Psychoanalysis and Criticism

First perhaps we should get the distinction between "psychoanalysis" and "analytical psychology" out of the way. Psychoanalysis derives from Freud and has its basis in neuroses and psychoses, that is in a study of the conflict between the ego and the id or the corresponding conflict between the ego and the outside world. The psychoanalyst engages in analytic work in order to understand an illness, a mental imbalance in which the individual is somehow in conflict with his or her own instinctive drives or with the environment. We equate psychoanalysis with a clinical method, the so-called "talking cure." In its literary application, psychoanalysis takes an interest in understanding the conflicts between ego and id or between ego and the world as they manifest themselves in literary works, in authors, or in readers. Analytical psychology, on the other hand, derives from Jung and in its literary application it represents a desire to praise the creative process itself. The artist participates in a continuing force of creative energy; he or she is a mouthpiece for a universal language of symbolism. Often analytical psychology, when turned to literature, results in what we know of as "archetypal criticism," a criticism that looks for universal symbols or archetypes in works of literature--looking for the anima or the mandala or the old crone or the maze or the child and so on as signs of a symbolic language that crosses cultures and historical periods. But my interest here is in psychoanalysis. But I note that both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology present themselves as scientific in method. Hence the emphasis on "analysis" and on "ology." Both proceed from a system outside of literature and both are, therefore, extrinsic approaches to literature. I say this because once put into practice both of these approaches can have the appearance of instrinsic approaches because both can focus closely on a particular text or set of texts.

Freud comes first in any psychoanalytic approach to literature. But it might be worth pointing out that psychoanalysis, like any other theory, can take several forms depending on whether the psychoanalytic critic bases his or her theories on Freud or on any branch of Freudian influenced psychoanalysis, say object-relations theories related to Melanie Klein or D.W. Winnicott, or ego or id-based theories. Anyhow, Freud is central. And whether or not we like it, Freud is one of the pre-eminent forces in twentieth-century thinking.

Let's begin with the phallic stage of development when the child leaves behind the period of undifferentiation and enters the world of difference (specifically sexual difference), the Oedipus complex in which sexual difference takes on a dynamic between child-mother-father, and castration anxiety or the fear of transgressing the law of sexual and social hierarchy. These are all useful things to know about mostly because the Oedipus complex has had such a monumental influence on our thinking. The Oedipus complex leads to what Freud calls the "family romance." The family romance finds application in any number of theories of literature (you might look at the anxiety theory of Bloom, for example). It posits a conflict within any "family." I put "family" in quotation marks to indicate that a family need not be a biological family. Anyhow, the biological family will do for purposes of explanation. Let's posit a family of three: mother-father-child. The dynamic here has to do with rivalry, desire, fear, and the need for order. Within the family a constant tension exists, a tension based on dominance, the desire for satisfaction of basic instincts. These instincts include the instinct for pleasure (love) and the instinct for control (power). The cite of power is the parents--father and mother--but even here a division exists since the father wields more power than the mother (yes Freud was sexist!). The father's power manifests itself in several ways, not least in his relationship to the mother. The child too has a relationship to the mother that precedes his or her relationship to the father (the mother gives birth to the child, suckles the child, looks after the child, and so on). The child perceives that the father's relationship to the mother is something he or she desires. Hence the Oedipal situation.

Perhaps for our purposes, the most important idea has to do with the reaction of the child to this Oedipal situation. Successful maturing involves a transference of the child's love for the mother on to a suitable substitute. This transference is crucial. It ties in with other Freudian notions such as condensation and displacement. These are terms which are separate but I'm lumping them here to serve as a focus for the essential Freudian move: any image or symbol tossed up in a dream or used by a writer in a work of literature is a product of such mental mechanisms as transference, condensation or displacement. What this means, in a simple form, is that no image or symbol will mean only one thing; it will have what Freud termed a manifest (obvious) meaning and a latent (hidden) meaning. The analyst/critic's task is to get through to the latent meaning. Now this latent meaning will be latent because of the mechanism of repression. Repression is the mind's safety valve covering over or hiding scary or socially unacceptable desires that push into consciousness from our unconsious. As these unacceptable drives push their way into the conscious they become displaced in order that we not recognize them, in order that they appear acceptable. Artists are good at this. They sublimate, that is, they turn into higher and even beautiful forms those drives that, if seen in unsublimated form, would be terrifying, maybe even ugly, and certainly disruptive to social order. Go back to the Oedipal thing. If we did not displace our desire for our mothers, then sons would cause all sorts of disorder within the family.

Aside: Freud can be accused, and sometimes is accused, of manipulating his patients into giving the answers he wants in order to have his theories confirmed. In other words, Freud as superego is a problem for anyone who wants to see Freud's theories as deriving from observation rather than from a priori assumptions on the part of Freud.

