Kidnapped 4.3

I had come to his door no better than a beggar and little more than a child; he had met me with treachery and violence;
it would be a fine consummation to take the upper hand, and drive him like a herd of sheep.
~     Kindle Edition, pg 27

David Balfour is not a child, but his story, published serially in a child's magazine, offers a range of experiences and an ideal for which to strive. David is already seventeen when he sets out to seek his fortune from his uncle at Shaws, but he sets a heroic example for young readers. David's adventure requires him to be resourceful, to make friends, to learn to trust and assess people. He acts bravely, and makes good choices with the information he has.

One important factor in the scene from which the quotation comes that contrasts starkly (or agrees with, as the ages differ) to Olaudah Equiano's childhood is David's confidence in himself because of his size. Although his uncle threatens him with violence, he is entirely sure he could give back as good as he gets. He express fear in other places in the book, but only in a context that also includes courage or action despite it. Olaudah and other children feel helpless when antagonized by grownups and other large people. David may be shanghai'd and kidnapped, held hostage, and hindered, but only when he is ill does he feel really weak and helpless. He jumps an impossible distance with "that kind of anger of despair that has sometimes stood me in stead of courage" (136), even drunk, ill, cramped, and bruised from running. Illness is also David's biggest excuse for picking a fight with Alan on politics (172).

Further questions: the ending. Why so sad?

Wuthering Heights 1.4

"They both promised fair to grow up as rude as savages."
~     Oxford World's Classics, pg 40

Wuthering Heights is not didactic or sentimental. It isn't educational, or a realm of the fantastic to be a child again. It is not autobiographical, from memory, and although Nelly Dean diagnoses poor Catherine every which direction, the story itself frustrates and even disapproves of such judgment. No, I believe that the children in this novel, though they grow up soon enough, can only be agents with authorial power. They frustrate beloved plot patterns, and behave badly.

Mr. Lockwood, the tenant in the narrative frame, learns most of Catherine's story from Nelly, who unabashedly dislikes her charge, so far as to say "I own I did not like her, after her infancy was past" (58). And yet she's the romantic heroine of at least the first part of the book. Well. . .

I'll say this: Nelly's theories on how to raise a proper child (education and discipline) contradict Catherine's wild, romantic childhood. She plays on the moors with a foundling named Heathcliff, and her "natural" development leads her to love him, and vice versa. Things begin to go wrong when that wild childhood meets the demands of civilized society, and I do not believe that a conclusive answer for the tragic conflict is offered by the text. As any great work of literature, it merely presents the questions. Is the Romantic child missing necessary skills for a successful adulthood? Is the "civilized" child missing characteristics necessary for happiness?

A criticism of the Romantic child is the condemnation of ignorance. I will need to come back to this text. It fascinates me more, the more I think about it.

I mean, does the Romantic childhood, does wildness produce the agent? Maisie was certainly a little ignorant, her book education being neglected for seeking her approval. Education must in these times have been thought of as producing civilization, control, and passivity, where now the rhetoric seems to imply, at least, that education offers power and independence. I think the Victorians were possibly more right. Anyone who has survived the liberal conditioning that is an undergraduate degree knows that education intentionally reproduces similar or nearly unvarying modes of thought.

Mill on the Floss 5.3

We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behavior to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, 
but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilized society.
~     Eliot, George (2012-05-17). The Mill on the Floss (p. 22).  . Kindle Edition. 

I think perhaps I will not be able to properly categorize this book for some time to come. The child has much of the agency of the author, often doing things with the filter of self-consciousness stripped away. She mutilates a doll to express anger when she cannot do so in public (14). She accidentally kills her brother's rabbits (16), and of course the hair-cutting incident, which criticism has noted as a common occurence at a time when girls' hair held a lot of social pressure. Several of these are things that either require total humility to admit, or an objective distance, though it seems Eliot had a large enough share of objective distance to laugh at herself, or use her own image to elicit pity. 

One rhetorical purpose of the book seems to be to reprimand Eliot's own brother for his conduct towards her after her public and unconventional extra-marital relationship. She seems to be giving a film to the events which interferes with a pure autobiographical reading, making Maggie NOT a remembered child. It places the image of Maggie somewhere nearer Linda, as a character in the Sentimental genre. Although in many instances the child and woman acts passionately and seems to make her own decisions and act as agent, in essential moments, the character often presents herself as the victim, because in a Sentimental novel, it is essential that the reader not judge her from any objective distance. Their sentiment must be engaged on her behalf. On page 59, for instance, she remarks, "Poor Maggie sat down again, with the music all chased out of her soul, and the seven small demons all in again." She is the victim of a situation, and is now housing passions she might not be able to control. Eliot also calls it "the daring that comes from overmastering impulse" (68). It all reeks of Tess of the D'urbervilles sleeping syndrome, but with passion rather than drowsiness.

