 4 ‗O Loire, what a fine bridge!‘: 166 Joyce, Foreignising Domestications and Illustrating Bridges Chapter 5 A Queer Phenomenology of Girlhood: 200 Stein‘s The World is Round Conclusion Rejecting Rousseau Today? 250 5 List of Tables and Illustrations Table 1. English-language editions of the primary texts 17 Table 2. French translations of the texts 19 Table 3. Practical Cats main characters‘ names 144 Table 4. Cats in ‗The Naming of Cats‘ 146 Table 5. Cats musical names 160 Image 1. Napo‘s flamingo, dodo and rabbit 95 Image 2. Vivas‘ Lugton-mountain 97 Image 3. Vivas‘ Windsor chair, back cover 99 Image 4. Grant‘s concrete jungle 100 Image 5. Napo‘s observing cat 102 Image 6. Scheffler fills the city with nature, ‗Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer‘ 128 Image 7. Scheffler‘s cats and children in collusion, ‗The Rum Tum Tugger‘ and ‗Mr Mistoffelees‘ 132 Image 8. Morgan‘s cats in adult clothes, ‗La vieille Chatte Pôdcolleuse‘ and ‗Machiavel‘ 137 Image 9. Grizabella‘s costume, Webber 155 Image 10. Erdoes‘ devil takes a bow 189 Image 11. Rose and Corre‘s Joycean devils 191 Image 12. Corre‘s image-text interplay and diababélien ideograms 193 Image 13. Corre‘s night architecture and child dreaming of the Eiffel Tower 195 Image 14. Blachon‘s medieval town, babyish devil and papal mayor 196 Image 15. Dachy fitting chapters to the edges of pages 237 Image 16. Dachy‘s incongruous dog 243 6 Introduction. Modernist Children‘s Literature and Its Translation into French ‘The higher the aesthetic ideal, the lower seems the calling to write for children.‘1 ‗Modernist children‘s literature‘ may at first appear a paradoxical term. The modernists are often associated with abstract complexity and their works typified by radical experimentation in style, genre, structure and language itself, producing such notoriously difficult works as The Waste Land, The Waves and Finnegans Wake. Further, it is the modernists who rigidified the distinction between serious ‗Literature‘ and popular forms, working alongside the newly formed academic discipline of English Literature to seek to establish a canon that largely excluded women, the working class and, of course, children‘s literature.2 In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Andreas Huyssen sees no points of connection between modernism and mass culture (including such supposedly populist modes as children‘s literature), only antagonism: ‗Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.‘3 One of the figures Huyssen points to in particular is T. S. Eliot, as an example of a modernist author attempting to distance art from the modern world: ‗Modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ortega y Gasset emphasized time and again that it was their mission to salvage the purity of high art from the encroachments of urbanization, massification, technological modernization, in short, of modern mass culture.‘4 Huyssen‘s view of modernism, as exclusionary and intentionally difficult, neglects the 1 Hope Howell Hodgkins, ‗High Modernism for the Lowest: Children‘s Books by Woolf, Joyce, and Greene‘, Children‟s Literature Association Quarterly, 32.4 (2007), 354-67 (p. 355). 2 Beverly Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children‟s Literature in America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 181. Steinar Larsen, ‗Children‘s and Young Adult‘s Literature in the Age of the Millennium: Towards New Concepts‘, in Modernity, Modernism and Children‟s Literature, ed. by Ulf Boëthius (Stockholm: Center for the Study of Childhood Culture, 1998), pp. 98-120 (p. 114). 3 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. vii. 4 Huyssen, p. 163. 7 multifaceted nature of most modernist writers, and I will discuss the true variety of (plural) modernisms below. Moreover, Huyssen takes no account of the brief but significant interest that several modernist authors showed in child audiences. Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein all wrote children‘s stories. While not often thought of as a modernist, I contend that Walter de la Mare‘s short stories for children, especially The Lord Fish, take part in this small but significant corpus of modernist texts for children. Their children‘s stories all reveal not a division or distance between modernism and children‘s literature, but common grounds between them: playfulness, a fresh outlook and the (in)significance of authority figures. They thus reached audiences outside the high brow and this readership has increased past the English-speaking world through the many translations of these children‘s stories. I will examine these neglected texts and their continued reception and reinterpretation through their French translations, in order to consider the places and spaces of childhood in the modernist rejection of childhood ―innocence‖. Specifically, Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s idea of the boy alone with his tutor, playing in and learning from nature, proposed in his profoundly influential text Émile, ou De l‟Éducation (1762), is challenged in multiple ways by the texts I examine here, in light of the developments in psychology, transport technology, urbanisation and philosophy of the early twentieth century, as I will discuss further below. In this introduction, I will outline the issues surrounding attempts to define ―children‘s literature‖, give a critical history of modernist children‘s literature broadly, before specifically discussing the primary texts and their particular critical histories. I will then discuss the modernist rejection of Rousseau‘s ideas and especially his still powerful notion of childhood as ―innocent‖ and ―natural‖ put forth in Émile. I will focus on his presentation of childhood as belonging to a particular space (the countryside, for Rousseau) and how the modernists wrote against this, before ending with an outline of the chapters and the key 8 research questions of this thesis.