Mac Barnett on New Editions of Gianni Rodari’s ‘The Grammar of Fantasy’ and ‘Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto’

Rodari insists on literature and creative writing’s centrality to a child’s schooling, and urges us to approach the subjects with a sense of delight and an appreciation of beauty. In “The Goat of Mr. Séguin,” one of the book’s most exciting chapters, Rodari lays out the stakes:

The decisive encounter between children and books takes place in the classroom. If it happens in a creative situation, where it is life that counts and not exercises, a taste for reading can arise, a pleasure with which one is not born, because it is not an instinct. If, on the other hand, the encounter happens in a bureaucratic situation, if the book is “humiliated” by being reduced to a tool for exercises (copying lines, summarizing the contents, analyzing the grammar, and so on), if it is suffocated by the traditional academic routines (“interrogation, evaluation”), the technique of reading can be developed, but not the taste for it. The children will know how to read, but they will read only out of a sense of obligation.

“The Grammar of Fantasy” is a tonic for anyone disheartened by our current zeal for STEM — curriculums emphasizing science, technology, engineering and mathematics — which often leaves little room for the unquantifiable benefits and innumerable joys of the humanities. A few years back, somebody had the idea to cram “art” into the mix, creating the new, much less substantial acronym STEAM. The whole thing was embarrassing, like when the office chips in to buy Jessica a cake for her birthday, a pretty one with “Happy Birthday, Jessica!” written on it, and then someone remembers that it’s also Carl’s birthday, so they scrawl “and Carl” in a different color. As anyone with a good arts education could have predicted, STEAM didn’t stick.

Rodari proposes a truly integrated model of education with “no hierarchy of subjects whatsoever. And ultimately, there is only one single subject: real life, encountered from all points of view.” This isn’t just some grandiose theory. Rodari gets practical. Throughout “The Grammar of Fantasy,” he offers classroom games that puncture the barriers between academic disciplines. A section on teaching limericks to kids concludes with this endorsement of nonsense and the irrational: “With children, to serve their best interests, it is important not to limit the possibilities for absurdity. For I believe that such possibilities can only add to their scientific education. Besides, even in mathematics, there are proofs that ‘reduce to the absurd.’”

Many of Rodari’s story prompts for students are ones the author used to generate his own famous stories. Most arise from his theory of the “fantastic binomial,” in which narrative energy is generated from the juxtaposition of two unlikely words, images or concepts. Whether other children’s writers find these prompts useful will depend on their taste for puns (a word game gives us “octomobile,” a car with eight wheels), topsy-turvyism (a silly gesture inspires a story about a man with a spoon for a nose who couldn’t eat his soup) and zany names. (“A character called ‘Pimpom,’” Rodari declares, “is certainly funnier than one called Carl.” On this point especially, Rodari and I could not more strenuously disagree.)