Next some words on Lacan and his crucial argument that humans enter into language as if they were entering into a stream. This is true for Lacan because for him we do not so much write as we are written. That is, no human can control language because language exists prior to and beyond each individual. All we can do is enter into the stream at any given place and stir things up a bit. For the literary critic who accepts Lacan's idea, this means that no writer knows exactly what she or he meant when he or she wrote something (because language always has a way of expressing more than we know) and therefore the writer becomes just another commentator, not necessarily better or worse, than any other on that writer's work. It also means that any given structure of words or work of literature swims in the language stream and to trace its meaning is to navigate the stream, not just the single swimming text. The thrust of such an approach will lead to deconstruction and I think I can leave this for now.

So let's look again at Jack Prelutsky's "We Heard Wally Wail."

Here's a short four line poem about someone named Wally who apparently transgressed the standards of good taste by creating a word in his alphabet soup. The poem gives us at least three people we might wish to consider in any psychological analysis: Wally, his mother, and the speaker of the poem who presents himself or herself as spokesperson for the neighbourhood. One way of proceeding might be to take the analyst's position towards Wally. Why did Wally choose the alphabet soup as the site of his transgression? And why did he choose to transgress at a time (dinner or lunch) and place (his own kitchen or dining room table) guaranteed to get him caught in the act? In other words, why did Wally wish to get caught? Did he know that his mother, not his father, would catch him? And if so, then why did he wish to have his mother catch him? First the soup. This is prime material for a Freudian reading. Soup is liquid and often hot or at least warm. It sits comfortably in a bowl, a nicely rounded shape. Remember, a psychoanalytic reading rests on the assumption that the manifest meaning--here a bowl of soup--contains a latent meaning--soup has something to do with warm fluids that relate to the mother. Dare I spell it out? Does Wally desire a return to the womb? Or does he desire some other equally transgressive satisfaction? At the very least we have here an image of something oral and in Freudian terminology the oral stage precedes the phallic one. Does Wally desire to regress to his infancy? Don't we call his type of behaviour immature, perhaps even "infantile." If you're with me so far, then the next step is easy. What are the letters in alphabet soup made of? Noodles, of course. Soft, long, rounded, worm-like pieces of pasta. Need I say more? The two images here--one decidedly female, the other male--are brought together. It is not too difficult to see why Wally's mother reacted the way she did; it hardly matters what the word was that Wally spelled because the significance of what he did rests in these images of male and female. Another way of putting this, and I think Wayne said as much, is that this poem deals with Wally's desire for his mother. His repressed desire for his mother surfaces in the soup and his mother acts the part of the controlling superego compelling Wally's desire to return to where it belongs, buried in the unconscious.

What about the poem's insistent use of alliteration. Can this be relevant to a psychoanalytic reading of the poem? The answer is, I think, yes. We might well relate the alliteration to Freud's notion of "repetition compulsion." Repetition compulsion is the uncontrolled return of the repressed. Because that which we repress desires release from the unconscious, it continually tries to find this release and it often does so in the same or similar ways--hence repetition compulsion. We are compelled to repeat the same mistakes or to return to the same images. This can result in a fetish. Have you seen the Eric Rohmer film CLAIRE'S KNEE (1971)? Here a young man becomes absolutely obsessed with the knee of a girl he does not even like. The knee is obviously a displacement of some other part of her body. He turns it into a fetish, that is a substitute for what he really desires. I'm suggesting, of course, that the insistent alliteration in "We Heard Wally Wail" reflects Wally's compulsion to repeat his transgressive acts. Read this way, Wally as a compulsive personality, the poem might alert us to a specific significance in the particular alliteration of the sound "w." "Wally wail" emphasises the "Wally" sound (or at least the "Wa" Wa" sound) and how far do we have to go to get "Willy" (or "Wi" Wi" "Willy")? In other words, a resolutely Freudian reading might well see Wally as penis. This type of reading, far-fetched as it may seem, has been applied to such texts as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is a distinctly Freudian reading. Were we to turn Lacan loose on "We Heard Wally Wail," we would come up with a different reading.

