A loss beyond imagining: child disappearance in fiction.

All through the twentieth century media accounts of child kidnapping or abduction acquired solidity and projection, especially in American and British contexts (consider, for example, recent parental abductions and paedophilia court cases that have been documented by the media). One could almost argue that child disappearance (the disappearance of children from the home and the disappearance of childhood) constitutes a hegemonic social and cultural construction of the late twentieth century and a dominant structure of feeling. Within present webs of meaning, the child lost by parents, the non-existence of children, kidnapped, abducted, and killed children, the absence of children from the family are all related cultural phenomena, also connected to the several theories that warn that childhood is disappearing or that we are witnesses to the `end of childhood'. Though related, however, they mean contextually in several different ways depending on which audiences are being addressed and to what purpose, as is the case with texts about children and texts directed at children as readers.

It is not exclusively in contemporary culture, however, that there is mention of the disappearance of the child. Past constructions have always dealt with images of a lost, abducted child, side by side with images of children's deaths, and interpretations have been offered of their cultural, social, institutional, and emotional meanings. My argument is that child disappearance is being woven into our contemporary notions of `the child' in particular ways that do not resemble those of the past and which are dictated by specific historical conditions: We are living a moment of cultural transition in the ways of defining `the child' and `the family', a period of globalization and new information and communication technologies that pervade the home and every other sphere of life. (1) Our time is shaped by several discursive forms of `the end of childhood', of the `pollution' and `robbing' of children, and of the conceptual `crisis' of how to make meaning of children in material conditions that, having revealed and condemned the associations of children with work, violence, or consumption, still cannot keep up the boundaries of an imagined and desired safe world of childhood. This is a time in which discourses on childhood address simultaneously the absence and the presence of children: their absence in adults' recollections of childhood and their presence as real individuals who either differ from or resemble adults.

Despite the many theories that support (and contradict) the disappearance of children and which have given rise to debates in the human and social sciences, little has been written of their implication for children's literature, though it is hard to evade its implications, since children's fiction is based on the presence of the child (reader, character, memory of an adult writer, the child within the adult). How the notion that childhood is disappearing has an impact on children's books is a question that needs to be addressed and a central issue in the clarification of literary and cultural constructions of the child. The first step towards the desired clarification is to consider why, how, and whence children disappear. It will come as no surprise to learn that the family is an institution from which children are disappearing and thus a central location in which to discuss the implications of the cultural phenomenon of child disappearance. Secondly, it is important to deal with the forms and conventions of representing child disappearance and the feeling of loss in fictions of and for the child and to acknowledge the difficult relationship of children's fiction and its criticism to representations and constructions of the disappearance of children, particularly as bodies, physical presences.

The issue of the disappearance of childhood is not adequately approached as a set of arguments for or against. On the one hand, having been thought of as commercialized and directed at children, children's literature stands apart from several other disciplines of knowledge which recently have had to acknowledge either that the child has been missing from their writings and conceptual frameworks or that his/her voice has gone unheard, accused of untruth in cases of child sex abuse allegations, excluded from agency and civil responsibility, marginalized to areas of non-interpretation, or subjected to meanings imposed by adults. On the other hand, predictions of `the end of childhood' and of its erosion threaten the existence and maintenance of a literature specifically or exclusively directed at children.

But when we speak of the disappearing child it is never quite clear whether the child does not exist or that it is we who do not see him/her. Do children disappear from culture because there is nothing to see (since children have become similar to adults) and nothing to know (because it is always adults who speak for and interpret the meanings of children), or because there is nothing to say about them due to the fact that we have ceased to care? Have we exhausted the subject of the child? Or do we want to suppress the child through stating that s/he does not exist? I am not sure it is possible to answer any of these questions fully, though I propose to confront the existing theories of child disappearance both as theoretical arguments and as fictions we live by. One thing may be ascertained from the start: child disappearance cannot be dissociated from the places occupied by children on the streets, in wars, as consumers, as viewers of television, as information technologies experts, and as the first mortal victims of global business and of war in all parts of the world. It has become impossible to insulate the lives of children from the manifold narratives that sustain their presence, and from the cultural and economic politics of the East and the West that represent children as an economic liability, a burden, voracious and frivolous consumers, and lazy and greedy off spring. (2)

Narratives of Child Disappearance

The subject of child disappearance commonly revolves around adult desperation and a sense of loss beyond imagining, which occurs within the privatized space of the family unit, as depicted in Ian McEwan's novel The Child in Time. (3) Child disappearance thus becomes a social, material, and cultural fact interpreted by adults in the contexts of their own needs, anxieties, and fears.

