Katherine Paterson
...We marvel at a man like Nelson Mandela. How was he able to walk out of prison after twenty-seven years of torture and humiliation and lead a tortured and humiliated people into a nation that sought justice without vengeance? If ever we despair of the human race, here is a man who can inspire us once again to hope.
"But didn't you hate your captors?" an interviewer asked him recently. "Yes," he replied. "For the first thirteen years I hated them. But then one day I realized they could take away everything I had - except my mind and my heart. I would have to give those away. And I would refuse to do that."
Nelson Mandela is a miracle, a man who knew that he had a mind and a heart too valuable to surrender, so dear in fact that he would use his solitary sentence to nourish himself. So for the next fourteen years he grew his soul. For which the world will always be in his debt.
I do not claim for a moment that any book could work that kind of miracle in most ordinary humans. But I think there is a gift that a book can give a child which bears some relation to Mandela's story. A book can give a child a way to learn to value herself, which is at the start of the process of growing a great soul. It is why I struggle so against the idea that characters in novels should be role models. Role models may inspire some children - but they didn't inspire any child that I ever was. They only discouraged me. Whereas that awful, bad-tempered, selfish Mary Lennox - who could admire her? Who could love such an unlovable creature? Yet she was given the key to a secret garden. Not because she deserved it, but because she needed it. When I read The Secret Garden, I fell in love with Mary Lennox. She was my soul mate. And because I loved her, I was able to learn to love myself a bit.
I am often accused of creating unlikable characters. Many a well-meaning teacher or parent has taken me to task for bringing Gilly Hopkins into the world. But ... if given a chance to reform her, I would flee in the opposite direction. Because children love Gilly. It seems that the worse they are, the more they love her. Which means, I believe with; all my heart, that loving Gilly, they can begin a little to love themselves, and children who love themselves do not strike out at other people. They do not shoot their classmates or blow up their schools. I would like children to take from a book I've written something that helps them love and value themselves...
When I look at my major characters, I seem determined to give them hope; when I look at the lot of many of my minor characters, I begin to resemble a child abuser. Well, I'm not Dickens. I can't make everything turn out rosy for all. There are a lot of Viles in this world who have trouble remembering that their real name is Violet. It seemed that in all honesty, the writer must acknowledge that. Still, we do not ever know what a child will take and treasure from a book. Once after I had made a speech, a young woman waited until everyone else had left the room to tell me that Bridge to Terabithia had saved her life. It seems she was a victim of incest from the time she was very young and had kept the uneasy secret of her family locked inside herself until one day, inexplicably, someone had scrawled her name and the four-letter-word message of her hidden family shame on the sidewalk outside the school for all the world to read. "I didn't know what to do when I saw it," she said. "Then people came up and began asking me what it meant. But I had just finished reading Bridge to Terabithia, and I remembered what Leslie said to Janice Avery - that if she just pretended she didn't know what they were talking about, everyone would forget all about it in a week. It got me through that terrible time. I wanted to thank you for that."
That wonderful young woman reminded me once again that there are a lot of children in our midst, locked up in all sorts of frightening or lonely attics. I don't think it is too much of an exaggeration to say that books can be a key to that locked door...
I'm not known to be in the vanguard of current trends, but I know what a Muggle is. And as Muggley as I may look to you, I had read all three Harry Potter books before the middle of last summer, which, you will note, was before volume three had even been published in this country. And how is it, you may well ask, that you were able to read them before most of the rest of us could get our hands on them? Because, I say smugly, my neighbor Kevin at Lake George, a non-reading, computer-crazy, eleven-year-old boy, was so enamored of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone that he nagged his mother (who had the credit card) into getting on the Internet and ordering volumes two and three from England for him. When he learned I was also a fan, he kindly loaned them to me. I gobbled them down in a two-day orgy.
Later that week, surrounded by his buddies, he came sauntering up to me on the swimming dock and, in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone around, proceeded to ask me a few key questions about Harry Potter, glancing back at his friends to make sure they were getting the point that he and I were having a literary discussion.
Exactly one year before, his very literate mother had been moaning to me about the fact that her son just wouldn't read anything. Now he was gulping down 300-page hardback books and bragging about it in front of his friends.
To those of you literalists out there who are mumbling under your breaths that the place of Harry's confinement wasn't an attic, it was a cupboard under the stairs, I will say, merely, that it had spiders. That qualifies it surely as a metaphorical attic...
