Child language is a subject in which everyone is an expert. Allparents study their children's language carefully, ifundeliberately, and every family has its precious memories of theunique verbal improvisations of childhood. For writers who continuallystruggle with and revel in the mysteries of language, the language ofchildren holds a special attraction.
Everyday Magic looks at the way Canadian writers havewritten through, as distinct from for or about, children, at the waysthey have used 'child language' and children's models ofperception to achieve various literary effects. It describes how textsmight be shaped by child usage and speculates that adult artists oftenfind themselves surprised and informed by the child language they seekto create.
Ricou examines how the distinctive features of child languagedescribed by psycholinguists intersect with the written languages usedby writers to suggest, not only a child language, but also the way achild sees and organizes an understanding of the world. The book'ssubtitle, putting the term 'child language' into the plural,points out that not one, but many written interpretations of thechild's perspectives are possible. In order to emphasize thisplurality and indicate that there are any number of child languages,the author has organized his study as a series of closely relatedessays. Each chapter considers the work of a Canadian author orauthors, with the book as a whole moving from the more conventionalwriters to those who step outside the bounds of convention. Ricouproposes analogies with Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas, Proust andDickens, but he finds his principal subject in the inherent interestof, for example, the Piagetian scheme that W.O. Mitchell seems to adoptin Who Has Seen the Wind; the obsessions with similes inErnest Buckler; the variations on the Bildungsroman in MargaretLaurence and Alice Munro; and the persistent experiments withpresymbolic language in bill bissett. For these and other writers suchas Clark Blaise, Emily Carr, Dennis Lee, Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page,James Reaney, and Miriam Waddington, Ricou illuminates the particularliterary languages appropriate to each author's subject. The resultis a fascinating and unique approach to Canadian literature.