The Child in Time draws the child and childhood at a crossroads of discourses and meanings, seeking ultimately to dismember the image of child as innocent and as a symbol for progress. The child in time is in fact a child out of time, unable to represent the future in the present, caught in the webs of adult projections which imagine her/him at the margins of time flow, as if the child were an impossible presence in adult representation strategies. Adults nurture childhood as a dimension of infinite and immutable time, an idea of innocence, and a locus of affective investment. Simultaneously these conceptions are distorted by adults' willingness to use the child as political weapon, the subject of a Childcare manual that will stand for a sign of the regeneration of a country. The narrator, Stephen Lewis, is quite open about The Authorised Handbook of Childcare he, among others, is supposedly writing, stating,

And there was no richer field of speculation assertively dressed as fact than childcare. [...] For three centuries, generations of experts, priests, moralists, social scientists, doctors--mostly men--had been pouring out instructions and ever-mutating facts for the benefit of mothers. No one doubted the absolute truth of his judgements, and each generation knew itself to stand on the pinnacle of common sense and scientific insight to which its predecessors had merely aspired. (p. 80)

The speculation about the child through which adults seek to reinvent their authority in the alienating living conditions of the capitalist and industrialized world cannot guarantee them the power they want to exert on the child nor empower the latter. Adults inevitably become enmeshed in education policies and family conceptions that hide conservative politics. Children are made prisoners of fictions of innocence. Stephen Lewis not only exposes the impossibility of arguing on `the child', but also makes it quite clear that adults (even those who are called specialists of the child) and children are puppets manipulated by politicians and governmental policies of the Thatcherite 1980s. Even before the subcommittee on reading and writing has ended its meetings with a view to producing the Childcare manual, there is already a copy of it, the `Restricted Reading Copy E-8. Copy nr. (5)'.

This copy was supposedly written by Charles Darke, a successful politician who, none the less, regresses to the paradise of the childhood he dreamt of, the sexual fantasies of the schoolboy, and the countryside as opposed to city life. This is the background against which the major plot evolves, that of Stephen Lewis's inner and outer search for his lost daughter, Kate, abducted in the supermarket when she was three years old. Since her disappearance, Stephen sees her ever present, an invisible child, in the children on the street, in parallel time, unable to cease loving her and to repress his desire for her presence. His private family chaos caused by Kate's disappearance, which occupies two and a half years of his life, is balanced only by his official engagement in producing the Childcare Manual. Unable to let go of Kate as spirit, as existence by his side, Stephen plays with scientific theories and education policies of the child and with notions of non-linear time, of parallel dimensions of time and space where past and present and possibilities of being unfold. From competing discourses that create and recreate reality, Kate (the missing daughter) materializes as street waif, political strategy, abstract and universal conception, or fragment of adult memories.

Extensively theorized, the child dissolves in an empty succession of meanings and Kate becomes increasingly fragmented: she is the mirage that Stephen pursues through town, she is the child that grows in her father's imagination; though gone missing, she becomes the dead child on the platform of the big railway; she is the school pupil Ruth Lyle. Just as the languages of science, of fiction, of politics, and of pedagogy multiply notions of the child, so Stephen, the father, looses his hold on the concrete presence of the stolen Kate.

Symbolically, the theme of The Child in Time, becomes central for the 1980s. A child is no more principally physically concrete, but the discursive production of adults interested mainly in reliving their pasts or using the child to articulate fears and wishes. From the point of view of the adults in the narrative, the life and feelings of the child are worth narrating and reflecting upon because they are irreconcilable with public life, despite being articulated by specialists and politicians in the public sphere. The absent child is obtrusively and excessively present in the life and acts of adults, though not as concrete presence, but mainly as a fictional motif that challenges values, life coherence, and responsibility. (4)

Two children's disappearance is the theme of Genevieve Jurgensen's autobiographical The Disappearance, (5) which stresses the devastated feelings of parents when confronted with the death of their children, feelings of panic and grief that devour their vitality, feelings of stupefaction, anguish, and unbearable pain. Don't Look Now (1973), a film directed by Nicholas Roeg, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, similarly documents the `appalling loss' of Christine, a small girl in a red mackintosh, drowned in a pond, through the desperation, wild hope, and `crazed persistence of desire' (6) of her father. The figure of the dead child and the colour red structure the plot and the terrifying, tragic, unspeakable loss of a child and its devastating emotional impact on the parents, bringing to the fore that which stands as the worst nightmare of every father or mother.

These three examples, centred as they are on the parent-child bond and on the location of the child in the family from which s/he disappears, are no doubt significant for our panic-stricken, anxious times regarding the safety of children. One of the striking features of these texts lies in the fact that parents claim the absence of children for themselves. The disappearance of children, daughters, is the starting point for gripping narratives of parental grief, emphasizing the hurting void left by children in the family, the purposelessness of adult lives without children, and the disintegration of societies unable to care for and protect the lives and well-being of their children.

