Remembering the Socialist Past - Bad request! - University of Exeter

epresentation of childhood. Naomi Sokoloff writes: ‘children in imaginative writing
by their elders are by definition Others whose words must be translated into a
world of mature discourse they do not yet inhabit.’ 76 The need to ‘translate’
children’s experiences into ‘mature discourse’ means childhood is always
represented from a distance, never from within as the child him/herself really sees
it. Sokoloff explains the consequences of this:
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Otherness always impinges in some way on treatments of childhood in adult
writing. No grown writer can speak authentically in the name of childhood
or in the voice of a child, for inevitably there exist disparities between
grown-up narration and the experience of youthful characters. 77
Gullestad also addresses this concern and draws a distinction between ‘textual
childhoods’ and ‘lived childhoods’, thus highlighting the fact that literary depictions
of children and childhood are represented as they are remembered, imagined and
observed by adults. 78 Depictions of children may also exploit or subvert our
associations with childhood in order to communicate a variety of ideas about
society in general. Even in autobiographies of childhood where the author really did
experience the events narrated, the inaccessibility of childhood is masked by an
acceptance or belief that because we remember our own childhoods we know what
being a child feels like. Writing about childhood, even more than other forms of
autobiography, requires an imaginative leap by the reader. Childhood memories are
likely to be fragmented and lacking in detail, yet many childhood memoirs offer
coherent narratives including, for example, substantial portions of dialogue which it
would be virtually impossible to remember accurately. Paul John Eakin refers to
popular autobiographical stories of childhood by Frank McCourt and Mary Karr as
examples where readers accept a certain amount of ‘imaginative reconstruction’ as
76 Naomi B. Sokoloff, Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992), p. 3.
77 Ibid.
78 Gullestad, p. 2.