The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  In place of Piaget’s breakthrough into recognisable, ‘operational’ rationality at the age of six or seven, the revisionists saw a parallel achievement, in language. Piaget’s bead question, it was clear, did measure something significant. When children reached the point of being able to answer it in its original, tricksy form, something had changed, a new stage of development had been reached. But the ability that had arrived then was the ability to perceive language as a system with formal rules dictating what a sentence must mean, even if the meaning went dead against expectations. The ability to handle the underlying logic had arrived years earlier, the flow of words helping to thin the internal trees long before the child could formulate the abstract relationship between a tree and a wood.

  The reliance on embedded language isn’t a weakness in small children. On the contrary: it is the first way that language becomes powerful for them, as a tool in their understanding of the world. It’s limited, but it’s primary. Through it they can grasp far more than Piaget imagined. They judge, assess, combine, and conserve much earlier than he supposed; they slot objects into groups, and groups into bigger groups. They cannot be as egocentric as he deduced they were, if they spend their time tracking the likely intentions of other people around them, sometimes to the detriment of exact comprehension of difficult statements. It is not just that they cannot easily pay close attention to language that is not embedded. It is that they can pay the closest attention of their lives so far to embedded language.

  And what, paradoxically, is the most embedded form of language, for all that it seems devoted to carrying those who hear it outside the context of the moment? What way of speaking deals out situations one after another, is full of concrete particulars, and keeps a beady eye on people’s intentions all the time? What packs in cognitive material most richly in a form children are able to attend to? The story. Arthur Applebee, studying children’s response to stories in the 1970s, discovered that around 70 per cent of two-year-olds have already begun to use the conventions which tell you that a certain piece of speech is a story, and not some other kind of remark, or joke, or instruction. The special past tense of stories usually comes first, followed by the discovery of the special opening formulas that inform a listener they should now transfer their gaze to happenings entirely sustained by words. Once upon a time. Long ago and faraway. When the people were animals and the animals were people. In the olden days …

  Meanwhile, from the very earliest stages of language acquisition, the child is learning to take words sensuously as well as functionally, for it is the structures of meaning that she or he cannot be scrupulously aware of, not language’s texture, its timbre, its grain – all gloriously embedded things. Rhythm precedes words altogether; the faculty for rhyme grows faster than the vocabulary of words to rhyme with, and spills over into nonsense. Ran, gan, splan, tran, pan, blan. Or there’s the pleasure in the music of lines where only a word in ten is yet understood. ‘Mister Magnolia has only one boot/ He has two lovely sisters who play on the flute/ And his dinosaur, what a magnificent brute!’ ‘I do not like green eggs and ham/ I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.’ Who cares what a dinosaur is, whether eggs can be green. Sounds make subtle patterns. In 1962 the psychologist Ruth Weir noted that her son Anthony, twenty-eight months old, was repeating ‘lipstick like a blanket’ over and over in his cot before sleep: not just making an analogy between the lipstick his mother put to her mouth and the blanket he was holding to his, but building an intensely satisfying trio of lines in which the l sound was followed by the k sound:

  Lipstick

  like a

  blanket

  – all setting up the pulse that beats on through one strand of language to the most developed and complex rhythmic achievements; to

  Of Man’s first Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree …

  And the stories begin.

  But then we are a story-telling species. The biologist Steven Pinker has argued that there is an evolutionary advantage in a language arranged so that it aids prediction of what is going to happen next in a world of potential food and potential danger. Across the whole species, all human languages seize that advantage by naming phenomena as objects or actions, nouns or verbs. This fundamental decision allows humans to construct the flexible, intensely useful sequences of words that tell us who did what, what went where – what is going on. There were other logical possibilities for language, Pinker shows: the logician W. V. Quine has explored some of them. We might have distributed the properties of nouns and of verbs between several different kinds of hybrid words, meaning a-thing-and-its-motion or maybe a-thing-and-its-surroundings. Because we didn’t, our language has a structural bias towards expressions that stay on the same level of reference: another reason why Piaget’s bead question is intrinsically hard to understand. There just aren’t any naturally occurring terms meaning a thing-and-its-category. And because we went for nouns and verbs as the building blocks, every sentence is a model of an event. It’s a report; or we could say, just as truly, that it’s a story. From this point of view, it hardly matters whether the event is real or imaginary. The essential breakthrough of human language is that events of every kind are represented. We tell stories all the time when we speak. Storytelling may be the function that made language worth acquiring. The two-year-old who has started to understand the rules of story is coming into an inheritance which may be as genetic as the upright gait of our branch of primates, or our opposable thumbs.