The Disappearance of Children from the Family

The disappearance of children is predominantly articulated with the private space of the family unit. The latter is conceived in isolation from the outside and juxtaposed to the public space. Thus, instead of pursuing the arguments of so many critics for or against Philippe Aries's thesis, (7) either that parents did not grieve for their offspring prior to the contemporary conception of the child or that parental anxiety and attachment to their o ff spring always existed and can be documented from letters, journals, and poems, I want to propose an analysis of the theme of child disappearance as a social, material, and cultural fact interpreted by adults within the contexts of their own needs, anxieties, and fears. The disappearance of children concerns in particular the child in the family and the alteration of traditional lifestyles. There is wide talk of new forms of child abandonment within the familial context: children who hardly have a chance to spend time with their working parents; children who are put in front of the television-set-turned-nanny; children of disrupted and malfunctioning family structures.

In a multiply divided society, child disappearance, in its many forms, is not a homogeneous subject, but mainly concerns middle-class grief and/or estrangement; the nature/nurture dichotomy; the anxieties and love of adults for children; with inevitably as many other meanings as those embracing `the child'. Consequently, the particular frameworks in which we have learnt to narrate and read the child and its disappearance, relate to a particular place of the child, namely that of the family and the home. Children disappear mainly from families. We do not address the case of the children in the streets of Rio de Janeiro as `missing' or having been abducted (though they are part of the theoretical argument for the disappearance of childhood). Child disappearance as a tragic and fateful event makes sense within the context of the privacy of family life and necessarily configures an assault on that place.

Despite the obvious physical, biological bonds between mother and child, constructed, circulated, maintained, and naturalized throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by many scientific discourses, (8) and despite the fact that grief for the disappearance (i.e., death or abduction) of a son or daughter has been with humanity since time immemorial, neither what is understood as `child' or as `parent' or as `family' (i.e. relations between parent and child), can be approached as stable concepts in time or space. The idea of `family', like that of `the child', is produced and circulated through discourses and cultural sensibilities as well as through subject areas (e.g. history, sociology, literature, psychology, medicine, politics). It is fluid and economically determined. `The family' and the obvious connection it has acquired with the study of the child has to be approached as a cultural and historical ideological concept that changes in time. Although we could adopt a psychological stance and speak of an invariable mechanism of each individual rooted in his/her family life as his/her first social experience, crucial for identity formation, this particular discursive and scientific interpretation of the child's relation first to the mother and, later, to the father can only occur within contemporary definitions of `the family' and of `the child'. And even twentieth-century definitions of the family are not as stable as they might appear at first sight.

The modern or nuclear family is, according to Edward Shorter, (9) a unit that depends on the presence of the child. In fact, Philippe Aries was first to acknowledge that the particular conception of the child we hold today depends on a new post-Enlightenment sensibility that accords the family pride of place. Unlike the traditional family, which presupposed a wider community, included many generations, and promoted the association of its members, according to gender and age, in religious, work, and festivities groups, the modern family is characterized by an emotional and domestic unity of mother (parent) and child, by romantic love, and by `home' as the protected haven from an aggressive and dangerous outside world. Being closely knit, intense in the interpersonal relations of adult with child, the nuclear family was put in charge of traditional patterns of socialization (communication and control), which were therefore reproduced in the interior of the family. The family and the home became the safe playground for children.

The new forms acquired by the family since the eighteenth century due to economic demands and demographic changes obviously impact on parents' attitudes towards their children. Henry Cunningham contrasts children as economic value for parents during the nineteenth century with twentieth-century children seen essentially as expensive and a cost. (10) D. W. Winnicott and John Sommerville, before him, called twentieth-century children a burden for parents, (11) although many authors call attention to the fact that the increasingly fewer children per couple, as well as an emotional investment in the child, have led western parents to expect more of children and consequently be more disillusioned by them. (12) Contemporary times, however, though incorporating many of the residual meanings of the nuclear family and the child from the past two centuries, have had to face what has been called the dissolution and the dysfunction of the family ideal (a nineteenth-century middle-class ideal of mother and children at home and father working outside, of stable and lifelong marriage bonds, of the subordination of women and children to men).

