Children Who Imagine, Adults Who Don't and The Type of People Who Are Neither

From Adolescent to Adult: Children Who Imagine, Adults Who Don't and The Type of People Who Are Neither

Alazne Cameron, University of Florida

Adolescence is difficult to define through determining a beginning and ending date to childhood as individual experiences trigger growth and maturity at different times, at different rates and in different ways. In literature, however, the child or adolescent is commonly marked by a sense of imagination which serves as the lens through which his or her youthful experiences are mediated. The adult, conversely, is marked by a loss or lack of any of the aforementioned imagination or, more acutely, an inability to reconcile the fantasies of children. Resultantly, adults typically become adversaries whose age and experience are the enemies of understanding and compassion. Loss of imagination is the hinge of the mean “older” brother, parent, principal, policeman, or teacher trope stunting the genius of Matildas and Judy Blumes alike. Yet, novels that deliberately challenge ideas of admission for adulthood being the loss of imagination tell tales of “mad scientists” or versions of “quirky” mentors who are comparable in maturity to their juvenile counterparts. Whilst this imaginative, idiosyncratic adult character type does exist in Riggs, Abe’s characterization as imaginative is complicated by his experience as a WWII survivor. When Jacob witnesses his grandfather’s murder by a fantastic creature, Jacob’s so far bildungsroman model is challenged. By requiring his coming to terms with the source of the “stories” he had begun to discredit, Jacob is required to forgo his innocent, naïve reading of his grandfather’s imagination and common tropes of young adult literature as a whole are subverted.

The prologue of the novel is Jacob’s retrospective internal monologue; delivering context for the reader’s benefit. Through his rumination, Jacob offers the insight that he “had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary”, that is, he had just begun to resolve that there was no space for the imaginative stories that had once colored his life, “when extraordinary things began to happen”. (Riggs, Prologue: location 57) The novel’s introduction also immediately establishes the concept that there is more nuance to becoming an adult than the simple deliverance from childishness, and that imagination serves greater purposes than entertaining immature adolescents. It is often implied in literature that in order to relate to the adolescent, one must lack capacity to function coherently as an adult. This view is demonstrated by Jacob’s parents, who are the personifications of dulled adults who have given imagination up as the cost of maturity. They, like a wide range of “adults” written for adolescent or children’s literature, fear for their son’s future under the guidance of Abe (who has been unjustly written off as unhinged) and hope for their son’s transformation.

When the author writes through Jacob that “I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover – that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions –” (Riggs, location 57), Jacob speaks admonishingly to their views of imagination as a disease to be purged from the body. The diction choice suggests Jacob must be ill if he imagines, at least in his parent’s eyes, and that they hold the view that those who imagine the way Abe does are unusual and unhealthy. The connotation of language with word choices like “infect”, “recover” and “inoculate” (Riggs, location 57) when used indirectly by his parents is juxtaposed with Jacob’s own sympathetic tones in his admission that “Compared to the horrors of mainland Europe, the children’s home must’ve seemed like a paradise, and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian magical children who couldn’t really fly or turn invisible or lift boulders, of course” (Riggs, location 134). Jacob’s tone when describing the same circumstances his parents had allows a direct linkage between Jacob’s age and subsequent imagination and the ability to be compassionate. Garnering an understanding or relating to a struggle requires an ability to imagine the experience of another person and Ransom Riggs suggests here that imagination is a necessary tool for operating with sympathy and empathy, thus, the young are particularly suited.

Throughout his early life, Jacob and his grandfather Abe maintained a close relationship. The relationship was fixed by Jacob’s awe at the stories Abe shared with him of superhero-esque characters from his childhood on a far-away island. Abe’s tales affected Jacob so strongly that he decides upon the non-traditional career of explorer, with the goal of “having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s” (Riggs, location 57). This choice of career is significant as it indicates that Jacob is primed to become a version of the adults who never grow up, in effect following in his grandfather’s footsteps. When he is at the age where his ambition is to be an explorer, Jacob’s views are a direct representation of his innocence. He has not yet understood that his grandfather’s “tales” are suggestive of representations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “Although psychiatrists and psychologists disagree over the effects of extreme experience on the survivor's memory and identity, there is general agreement that traumatic experience can disrupt or alter consciousness, memory, sense of self, and relation to community (Williams and Banyard xi)” (Balev, p.156) In his innocence, he misses the darker realities of the origins of his grandfather’s sufferings where “The peculiarity for which they’d been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that island in a tide of blood.” (Riggs, Prologue: location 143)

