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Our ideas about childhood tend always, it seems, to express otherness and difference and separation and the need to bridge the gulf. . . .
There is really no move forward or backward, no final wisdom to be achieved-no purpose in the game but the pleasure of the never-ending process.
-Perry Nodelman
I take my epigraphs from Nodelman's "Pleasure and Genre: Speculations on the Characteristics of Children's Fiction" (see the preceding essay). This essay provides the occasion for my own, which is not so much a response to Perry's as a continuation of an ongoing conversation. And let me say at the outset that I shall drop the scholarly convention of citation by surname and refer to my partner in conversation as Perry. I take it that much of the pleasure that reading books of any kind gives is the pleasure of conversation. It takes at least two to converse, and to converse implies not only more than one voice but also more than one point of view. To adapt a saying from an old friend, I note that without points of view there is no learning. And so I can begin by asserting that I learn from Perry and that my understanding of children's literature and its pleasures differs somewhat from his. Somewhat. I think we set out, however, with a similar sense of this literature's potential appeal to all readers.
Perry would, I suspect, sympathize with U. C. Knoepflmacher's assessment of the "subversive touches" in Thackery's The Rose and the Ring: "they kindle a pleasurable alertness that makes the reader-and especially the juvenile reader who enjoys detecting sham and trickery -an eager accomplice of a winking author" (107-8). I'd like to think that "pleasurable alertness" could aptly describe any reader's response to any literature, but the pleasure that Wordsworth describes as a "grand elementary principle" (140) is necessarily different from alert pleasure in that the latter results from attention and learning, whereas the former derives from immediacy and self satisfaction. Pleasure, like anything else, is something we learn, and we can learn to enjoy it as an immediate sensation and also as a cerebral exercise. I'll invent a distinction to help me along here: elemental pleasure and alert pleasure. One we experience from...