Just how different? Well Lacan is more interested in language than in the libido. The unconscious for Lacan is structured like a language and so although libidinous drives might be important, they cannot be articulated without language. Everything depends on the letter. In "We Heard Wally Wail," everything turns on the letter. Whatever it was that Wally spelled, his letters caused the action of the poem. I think a Lacanian reading of this little poem would direct us to those letters in the alphabet soup. Clearly, those letters constitute a signifier, but in the poem this signifier is absent. Of course, it is also present in that the signifier clearly caused action to take place--Wally's mother reacted strongly to this signifier. But the signifier remains hidden, absent. What it signifies is unclear, absent. It is not important what the signified is because there is no signified. Without knowing what the signifier is, we can never know what the signified is. Without knowing what the signified is, we are left with an endless chain of possible signifieds-which are, by the way, really other signifiers. In other words, those letters in Wally's soup constitute what deconstructionists would describe as the "mise en abyme," the point of the abyss, the drop into emptiness. We might interpret Wally's letters as his separation from the mother (in fact, the poem lets us see this in a quite literal fashion), his entry into what Lacan refers to as the "symbolic." The entry into language for Lacan is the activation of the unconscious. Without language the unconscious does not exist. In other words, Wally's letters inscribe his unconscious and in doing this they mark his entry into the world, his entry into the world that functions only and because of the letter. This is the "law of the father." It is, in short, a phallocentric (and therefore logocentric) world. Hence the noodles as letters is a nice Lacanian touch. We might go farther and posit Wally's letters as his way of trying to reach--i.e. get back to--his mother, but the result of those letters is to drive him farther from her. His "wail" is his lament at recognizing what he has lost. He wails because he lacks what his letters in the soup had tried to retrieve. His wail and his letters are indications of lack, of a desire frustrated. And the whole neighbourhood hears Wally's wail because the whole neighbourhood is witness to the ever repeating operations of lack. Repetition compulsion is at work here too because we are ever doomed to repeat the attempt to satisfy desire, but all our attempts are frsutrate from the beginning because all attempts must function in the realm of the symbolic, and by definition (Lacan's anyway) the symbolic is a substitution for that which we really desire. We are doomed to a succession of substitutions none of which can fulfill the role of that which they substitute for (essentially, the mother and what she signifies). Wally's wail is the sound of the Lacanian subject forever displaced from the site of pleasure. Lacan's world view is not optimistic.

These types of reading might be brought to other works, say William Blake's "The Sick Rose" or of course William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING. I won't go on to such readings now, however, because this has already gone on too long. I hope, however, you can see how psychoanalytic readings might work, and I trust you see how they become for me just another way of playing with texts. This notion of play becomes central to the next theory we come to: deconstruction. We might situate Lacan precariously between structuralism (he is after all interested in the structure of the unconscious and the structure of langauge) and post-structuralism (which amounts to a view of things which accepts without hesitation the slipperiness of the signifier). In short, structuralism in whatever form it might take rests on an idealistic base; that is, it remains confident that its search for clarity and even "truth" can find successful conclusion. Post-structuralism in whatever form it might take rests on a sceptical base; that is, it accepts the view that all knowledge is relative and that the search for clarity and truth will never find a conclusion. The shift from the first of these views to the second accounts, partly, for the shift in pedagogy over the past couple of decades. The shift from instructor-centered to student-centered learning could not have happened without a shift from what I'm calling here a structuralist view of things to a post-structuralist view of things. We are now in an age of "postness": post structuralism, post modernism, post industrialism, post literacy, post colonialism, post office, post haste, and post democracy. It's time to post on out of here.

Here are a few more jottings: the unconscious is related to the instincts, especially aggressive and sex-driven instincts. For the purposes of literary criticism, the very acceptance of the concept of the unconscious opens the door to probing beneath surfaces. And yes, to probe unconscious material, the critic will look to find instinctive drives related to pleasure (loosely defined perhaps as the sex instinct or eros), pain (fear of such things as castration and isolation), death (the death wish or thanatos). Stories liberate these unconscious drives simply because in story our defenses are relaxed, or if we accept Lacan, language partakes of the unconscious and we cannot use it without revealing something of those unconscious depths. And yes, a psychoanalytic approach to text will likely take an interest in how gender manifests itself in our psychic lives. We could reprise the Oedipal and Electra phases once again, but I'll resist.

Related to gender identity is psycho-sexual development: the various 'stages" of growth such as oral, anal, phallic, etc. These "stages" are not necessarily left behind as one grows older, and therefore we might see an anal fixation in a particular individual. Fixation in any of these early stage reveals immaturity. The most famous literary manifestation of such a fixation is probably Hamlet who is supposed to be fixated at the Oedipal stage, unable to cope with his love for his mother. A character in fiction who eats all the time might be fixated in the oral stage. And so on.

On to the Oedipal stage which illustrates the male-centered aspect of Freud's theories. "psychological determinism." All action has a cause; all symptoms arise from some psychic imbalance. We might also see psychoanalysis as a "blueprint" and as such it is deterministic. We set out to determine the fit of a text to the Freudian or Lacanian or Kleinian model. The grid includes the triad that Freud invented late in his career: id, ego, superego. These relate to the two principles: pleasure and reality. Our id pursues the pleasure principle, but the superego always counters this with the reality principle. If we pursue pleasure willy-nilly, so to speak, then reality will rear its ugly head and punish us. This is the reason we have repression, the psychic mechanism that keeps us functioning as social creatures.

