Profound or Childlike: Writing may seem innovative and profound when it employs the cognition and imagination of childhood

When a book is odd or confusing, because it problematizes time, identity, and reality, but readers have good reason to think that the writer knew how to write well and was not crazy, many readers think that the work is innovative or profound.

But what if such writing were neither mad nor bad nor innovative nor profound, but a reversion to the cognition and imagination of childhood? That is what I wondered when I read what I quoted in yesterday’s post:

“…the Brontë juvenilia can be seen as a precursor of the postmodern tendency to problematize time and the identity of self…The question of ‘Who am I?’ is finally one of existence, but it is also one of consciousness. What am I doing when I record the ‘airy phantoms’ of my imagination? What am I doing when I divide the self? Which part of me is real? The physical self or the imaginative self (or selves)? How can I reconcile the competing demands of each? Such questions reach back to Charlotte Brontë’s earliest juvenilia, large ontological questions that are not usually associated with children. Certainly the modernist fascination with the fragmentation of the experiencing subject (the narrative ‘I’) is anticipated by the young Brontës in their juvenilia. Perhaps children know these things instinctively and it is adults who forget them in their search for a coherent identity.”

How could adult writers write with the cognition and imagination of childhood? If they had multiple personality trait, they might mingle the perspectives of more than one personality, including child-aged alternate personalities.