| From
the March/April 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Hansel, Hobbits, and Harry
recently had the good fortune to see a brilliant production of Humperdinck’s
Hansel and Gretel at the Chicago Lyric Opera. Directed
by Richard Jones and designed by John Macfarlane, it was not intended
as a production for children; nevertheless, it neatly focused the
work using its most child-compelling theme: hunger. The first-act
curtain displayed a painting of a proscenium-high empty plate; the
second act began with another huge image of a gaping red-lipped
mouth with enormous white teeth; the third went back to the opening
drop, but now the plate was smeared with blood. The famous “Evening
Prayer” tableau gave Hansel and Gretel a midnight feast prepared
by the fourteen angels — here got up as chefs à la
Sendak’s Night Kitchen bakers, but with heavenly
white wings.
As compelling as the production was, of even greater
(professional) interest was the conversation in the stalls during
the intermission. Although enthusiasm bubbled, questions were asked:
where were the pebbles, the breadcrumbs? Somebody was looking for
“the woodcutter.” Apparently unaware of the changes
the Grimms themselves visited upon succeeding editions of their
tales, many commented on the opera’s “changing”
the stepmother to a mother. The talk not only displayed an appreciation
of the opera but was evidence of art mediating between adulthood
and childhood. We in the audience had collective and individual
memories of hearing, reading, seeing, and perhaps retelling “Hansel
and Gretel”; the evening added to our personal variations
on themes first heard long ago.
In this issue, noted fantasy novelist Susan Cooper
looks at The Lord of the Rings, a work that may not have
the same primacy as “Hansel and Gretel” (though its
characters wander in analogous woods) but one that similarly engages
an audience of both adults and children. Tolkien’s trilogy
was published for adults, but its audience gathered up college students
in the 1960s and teenagers in the 1970s and will reach still younger
with the impetus of the popular movie.
The movie will also broaden the audience beyond
the self-consciously countercultural — reading The Lord
of the Rings has long been a mark of coolness for its fans
(who are in turn dismissed as geeks by its detractors). Harry Potter,
on the other hand, is not about countercultural coolness. You don’t
read Harry Potter to set yourself (and others “like
you”) apart, you read it because everyone else is, and you
want to join in the fun. If LOTR is an adult book that
found its truest audience among the young, Harry is more
like The Hobbit, a book for children that adults have taken
up for their own pleasure. As Christine Heppermann points out in
her provocative column on book reviewing this month, a lot of us
are in this business because we like to read children’s books,
whereas to most of our chronological peers a forthcoming novel by
Lois Lowry or Virginia Euwer Wolff is pretty much a nonevent, never
mind something to anticipate. And unlike the children’s books
that usually do attract adult readers, Harry Potter is
indisputably a book for children, not some sanctimonious fable tricked
up as a picture book (think The Giving Tree). My partner-the-Realtor
says he’s amazed at Harry’s regular appearance on nightstands
in tony loft-conversion condominiums whose décor says No
Kids Here, Ever. Unless someone wants to offer a theory that putting
Harry Potter on your nightstand is an urban variant of
burying a statue of St. Joseph in the yard in order to sell your
house, I’d say it’s clear that this wizard has bewitched
an adult audience on his own terms.
As regulars to this page will know, I don’t
count myself among Harry’s fans, so my point is not
that the sign of a good children’s book is that adults like
it, too. Instead, it’s that we should pay close attention
to what Heppermann says about respecting, indeed cultivating, our
own responses to the literature we provide to youth. To say of,
for example, the Captain Underpants books that “these are
dumb, but kids like them” is to acknowledge the distinction
between critical response and professional observation. I’ve
cautioned before about confusing the two; let me here suggest that
we can’t trust the latter without investing ourselves in the
former.
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