The very important idea of the "subject" came next. What is a subject? This implies the opposite question: what is the object? Are subject and object immitigably separate? Is the subject identifiable as coherent, homogeneous, and knowable? Or is the subject other than itself? Are we all "strangers to ourselves" (this is the title of a book by Kristeva). How does subjectivity enter into the act of interpretation? Can we ever interpret subjectively if subjectivity is itself a site of conflict? If all subjects are outside subjectivity, then how can interpretation be otherwise? what I'm suggesting is that all interpretation is a function of the interpreter as subject, but that the word "subject" involves the "other." We cannot be subjects without the other to give our subjectivity form, and this "other" intersects with our subjectivity. All interpretation is subjective only in the sense of "inter-subjective."

Finally, a brief reading of Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" from a pyschoanalytic perspective. The reading here is decidedly Lacanian in that Lucy becomes for Wordsworth (or for the poet, if you prefer) that which he lacks. From a strictly Lacanian perspective, Lucy is what Wordsworth desires, and what he desires he cannot, by Lacanian definition, have. We could identify Lucy with the mother, and this is certainly a plausible Lacanian reading, although the poem might raise some doubts here. Lucy is a maid. She is fair as a star and she is a violet. I suppose a son might wax figurative in such a way about a mother. But if Lucy is the poet's mother, then she might be so in a strictly Freudian sense: his desire for her is charged with a sexual frisson. It is interesting that Lucy is figured in the poem. She becomes a metaphor--a violet, a star. These signifiers replace Lucy (who is, after all, absent and also silent). We might say that for the poet, Lucy is an absence which requires a substitute, a simulated version to fill in for the absent one. But that first stanza, in which we learn that Lucy lived beside the springs of Dove, sets up a metonymic possibility. To live beside, to be continguous, to have Lucy, by virtue of proximity, partake of the implications of Dove might well lead us to another discourse: the discourse of the literal (or what Mitchell calls variously the semiotic or carnival). Lucy is a Dove; that is, she is all spirit (whether we see that spirit as the "spirit" of nature or spirit in the noumenal sense) and consequently she has no material existence and she cannot be touched by the poet in any mundane way, although she can touch him spiritually. She lives in relative anonymity, and she has very few to love her. We might surmise that the poet is one of those who loves Lucy, and her love brings the two of them together; they love as if joined. If the stanzas show progression, then we might argue that the first is metonymic (which I relate, following the lead of Margaret Homans--see her Bearing the Word--to the language of the mother, a literal language in which signifier and signified touch), the second is metaphoric (which I relate to the language of the father, the language of substitution and deferral). This leaves the third stanza which gives us a language without either metonymy or metaphor. Whatever else one says about metonymy and metaphor, they are communicative discourses; that is, they speak across a barrier--from someone to someone. As I've defined it, metonymy is a mother's language, the way of communicating between mother and child. Metaphor, on the other hand, is the father's language, the way of communicating between father and child. Somewhere Lacan speaks of these as the language of Yes and the language of No. The third stanza might be the language of 'oh." "Oh" indicates a turn, and the turn I am suggesting is a turn inward to so(h)lipsim. "Oh" is an emptiness, an expression of no signified, a free floating signifier that can never find a signified. The poet is cut free from communication, from community. He turns inward to self--"the difference to me." "Oh" is a good example of the Lacanian subject, empty of meaning.

I hope you see I'm just playing about with these ideas in relation to the poem. I suppose a more traditional psychoanalytic reading would stay closer to the notion of grief. The poet clearly finds himself in a position of loss. How we interpret this loss will depend on our particular psychoanalytic focus. If Lucy is either the poet's mother or sister, then we might see the poem (as some have done) as an expression of the poet's repressive defense mechanism. Rather than act upon unwonted (even taboo) desire, the mind does away with the desired object. That is, the mind successfully reenacts the gesture of repression driving Lucy deep within the mind, so deep that she is "dead," lost to the conscious.

I might also point out three things: 1) Freudian readings tend to focus on desire, repression, and fixation; 2) Lacanian readings can take many directions, the one I've chosen here moves in a deconstructive direction; and 3) to a great extent the text we are interpreting directs the approach we will take, and this poem by Wordsworth seems to me to offer some resistance to a psychoanalytic reading. Most psychoanalytic readings of the poem--I refer to the Bateson thesis which identifies Lucy with Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet's sister--incorporate biographical material. In other words, they psychoanalyse Wordsworth himself and in so doing they move into the extrinsic mode.