  *

  What first teaches us the nature of story is not the fixed form of writing on a page. It isn’t the page that teaches us that story is language miraculously fixed into an unvarying shape, which makes absent things present, as if the common air had stilled in its place and become hard crystal, through which you see visions. That comes after. The medium of the first encounter is an adult voice speaking, and saying the same words in the same order each time the story comes around. Once a small child grasps the principle, no one is more eager for the repetition to be exact. The words have to be right, or they aren’t the story. ‘Don’t say “The fox met a family of ducks.” Say: “The fox met Mr and Mrs Duck and all their duckling children”!’ The invariability of a story is what gives it a secure existence. It adds it to the expanding sphere of what is known for sure; and therefore to the dependable world, which is made up at the deepest level, for a small child, of patterns on which it is safe to rely. Piaget called the patterns in an infant’s head ‘schemes’. They begin very simple. There is one scheme of ‘everything that will go into my mouth’. Then it subdivides, and there are separate schemes for food and for not-food. Complexity mounts up. Another way of seeing it is to say that small children agree intuitively with Wittgenstein. ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’ It’s what you know to be true that constitutes the world. Objects are terribly important, but the things in the small child’s world that she or he can touch – the red brick that somehow encapsulates the nature of the whole box of bricks, the kitchen furniture nested at the centre of the whole geography of home – count just as one type of true fact. Objects are just a subset of a scheme that has already divided, the scheme of things-that-are-true. They’re the type of fact you can verify by prodding or biting, but they go together with other types, equally certain, such as the fact that morning always comes. Or that the third little pig’s house will never blow down in any telling of the story, no matter how hard the wolf huffs and puffs. Stories are so. Once you’ve established that they don’t randomly alter, they have a role in the structure of reality. ‘The world is everything that is the case.’

  Not surprisingly, it doesn’t matter much, at this stage when stories are satisfyingly invariant patterns, that they are fictions. The solidity of stories is also the quality that allows them to transport you; but to begin with they don’t transport you very far. G. K. Chesterton pointed out that where a six-year-old is excited if someone opens a door in a story and finds a dragon on the other side, a two-year-
old is excited enough if someone opens a door. The journeys that picture books take a small child on are very often journeys around the familiar. Burglar Bill in Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s phenomenally successful picture book wears a stripy burglar’s jersey and the traditional eye mask. The child who meets him has been introduced to a useful stock figure, maybe their first outlaw, and the wicked energy he represents is getting an outing. But what Burglar Bill does, once he has inadvertently stolen a baby, is to change nappies and warm up bottles, returning to the most familiar rituals with the difference that he is carrying a swag bag. The Ahlbergs’ Baby’s Catalogue takes this to its logical conclusion. It offers the pure pleasure of recognition, and nothing but. Its pages are arrays of feeder bottles and potties, little cardigans and high chairs, alternative mummies and daddies (recognisable as nicely observed types in the human zoo, so that even this virtually wordless book is already giving the adult intermediary who offers it to a child a little something for him-or herself, as the best picture books do, pleasing the social intelligence of adults on the quiet). In Shirley Hughes’s Alfie Gets in First, Alfie, who is about three, excitedly slams the front door behind him, locking out his mum who’s been wheeling his baby sister up the path. Through the letterbox she tries to talk him through the process of opening the door, helped by an ever-growing crowd of passers-by.

  Alfie’s mum – to switch to judgements made by the adult eye – is a frizzy-haired CND-supporting social worker from about 1985. Children don’t do this stylistic/social disentangling, but they do make a global, intuitive decision about whether pictures represent the world as they know it to be. Alfie Gets in First will continue to speak directly to children about their front doors so long as Alfie’s mum still looks reasonably contemporary. The Shirley Hughes I had when I was two in 1966, Lucy and Tom’s Day, doesn’t do this any more. Time has carried away the possibility of recognising the baker, the milkman and the newspaper boy who deliver things to Tom and Lucy’s house. Daddy goes to work in a hat, Mummy stays at home in a print dress. But what I remember is how vivid the illustrations were, then as now led by the ink lines of Shirley Hughes’s particular, rounded sense of children’s faces. The ordinary scenes of Lucy and Tom’s day affected me almost viscerally. The little red and blue train Tom played with seemed to be essence of toy; the tents they made of the dark red blankets in their nursery involved me in all the sensations that go with containment and hiding; the smeech of treacle on Tom’s face at teatime had in it in concentrated form the comedy of disorder, the hilarity of things being out of place. Lucy and Tom’s Day didn’t bring in a single element I couldn’t recognise from my own life. Its ordinary vision was quite intense enough.