To understand the new structure of feeling in contemporary emotional attitudes of parents towards children, it is important also that we understand how `the postmodern family' is characterized for our times. For Shorter, on the one hand, the modern family is edified on the mother-child relationship, while the postmodern relies on the erotic life of the couple. As such it is more unstable and less supportive of the `nest' idea, since women are economically independent and feel mothering as stifling. On the other hand, parents shift from the role of educators to that of friends of their children in order to compete with the influences and values of peer groups of children and adolescents. The functions of the modern family in surveillance of and contention with the child are diluted. (13) Educating, caring, socializing the child, instilling in him/her the consequences of a benevolent authoritarianism through coercion and power are still important methods of social control by the family, (14) but the emotional bond is now also greater, as is the growing feeling that the power relations of adult over child have to be overthrown, that children should be respected in their feelings, wishes, and reactions, and that they should be accorded new civic rights. Permissiveness in parents is accompanied by the growing recognition of the presence of a culture of consumption and fun morality directed at children. (15)

The postmodern family is, thus, one of the social and cultural agents that construct children's identities and subjectivities in contemporary culture. The postmodern family can be envisaged as an effect of crisis in the modern family due to heavy divorce rates; it can also be held responsible for the emotional deprivations of children or their violent and criminal behaviours, as happened during Margaret Thatcher's and John Major's governments, with ensuing legislation (the `Young O ff enders Act' of 1982, the `Education Reform Act' of 1988, `The Child Support Act' of 1993 and the `Education Act' of 1993), that denounced the dysfunctional family as causing the violent or deviant behaviours of children. (16)

The interesting point about these urban children (mainly represented as boys and from the working classes) is that they have clearly escaped from familial containment and have dissolved into the big threatening outside world, thereby losing the possibility of incarnating innocence. The sense of threat that accompanies criminal and undisciplined or untutored children, their disappearance as `children' and their re-emergence as monsters or victims of a ruthless society is counterbalanced by the nostalgia for a lost category of the innocent, pure, passive, and dependent child. It is this child (necessarily in contemporary times a very small child, almost a baby) that is surrounded by a halo of agonizing love and grief, of unspeakable horror in the face of the myriad imaginable violent behaviours that can be inflicted upon such a small and fragile, dependent familial being.

Thus, the postmodern family and society are predicated upon the fear of the disappearance of the child and on the terrifying absence of the child, symbolized either by the death of children or their abduction. The disappearance of childhood as we know it is the larger issue. The disappearance of particular children, which the media have institutionalized, translates a painful event for parents into a cultural scenario of crisis and panic. This scenario is marked by absence, by the lack of a stable meaning of the child, and more terrifying the pressure on the boundaries that separate adults from their children-others.

Child abduction, kidnapping, and the voluntary or involuntary disappearance of children may well represent the nostalgia for imaginary relations within the family of love, affection, kinship, and identity, and be an indication that too much pressure is being directed at the child-family agenda. These fateful events certainly play a compensatory role for the many images that identify children as perpetrators of evil deeds, as violent, as antagonistic to parents and to the law, as belonging to peer groups rather than being involved in benevolent mother/child and father/child bonds, and as polarizing relations between generations. On the whole, the forms, narratives, and meanings of child disappearance in contemporary societies strive to deal with changes in the composition and meanings of the family and changes in the generation division of adult and child in the culture industry. Both are partly the result of the changing structures of late capitalism, in the context of which we are witnessing child disappearance reflecting altered social, economical, and cultural conjunctions and new child and childhood conceptions.

Narratives of the disappearance of children are capturing our contemporary imagination because they represent a `nostalgic worship of childhood innocence' (17) through being an attack on, a seduction or an abandonment of the child as the image of innate good, innocence, and ignorance. However, these narratives also articulate, in complex ways, the present cultural climate fraught with talk about the disappearance of `the child' or its future extinction as category set apart from adults, as if the criminally produced disappearance of a child were a cultural phenomenon related to a new conception of the child that fails to see it as innocent, either because innocence understood as ignorance has ceased to be possible in a depraved world, or because the innocence, playfulness, and tenderness of children has acquired a devilish counterpart (the bad children of modernity who kill and exhibit unimagined violence), or because childish innocence is theorized as a strategy of adults to demean and overpower children: innocence demands that children are kept outside society.

This brings us to a proposition: children's abductions, disappearances and deaths are also expressions of the environment of risk and chance of high modernity. (18) The physical and symbolical notion of the disappearance of children and of childhood stands for the apparent contemporary inability to calculate risk and therefore control human activity. Child disappearance, a symptom and symbol of the declining social value of certain children (i.e., poor children) in advanced industrial societies, may be viewed as a means of representing the future not only as unknowable but also as problematic and insecure. Because of childhood's value as an idea of continuity and of the future, the disappearance of a child also becomes the disappearance of a wholesome utopia or, at least, of the conditions of self-reflexivity and calculated risk which, according to Anthony Giddens, define high modernity. The disappearance of a child stands thus, in modern social life, as a fateful moment, when things are wrenched out of joint suddenly and unpredictably. It threatens stability, human faith in action, it imposes grief and penalties on the adults in charge, and, ultimately, it demands a change of habits or a readjustment of projects. The narrative representations of child disappearances ultimately call for the transformation of existing conditions and for new possibilities to be envisaged, emerging out of a sense of utter powerlessness and disillusionment. These moments thus configure the need for major transitions, for the re-skilling or empowerment of individuals, groups of people, or whole societies.