Dark Visions of Torment: William Blake

This is a strange title for me to give this post because I don't find Blake's work in the least tormenting. Clearly, this work speaks to me of what I already know; the fish that swims against the stream achieves a victory even if that victory comes in death. Browning's Childe Roland arriving at the Dark Tower comes to mind, for here is a trumpet blast of victory even if that victory is only the achievement of consciousness, in this case the consciousness of darkness, of what Coleridge calls "the dread watchtower of the absolute self." I like Blake because he writes about what I already know and care for. And his work is for me a splendid example of how literature works; that is, a work of literature works best when it both imagines that which we know and keeps us in uncertainty. In other words, Blake is one of those writers who is always ahead of his readers, at least those readers whose reading is an attempt to do what Urizen does: formulate a wide interpretation of solid obstruction or seek a solid without fluctuation. Urizen's torment derives from his inability to share eternity with the Eternals; he wants it for himself. To allegorize this as the reading process, I suggest that Urizen does not want to share the text with a community of readers; instead he wants to create a group of readers, all of whom read like him, accept his vision of things, which is to say his vision of himself. Selfhood brings torment.

I seem to have reached a paradox here: Blake writes about that which I already know. If this is so, then to accept Blake's vision of things is to accept my own vision of things, and in doing this I must perforce be locked in selfhood. It also presumes that I understand what Blake has to say, a rather large presumption. My only way out of this torment is through the door of uncertainty. My understanding is certainly not without fluctuation; I have not closed the book. In fact, I do not wish to close the book; to do so would be to shelve it, own it, consume it, swallow it the way the Abyss swallows Blake's creatures at the moment of creation. I prefer to play with possibilities.

Speaking of creation, I may say that THE BOOK OF URIZEN is about creation and miscreation. This much seems clear. Unlike AMERICA or EUROPE, THE BOOK OF URIZEN dispenses with historical material and moves us directly into mythic time and space; whereas those earlier works allude to Biblical and Miltonic types, and even assimilate them to political and social realities of the late eighteenth century, THE BOOK OF URIZEN rewrites Genesis. Blake said at the end of The MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL that he would give the world the Bible of Hell whether the world wanted it or not; here is part of that Bible, the part that chronicles creation. The key to this version of creation is that for Blake the Fall and Creation are coterminus. The story goes something like this: in the beginning was one huge Being, called the Eternals, the plural indicating a unity that has nothing to do with uniformity. In Genesis, of course, this is the time before God moved upon the face of the waters. One aspect of this great Being decided to separate himself from unity and in parody of Genesis he "arose on the waters"; this aspect, called Urizen, desired power. Rather than accept mutuality, Urizen projected himself as the only reality. He does so with a blast of trumpets in a parody of Revelation (see chapter ll). Paradoxically, Urizen's move of separation reveals him as nothing but a shadow, unknown and unprolific. Again, in Genesis this is Satan who refuses to play second fiddle in Heaven and who is a shape shifter, a thing of no clear form or identity.

Where God gives Moses, later in Genesis, the tablets of stone upon which are written the Ten Commandments, Urizen writes the Book of eternal brass. You can see how Blake conflates events. The Creation includes the Fall (after all Urizen falls from unity with the eternals), and the Fall brings with it the rise of law and governance. With the book of law comes those to enforce the law: the Priesthood, Kingship, and one God. Again Blake reverses a biblical typos: in Daniel the great book is sealed only to be opened at the end of time as represented in Revelation. Urizen unclasps his book of brass to begin social organization. The opening of the book separates Urizen from the Eternals; it leaves "ruinous fragments of life." Another metaphor familiar in Romantic poetry is "sleep." Remember Goya's "The Sleep of Reason." This is Urizen's sleep or that of Enitharmon in Europe. The world of sleep is the world we live in: the nightmare of history from which we are trying to awake. From the point of view of the Eternals, the earth is death, Urizen a clod of clay. That is, when we take nature as the only reality we live a life-in-death (see The Ancient Mariner).

Meanwhile, another of the Eternals, Los the great artist, looks on on this going on with dismay. Not being able to understand what is happening--how could he since Urizen is formless, shadowy?--Los sets out to make Urizen graspable by giving him form. This is a bit like Odysseus's need to hold Proteus down until he assumes a definite form. So: we see Los at work forging Urizen. Unfortunately, Los clarifies Urizen but negatively. Rather than giving him positive form, he gives him negative form, and in doing so he begets time and the cycles of generation. We have a parody of the seven days of creation in the seven Ages of dismal woe, the last five of which give us the formation of the five senses ending in touch. Once the seven Ages have passed, Los closes up (shrinks the way Urizen did; the Fall is a shrinking into selfhood) and separates into a male and female part. The female part is called Pity; she is Enitharmon. The two of them are akin to Adam and Eve, and they have a child called Orc. Sound familiar? In all this we have fallen love which must hide its lineaments in secresy and jealousy. The parents enchain their child, and Los even attempts to kill him.