This mixing of fiction and autobiography in the sentimental mode produces frustrating conundrums of judgment and pity. The speaker knows the character is being judged, and if the author identifies too much with the character, as in the case of autobiography (of various tinctures), the result is half defiance, half cowardly veneer. Fear turns autobiography into fiction. This dynamic is further complicated in Eliot's writing (especially this novel) because the sin she is decrying is cruel or unrighteous judgment. The text roundly condemns characters who mistreat Maggie for crimes she did not commit, or did not intend.

Because the reader, specifically Eliot's brother, is so often the focus of the sentiment of the novel, I think I must call Maggie an object-child, who serves to elicit sympathy from the audience.

This text bears further scrutiny, especially at moments of turning or decision-making for Maggie, or at her "running away" with Stephen.

Might she be attempting to show that a passionless life is worse than an error-filled life, as the prude judge?

Olaudah Equiano 2.1

. . . I thought I could plainly trace the hand of God, without whose permission a sparrow cannot fall. I began to raise my fear from man to him alone.
~     Olaudah Equiano, Norton edition, pg. 64

Equiano's account of his own childhood is marked by fear. His several accounts from Africa include the regular fear of kidnapping, punishment, war, and abandonment (he could not leave his mother, even during her time of separation), and especially his fear of the cemetary and his mother's ancestor rituals. This beginning opens a major thread of the narrative, which is Equiano's spiritual journey from fearful childhood through zealous proscelyte. The frightening things don't stop happening to him after his coming of spiritual age - at several points in the text the reader fears for his enslavement or financial ruin - but the text shows him reacting with faith, prayer, and courage, though surely this change has as much to do with the development of physical stature and confidence in his profession as it does with his spiritual growth. But these are other threads which Equiano does not emphasize at all.

The child in Equiano's story is the remembered child, emphasis on the author, and is pushed through filters of memory and storytelling. We know Equiano enjoys a good story because we don't know if his African childhood is his own, and we're pretty sure seahorses don't whinny. Although he rhetorically creates an image of himself to intentionally react to and respond inside the racial discourse of the late eighteenth century, the infant Equiano is not flattened into a pathetic figure as would be the way in the later sentimental novels and slave narratives, and the first-person perspective keeps the child immediate to the author without giving him the author's adult agency.

The nearest reader-oriented wing that might house Equiano, because so much of his spiritual maturing could be read didactically, would be the classroom wing where the interactions of the adult world are laid out for the edification of the child or pupil (DuBois sufficiently complicated that conflation), but in comparison, the classroom wing seems to maintain some kind of ideal within those rules and interractions (this is the world you must enter, vs. these are the problems we should fix), where Equiano's experiences with American slavery defy that kind of idealism while immitating the styles of the wing's other occupants (Defoe, most clearly).

Also, I love a good sea story!

The Souls of Black Folk 5.2

The bright ideals of the past,— physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,— all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,— all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,— the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power.
     ~     Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) (2012-05-16). The Souls of Black Folk (p. 10).  . Kindle Edition. 

W. E. B. DuBois's text contains several accounts of children. The author-speaker was a school teacher and observed children in that capacity, and also takes two chapters to describe contrasting accounts of individual lives beginning at childhood. He also describes his own experiences and feelings at the birth and death of his first child, which places this texty squarely in object-child territory.

Chapter four describes DuBois's schoolteacher days, and the students (not only young children) who came, but only when their work wasn't needed at home. He describes many of the children individually, especially the woman-child Josie, who never did get to college, but died. He humanizes them with very lifelike, broad strokes for sympathy, and then explains how they failed. These children receive more description than most in this object-child wing, but the description serves to help the reader regret that better could not be done with their unique and valuable lives and minds. This disappointment/awakening is key to the object-child rhetoric.

The ninth chapter mentions child labor.

Chapter eleven describes the death of DuBois's firstborn child, a son. The chapter is full of pained prose and deeply mixed feelings that the child was never to grow up enough to be disillusioned, to discover the impenetrable "veil" that separates the races.

