Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [126]
In Britain, Vinnie has observed, most lecturers feel an obligation to entertain their listeners and to avoid jargon; it is therefore usually safe to attend any public talk if the topic seems interesting. Maria Jones, however, is too nervous to think of her audience, and is made almost inaudible by shyness; and Dr. Smithers is too self-satisfied. He has, as he puts it, “studied extensively in the United States,” and delivers his platitudes with a bland transatlantic pompousness. Like some American educators, he insists upon speaking of The Child as a sort of abstract metaphorical figure—one of those Virtues or Graces represented in stone on public monuments. Smithers’ abstract Child is full of Needs that are in danger of being “unmet” and of Creative Potential that must be “developed” if “he-or-she” is to become a “full human being.” Vinnie has always especially detested the latter phrase; this evening it has an ironic ring—seeming inevitably to refer to Smithers’ own physique, which is of a rotundity rare in Britain. In Vinnie’s own country, according to statistics (borne out by her own observation) one out of three men over thirty is overweight. Here most remain trim; but those few who do become fat, as if by some law of averages, often becomes excessively so. In the same way, those British minds that allow themselves to be filled with jargon swell to sideshow proportions.
Warming to his subject, exceeding his allotted twelve minutes, Smithers declares that The Child’s “moral awareness” must be awakened by “responsible literature.” The frictions and stresses of Our Contemporary World press hard upon The Child; he-or-she (Smithers, no doubt aware that the majority of his audience is female, has used this awkward pronoun throughout his talk) must be able to look to literature for guidance.
Vinnie yawns angrily. There is no Child, she wants to shout at Smithers, there are only children, each one different, unique, as we here in this room are unique—perhaps more so, for we are all in the same profession and have been sanded down over time by the frictions of your nasty Contemporary World.
How much nicer and less boring it would be if we were all still children, Vinnie thinks. Then, as she often does on boring public occasions, she relieves her restlessness by imagining the weight of years lifted suddenly from everyone in the room. The older members of the audience, like herself, become children of ten or twelve; the undergraduates mere babies. Whatever their new age, all those present, upon finding themselves transformed, share a single thought: Why am I sitting here on this chair listening to this nonsense? At their table, the speakers and the moderator look at each other with surprise. Smithers, who is now a fat, earnest boy of six, drops his notes to the floor. Vinnie’s friend Margaret—already at nine a sensible, kind, observant little girl—leans over to comfort Maria Jones, who is now only about three years old, but already painfully anxious in public. Margaret wipes Maria’s brimming tears and helps her to climb down from the platform. In the audience the baby students toddle about, playing house under overturned chairs, scribbling on the walls with pencil and chalk, building and demolishing textbook towers with shrieks of mirth.
It would be only just if some minor, humorous god, perhaps The Child Him-Herself, were to work such a metamorphosis, Vinnie thinks. The very idea of making children’s literature into a scholarly discipline, of forcing all that’s most imaginative and free in what Smithers calls Our Cultural Heritage into a grid of solemn pedantry, pompous platitude, and dubious textual analysis—psychological, sociological, moral, linguistic, structural—such a process invites divine retribution.
Though it has given her a livelihood and a reputation, not to mention these happy months in