Meanwhile, Urizen explores his dens, the image drawing on the rapaciousness of lions and the enclosedness of caves. The world--nature--surrounds us like a cavern. We are swallowed by nature. This is an important metaphor in Blake. The poem ends with Urizen forming Religion as a Net to hold all his subjects in thrall, and a final parody of Genesis in Blake's vision of Creation as a Fall. Urizen and his forms of repression--the scientific instruments he uses, religion, law, books--hold sway.

This is the story told in the written part of THE BOOK OF URIZEN, at least as far as I can follow it. But for me, the fun only now begins. The very fact of reversal in this story indicates to me the possibility of reversal everywhere and I look at this work for its chiasmic effect. In other words, I think we can play with aspects of the very words Blake uses to see him signaling the continual possibility for reversal. Urizen may separate, but his separation is not irreversible.

Pictures and Preconceptions: Judging a Book by its Cover

Picture books marketed for children inevitably foreground the eye. Whether the artist and writer are the same person or whether they are not the same person hardly matters in terms of priority. The eyes have it. To put this another way, the pictures in these books always dominate. Obviously for the young child who may not yet read, the picture is the thing to capture her interest; but the adult too will gravitate to the visual image simply because this is more readily attractive than the printed word. The eyes have it. The first thing one sees is the book's cover, and the picture book cover is arguably far more deeply implicated in the rest of the text than are covers of other types of books. Jane Doonan notes that "Picture-book stories often begin on the cover" (52). This is true, but even when the narrative does not have its "beginning" on the cover, the cover contains narrative information. The covers of picture books are peritextual, but their very peritextuality is an aspect of their textuality in ways that are less intense in non picture books. My next point hardly depends on what I have just said, but I want to make a connection. The pictures in children's books introduce novice (even non) readers not only to visual codes, but also to visual styles. Picture books are a young child's first introduction to the fine arts (see Doonan 7), and the covers of these books set the style just as they introduce the content of what lies inside.

Picture books may be a "composite art,"1 but the attractions of colour, shape, and design draw us to the pictures. A cover illustration creates a preconception; in fact, in some instances the cover illustration gives us all we need to know in order for us to enter and understand the fictional world between the front and back cover. As an example of what I mean, I offer the cover of the OUP edition of Alfred Noyes's The Highwayman, illustrated by Charles Keeping (1981). Here the reader, young or older, prepares to enter a book that works through the expression of terror, a terror both emphasised and released through Keeping's expressionistic art. The narrative of ill-fated love takes on, through Keeping's visual imagination, a visceral quality; Carpenter and Prichard refer to the imaginative quality of this book as "morbid" (288). I'm not sure about morbidity, but certain it is that in The Highwayman as illustrated by Keeping story becomes emotion, and through this transformation of story Keeping challenges the whole notion of narrative as linear.

A glance at the cover will indicate how important the publisher thinks the pictures are. Note that the names of both author (Alfred Noyes) and illustrator (Charles Keeping) are visible, but that Keeping's name is in uppercase bold lettering, while Noyes's is in lower case. Note too that the cover picture occupies two thirds of the space and the title one third. And note also that the hoofs of the Highwayman's horse come below the line of sepia that crosses the sight line cutting off the picture from the title. In other words, the picture starts to invade the region of the cover devoted to the printing of the title. The point, I think, is that the illustrations here will overpower the poetry. I think they do.

A number of other things might also derive from this cover. The picture is in sepia--a sort of grey/brown shading with white. In other words, the picture does not use colour; it is closer to black and white than to colour.2 As Nodelman points out, "serious picture-book artists who choose to avoid colour in a medium noted for its use of colour often have similar special points to make" (67). It is worth asking what point Keeping might make here, what effect black and white, or at least the sepia tint, makes in this instance. The type of tint might remind us of old photographs, althought the style of the drawing is clearly not realistic or photographic. I'll come back to the style of the drawing in a moment, but first let's notice that black and white or variations of black and white are serious in tone; they do not, as Nodelman says, have "the frivolous intrusion of colour" (67). This is partly because we are used to seeing black and white pictures as aspects of a serious type of communication: documentaries, newspaper photographs, and the like (again see Nodelman 67-72). The great photographers--Man Ray, Ansel Adams, or Annie Leibowitz, for example--as often as not use black and white. Black and white, if nothing else, communicates age. This was not true at one time, but now in this era of constant and ubiquitous colour black and white seems to announce something that was made long ago. And also something portentous, something we should take seriously (I think of Spielberg's Schindler's List). Clearly, the content of this poem takes us into the long ago. Also we might think of the content as serious and black and white captures this. Note I say "serious" rather than "romantic." It is true that the story we will read is a romance laced with irony, a tragedy of separated lovers, but the colour of the illustrations begins to question the "romance" of this story. Romance, remember, suggests something idealized, removed from the real world we live in. These illustrations, despite their unrealistic style, remind us of the real world in all its earthiness. And here in this word "earthiness" we might find a reason for the tint of the illustrations: they are earth-toned. This is a very earthy book.

