Questions of "what" and "where", and contexts of "meaning" for "The mouse and his child" in the late twentieth century

Nearly thirty years after its first publication, I was using The Mouse and His Child as a set text for an undergraduate course in children's literature. The students were mostly around twenty years old, and the bulk of them were not literature majors. To my great chagrin, very few of them liked the book (though those who did were very enthusiastic about it), and when I sought to determine why this was so, it seemed to me that there were two broad reasons. On the one hand, the students were apt to become annoyed because they found too much in the book that was unrecognizable. Few of them had any concept of what a windup toy would be like, or of the principle of the spring that was tightened and then ran down, and so they neither recognized nor understood the figurative uses of the spring that recur in the text. Further, they experienced difficulties, similar to those that the Rustins had identified as problematic for child readers, with the "diversity" of the narrative and its "range of cultural and social references." Thus they did not recognize the parodies of Beckett, or the tenets of existentialism, and tended to resent such things when they were pointed out. On the other hand, they did not know how to read the book in a more general way, and seemed puzzled by the genre. This problem of reading characteristically emerged as an inability to distinguish story and theme, but that inability in turn reflected two more basic problems of textual interpretation. One lies in the implicit claim of the text to pose simultaneously empirical and universal questions (as, for example, in the interlocked questions, what is the way out of the mud at the bottom of the pond? and, what is the basis of agency?); the second lies in a distinction, also perceived by the Rustins, between a narrative focused on "the child's internal world" (that is, another humanistic narrative dealing with the theme of subjectivity) and a narrative focused on "the qualities of the social world," and the propensity for recent theories of subjectivity to efface this distinction.