Two Case-Studies of Children's Picture Books

Contemporary picture books for children have not remained uncontaminated by fictions of the disappearance of the child. In quite remarkably different ways, Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There and Jon Sciezska and Lane Smith's The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales deal with theories and aspects of child disappearance.

`When Papa was away at sea, and Mama in the arbor, Ida played her wonder horn to rock the baby still--but never watched. So the goblins came. They pushed their way in and pulled baby out, leaving another all made of ice.' These are the initial words of a picture book by Maurice Sendak, Outside Over There, published in 1981. (19) In a domestic world of sisterly affection and courageous action undertaken by the young female protagonist, the fairy world of grey-clad goblins intrudes to snatch away a baby girl to be a goblin's bride. In this picture book for children by the well-known American children's author, baby snatching becomes the motive for a girl's heroic action in exploring the `outside over there' with a magic horn and finally rescuing her baby sister into the safe world of femininity (mother and girls) in the garden. Within the magic space of far-away times and goblins, the baby girl is stolen to become `a nasty goblin's bride', a fate from which big sister Ida, in the absence of father, rescues her through playing the wonder horn and transforming the goblins into a dancing stream.

The story of the little baby girl stands in a long tradition of narratives about innocents kidnapped for the private interest of adults or others, of which R. L. Stevenson's Kidnapped (1886) is perhaps the best known example. (20) Children may, however, disappear either because they get lost, spiritually and/or physically, as in Blake's well-known poem, `The Little Boy Lost' from Songs of Innocence (1789) or in the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel, or disappear from one particular social context only to reappear in another, as in the case of magic tales and time travel stories. The abducted child and the child who mysteriously disappears (only to reappear later) is also a common motif of mystery stories and thrillers, such as Mary Kelso's Abducted! (1988), James Grippando's The Abduction (1998), and Jacqueline Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean (1999), (21) to name but a few. Invariably, however, it is less a sense of loss that these texts address than the possibility of finding the lost child or of gaining a new identity. Children's books have, in fact, been described as predominantly about `being or becoming, about the quest for self hood and identity, the attempt to discover what it is that makes an individual person or thing indubitably him or herself'. (22) They are not about disappearing and not being. Though a slightly exaggerated conclusion, it none the less serves the discussion of child disappearance in children's fiction. As in Sendak's picture book, when a child disappears, it is another child that looks for it and recovers it, or it is the lost child's narrative that the readers are invited to follow. The theme of the absence of the child or of child disappearance is balanced by another child's concrete fictional existence. Nevertheless, there are feelings of absence and loss, though these concern the relation between parents and children. (23) Just like adults in fictions about the child, abandoned, dispossessed, orphaned, and parentless children of children's books feed on their own insecurity, deprivation, and isolated lives, none the less managing to survive in the absence of adults and of their lack of perception of how children feel. Children's voices, as represented in contemporary children's books, still largely concentrate on the feelings of absence, loss, confusion, and pain, though more and more, throughout the twentieth century, on the distance between parents and children, adults and children, thus marking out the frontiers of `childhood'.

Apparently, children's books depend on the presence of children or childlike characters for their existence. In fact, one way of understanding the role of children's fiction in society and culture is through seeing it as a space for the articulation of the voices and the stories of children, in spite of the presence of adults at the production and reception ends of this type of communication with children. It is therefore mainly the adults that disappear from children's books, who become non-existent, who exist elsewhere (outside the narrative frame). The absence of adults is that which, within the narrative conventions of children's books, allows children a voice to tell their own stories and to be heard. However, one must be aware that despite getting rid of parents or pushing them to the margins of the narrative, children's books continue to live out the role of the child as emotional object in the protecting and loving discourse of parents through the presence of adult authors/narrators and child characters. Children's books are as much discourses for children and e ff orts at interaction between adult and child as about children among adults. The child appears locked inside the family and its fantasy systems, as well as in its discourses of parenthood. The disappearance of children in children's fiction, when it occurs, thus becomes a strategy to make them more visible and central and seldom separates them for ever from their familial contexts or familial projects of identity as continuity.

