Children's books

This weekend, Rita and I went into a bookstore to buy a book for Helena Iara.  As Rita and Helena paged through the kids' section (Rita paged, while Helena removed each book, looked at it, and then placed it on the floor), I ran into a new translation of Paul Ricoeur's famous book on narrative, where he hypothesizes that time is actually constructed from story, not only that we understand history through tales, but that time itself is the result of narrative.

Helena likes some books that have a beginning, climax, and end -- Little Gorilla, for instance, and Fortunata the Giraffe, which Rita ended up buying for her --  but narrative is hardly necessary.  One of her favorite books right now is My Circus, which pairs simple drawings with single words on each page: "Clown; Elephant; Tent; Acrobat."  If I turn the pages one by one as I read the words, she quickly gets bored, but if she turns the pages, sometimes back to forward, other times forward to back, sometimes skipping pages or flipping back to the beginning, she can sit with the book for fifteen minutes happily.

Clearly, she loves to see the way turning pages impacts her world: as she flips quickly between "Acrobats" and "Jugglers," I have to say the words just as quickly as she turns the pages... and then she flips back to "Children" just to see if I notice.  Kids like to exercise some kind of control over their parents, and turning the pages back and forth does that for Helena.

But I think there's something else going on here, too.  Helena likes to see new juxtapositions.  The list "Drum, Tent, Clown, Magician, Caravan" means one thing, but "Clown, Drum, Children, Acrobat, Elephant," that's a different story all together.  Or maybe not a story... and I guess that's my point.  There is something exciting about putting things or images or ideas together in an unexpected or even prohibited way.  That can mean anything from André Breton's surrealism, where poems are made of the seemingly random transpositions of words, to Dalí's paintings, to the chance placement of a book by Foucault next to the New Testament, making one think of new ways to interpret the epistle to the Romans.

Ricouer is probably right: narrative does create time, or at least the way we understand it (thermodynamics probably has something to do with the physical reality, after all).  And I think babies do understand both time and narrative, but that's not the only lens through which they look at the world.  There is also a jumping, random juxtaposition, and then the struggle to make sense of those new orders.  Narrative can be fun, but so can turning the pages any which way.  Things get placed side by side, the brain has to work to make the connection, and that's fun.