  But soon afterwards the child’s mind is being stocked, at speed, with all the figures and locales of story that have no equivalent whatsoever in their own lives. The other kind of story that small children are told – are equipped with, almost – before they can read, is the fairy tale. It can arrive as another, perhaps very beautiful, picture book, Briar Rose or The Dancing Princesses illustrated by Errol Le Cain; or in the form of a Disney video; but fairy stories come closer than most fictions to pure sequences of events, and no telling is definitive, though some are more orthodox than others. The tale is a running order, that’s all. It can be stripped back to a flowchart like a software algorithm, and has been by the analysts who follow the Russian folklore formalist Vladimir Propp. It doesn’t need pictures, it doesn’t need to exist as a written-down text. You don’t remember the words of a fairy story except for a very few ritualised formulas whose utterance is itself an event in the story and therefore belongs in its minimal flowchart. ‘Once upon a time’. ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall’. To be said with three heavy emphases: ‘And she danced until she dropped down dead!’ All a fairy tale needs, on the teller’s side, is a speaking voice. Even a sense of occasion, with deliberate creation of atmosphere, isn’t obligatory. Fairy tales survive perfectly well in the absence of firesides. They succeed partly because they can be reeled off pat by a busy adult to entertain a child while cooking or hoovering a floor. Enough atmosphere is already there. The story’s flowchart already builds in a demarcation from ordinary speech. ‘Once upon a time’ is a marker to the effect that the language which follows isn’t going to work the levers of immediate activity. Switch off your attention to cause and effect – to your surroundings – it says, and listen to this, sweetheart. ‘… Happily ever after’ says that normal service will now be resumed.

  In fairy tales, famously, character is destiny. Who the personages are, and what happens to them, are completely inseparable. You can predict what will happen to a good princess, just from the fact that she is a good princess. Her identity in the story maps out her future. Conversely, her goodness has no other aspects except those that are revealed by her marrying a handsome prince. That’s all her goodness really means; though we will of course have seen it in action in acts of kindness or victimhood at the beginning of the story, so that we know it is there. In true fairy tales, as opposed to literary hybrids smuggling in the techniques of the novel, there are no individual characters, only types. Good princess; bad princess. Witches. Fairy godmothers. Genies. Kings who set tasks for suitors. These beings do not exist in the environment of the child who, at the same time as hearing about Snow White, is also thrilled by stories of door-opening. But the vocabulary of types is actually easier to acquire, in some ways, than knowledge about the child’s own world, because the fairy-tale world is so perfectly self-explanatory. Every appearance by a witch is a complete, sufficient demonstration of what a witch is. In life, knowledge of other people’s natures is both important and relatively hard to come by; it depends on a long loop of inferences moving gradually from the things people do and say, to conclusions about what they’re like. Children can afford to be much less cautious about the information in stories – much quicker to decide. Arthur Applebee asked a group of pre-school children to tell him the characters of a list of animals. They were more certain of the stereotypical personalities of animals they could only have met in stories, such as brave lions or sly foxes, than of the characters of dogs or cats, where experience of specific dogs and cats came in to complicate the picture. Story characteristics are prepared for reception, so to speak; they’re consistent, they don’t contradict themselves, and they’re dispensed at the pace that understanding demands.

  To enjoy a story (including a fairy story) a child has to be curious about people. Also, they need to have reached the stage of socialisation at which they understand emotional cause-and-effect between two or more actors on a story’s stage. One person is angry, and the other person is sorry. Stories work once you know why. Autistic children, who never securely master interaction between people, never cotton on to narrative either. But once a child understands how different people’s actions fit together to make up events, the information in stories flows with a purposeful density quite unlike the knowledge acquired one mosaic piece, or cloud droplet, or Seurat dot at a time, by participation in a world of behaving humans on whom the files are always open. Here’s the first hint of the possibility that fiction can be an alternative to experience, rather than a representation of it.

  Remote from our immediate experience fairy stories may be, but they can’t be remote from our fears and desires, or we would find no urgency in them. ‘Only those voices from without are effective,’ wrote the critic Kenneth Burke in 1950, ‘which speak in the language of a voice within.’ Studies in the 1960s and 1970s of the stories children themselves tell at two and three found a relationship between how ‘socially acceptable’ the actions in them were, and how much they took place in the recognisable, everyday world of the child’s own experience. If they included taboo behaviour like hitting a parent or wetting yourself, or major reversals of emotional security, like having a parent die or being abandoned by parents, they were less likely to have a realistic setting (69 per cent versus 94 per cent), less likely to feature the teller as a character (13 per cent
versus 39 per cent), and much less likely to be told in the present tense (19 per cent versus 56 per cent). Dangerous things were moved further away in place and in time, and were not allowed to happen even to a proxy with the same name as the child. Children a year or two older no longer varied the present tense and past tense, because they consistently told all stories in the past tense; but they used settings in the same way, moving the troubling material outward into fantasy, into the zones where a story event reflected a real event less directly. To castles, pirate ships, space; to the forest. There the terrible things you might do, and the terrible things that might happen to you – not always easy to separate – can be explored without them jostling the images you most want to guard, the precious representations of your essential security. In fairy tales, after all, it is well known that people get their heads chopped off, or are eaten by wolves, or have to weave shirts of stinging nettles. A loose framework of retribution tends to balance up the books on cruelty in fairy stories, by the end; but bad things by no means happen only to bad people. Random acts of senseless violence come with the territory. They are natural there, you might say, along with skin-melting magical transformations, and blatant comic fusions involving noses and sausages, and the sudden sweeping arrival of great happiness.