Children's fiction does not ignore the threats aimed at `the child' and at his/her disappearance, though it holds on to a set of conventions that seem to contradict the feelings inherent in an age of anxiety, risk, and change through protecting an imagined world of order, harmony, and familiarity in the background. It has certainly found themes and plots of its own to confront the contemporary cultural politics of child representation. As in Sendak's picture book, the kidnapping of the little sister none the less leaves the bigger child in charge. The mild terror and confusion and the disruption and disintegration of the female core of the family caused by the kidnapping are replaced by order (the eighteenth-century bucolic scene), reassurance, protection (the German shepherd dog), and peace in the end. In the face of the threat of a child's permanent absence from the family, it is another child who has the strength and the resolution to restore a familial world to its classical proportions of an enclosed garden by the sea, an ordered landscape, a man playing the piano, a small brook over a calm rivulet, sheep grazing, children playing.

The majority of books for children (I am excluding on purpose those that have started to be considered young adult books) are still positive and encouraging through the happy endings they configure, the closed endings, the harmony and balance re-established, even when they narrate fear, insecurity, doubt, chaos, weakness, worries, and anxieties. Maurice Sendak is not only an example, but the incarnation of what Susan Ang calls `the fiction which is still generally current today, of the immense stability and security of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century societies' (pp. 57-58). Somehow children's books have managed, at least partly, to keep their value as adult escape routes from chaos and anxiety, from outside polluted and corruptible worlds, as the last space where the child can be written of as present and presence, despite the many indicators of radical changes in the fabric of contemporary societies on how to understand, define, and maintain the adult/child dichotomy.

Still, other picture books are differently confronting the challenges of child disappearance. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992), by Americans Jon Scieszka, writer, and Lane Smith, illustrator, won the Caldecott Honor medal; it is a commercial success (followed by many others), and has been very favourably reviewed by literary critics. (24) One of its authors, Jon Scieszka, has even been described as having changed the face of children's literature for ever. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales is becoming a set text in the children's fiction literary canon, and it seems to be widely acclaimed by child readers. This particular picture book is a perfectly good example of how, through the child (and her/his wish to disappear), adults are seeking to define their identities and anxieties in a changed environment and faced with the end of childhood as a representation of passivity and innocence.

The book retells and recreates fairy tales: Jack and the Beanstalk (which unfolds into three stories, `Jack's Bean Problem', `Giant Story', and `Jack's Story'); Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin which blend into `Cinderumpelstiltskin or the Girl who Really Blew it'; The Ugly Duckling, which becomes `The Really Ugly Duckling'; Little Red Riding Hood, transformed into `Little Red Running Shorts'; The Tortoise and the Hare, which transforms the latter into a homophone and develops into a parody of the fable; The Frog Prince, which becomes `The Other Frog Prince'; The Princess and the Pea (now `The Princess and the Bowling Ball'); The Little Red Hen; and a recreation of several fairy story plots and structures in the stories of `Chicken Licken and of `The Stinky Cheese Man'. The coherence that holds the text together is double, that of the traditional tales and that of the subverting logic, which is only made available if the former are known.

These tales are all made grotesque with the help of the bizarre sense of design of the illustrations by Lane Smith, the play with words and nonsense, reminiscent of the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, and the graphic chaos that holds the book together. The narrator Jack is ugly and perverse looking, a kind of small and unimportant dwarf who lies in hiding after every page in order to organize his material, who has to plead with his characters for them to appear on the page, and who is poised on the rim of one of the unnumbered pages. He has no master's voice and is presented as being unable to control the disruptions of (presumably his) narration.

The fable of the `Tortoise and the Hare' becomes a text in which a rabbit challenges the tortoise with these words, `Tortoise, you are so slow I could probably grow hair faster than you run'. So `Tortoise started to run' and `Rabbit started to grow his hair' and, consequently, a coil of hair trails from one page to the next. Table of contents, book jacket, fly leaf, end papers, dedication pages, ISBN code, none escapes the mad and funny sense of confusion and altercation that holds the book together. Chicken Licken keeps shouting her story through the pages, the giant of Jack and the Beanstalk eats the bread, crunches words under his boot, messes the story line, cuts pages out of fairy-tale books. The words change in size, colour, and intensity, following patterns of sounds, catch phrases, assembling a rhapsody of tales. Pages are given numbers in the table of contents, despite not being numbered. The dedication page is written upside down and the reader invited to stand on his/her head to read.

