Philip Nel’s ‘Tales for Little Rebels’

Philip Nel’s Tales for Little Rebels I thought was published some date ago but NYU is putting out an edition on the Ides of March that I want to mention here considering it makes an critical point about children’s literature, all literature really, and how we think about that subject.

Full disclosure: I know Philip Nel and I like him. Prof. Nel wrote what I think was the first academic attempt to come to terms with Harry Potter as literature and his critical biography of Dr. Seuss is perhaps the best thing I’ve read of that type, certainly in the field of children’s literature. I met him at my first Harry Potter conference, Nimbus 2003, and again in Toronto at Prophecy 2007. He came to my talk about Literary Alchemy in Orlando and was very kind and encouraging to me in his comments afterward (to understand how grateful I remain for that kindness you’d have to remember I was considered something of a nut-job at the duration by Ivory Tower types for arguing that Ms. Rowling was using a traditional alchemical scaffolding for her work).

What is Tales for Little Rebels about? Here is the Amazon page’s product description:

In 1912, a revolutionary chick cries, “Strike down the wall!” and liberates itself from the “egg state.” In 1940, ostriches pull their heads out of the sand and unite to fight fascism. In 1972, Baby X grows up without a gender and is happy about it.

Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer, twentieth-century leftists encouraged children to question the authority of those in capability. Tales for Little Rebels collects forty-three mostly out-of-print stories, poems, comic strips, primers, and other texts for children that embody that radical tradition. These pieces reflect the concerns of twentieth-century leftist movements, like peace, civil rights, gender equality, environmental responsibility, and the dignity of labor. They additionally address the means of achieving these ideals, including taking collective action, developing critical thinking skills, and harnessing the liberating capability of the imagination.

Some of the authors and illustrators are familiar, including Lucille Clifton, Syd Hoff, Langston Hughes, Walt Kelly, Norma Klein, Munro Leaf, Julius Lester, Eve Merriam, Charlotte Pomerantz, Carl Sandburg, and Dr. Seuss. Others are relatively unknown today, but their work deserves to be remembered. (Each of the pieces includes an introduction and a biographical sketch of the author.) From the anti-advertising info of Johnny Get Your Money’s Worth (and Jane Too)! (1938) to the entertaining lessons in ecology provided by The Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo (1971), and Sandburg’s mockery of war in

Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), these pieces will thrill readers intrigued by politics and history—and anyone with a love of children’s literature, no matter what age.

If you’ve read the Seuss/Geisel work, you know that Prof. Nel really understands the way children’s literature delivers meaning within the lines (as well as in-your-face) and particularly ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ meaning. We live in a historical period, of course, characterized by no little irony considering the regime’s letter today is the deconstructionist anti-metanarrative war-cry “Speak Truth to potential!” The irony and black comedy of having an implicitly anti-regime report as the predominant cultural meme we see played out in the weird contradictions of political correctness.

The value of Prof. Nel’s book, though, and the point of that post is only the fairly obvious one that all books are vehicles, first, of the core values we have in common as humans living in a specific historic period. Children’s books, considering they are nearly by definition stripped down work in which the moral messages are transparencies even the youngest reader will get, are broadsides of these shared ideas or mores.

The odd thing is that we recognize that in primers (if we’re paying attention or lucky suitable to be guided by a mentor as capable as Prof. Nel) but neglect it in popular fiction. Harry Potter, Twilight, and The starvation Games have several things in common, though their narrative lines are poles apart: think ‘literary alchemy,’ ‘religious allegoricorical meaning,’ and ‘genre melange’ for starters. The most obvious  — or least obvious for being hidden in plain sight — is their shared postmodern mantras of “the exclusive metanarrative is evil,” “don’t believe what you think,” and “right choice is the only means to real freedom (and the only valid choice is, that’s right, “speak truth to power”).

I think we can expand the data of Prof. Nel’s book, in fact, though it is not about Young Adult or Adult fiction or even Children’s literature as a whole, to the whole of reading and story-telling in our times. All of it, to greater or lesser degree, is about fostering the “Little Rebel” in us.

Sadly, in a nation of non-conformists imagining themselves all to be “different” in wearing their baseball cap off center like everyone else pursuing individuality, such messages are redundant. Please send me your list of novels, not about ‘Little Rebels’ combatting prejudice and discrimination, but about the young person who chooses to conform to higher standards rather than lower ones considering s/he believes there is a larger life in community and tradition and in the spirit than in the individual, the conventional, and the ego.