I'm getting closer to the style of the illustration, but first let's notice the pose of the horse and rider. The horse has two legs, one front and one back, raised in a position that reminds me of a certain type of elegant show horse. Note too the rise and fall of the tail. Here's a prancing horse in a very formal and controlled pose. Keeping's drawings are often full of movement, but not so here; this is a highly stylized representation of a horse. The rider too is stylized. He turns so that he faces us directly. We see the horse from the side, but we see the rider in full frontal position. He stares right at us from behind his mask. His outfit reminds us of a dandy, someone formal and studied, but the mask reminds us that he is an outlaw. So too does the gun. And that gun points directly at us. The picture reminds me of the famous final shot (literally) of Edwin S. Porter's film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), in which one of the outlaws who has robbed the train stands in medium close-up, facing the audience, holding his pistol at the camera. As we watch, he fires. When audiences first saw this, women fainted and strong men fled the cinema in fright. Anyhow, the point is that the gun and its position are uncomfortable reminders of the reality of robbery. The rider threatens us. The boldness of this figure staring directly at us is a challenge, and the romance of the Highwayman should not tempt us to overlook the menace he represents. This is, finally, no Stewart Granger in swashbuckling splendour.

Now the style. As I indicated, Keeping's drawings are representational, but not realistic. Take a look at the rider's right leg, for example. This leg looks more like a prosthetic leg than a real one. It is too thin and barely bends. Where is the knee? The foot appears wafer thin, and the spur protruding from the boot heel is a token spur only. Clearly, Keeping is not interested in "realism." If he were, then he would not let us see the line of the horse's left rear leg through the hoof of its right leg, or he would finish drawing the right front hoof. He is more interested in sketching in his figures than in providing the viewer with finished , hard-edged figures. Why? Well, one reason is that he wants to "express" the figure, to give expression to his figures. This means more than that he wants the reader to fill in the edges of the figures he draws. Keeping wants his figures to express more than their shapes; he wants them to express a feeling, an emotion. His line serves emotion more than visual correctness.

Rarely in this cover illustration does Keeping use a straight line (except perhaps in the line of shading that separates the white space at the bottom from the illustration itself or in some of the horse's tack); most of his lines are squiggly or curved or wavy or whatever, anything but straight and rigid. They express movement even within this very formal pose. The most obvious example of this are the lines on the horse's body. They curve and even splotch, but often they do not connect. Many lines attach to nothing. The effect here is to unnerve the viewer. We are comforted when what we see has definite form and shape, when lines connect to lines completing a design. Here lines disconnect and threaten to distort the image. Perhaps the best example of this in the book is the illustration of the Highwayman's sprawled body after the soldiers shoot him. Here lines and splotches move in all directions. His body splays out just as his blood flows without the containing body. The difference between the cover illustration and the one of the dead Highwayman occurs in composition, not style. Both illustrations have the same nervous energy, but the one on the cover has symmetry and balance, whereas the other one shatters balance. What I want to conclude is that the expressionistic style Keeping employs charges his illustrations with emotion, and this emotion is often brutal and unpleasant. This brutality and unpleasantness function to demystify the romantic poem.

Keeping is, for the most part, resolute in his desire to demystify. His soldiers are ugly both inside and out. They have bad teeth, bad skin, and bad habits. They are gross and unpleasant. They are associated with hardness--straight lines, mostly guns, are evident in the scenes in which they appear. The focus is, I think, on the helplessness and confined position of Bess, the landlord's daughter. Many of the illustrations look out from the inn onto the road and the trees and the moonlight. In other words, many of the pictures take Bess's point of view. The picture from inside the inn out along the moon-drenched road is so insistent that we see it six times before the death of the Highwayman, and in four of these pictures the turn of the road strikes me as distinctly reminiscent of a sickle. If I am right and we can see a sickle here, then the imminent arrival of death is clear. Indeed, this is the case whether we see the sickle or not.

