Libraries & Culture

Libraries & Culture 38.1 (2003) 84-85

Jeux et enjeux du livre d'enfance et de jeunesse. By Jean Perrot. Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 1999. 414 pp. 250F. ISBN 2-7654-0752-5.

It is a pleasure to introduce the work of Jean Perrot, a major French critic who has published on Henry James and nineteenth-century Russian and British literature as well as on international children's literature. Professor emeritus at the Université Paris-XII, Perrot has concentrated in the last few years on the Institut International Charles-Perrault, which he founded in 1994 and which is devoted to research, lectures, conferences, and the translation and promotion of children's books. Aside from L'Humour dans la littérature de jeunesse (Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 2000) and essay collections and guides, Jeux et enjeux is Perrot's latest book on children's literature and addresses a theme central to his thinking: the importance of games and play as well as the critical stakes involved in addressing them for children and their literature, whether the aim of the author be didactic, aesthetic, or both. In Jeux et enjeux Perrot discusses, in an interdisciplinary fashion, subjects that have appeared in his earlier critical work such as Du jeu, des enfants et des livres (Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 1987), for example, myths, fairy tales, the baroque, Père Noël, gifts, linguistics, binaries, codes, chance, subversion, the organization of space, familial models, dolls, the [End Page 84] Gypsy and the Golem, surrealism, illustrations, photography, and films. The Alice books serve as a touchstone throughout Perrot's work, although his most important treatment of Lewis Carroll occurs in a brilliant and highly recommended chapter in Art baroque, art d'enfance (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1991), which addresses the role of Russian folklore and of Carroll's trip to Russia in 1867 in Through the Looking Glass.

In the more recent Jeux et enjeux, Perrot looks primarily at French children's picture books, novels, and science fiction published since 1994 but also uses French children's literature classics by authors such as Jules Verne and Sophie de Ségur as a frame of reference. Beginning with young children and the books for them, Perrot ends with those for adolescents up to about age fifteen, including not only his own critical remarks and those of others but quotations from the authors themselves interspersed with the responses of child readers. Calling himself a "ludiste invétéré" (396), Perrot plays an intertextual game, weaving references to chocolate and its delights as a symbol of literary jouissance, beginning with François Fénelon's Voyage dans l'île des Plaisirs (1687) and ending with Philippe Corentin's picture book Les Deux Goinfres (Paris: L'Ecole des Loisirs, 1997).

In Jeux et enjeux Perrot does not directly concern himself with libraries or library history, although he has elsewhere. But he does address a matter of concern to libraries in the second half of his final chapter, "Les Citoyens sur Web à la Très Grande Bibliothèque: Lecture d'avenir et science-fiction" (14): "Cédéroms et écriture: Information et expression." Here he discusses the implications of multimedia, interactivity, and the blurring of the boundaries between text and illustration, text and reader, and the great role that chance plays in how a text may appear at any given time. He ends with an account of a book by Christian Grenier, L.I.V. 3 ou la mort des livres (Paris: Hachette Jeunesse, 1998), in which a virus attacks the books in "la Très Grande Bibliothèque de France" that causes every page read to turn blank. But to Perrot, the greatest virus that can attack a library is that of censorship from both the Left and the Right—we must not burn Babar. All in all, there seems to be no cultural or historical phenomenon that Perrot does not comment upon and no modern critical game to which he does not apply his wit and perception...