Everyday Magic

Child language is a subject in which everyone is an expert. All parents study their children's language carefully, if undeliberately, and every family has its precious memories of the unique verbal improvisations of childhood. For writers who continually struggle with and revel in the mysteries of language, the language of children holds a special attraction. Everyday Magic looks at the way Canadian writers have written through, as distinct from for or about, children, at the ways they have used 'child language' and children's models of perception to achieve various literary effects. It describes how texts might be shaped by child usage and speculates that adult artists often find themselves surprised and informed by the child language they seek to create. Ricou examines how the distinctive features of child language described by psycholinguists intersect with the written languages used by writers to suggest, not only a child language, but also the way a child sees and organizes an understanding of the world. The book's subtitle, putting the term 'child language' into the plural, points out that not one, but many written interpretations of the child's perspectives are possible. In order to emphasize this plurality and indicate that there are any number of child languages, the author has organized his study as a series of closely related essays. Each chapter considers the work of a Canadian author or authors, with the book as a whole moving from the more conventional writers to those who step outside the bounds of convention. Ricou proposes analogies with Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas, Proust and Dickens, but he finds his principal subject in the inherent interest of, for example, the Piagetian scheme that W.O. Mitchell seems to adopt in Who Has Seen the Wind ; the obsessions with similes in Ernest Buckler; the variations on the Bildungsroman in Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro; and the persistent experiments with presymbolic language in bill bissett. For these and other writers such as Clark Blaise, Emily Carr, Dennis Lee, Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, James Reaney, and Miriam Waddington, Ricou illuminates the particular literary languages appropriate to each author's subject. The result is a fascinating and unique approach to Canadian literature.