Didacticism and Diversion

As we have seen in the previous chapters, katabases for young readers call into question Genette’s association of children’s literature with suppression and sanitization. But in Palimpsestes, Genette also argues that particular types of material tend to be inserted into rewritings of adult works for young readers. He refers to the ‘effets de moralisation’ [moralizing effects] apparent in Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Adventures of Ulysses and describes Télémaque as ‘l’édifiante extrapolation fénelonienne’ [Fénelon’s didactic extrapolation]. ¹ In the latter text:

à travers les erreurs, les tentations surmontées, les épreuves, les bons et mauvais exemples et les leçons opportunes de Mentor, Télémaque subit un véritable apprentissage, évidemment destiné, par procuration, au duc de Bourgogne, et dont le principe même (évolution et formation d’un caractère) est tout à fait étranger au fixisme résolu de l’épopée. ²

[by way of errors and temptations overcome, tests and trials, good and bad examples, and Mentor’s timely lessons, Telemachus is made to go through a real apprenticeship, obviously intended by proxy for the Duke of Burgundy. Its very principle, the evolution and formation of a character, is quite alien to the resolute fixedness of epic psychology.]

Thus, both protagonist and reader undergo a learning experience in the course of a text which injects a didactic dimension absent, in Genette’s view, from its principal hypotext. Given the localized didactic contexts from which many of the texts of this corpus emerge, as well as the moral functions of some of the unsuppressed material (i.e. deaths), Genette certainly seems on firmer ground in this respect. But if children’s literature serves to educate, it also seeks to entertain, and indeed to educate by means of entertainment. Fénelon’s ‘propos essentiel’ [chief objective] in Télémaque may be, as Genette states, ‘d’ordre pédagogique’ [pedagogical], but as we saw in the introduction to this study, the archbishop fully recognized the importance of entertainment in the learning process. ³ As Robert Granderoute makes clear, Fénelon was ‘[h]ostile à la distinction traditionnelle travail–divertissement, il veut faire du travail un divertissement, du divertissement un travail. Il souhaite réconcilier instruction et joie’ [hostile to the traditional work/ play distinction, he wanted to make work playful and play constructive. He sought to reconcile study and pleasure]. ⁴ Fénelon’s belief in the dulce utile would be shared by countless other writers and publishers for young readers. ⁵ Yet from the second half of the nineteenth century in England in particular, many writers for young 97readers regarded entertainment not as a means of sugaring the didactic pill, but as an end in itself.