Chapter twelve describes the life of Alexander Crummell in metaphorical prose that describes three temptations of the maturing soul in a world of racial oppression: hate, despair, and doubt. The childhood test is "hate," and DuBois's solution is kindness from the enemy. This learning to hate and overcomeing it seems to be the coming-of-age disillusionment that makes this child, too, an object lesson.

John, the college student whose story DuBois talks about in the thirteenth chaper, becomes a schoolteacher but is not allowed to teach his pupils equality. His education, enlightenment, and disillusionment are constant, even though as a character, his story begins well after his childhood.

Remodeling the Mind Palace

I'm running into difficulties in my fourth wing. I think I need to create a sixth wing, and set it between the fourth and fifth wings, and then re-distribute several of my texts. The foyer would be an equilateral heptagon, one side of which is the entrance, and from the others, wings would branch off like a child's drawing of a sun.

The first three wings are author-centric, and the children are classified or mediated through the author's own system, social theories, or literary style. These texts often spring from the author's memory as a mode of self-expression, the agent-child being the most immediate (imbued with the author's own sometimes godlike agency), and the observed child the most distant and powerless.

1. The agent child wing, attended by Maisie, now contains three texts: Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art," Ovid's Metamporphoses, and Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social. These are descriptions of children with voice and power, or theories that would allow for a textual child with agency in the text, as far as any figure in the text is allowed.

2. The remembered child wing, attended by Hartley Coleridge, remains unoccupied for now.

3. The diagnosed/observed child wing, unattended, is also unoccupied.

The last three wings are reader-centric, and the texts here are designed (or simply used) didactically for edification or education. The children, if present in the text, face constant judgment by the narrator or reader, and must walk a strait path to garner sympathy, especially in sentimental novels. The three wings follow a range of educational theories, and might be rearranged by the age of the intended audience.

4. The classroom wing is unattended, but the entrance has a height (shortness) requirement. To enter it, the reader must become a child: malleable and naive. These texts do not contain images of children, but present settings in which reader/children can learn a set of principles, and the ordering of the adult world. These texts include Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, and soon also possibly Olaudah Equiano. They are not necessarily intended for children, but can be staples of early reading because of the principles they propone. The educational theory is the older one - that all a child's occupations should prepare her/him for adult life. It is marked by a kind of human realism, but not historical truth. This is not Hogwarts.

5. The object child wing, attended by Jo the street sweeper, is full of pathos and pity for unfortunate children who either must lose their innocence, or already have. Readers don't necessarily identify with these children, but are certainly meant to sympathize, and adjust their own behavior accordingly. These texts include most Dickensian children, Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, and The Souls of Black Folk. The intended reader is not a child, but the adult whose behavior could potentially affect children. These are the Hunger Games.

6. The empty child wing is unattended, but the door is Atreyu's mirror gate. In this wing, the reader of any age sees himself as the child or main character. The adult becomes a child, and the child is free to be silly or carefree or frightened. This is my favorite wing, because it's often full of play and bright imagery. This wing contains many fairytales, but not all. It's a place of sometimes heavy allegory where the emphasis is not on the mask the reader is wearing, but on the things he sees through it. It is also a place to learn ageless truths. This is Hogwarts, and Narnia, and Wonderland, and Fantasia. So far, this wing contains Wilde's fairytales, like "The Happy Prince."

 

This system of textual classification is purely preliminary, and invented off the top of my head. Like Hogwarts, my head's connecting stairways shift, and are intended to do so, to bring the texts into communication with each-other. A text can belong in more than one wing.

Reassembling the Social 1.3

Because this text purports to emphasize the relationship between agents rather than the demographic to which the agent belongs, I think this can fairly be ascribed to the agent-child wing, although I am a little disturbed by the post-humanist leanings of this particular text.

I'm not at all sure how this text might be used in a literary interpretation, or how it might be relevant. I'd be interested in writing a text according to its ideas, though, and I'm curious how the final product would appear. I am reading Bruno Latour for the third time and I'm still flummoxed around the edges. He speaks very vaguely and seems to refuse to pin down what he says with practical examples. Necessarily, I believe.

What really attracts me to this piece is ANT's dedication to taking the long road. Someone truly using this social theory, or theory of social relationships, does not fall back on customary "shorthand" and doesn't look at sociology as a study of only one kind of relating. An ANT sees the minute details of a particular transaction and traces each association.