These are a few instances of the irreverence in contents and structure of this book, achieving through it the illusion of little authorial control and a creative rebellion in which the characters seem to have an independence of their own, running loose, contradicting and interrupting the narrator, and the story lines are left to interfere with each other. There is no place for sensible thoughts or morals or for a stable narrative or sequence of stories. All boundaries are dissolved: those that separate each tale; those that limit the text itself from editing details such as title page, dedication, bibliographical information; those of the traditional fairy tales, explored almost nonsensically to their subversive potential; those of a realistic narrative that aims at disguising the processes of its own construction. Most relevantly, the stability of the book is challenged: it is replaced by a dynamics of words and characters that resist meanings imposed on them, by images, designs, and graphics that subvert words and meanings generated by them, by a narrator who has to play hide and seek with the giant through the pages, by a red hen who continually interrupts other stories, and by a table of contents with a life of its own, which falls and smashes the characters of `Chicken Licken'. This is the postmodern text of pastiche, simulation, and counterfeiting (symbolized in the narrator Jack, who tries to push the end page to an earlier position in order to defeat the giant).

There are but three children represented graphically in the pages of The Stinky Cheese Man and they may rightly be defined as postmodern and in the process of disappearing: Little Red Running Shorts and both a little boy who runs away and a little girl who jumps in the air because of the Cheese Man's stink. These are active, reactive children, with no friendly looks on their faces. In fact, all look angry and in the act of turning away from the events of the page. The little boy actually says, `Let's get out of here', just as Little Red Running Shorts addresses the wolf, `Let's go, wolf. We're out of here', turning her back on the narrator Jack who wants them to stay for the story. These children's voices arise in frontal disrespect and disobedience to the narrator's injunctions, and furthermore they disrespect teachers: `A little boy looked up, sniffed the air and said, "If we catch him [meaning the Stinky Cheese Man], our teacher will probably make us eat him. Let's go out of here".' These are angry children of the 1990s, represented in flight, shown experiencing difficulty in achieving the obligatory fun of our modern cultural trend to mix work and fun together. They are bored and beyond the control of the book's pages as well as the authors.

The dismissive and rebellious attitude of worldly and wise children, similar to the subversive kinderculture tones of Kevin in the Home Alone films or to Lisa and Bart Simpson, is reinforced by the structure of the book itself, the disorganization of which seems to welcome and define the child reader as the reader who skips pages, looks and/or `reads' at random, interrogates words, covers, pictures, and ultimately who goes away, leaving the book behind. The apparent lack of control of the narrator Jack and the running loose of all story characters also seem to invite the child reader to read as s/he pleases, for the fun of it, not paying much attention to sequence, logic or moral, setting the activity of reading as largely self-regulating for children.

A very definite projection of `child' thus emerges from these pages: irreverent, solid, intransigent; cynic, agent, critic of the world in a comic and playful way; fantasizing the world, recreating it as out of proportion, distorted, intrinsically funny, mad, nonsensical. This child reacts to the fantasy of fairy tales, considering their moral precepts crude and their logic stupid. This clever child is well-informed, with access to many stories, creative, possessor of a child's mind able and free to develop traditional lore, book contents, and form. In conclusion, we are, on the one hand, confronted with the child of a permissive child-rearing style that assumes that too much manipulation of children by adults may be destructive for the child, and, on the other hand, with a child who wants to get rid of the adult constructions imposed on him/her, through `running away' from the narrative and abandoning the pages of the book.

Thus, children are configured as disappearing from the story plot and are simultaneously being asked to take part in and laugh at the construction of texts and stories, to read them as they please, to relate them, to subvert authority structures, to escape through cynicism and downright rejection from the reading of traditional fairy tales, but also from realism and from a kinderculture.

Scieszka and Smith's picture book is radically different in kind and in the way it constructs the child from Sendak's. Placed outside the family in a no-morality, all fun environment, it is the children themselves who purpose to abandon the boundaries and strains of `the book' as microcosm for the world of children's fictions and culture. They do not need the affective protection of the family, the authority of teachers, they do feel vulnerable to adults' conceptions, but are not helplessly subjected to them. They do not need to be rescued by other children, but are quite able to negotiate the terms of their existence on the physical margins of the picture book and even suggest that they will be safer outside the limits of the picture book.

This particular picture book betrays a deep-set cultural difficulty surrounding the adult-child relationship. It acknowledges that adults are experiencing major difficulties in making successful transitions to adult autonomy and responsibility, through the depiction of a permissive and fun-moved culture and a postmodern ethos centred on a metacritical attitude, on the joys of rupture, nonsense, non-purpose, play, and art of no ethical or political significance. Thus, the children's wish to disappear from the pages of the book has to be viewed as a certain way of constructing narratives about the child that are woven out of the materials of the contemporary muddle surrounding the category of the child.

