Weltschmerz And Children’s Literature

 

 

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. – Franz Kafka

 

 

Children’s literature is a wonderful paradox. It is delightful tales told of adult issues. The Grimm’s tales and Anderson’s, for example, were exceptionally dark yet the child reading the story accepts the darkness as part of the story and is carried away by the fantasy. This is a great credit to the child’s mind and gives a glimpse of the inherent genius of the said mind.

 

Children’s literature often takes one or more big themes from life and considers them through a different prism. Peter Pan is the tale of children who don’t want to go to bed as they do not want to lose the magic of childhood by getting a day older and so are taken away to a land in which there is only one villain, a grownup who hates the children for their eternal youth whilst he himself is constantly pursued (either in actuality or in his mind) by time which wishes to devour him (portrayed by a crocodile which has already bitten off his hand (with his watch) causing the hand to be replace by a functional (somehow) cold metal hook. The symbolism being that he is aware of time and time has already changed him with its first bite. Plato wrote ‘He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden’, imagine Hook as a child. Ugh).

 

Alice tells the tale of a little girl who finds the conventions of the real world absurd and so goes into a wonderland in which the characters exist only as possibilities. There is no should or shan’t but only what if and why not. Alice traverses the world and finds that these characters live in fear- fear that their what ifs and why nots will be replaced with shoulds and shan’ts. The world is utterly absurd and yet more real than the real world.

 

The German writer John Paul Richter coined the phrase weltschmerz. Weltschmerz is the feeling of depression which arises when comparing an ideal world to the actual world and this, surely, is what makes great children’s literature great. The authors look at the world and see a world in which the what ifs and why nots have been replaced by shoulds and shan’ts. Thus they create a world which abides by their ideals, a world which is fantastical to adults but completely plausible to children.

 

As one grows older, as with Susan in Narnia, one finds less need for ‘stories’ as real life sets in with duties and conventions. The what ifs and why nots become replaced by shoulds and shan’ts yet deep down one knows that this is not the real world, as the world should be, and those brave enough let themselves fall back into the world of whimsy and magic and are reborn in the real world.

 

In the Velveteen Rabbit the rabbit asks the old skin horse how one becomes real. The skin horse replies that first one must be really loved but that to become real hurts and by the time one becomes real one’s fur has rubbed off and one is blind and so forth but none of these things matter for to be really loved is to be real and is to live in a world of what ifs and why nots.

 

‘till next time