I catch a whiff of Foucault's power theories here. Although Foucault was interested in only one kind of relationship and the actors he worried about were always involved in power transactions, his narrow definition still broke out of previous assumptions somewhat, in recognizing power as a commodity and actors as actants for the transactions of the commodity. By flattening the map (Latour's language, my application) Foucault moves towards evening out the balance between actants (trader/commodity), and it is, I think, this kind of move that Latour wishes to continue, but without Foucault's narrow definitions - applying his method to other types of events and actants, perhaps, and on a micro level, certainly. Looking broadly at the "forces at work in society" (scare quotes - sorry Howard) might, as Latour points out, bring us to accurate conclusions about society, but it is less scientific or meticulous than Latour seems to like.

I admire meticulous. I'm interested in letting these ideas percolate to see how they might function within an already-written text, though I'm inclined to believe Latour is more interested in the text as a commodity, or as some other actor in some specific context.

I've attempted something similar before, and have fared rather badly. Let's hope my brain grew up in the last two years. I think it would help to slice a novel into events, rather than looking at characters, especially dynamic characters, to analyze the movement in a single scene, or chapter. A bit of dialogue, for instance.

Another thing that attracts me to this text is its delightful grammar. Although admittedly more complex, the ideas seem to nearly fit the metaphor of parts of speech working in a single sentence. Although being metaphorical excludes a non-human object from actor status (whatever that means), I like grammatical metaphors. I like calling positions "actants" and thinking about verbs and adverbs as equally as important as nouns and pronouns.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 5.1

I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little slave's heart.
I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs.
~     Jacobs, Harriet Ann (2012-05-17). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself (p. 24).  . Kindle Edition. 

This specimen of the object-child wing stands apart from other autobiographical/first-person accounts, and from the classroom wing, though it, too, sentimentally expresses some manner of idealism for interaction with those suffering under American slavery. In the sentimental genre, children are not intended to be individuals but simply interchangeable inhabitants of the space of childhood much in the same way that Dickens uses children: for pathos. It is their presence, treatment, and education that concerns us, not their faces or personalities. The book itself is still intended as a kind of space for education, but the student is adult learning about the experiences and evils of American slavery - the gaze is at the child, not through the child, and the reader is not asked to become childlike.

Children named in the novel (there aren't many) include (earlier) Linda herself, her brother William, and her two children, Benny and Ellen. All of them temporarily live in a space protected from the reality of the adults they live around, illustrated quite aptly by a moment when Linda describes seeing a white and slave child playing together, and bemoans that moment when they must learn that they are not the same. Linda knows of that experience because she had it herself. The slave child is not given privileged information about her/his social prospects, but both are kept ignorant of it until a time when they must be separated.

The Sentimental genre here shows its form. This "learning" of something that is not essentially true, but unnecessarily true of society is the text creating a conundrum for the reader. The innocence of children playing together is shown to the reader as something idealistic, but "true," and the separation of the children as painfully unfortunate. After all, why should they not continue playing together as equals in perpetuity? But the children were never economic or social equals, and their eventual separation is both true and false: the system which requires their separation is an economic reality, though socially constructed (indicated by Linda's experience in England), and is therefore a surface "truth" which can/should be abolished with respect to the underlying truth that the children are essentially equal, which proves that skin color is no basis for discrimination and that no person should be the property of any other person, etc.

Linda's experience in England solidifies the impression, and necessarily describes a (probably imaginary) society without racism. Linda means America to admire England for their progressive and fair culture, which treats people better than slavery does slaves. She describes the homes of even the poorest of the English (clean and safe), and the education of all children (remarking notably that children are much the same everywhere). She must produce an ideal if only to prove that change is possible: for the English, too, at some time held slaves. The educated reader will know that this is a necessary fiction (or simply a relative experience) because we have historical accounts that racism did and still does exist in England, although our definitions of it have likely become more stringent than previously. Linda, for instance, was not seeking employment and so would not have experienced that kind of rejection on the basis of her parentage.

Acknowledging this probably "literarying" makes more sense, then, when Linda's description of an "ideal" employer rings somewhat false or overly sentimentalized. Her verbal adoration of a "good" white friend (protecting the helpless, bravely harboring fugitives, treating people kindly) must necessarily overpower her resentment of the "cunning" white enemies or the poor white people seduced by the legal fiction that they can sell a servant for quick cash. Especially if the novel is to serve one of its rhetorical purposes, which is to gain sympathy for abolitionists, it must express a hope for and reward of real kindness towards the cause. Linda's employer acts "correctly," and her sympathy is rewarded by loyalty, and presumably Heaven (eternal rewards are a necessary staple of the sentimental novel).