Trauma is often included in literature as a means of addressing a wider, recognizable experience that speak to a collective identity. Ransom Riggs links Abe to his readers by introducing his imagination with elements that are relatable: “imaginary” friends with superpowers and a fear of monsters which are innocuous experiences of most children. The effects of imagination on Jacob’s grandfather – though benign initially, morph to form a version of coping mechanisms not uncommon to those who survive trauma. “On the basis of Horowitz’s approach, Brett and Ostroff proposed to organize the symptoms of stress around two “dimensions.” The first dimension involved repetitions or reexperiencings of the trauma in the form of unbidden and intrusive images, images that were accompanied by affective states and actions. The second dimension involved defensive efforts to deny the trauma, including emotional numbing, amnesia, and other attempts to suppress or avoid the trauma.” (Leys, 97) Abe’s skills as a multilingual self-defense, survival and weapons’ specialist who fought wars before successfully immigrating, settling and starting a family in the United States create a fascinating figure but reflect an attempt to physically suppress and avoid intrusion of his memory of the monsters of a childhood torn apart by war. When the author itemizes a list of the things that “grandpa Portman” had endured immediately before detailing his more dangerous habits and radical actions, Ransom Riggs gives authority to the reader to draw a connection between what a person has endured, and what he becomes as a result, and asks the reader to keep Grandpa’s trauma in mind when he details the more impractical actions and stances taken by Abe. This choice serves as a nudge to consider the stereotypes perpetuated when adults are typecast as either the enemy or the cautionary tale in literature and reminds the reader that it is negligent at best to write imagination off as folly.

The war produced a man who felt he never escaped, felt the need to be on alert to safeguard against “monsters”, stockpiled weapons which eventually had to be hidden from him and who constantly made calls to his family (who ignore him) about the dangers he constantly sees and the war he is compelled to continue to fight. Here, “The indistinction between perception of external reality, and the experiences of the internal self and organization of identity, has thus led to the popular proclamation that the traumatic experience “shatters” identity and inherently pathologizes the person.” (Balev, p.162) Jacob, though, describes Abe in a way that gives credence to his trauma and tells the reader to forgo thinking reductively about his “quirkiness” as ““untamed” images of the trauma remained stuck in a hypothetical image storage system, from which they repeatedly pressed for revisualization and assimilation in the form of peremptory flashbacks and imagistic intrusion. (Leys, 97) As the protagonist, Jacob is the medium through which Riggs deviates from aforesaid perpetuated norms because “in the trauma novel, that narrative demonstrates that the protagonist is forced to reorganize perceptions of reality and explores how the event changed previous conceptions of the self” (Balev, p.162)

After he is teased for still believing in fairytales and society metaphorically intrudes to normalize him, Jacob proclaims to his grandfather that “a made-up story and a fairytale were the same thing, and that fairytales were for pants-wetting babies…”. (Riggs, location 115) This moment of rejection signals the transition from an innocent belief in fantasy to berating it. As Jacob begins to grow into his less imaginative mind, marking his coming-of-age as having turned down the “healthy” path of solemnity disguised as development; there is a notable shift in his approach to his grandfather. As the novel moves into the main plot, Jacob moves into a phase of his life where like his older family, he handles his grandfather with kid gloves and annoyance because his compassion has diminished inversely with his increasing age. His previously compassionate tone now reflects one of pity when he says “My grandfather was getting old, and frankly he was starting to lose it…The fantastic stories he’d invented about his life during the war – the monster – the enchanted island – had become completely, oppressively real to him…” (Riggs, location 190) Riggs uses parallel admonishing language to that of his parents earlier in the novel when he describes Abe’s imagination. With Jacob no longer carrying his blinding innocence, he recognizes that Grandpa Portman struggles with something more severe than an overactive imagination. He is still young enough to be compassionate, however, so he recognizes that Grandpa Portman should not be rebuked as if he has a compulsion to lie or make up stories.

In fact, Jacob seems to be the single person who is aware that “Traumatic memory is rarely represented as an exact recalling of events. Rather, the construction of the past includes new details with each telling…” (Balev, p.164) and accepted this signal as an explanation when “Every time he described them he’d toss in some lurid new detail” (Riggs, location 75).