The point I want to make in the context of this speech is why this particular attic child has conquered the reading world, as well as many whom we would have thought of as citizens of the non-reading world. J. K. Rowling has tapped into the secret heart of us all. Just as Cinderella, despised and unrecognized amongst the ashes, made us all hope that someday our prince would come and reveal us for the princesses we were in truth, so Harry Potter fulfills our dream that we are in truth magical and powerful, and if only we could wrench ourselves free of the Muggles of the mundane world who drag us down and lock us in cupboards, we would flyaway on magic broomsticks and amaze even the denizens of enchanted lands.
I hurry on to say that J. K. Rowling has done far more than simply tap into our unconscious longings. She has created a marvelous, delightful, and deliciously scary parallel world. I think Time magazine is right when it compares her books with the classic fantasies of Tolkien, Baum, Carroll, and Lewis. I think Rowling's writing will also endure and will deserve to. The adventures of Harry Potter, which have pulled a generation of computer-crazed children away from the keyboard and into a series of great fat books - these adventures will enchant children for many generations to come.
As I was thinking about the differences between Sara Crewe and Harry Potter, it occurred to me that they exemplify for me the principal difference between fantasy and realistic fiction. It is not that one genre is intrinsically better than the other, either as literature or as food for the emotions. It is, instead, a matter of where the imaginative action of the book takes place and, therefore, what we take away from the book, what we remember.
In A Little Princess, as in most serious realistic fiction, the imaginative world is inside the central character's head. In fantasy, the imaginative world is outside the main character. So, although you can perhaps think of notable exceptions, it seems to me that what we remember most about strong realistic fiction is character, while what we recall most readily about fantasy is story. Thus what we take away from A Little Princess is Sara Crewe herself; what we remember most about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban are Quidditch, Botts Every Flavor Beans, Hogwarts Express, and all the amazing adventures that Harry encounters. The magic is on the outside rather than the inside...
I'm very biblically oriented... and so for me the most important thing is for the word to become flesh. I can write stories for children, and in that sense I can offer them words, but you are the word become flesh in your classroom. Society has taught our children that they are nobodies unless their faces appear on television. But by your caring, by your showing them how important each one of them is, you become the word that I would like to share with each of them. You are that word become flesh.
What I want to say to that isolated, angry, fearful child in the attic is this: You are not alone, you are not despised, you are unique and of infinite value in the human family. I can try to say this through the words of a story, but it is up to each of you to embody that hope - you are those words become flesh.
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"But didn't you hate your captors?" an interviewer asked him recently. "Yes," he replied. "For the first thirteen years I hated them. But then one day I realized they could take away everything I had - except my mind and my heart. I would have to give those away. And I would refuse to do that."
Nelson Mandela is a miracle, a man who knew that he had a mind and a heart too valuable to surrender, so dear in fact that he would use his solitary sentence to nourish himself. So for the next fourteen years he grew his soul. For which the world will always be in his debt.
I do not claim for a moment that any book could work that kind of miracle in most ordinary humans. But I think there is a gift that a book can give a child which bears some relation to Mandela's story. A book can give a child a way to learn to value herself, which is at the start of the process of growing a great soul. It is why I struggle so against the idea that characters in novels should be role models. Role models may inspire some children - but they didn't inspire any child that I ever was. They only discouraged me. Whereas that awful, bad-tempered, selfish Mary Lennox - who could admire her? Who could love such an unlovable creature? Yet she was given the key to a secret garden. Not because she deserved it, but because she needed it. When I read The Secret Garden, I fell in love with Mary Lennox. She was my soul mate. And because I loved her, I was able to learn to love myself a bit.
I am often accused of creating unlikable characters. Many a well-meaning teacher or parent has taken me to task for bringing Gilly Hopkins into the world. But ... if given a chance to reform her, I would flee in the opposite direction. Because children love Gilly. It seems that the worse they are, the more they love her. Which means, I believe with; all my heart, that loving Gilly, they can begin a little to love themselves, and children who love themselves do not strike out at other people. They do not shoot their classmates or blow up their schools. I would like children to take from a book I've written something that helps them love and value themselves...