So many scare-quotes! Sorry Howard!

I think a key difference between the didactive novel for children (The Classroom Wing) and the didactic novel for adults (The Object-Child Wing) is the difference between "this is the world you will live in" and "we need to change the world," and pitiable children change adults, and admirable adults change children.Further, a key difference between the "remembered" autobiography and the object-child biography is the degree to which childhood is sentimentalized, and the author paints herself pathetically.

Metamorphoses 1.2

. . . a boy, as pretty as a girl. . . "What god is within that body, I cannot tell, but a god there is."
~     Book III, "Acoetes" and "The Fate of the Lydian Sailors

I think Bacchus is the central reason I have chosen to build a room for Ovid in the agent-child wing.

Because the lineage of the Roman pantheon form the links between stories, links between generations in the long chain of stories about changing, children feature heavily, but rarely as in the state of childhood. This is probably partially because "marriagable" age was 13-14 for girls, and 16 for boys. More often children are simply gods, nymphs, or humans of the next generation. With Bacchus, though, because he is born of a dead mother (yet another of Jove's rape victims) and gestated in his father's thigh (twice-born) his birth is unusual among stories that often become frustratingly repetitive. Bacchus's guardian gets himself turned into something, or dies of grief, and so the child is alone on an island, and is picked up by sailors who begin this "new" cult of Bacchus, of rousing and riotous worship. These are all things that happen to him, though. The child itself, Bacchus the boy, displays great power aboard the ship, proving his divinity and punishing those who disobeyed. He is an agent with judgment, discernment, and the ability to make things happen according to his will.

Bacchus's origin story, and Ovid's own frame for the story make the child first an object of protection, and then an attracted gaze. As a god, the fear he creates in his worshipers (though they seem little inclined to dwell on fear) indicates that for them as well, he is no longer merely an object, but an agent, and bearer of voice, will, and power.

Iphis, engaged to Ianthe, is another fascinating snippet. Because her father swore that only a male child should survive to be raised (money?), her mother raised her as a boy, and her father engaged her to Ianthe, with whom she fell in love. Iphis's wish (to be with Ianthe) is granted by the gods, who solve the problem(?) by making her a man. Iphis's childhood is co-opted by her mother, for the child's survival. She is given a man's life without her consent, but she gains some agency after she falls in love. The wish is hers, but the power isn't. Does she truly have agency? Is her love a consequence of her gendered upbringing? Unlike Bacchus, Iphis seems to be functioning in a "childland" story, where the child is interchangable under a system of education, on a scale of identification furthest from the Empty Child. The reader isn't meant to "be" Iphis, but also isn't meant to observe her as a case study either.

Adonis's childhood slipped by very quickly, but his birth and parentage were remarkable. As a sign of agency, Myrrha's seduction/rape of her own father weighs heavily. Also significant that to a much larger extent than Byblis who loved her own brother (Caunus), the narration/Ovid condemns the woman's "unnatural" choice in life partners (unlike Iphis's, which was noted as being unnatural, but not condemned because she became a man). Men are never the originators of incestuous temptation in these stories, and Caunus resists, and Cinyras kills himself when he finds out. Both women, though, know that what they want is forbidden, but seek it anyway. It's enough agency to condemn them.

More interesting than the repetitive male-female (etc.) relationships are the power relationships between types of beings. Gods cannot be resisted by anyone not a god, though male and female gods behave differently, and they have their own hierarchy by birthright. Children of any kind usually have the least power, and if an adult loves a child, the child not only has no possibility of resisting, but has little or no voice at all, which is why Polyxena's death scene is so remarkable. The princess Polyxena was taken as a human sacrifice, but demanded certain rights, including her virginity, her freedom, and her modesty. These were granted as her life was taken. The poet Ovid allowed her not only a voice, but agency and power as an example of noble self-sacrifice (though she doesn't seem to have had any real choice about dying).

Sybil is another remarkable break from the power-relationship between humans and gods. Apollo asked to be her husband (sought her consent), and attempted to bribe/woo her with anything she asked. She asked to live as many birthdays as the grains of dust in a pile. He granted her the wish, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth. Phoebus offered her that as well, but she refused his attentions and remained unwed. She does not accuse Phoebus of taking her, and did not bear him a child, but regrets that because she has become so aged, no one will believe that a god could ever have loved her.

