On dangerous children – Bharat Tandon in TLS:

‘As a result, he can even begin his study with Alice, perhaps the most critically discussed child in fiction, without the territory feeling over familiar. While he does note that, in the Alice books, “our almost metaphysical attachment to social convention is put to the test”, his real interest lies in the ways in which the figure of the child might introduce into the world a more unpredictable and thoroughgoing spirit of nonsense (“Life itself is a trickster here”, he notes pertinently). By building on, but also stepping away from, critical traditions of reading Carroll primarily in terms of inverted or displaced systems of order, Gross can see Wonderland and Looking-Glass World as shape-shifting places, inhabited by a nonsense that is “transitive, endlessly evolving, collaborative and competitive, hungry and vulnerable. It’s a prehensile, almost a Darwinian nonsense”. Likewise, although the Alice books consistently foreground language and its discontents, from puns and portmanteaus through to the pragmatics of conversation, one of the salutary aspects of Gross’s reading is the attention he encourages readers to bring to the texts’ silences, suspensions of sound and time that bring Carroll and Alice into the company of works such as Tristram Shandy. “Time is disordered”, he remarks, “as a function of the world of play, but also as part of an adult world that doesn’t recognise its own madness, how mad and broken attempts to control time can become”.’

(…)

‘It might also go some way towards explaining why What Maisie Knew is such a re-readable novel: that sense that, for all James’s play with the verb “know” and its relations throughout the book, something of Maisie is always beyond the event horizon of knowledge itself.’

(…)

‘Gross offers an extraordinary account of a certain form of uncanny childhood; and yet it might also have been instructive to set these children, whose “danger” is fully actualized, against those whose potential is compromised or snuffed out – even a figure like Flaubert’s young “Charbovari”, in that vanishingly brief glimpse we get of him before he returns, assimilated by bourgeois propriety and stripped of anything that might once have marked him out. ‘

Read the article here.

The best and probably only defense against our ‘metaphysical attachment to social convention’ is the ‘spirit of nonsense’.

We all deserve an uncanny childhood. At least some parts of the uncanniness must be waiting for us in the future. What else is hope for?