I just recently listened to NPR.org's story about A Wrinkle in Time and the unlikely classic it would become. This book has always held my admiration, not just for the story itself, but the story behind the story. It took L'Engle many years to get this story published, even though she already had six published books and was already an established author. But the story didn't fit the editorial mode. Who was it for? Would it sell? Who would want to read this story? Just about everyone. The book received the Newberry Medal in 1963 for outstanding children's literature. Madeleine L'Engle has always been a hero of mine. I own every single one of her books, save the one that is out of print. She did more to shape my understanding of writing and writing fantasy than almost anyone. I am particularly drawn to her idea that fairy tales and myth are part of a universal language that children automatically respond to and internalize. Here are some of her loveliest words about a subject that is near and dear to my heart. From the Newberry Award speech by Madeleine L'Engle “A writer of fantasy, fairly tale, or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his own knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can’t possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant. Very few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it’s their own world, the world of their daily life, and it’s our loss that so many of us grow out of it. Probably this group here tonight is the least grown-out-of-it group that could be gathered together in one place, simply by the nature of our work. We, too, can understand how Alice could walk through the mirror into the country on the other side; how often have our children almost done this themselves? And we all understand princesses, of course. Haven’t we all been badly bruised by peas? And what about the princess who spat forth toads and snakes whenever she opened her mouth to speak, and the other whose lips issued forth pieces of pure gold? We all have had days when everything we’ve said has seemed to turn to toads. The days of gold, alas, don’t come nearly as often. What a child doesn’t realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairly tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture. Many Newbery books are from this realm, beginning with Dr. Dolittle; books on Hindu myth, Chinese folklore, the life of Buddha, tales of American Indians, books that lead our children beyond all boundaries and into the one language of all mankind. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth… The extraordinary, the marvelous thing about Genesis is not how unscientific it is, but how amazingly accurate it is. How could the ancient Israelites have known the exact order of an evolution that wasn’t to be formulated for thousands of years? Here is a truth that cuts across barriers of time and space. But almost all of the best children’s books do this, not only an Alice in Wonderland, a Wind in the Willow, a Princess and the Goblin. Even the most straightforward tales say far more than they seem to mean on the surface. Little Women, The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn --- how much more there is in them than we realize at a first reading. They partake of the universal language, and this is why we turn to them again and again when we are children, and still again when we have grown up” (L'Engle). | |
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Thoughts:A random conglomeration of thoughts and observations. Archives
May 2015
Categories
All
|