But she resisted, and was not forced. Is there some qualitative, unspoken (in this text) difference between amorous attentions and the desire to marry that disallows rape in the later category? I shouldn't have thought so, but since when has Phoebus ever accepted refusal? I think in a stereotypical Victorian context, the difference would be the "quality" of the female, but what was it classically?

The Origin of the Work of Art 1.1

The answer to the question, like every genuine answer, is only the final result of the last step in a long series of questions.
Each answer remains in force as an answer only as long as it is rooted in questioning.
~     Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. Albert Hofstadter. 68.

Heidegger's essay on the nature of art loads each term slowly (very slowly) until, by the end of the first section, when we reach the now-cliched "Art is Truth that has set itself to work" all of the actants in the sentence have a nuanced and subtly developed difference from what we would immediately interpret them to mean, except perhaps "art" which has maintained its identity as an aesthetic object and must necessarily remain somewhat static as the ontological subject of the entire essay.

Heidegger defines truth as more than empirical, and "work" in its common denotation, plus the baggage of meaning "work of art" - a work as a constructed thing, but specifically interpreted not as the final product of construction, broken down into its chronological "thingly" origins, but as a completed thing serving some function and holding an inherent "artness."

Note - I'm using scare quotes, not necessarily borrowing Heidegger's words, which pile on top of each-other in a very Gertrude Steinian way after long hours of reading.

The fundamental contrast of this section, if I may be more structuralist than Heidegger would have allowed, is between "thing" and "equipment" and "work." Like me, he notes their levels of constructedness, but also some differing inherent quality, existence, or purpose. "Things" are not constructed. "Equipment" is constructed but becomes itself when inside a world. A "work" is constructed, but does not function inside a world. It functions in the striving between "world" and "earth."

The "world" and "earth" dichotomy poses some difficulties in practical interpretation at this point in the essay. The idea springs from the examination of the temple-work, or a constructed work which opens a space very literally that a painting might do more figuratively. This translation expresses it: "The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing" (Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. Albert Hofstadter. 47). Work brings these two, the open decisions of historical people and whatever Heidegger describes as "self-secluding"  and "concealing," together in a perpetual striving/conflict.

It took me several weeks to decide which hall Heidegger's aesthetic theory should occupy, but looking back at the entire document and appendices I feel that it must be, symbolically at least, the agent-child.

The image of a child, as such, cannot be removed from the work in which it appears any more than a pair of shoes can be removed from a Van Gogh and worn outside, but like certain images of children (James's Maisie) Heidegger's description of the Being of Art gives it some function underneath its function as object. As he says, Art is both object and subject, and even that assertion is still another series of questions that only together, and piled atop each-other, constitute an answer.

But Maisie's emptiness seems to be a space of being, rather than the nothing of the Empty Child, or the metaphorical reader/subject. The child has agency. And while Heidegger did not, as far as I can tell, attempt to attribute agency to art, he did wish to speak of it as something more than just a creation and certainly more than the mere expression of genius. By distinguishing the happening of (inside/from/because of/causing?) Art from the aesthetic experience of the artistic patron or preserver (probably two distinct modes), Heidegger seems to be making Art more than an object or space for the occupation of an observer/subject. It is a space already occupied by Truth, or the manifesting of the perpetual conflict between World and Earth, or revelation (my word, notably without religious connotations from Heidegger, but possibly some questions from me) and concealment.

Maisie herself and her novel/world/work as a whole seem to create this space where the striving between what seeks to come forth and what must remain hidden produce a profound Truth of the Modern era thrown to me from a hundred years ago. Does that mean I get to be a preserver? Yay!
But the more important point is that the novel as Art has something at its core which I am inclined to describe as "absence," as in, "an absence of information about how much Maisie absorbed or internalized about the information she/the reader was given" but I think it can also be described as a kind of space not meant for the reader to occupy alone, or except in sympathy for her situation without access to her agency.

I also need to shift my perception of these modes of child-images from a sense of constructedness to a range of subjectivity and objectivity between writer and reader, which relationship Maisie complicates horribly. If she is an absence, then is not the reader expected to occupy her, to fill her headspace and process her data? But that absence is alienating, because it is not an absence, but a concealment. We don't think Maisie's head is empty, only that it is unknown. She still makes decisions that we can't anticipate. So, like art, as art, Maisie the text both conceals and uncovers, and thus is produced by/produces Truth.