The latter is not caused by transformations in familial patterns alone, but also concerns a particular sensibility of the twentieth century initiated in the Peter Pan myth, namely the difficulty of growing up and of biological ageing experienced by adults. The rival claims that adults do not want to leave behind the irresponsibility of childhood and that children know too much are two contradictory tendencies that necessarily transform generational bonding and conflict. The causes for this sociological condition have been sought and found, again and again: Theodor Adorno complains about the childlike attitudes of adults in the grip of the modern culture industries. (25) Neil Postman argues that children are the first casualties of a global media culture of late modernity in that these erase the differences between adults and children. (26)

Thus, the growing panic over children's acts and habits through all the institutions of regulation and surveillance of the child (family, school, government policies and advertising campaigns against truancy, for example) translate easily, on the one hand, into that of the child missed to distraction by adults. But this is an innocent child, an unsafe child in an unsafe world in need of parental and institutional protection from all sort of predators. Childhood thus becomes exclusively a social construction of possessive adults. The abducted child dissolves into a mirage, s/he has no voice, s/he is victim rather than actor, s/he depends on adult intervention, imagination, and regret.

On the other hand, children may be invited to occupy transgressive positions (even if they result basically in being invited to reflect on the construction of fictionality while reading), transforming what adults see as disappearance into an escape from the impossible terms of child construction and enunciation through manifold discourses.

(1) For a different account of the variations of the history of the ideology of childhood, see Henry Jenkins, `Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths', in The Children's Culture Reader, ed. by Henry Jenkins, (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 1-40.

(2) See Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, ed. by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 10-11.

(3) Ian McEwan, The Child in Time (London: Picador, 1988).

(4) McEwan himself states that children are the motifs for our search for values. They foster confidence and honest communication among people. Simultaneously they represent an investment in coherence, continuity, and responsibility. See R. Casademont, `The Pleasure of Prose Writing vs. Pornographic Violence: An Interview with Ian McEwan' European English Messenger, 5.1 (1996), 44-45.

(5) Genevieve Jurgensen, The Disappearance (London: Flamingo, 1999).

(6) Leslie Dick, `Desperation and Desire', Sight and Sound, 7.1 (1987), 10-13.

(7) Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1959), trans. by Robert Baldick (London: Cape, 1962).

(8) I am not calling the bond of mother and child `natural' as its naturalness has been constructed throughout the centuries. See Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), who holds that despite variations in the child rearing traditions and advice to mothers, these always loved their children.

(9) Edward Shorter, The Meaning of the Modern Family (London: William Collins, 1976).

(10) Henry Cunningham, Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

(11) D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family and the Outside World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964); John Sommerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood (Beverley Hills, CA, London, and New Delhi: Sage, 1982).

(12) Vivian Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

(13) Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 75-77.

(14) Penelope Leach, Children First: What Society Must Do--And Is Not Doing--For Children Today (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 117-18, 129, 204.

(15) Martha Wolfenstein, `Fun Morality: An Analysis of Recent American Child-Training Literature', in The Children's Culture Reader, ed. by Henry Jenkins (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 199-208.

(16) See Thatcher's Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, ed. by Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (London: Falmer Press, 1996).

(17) Marina Warner, Managing Monsters. Six Myths for Our Times (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 34.

(18) Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 109.

(19) Maurice Sendak, Outside Over There (London: Bodley Head, 1981).

(20) Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (1883; repr. London: Penguin, 1994). Orphaned David Balfour falls prey to his uncle's greed and is kidnapped in order to be prevented from inheriting a fortune and a position he is entitled to. He becomes one of those `unhappy innocents who were kidnapped or trepanned (as the word went) for private interest or vengeance' (p. 33).

(21) Mary Kelso, Abducted (New York: HarperCollins, 1988); James Grippando, The Abduction (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); Jacqueline Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).

(22) Susan Ang, The Widening World of Children's Literature (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 5. She also extends this definition to `books about children', which I consider inappropriate, considering the texts cited in the first part of this article.

(23) Victor Watson, `Children's Literature and Literature's Children', in The Prose and the Passion: Children and Their Reading, ed. by M. Styles, E. Bearne, and V. Watson (London: Cassell, 1994), pp. 169, 174.

(24) Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (New York: Viking, 1992). Other books by John Scieszka and Lane Smith include: Squids Will Be Squids: Fresh Morals, Beastly Fables (New York: Viking, 1998); Summer Reading Is Killing (New York: Viking, 1998); Tut, Tut (New York: Viking, 1996); Math Curse (New York: Viking, 1996); 2095 (New York: Viking, 1995); The Book That Jack Wrote (New York: Viking, 1994); The Good the Bad and the Goofy (New York: Puffin, 1993); The Not-So-Jolly-Roger (New York: Puffin, 1993) Knights of the Kitchen Table (New York: Puffin, 1993); Your Mother Was a Neanderthal (New York: Viking, 1993); Frog Prince (New York: Viking, 1991); The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (New York: Viking Kestrel, 1989).

(25) Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).

(26) Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (London: Allen, 1982).

MARGARIDA MORGADO
Educational Polytechnic of Castelo Branco