The news that best-selling children’s author Enid Blyton was banned by the BBC for nearly 30 years because the corporation thought her work lacked literary merit is confusing to so many Indians who grew up reading her stories and still feel all warm and fuzzy about them. In a career spanning 50 years, Blyton wrote over 800 books and created an astonishingly wide range of characters that readers still love and trust. So even as England’s literary snoots repeatedly dismissed Noddy, Famous Five, Secret Seven, Mallory Towers, St Clare’s and Milly Molly Mandy as simplistic, repetitive and predictable, Blyton’s popularity rose to spectacular heights and she sold over 600 million books worldwide.
But what exactly is literary merit? Generally, critics hold that it is a book’s ability to stand the test of time. Apart from technical and aesthetic competence, books with literary merit embody values that lift the human mind and spirit without being preachy or patronising. Of course, some human values change with the passage of time while others endure. Books with literary merit, then, are either those which reflect enduring human values, or those that are complex enough to be re-interpreted to suit new ones.
Based on this definition, critics presumably disregarded Blyton’s books because her all-too-tidy resolutions to real life problems did not have the ability to elevate or edify. In short, Blyton’s books were escapist entertainers — enough to win mass appeal but not literary accolades. Yet if this was the BBC’s stance, PG Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle, amongst others, did not fulfil the criteria for literary merit but were not banned.
Perhaps the real charge against Blyton’s books, then, was left unsaid: her books reflected the romanticised aspirations of England’s proletariat and not the lived reality of its bourgeoisie. Put plainly, Blyton’s books were for working class wannabes and therefore not fit for the children of England’s elite.
Even as England’s gatekeepers of literariness hated Blyton and America waved her aside as an irrelevant prude, a curious love for her developed in India. Although politically independent of the British Raj, India’s middle classes continued to nurture an ideological reverence for their colonial masters. While England’s libertarian elite thought little of Blyton’s books, in India the Victorian quality of her English was deemed as “proper” as the conservative values imparted by her stories. So although not forced to read Blyton’s books, generations of Indians grew up reading them because there were few other works in English from which to choose. Literary merit or not, Enid Blyton books were what was predominantly available.
Still, who gets to decide what is literary merit? The criteria set down by lay readers for evaluating books, after all, are no more or less culturally constructed than those adopted by the custodians of literature. But like history, literature is defined by the powers-that-be. So literature is that which gets called literature. Or not. Perhaps that is why despite her popularity, Blyton remained a literary pariah. And the next charge was that although creative and imaginative, her writing was racist, sexist, elitist and, generally, politically incorrect.
The suspicion, nonetheless, is that Blyton was ignored by England’s upper classes because her target audience was not upper class enough. Put simply, she had no right to create characters who were snobs because snobbery was reserved for those who had something to be snobbish about. Such was and is the upper class hostility towards her that a recent BBC biopic depicts her as a cold mother, an immature, spiteful wife and a shameless self-promoter who used her own children to fulfil her professional ambitions.
Regardless of Blyton’s strengths or faults as a person, the real question now is this: do her books lend themselves to definitions of friendship, justice or empathy as we know them today? Are her stories relevant to a contemporary political and social context?
In India, Enid Blyton has been steadily displaced by Harry Potter and even Goosebumps —a discussion of whose literary merit might make even sturdy Blyton-bashers faint. Yet today there are also a growing number of Indian readers who are drawn to works that offer the complexity of progressive values. Equally, a better sense of self-esteem has made many Indians far less apologetic about their own variety of English.
In England, interestingly, Blyton has experienced a resurgence. Perhaps England seeks to undo past literary injustices by exploring contemporary interpretations of old writers. Or perhaps the forces of consumerism have overtaken those of literary correctness and popular tastes prevail.
Whatever the case, there is no denying that Enid Blyton still rules the hearts of her
readers, so what if most of them are now adults. She not only topped the 2008 Costa Book Awards poll for most loved children’s author but also continues to sell up to 8 million copies worldwide every year even today, 41 years after her death.
(The writer is a Mumbai based journalist)
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