When I look at my major characters, I seem determined to give them hope; when I look at the lot of many of my minor characters, I begin to resemble a child abuser. Well, I'm not Dickens. I can't make everything turn out rosy for all. There are a lot of Viles in this world who have trouble remembering that their real name is Violet. It seemed that in all honesty, the writer must acknowledge that. Still, we do not ever know what a child will take and treasure from a book. Once after I had made a speech, a young woman waited until everyone else had left the room to tell me that Bridge to Terabithia had saved her life. It seems she was a victim of incest from the time she was very young and had kept the uneasy secret of her family locked inside herself until one day, inexplicably, someone had scrawled her name and the four-letter-word message of her hidden family shame on the sidewalk outside the school for all the world to read. "I didn't know what to do when I saw it," she said. "Then people came up and began asking me what it meant. But I had just finished reading Bridge to Terabithia, and I remembered what Leslie said to Janice Avery - that if she just pretended she didn't know what they were talking about, everyone would forget all about it in a week. It got me through that terrible time. I wanted to thank you for that."
That wonderful young woman reminded me once again that there are a lot of children in our midst, locked up in all sorts of frightening or lonely attics. I don't think it is too much of an exaggeration to say that books can be a key to that locked door...
I'm not known to be in the vanguard of current trends, but I know what a Muggle is. And as Muggley as I may look to you, I had read all three Harry Potter books before the middle of last summer, which, you will note, was before volume three had even been published in this country. And how is it, you may well ask, that you were able to read them before most of the rest of us could get our hands on them? Because, I say smugly, my neighbor Kevin at Lake George, a non-reading, computer-crazy, eleven-year-old boy, was so enamored of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone that he nagged his mother (who had the credit card) into getting on the Internet and ordering volumes two and three from England for him. When he learned I was also a fan, he kindly loaned them to me. I gobbled them down in a two-day orgy.
Later that week, surrounded by his buddies, he came sauntering up to me on the swimming dock and, in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone around, proceeded to ask me a few key questions about Harry Potter, glancing back at his friends to make sure they were getting the point that he and I were having a literary discussion.
Exactly one year before, his very literate mother had been moaning to me about the fact that her son just wouldn't read anything. Now he was gulping down 300-page hardback books and bragging about it in front of his friends.
To those of you literalists out there who are mumbling under your breaths that the place of Harry's confinement wasn't an attic, it was a cupboard under the stairs, I will say, merely, that it had spiders. That qualifies it surely as a metaphorical attic...
The point I want to make in the context of this speech is why this particular attic child has conquered the reading world, as well as many whom we would have thought of as citizens of the non-reading world. J. K. Rowling has tapped into the secret heart of us all. Just as Cinderella, despised and unrecognized amongst the ashes, made us all hope that someday our prince would come and reveal us for the princesses we were in truth, so Harry Potter fulfills our dream that we are in truth magical and powerful, and if only we could wrench ourselves free of the Muggles of the mundane world who drag us down and lock us in cupboards, we would flyaway on magic broomsticks and amaze even the denizens of enchanted lands.
I hurry on to say that J. K. Rowling has done far more than simply tap into our unconscious longings. She has created a marvelous, delightful, and deliciously scary parallel world. I think Time magazine is right when it compares her books with the classic fantasies of Tolkien, Baum, Carroll, and Lewis. I think Rowling's writing will also endure and will deserve to. The adventures of Harry Potter, which have pulled a generation of computer-crazed children away from the keyboard and into a series of great fat books - these adventures will enchant children for many generations to come.
As I was thinking about the differences between Sara Crewe and Harry Potter, it occurred to me that they exemplify for me the principal difference between fantasy and realistic fiction. It is not that one genre is intrinsically better than the other, either as literature or as food for the emotions. It is, instead, a matter of where the imaginative action of the book takes place and, therefore, what we take away from the book, what we remember.
In A Little Princess, as in most serious realistic fiction, the imaginative world is inside the central character's head. In fantasy, the imaginative world is outside the main character. So, although you can perhaps think of notable exceptions, it seems to me that what we remember most about strong realistic fiction is character, while what we recall most readily about fantasy is story. Thus what we take away from A Little Princess is Sara Crewe herself; what we remember most about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban are Quidditch, Botts Every Flavor Beans, Hogwarts Express, and all the amazing adventures that Harry encounters. The magic is on the outside rather than the inside...
I'm very biblically oriented... and so for me the most important thing is for the word to become flesh. I can write stories for children, and in that sense I can offer them words, but you are the word become flesh in your classroom. Society has taught our children that they are nobodies unless their faces appear on television. But by your caring, by your showing them how important each one of them is, you become the word that I would like to share with each of them. You are that word become flesh.
What I want to say to that isolated, angry, fearful child in the attic is this: You are not alone, you are not despised, you are unique and of infinite value in the human family. I can try to say this through the words of a story, but it is up to each of you to embody that hope - you are those words become flesh.
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