Jacob is not just aware that to become an adult, the cost is his imagination’s death, but he also recognizes the role roles of the novel’s isolated metaphors for society in demanding the death of his childhood imagination to mark him as successful. Jacob’s parents serve Riggs’ typification of adults and children who imagine perfectly. He differentiates between his still compassionate nature which had not yet dismissed imagination, and his parents and family who had. Strikingly, Jacob seems to be the only character who is mindful of the fact that Abe’s background and experiences are what have made him cling to imagination in order to process and interpret the atrocities he had faced, and his intrusive memories are “constructed from different perspectives, which demonstrates that memories of the traumatic experience are revised and actively rearranged according to the needs of the individual at a particular moment” (Balev, p.164)

Trauma, especially that which is associated with mass atrocities like the holocaust, is generational and “representations of trauma anchors the individual experience within a larger cultural context, and, in fact, organizes the memory and meaning of trauma” (Balev, p.150) Jacob’s transition from childhood to adulthood exposes him to the non-innocent version of reality that “What made them amazing wasn’t that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough” (Riggs, Prologue: location 143) as his imagination no longer works to save him from these exposure to these horrors. It is significant that imagination originally produces a desire in young Jacob for a fantastic life, but just like in Abe’s case, it devolves and becomes threatening. In the second phase of the plot, Jacob finds himself facing his own trauma, which he copes with similarly, through “imagined” images of the fantasy world his grandfather had conjured leaking into his daily life. Jacob as the replacement “victim unable to process the meaning of the traumatic information because it could not be assimilated into existing cognitive schematas.” (Leys, 97), with “Images, as internal psychic representations..” that his imagination created memories that “ … were not simple replicas of an external stimulus, but complex amalgams of memory fragments, reconstructions, and fantasies whose formation could be influenced at any time by the subject’s emotional states, proneness to experimental compliance, suggestibility, and other factors.” (Leys, 95)

Jacob’s imagination becomes active enough to plague him with nightmarish visions of the monsters Abe would describe as is revealed when “It wasn’t long before I had trouble falling asleep, my hyperactive imagination transforming the hiss of tires on wet pavement into labored breathing just outside my window or shadows under the door into twisting gray-black tentacles. (Riggs, location 75) is written. “But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” (Riggs, location 134) Riggs uses the murder of Jacob’s grandfather by one of the creatures Jacob had conditioned himself to doubt to reflect underpinning of inherited trauma and to catapult the subtle message he had been pushing into the forefront of the readers mind: imagination is not a disease, it is a valid reflection of the subconscious, and it functions a tool rather than an affliction. “The trick of trauma in fiction is that the individual protagonist functions to express our unique personal traumatic experience, yet, the protagonist also functions to represent and convey an event that was experienced by a group of people, either historically-based or prospectively imagined.” (Balev, p.155). In these characterizations, the author skillfully speaks out against generalizations of imagination as simply foolish, and highlights imagination as more distinctly tied to the manner in which one functions as an adult, rather than the marker of a child.

Though Jacob had emerged on the other side of his imagination-cured transformed and complete as an adult, leaning into his imagination is the only thing that allows for him to navigate his grief and put his haunting to rest. His search for the island his grandfather described and the mystical people who inhabited it, resulting in the discovery in a fantasy time-loop offer him more solace than a real-world therapist or parent or “normal” friend, and his decision to live in the world he had found at the cost of his “regular” adult life. At the end of the novel he chooses actively, despite having an opportunity to pick the normative route, to utilize his imagination as a safe haven. In this, the author highlights the flaws inherent in traditional representations of the difference between childhood and adulthood by presenting the reality of coping mechanisms for trauma, thereby allowing for young audiences to recognize that being an adult is not simply as a loss of imagination and in some ways, imagination is the best way for an adult to navigate the horrors of post-adolescent life.

Works Cited

Riggs, Ransom. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Philadelphia, PA: Quirk Books,

2011.Kindle E-Book.

Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical

Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 149–166. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44029500" www.jstor.org/stable/44029500.

Accessed 21 Mar. 2020.

“Image and Trauma.” From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After, by Ruth Leys, Princeton

University Press, PRINCETON; OXFORD, 2007, pp. 93–122. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t727.7. Accessed 27 Mar. 2020.

Download the paper here

Alazne Cameron is a junior at the University of Florida. She was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and is pursuing a double major in English and Political Science. Her writing has most recently been accepted into Collision Literary Magazine and she is most interested in creative writing depicting experiences of immigration and journey-driven narratives. Today, she is presenting on the young adult novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children which deliberately challenges ideas of bildungsroman by contesting the preeminent views of imagination in adulthood.