Remaining questions: The relationship between sketch and Platonic forms? The relationship between Heidegger and Plato more generally? The class context for preservers (probably depends on the relationship between history and economy)? Teleology?

The Happy Prince 6.1

and the Mathematical Master frowned and looked very severe, for he did not approve of children dreaming.
~     Oscar Wilde: Stories for Children. Illus. P.J. Lynch

Very much in the style of Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde writes moving and imaginative fairytales full of a troubling kind of Christian symbolism and pathos.

I had no trouble deciding that this story, and most of the others in the same volumes, belong behind the Empty Child. The reader is often very clearly intended to identify with the child-figures, animals, or inanimate objects while also allegorically identifying them as Christ-figures, or reading them as parables. The idealized figures have or learn very generous self-sacrifice. The Happy Prince gives up his gold and jewels (his skin and eyes) to help the poor of his city, and the bird gives up his plans, and finally his life, to aid him. The giant opens his garden to children, especially the Christchild.

My favorite copy of these stories off my own shelves is illustrated by P. J. Lynch, an artist of innocence and genius.

The stories contain moments, smaller stories that elucidate more commonplace scenarios. For instance, the swallow in The Happy Prince begins the story in love with a reed, and as the reader reads, she wonders what this has to do with a prince at all. The setting is entirely different - a "talking animals" story, in the Aesop vein, with some saucy social commentary, while the last part of the story feels much more like Andersen's "The Little Matchgirl," full of pathos and compassion in a cityscape.

The Romantic ideas here, though, that I wish to capture with the epigraph, is the opposition between adults/education and childhood/children. The Math Master would wish to prevent children from doing what they naturally do, while the reader is meant to understand that what they are doing is not incorrect, and indeed, laudible - they hold an inherent innocence and purity that education is meant to train out of them. I suspect that the adult/child opposition will characterize many of the stories in the empty child wing, though it sets up an interesting kind of opposition between the adult reader and the child s/he is meant to occupy in a given instance. I suspect that education does not always oppose childhood, but that (Narnia?) sometimes natural maturity (Wordsworth?) wears away the heavenly glimmer.

Robinson Crusoe 4.2

I was removed from the wickedness of the world here. . . I was lord of the whole manor; or if I pleased, I might call my self king or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of.
~     Robinson Crusoe, Penguin Classics, page 139

Defoe's didacticism has renown among my fellow students at least, and the narrator interrupts the plot narration in a very similar way to that of Scott's editorials, although Crusoe is a first-person narrator. He interrupts his various narrative styles with long stretches of religious reflection from his predicament as various hardships or encounters prompt those impulses. It feels very instinctive and true-to-life for those familiar with Christian modes, and yet the utter absurdity of his fear and observation of cannibalism turns the whole story a little farcical. - perhaps not such a strong word -  grotesque? hyperbolic? His fear seems real, but the characterization of "savages" seems exaggerated for violence, and the simplicity with which Friday is converted to goat's meat feels comically misinterpreted.

I suspect that in this, I must blame my contemporary racial sensibilities.

Although the moral meditations might be more to the novel's educational purpose, and a strong reason to allow young boys especially to read it (remembering all those passages from the early chapters when Crusoe bemoans disobeying his father and running off to sea), the novel is clearly fascinated with the ideals of survival - the minimum tools, and a fantasy of what can be done for oneself, as one carries one's civilization within. The wastrel traveler becomes farmer, landowner, goatherd, builder, botanist, landscaper, hunter, slaver, and constable, with moments of doctor and priest as well. The meticulous way Robin's survival techniques unfold and build on each-other nearly undoes all the regret he had for disobedience and torturing his parents. Because finding out what a person can do AWAY from the ridiculous social structures and restrictions of humankind is EXCITING. Hence, Boyscouts.

The final chapters present some complication to the simplistic interpretation as Crusoe's sojourn as punishment for his childhood stubbornness. Crusoe is clearly rewarded for his success on the isle. Though it is dangerous, the emotional reward from success alone is much greater than his financial success in society. He marries and has three children, plus two nephews, but expresses no satisfaction at them, nor much sorry when he loses his wife. The editors include an analysis of Crusoe's source-story, that of Selkirk, and conclude that he lesson learned from the book is a kind of natural minimalism - things can't make you happy, and solitude brings you closer to God.