Children’s Books

Many of the formative images and mythologies relating to naughtiness, at least in my personal experience, come from nursery rhymes in which children are depicted as getting up to mischief. The children as characters are defined according to, and often have names suggestive of, their techniques of misbehaving. The tales of Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann, in the collection Struwwelpeter, are a good example of the way pious and moralising discourse finds its way into narrative.¹ In my own experience, these stories and my exposure to them as a child, is also a good example of the discrepancy between the outcomes of such narratives and what their creators might have intended.

Struwwelpeter was first published in German in 1845. The stories are described as funny and whimsical. They are funny perhaps, with the benefit of perspective, but disturbingly so. The titles of the stories featured in the book are as follows: Shock-Headed Peter, The Story of Cruel Frederick, The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches, The Story of the Inky Boys, The Story of the Man that went out Shooting, The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb, The Story of Augustus who would not have any Soup, The Story of Fidgety Philip, The Story of Johnny Head-in-Air, and The Story of Flying Robert. The misbehaving children in these stories tend to come to drastically unfortunate ends. The message is, more or less, if you do fun things you will be punished by fate. Don’t tempt fate. Frederick ends up in hospital, Harriet burns herself, Conrad gets both his thumbs chopped off, Augustus dies from anorexia, Philip, who suffers comparatively mild retribution, ends up falling off his chair and ruining dinner in the process, Johnny falls into the water and has to be fished out by strong men using sticks, and flying Robert disappears from the face of the earth for the sin of playing outside during a storm.

It would of course be wrong to censor fairytales of any exaggerated reference to the horrific or the macabre, but it’s the particular way these stories deal so clumsily with the relationship between naughty tendencies and the complexity of a child’s perceptual and imaginative experience that make them so stark or even deranged. This is one criticism. Another is that in my own experience of reading these tales, I never meaningfully related to the message they sold. I understood the moral, and I was both intrigued and frightened, but what I really took notice of, and I assume it would be the same for most children – at least children who were likely to be naughty – was that kids who misbehaved got stories written about them. There is a slipperiness to the naughty that makes it very difficult to use simply as a prohibitive tool. Like the cute, naughtiness is desirable in a manner that is more surreptitious and allusive than the beautiful, and less obviously bad than the gross, the ugly or the criminal.

The recently deceased Maurice Sendak is a writer whose stories for children reflect an accurately sympathetic intuition regarding the perceptual and imaginative experience of a child. Francias Spufford describes Sendak’s now canonical Where the Wild Things Are as ‘one of the few picture books to make a deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger’ (60).² According to Spufford, and in contrast to the worlds suggested by Hoffman’s tales, Sendak construes childhood misbehaviour as a necessary though not always pleasant part of growing up.

Artur and Jeremias

Franz Kafka’s novel, The Castle, features two memorable characters, Artur and Jeramias, K.’s not so helpful assistants.³ Artur and Jeremias are definitively naughty characters, duplicitous both in their behaviour and their quantity. At the book’s beginning K. can’t tell the difference between them and asks if he can refer to them both by the same name (18-19). The assistants are peculiar beings. Especially concerning the question of age. Jeramias looks older once he’s alone, Artur after he’s taken a beating. The way they look is determined largely by the contingencies of the situations in which they are described. Maturity is a matter of mise en scène.

Kafka’s fictional reality makes a particularly good case for the idea that attributions of naughtiness often involve transformation and sympathy. But perhaps this is more to do with Kafka’s fiction that with naughtiness per se, perhaps it has to do with both. My ideas regarding the way subjects and attributes work in Kafka’s prose appeals to Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of his work, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, however I want to avoid using their vocabulary.⁴ The reason I say that Kafka’s fiction is a good example concerning sympathetic perception is due to the fact that K. is also very naughty, definitively so. Like the assistants he is incorrigible. In reading Kafka, one finds oneself saying, ‘stop, stop doing what you are doing, you continuously implicate yourself in more problems due to your efforts to solve them’ – K. is not really interested is solving his problems, he is interested in self-justified misbehaviour. The way the attribution of characteristics works in the fictional reality of Kafka’s books means that no particular thing or attribute is simply located in a particular character or being.⁵ Rather, traits, potencies and feelings are distributed; they are the forces called to order that structure the various speaking positions. Despite the history of human pretensions that suggest otherwise, we never posses power as such. Although the naughtiness of Artur and Jeremias is constituted by K.’s efforts and inability to discipline them, K. too is naughty to a similar degree.

In Mark Harman’s more recent translation, the comic elements of the narrative are emphasised at the expense of some of the theistic undertones. But even in Wilhelm and Edwin Muir’s translations, K.’s naughtiness shines through: rolling around on the taproom floor with Frieda, his continual, wilful disobedience, his capriciousness, both in behaviour and thought, the way he converts supposed obstacles into profits and potential openings, his simultaneous intent and lack of direction.

The scene involving the assistants that comes immediately to mind is when K. locks them out of the school in which he has temporarily taken up residence. The setting is appropriate considering the associations of naughtiness and ill-disciplined children. The assistants have been harassing K., from the beginning of the story they are regarded as being of dubious worth. He thinks of himself as their superior and basically gets sick of them bugging him, their joking ineptitude and the mild chaos they perpetually produce. Below I quote a large passage in full in order to preserve the pleasant surprises that rhythmically inform Kafka’s prose. Frieda, who seems K.’s both recent and life-time partner – Kafka does a fantastic job of making chronology a matter of emotional intensity – hears that he has dismissed the assistants, who now wait for him outside in the cold. K. accuses Frieda of being ‘too friendly toward the assistants,’

you tolerated their bad habits, laughed at them, stroked their hair, pitied them constantly, ‘poor things, poor things,’ you’ve just said so again, and then finally that last incident, since you believed I wasn’t too high a price to pay for getting the assistants out of a beating.’ ‘That’s just it,’ said Frieda, ‘that’s what I’m talking about, that’s exactly what makes me so unhappy, what keeps me from you, even though I know of no greater happiness than to be with you, constantly without interruption, without end, but in dreams I dream there’s no tranquil place on earth for our love in the village or anywhere else, so I picture a deep and narrow grave where we embrace each other as if with claps, I hide my face in you, you hide yours in me, and nobody will ever see us again. But then – look at those assistants! It isn’t you they are thinking of when they clasp their hands like that, but me.’ ‘And it’s not me who is watching them,’ said K., ‘but you.’ ‘Of course it’s me,’ said Frieda almost angrily, ‘but that’s what I’ve been telling you all along; why else would the assistants be pursuing me, even if they are the emissaries of Klamm – ’ ‘The emissaries of Klamm,’ said K., for though the term immediately seemed quite natural to him, it still came as a big surprise. ‘Yes, of course, Klamm’s emissaries,’ said Frieda, ‘but even if they are, they’re still clumsy youths whose education could profit from a beating. What ugly, swarthy youths, and how repulsive the contrast between their faces, which make one see them as adults, or almost as students, and their childish silly behaviour. Do you think I can’t see this? I am ashamed of them. But that’s exactly it, they don’t repel me, I’m ashamed of them. I can’t stop looking at them, I can only laugh. When one ought to strike them, I can only stoke their hair. (138)

I’ve always loved Kafka for the insight he gives into the non-correspondence produced between speakers that try desperately to sustain their togetherness. That feeling of transient truthfulness associated with love, and the immediate and all the more pronounced sense of failure associated with the expression of that truth. Frieda and K. might just as well be talking to themselves, in their own language, in their own perceptual bubbles. Both express the difficulty of coercing the world’s forces such that they might be in harmony with one’s own position – the unending delight and futility of this.