We see this same landscape two other times, both without the framing device of the window, once at the beginning when the Highwayman first arrives and once at the end when he returns after death for his beloved Bess. In both pictures, the sickle-like aspect of the road is less clear. And of course the last scene reverses the light quality of the first as if we've gone to the negative of the picture. The negative effect is a move into the other life. These lovers can find fulfillment only in death. This talk of fulfillment might take us back to the cover, and it is worth reminding ourselves that picture books communicate everywhere from front cover to back cover. Anyway, on the back cover we see the two lovers in embrace, she inside the inn (as usual), and he outside. But the lines of the windowsill and clothing intersect to indicate that no barrier exists between the two lovers. They merge into one another. They did this earlier in the book--on the eighth page--when Bess's hair becomes one with the Highwayman's hair and face. But here the sense of inside and outside are strong. By the time we reach the back cover, this sense of separation is gone.

I have concentrated on Keeping as opposed to Noyes here, but I think this version of the story invites us to do so because Keeping's illustrations are so strong. Students with whom I have discussed this book often remark that the illustrations are too gory, too sensual, too gross, too scary. His figures are abnormal, some say. In short, few students have expressed any interest in the book, although some think the poem is good. Those who do find the book interesting, claim to find this book very powerful. What strikes me is the reaction from both those who like and those who dislike the book: it is invariably strong--even visceral. It seems impossible to be neutral or non-committal about this book.

What Keeping has done, it seems to me, is to take an essentially light-weight poem and transform it into an emotional revel. Take for example the picture which accompanies the words: "Not till the dawn he heard it, and his face grew grey to hear/How Bess, the landlord's daughter,/The landlord's black-eyed daughter,/Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there." We see the Highwayman's face in full close-up, framed by two rugged and hard faces. The illustration focuses on eyes and mouth; we must contemplate eyes and mouth because of the use of black here. The eyes are demented. The mouth is a gaping agony. Drops of sweat on the nose express intensity of feeling. This is a moment of shattering horror, of the realization of what has happened. The madness of the Highwayman comes across forcefully. Aristotle's notion of art's cathartic effect strikes me as applicable here. Keeping's drawings express brutality and ugliness, but they do so in an aesthetic manner. These pictures ask us to respond both emotionally and intellectually. They turn powerful moments of drama into abstract shapes. The moments of death recorded here are moments when the body bereft of life becomes a shape, an object, an object that discomfits us by forcing us to gaze upon it. In some strange way, we become complicit in the deaths of these two people. Their deaths compel us to think of brute facts. The gaze, which we are told so often is a sign of power, here becomes, ironically, a sign of helplesness.

The spirit of this book is transgressive. We can see this right from the front cover where the tradition of court portraiture from at least the time of Van Dyck's portrait, Charles I on Horseback (c. 1637-8) stands on its head. What is regal, realistic, studied, and finished in Van Dyck, becomes in Keeping confrontational, artificial, parodic, and incomplete. We gaze at an illustrated man who returns our gaze so intently that we cower. What we understand from this book is that art can organize life, but it cannot protect us from it. Looking at Keeping's work estranges us by attracting our attention to primary things: love and death, black and white, negative and positive, ugliness and beauty, desire and fear. Some might find Keeping's interests in violence and brutishness "morbid," but I prefer to think his interests are more aesthetic than sucked sugar stick.

Notes
1. "Composite art" is a term coined, I think, by Jean Hagstrum in a book on William Blake. Hagstrum speaks of the "living unity" of Blake's words and pictures, in which one aspect of the form picks up what the other lacks. See Hagstrum 10-20.

2. In fact, at least one description of the book speaks of Keeping's "powerful black-and-white illustrations." See Watkins and Sutherland 318.

Works Cited
Carpenter, Humphrey and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. Oxford and New York: OUP, 1984.
Doonan, Jane. Looking at Pictures in Picture Books. Stroud, Glos.: Thimble Press, 1993.
Hagstrum, Jean. William Blake Poet and Painter: An Introduction to the Illuminated Verse. Chicago & London: University of Chicago P, 1978 (1964).
Nodelman, Perry. Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children's Picture Books. Athens & London: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
Noyes, Alfred. The Highwayman. Illus. Charles Keeping. Oxford: OUP, 1981.
Watkins, Tony and Zena Sutherland. "Contemporary Children's Literature," in Children's Literature: An Illustrated History, ed. by Peter Hunt. Oxford and New York: OUP, 1995. 289-319.

RAY 'CRASH' CORRIGAN

One of many cowboys who turn up in HE WAS SOME KIND OF A MAN (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009)

"An Endless Variety in Language": The New Mother

A student asked me just after class whether I liked Lucy Clifford's story, "The New Mother." I replied briskly that I did, and when the student wanted to know why I should like such a dismal little story, I replied once again briskly that it was thought-provoking. I meant, of course, that the story is shocking and that its very shock-value prompts us to ask questions about the story. But leaving class, I was troubled that I had not answered the question in a satisfactory way. Sure, it is possible to "like" that which is not pleasant; this is one of the nifty things about art: we can like that which in real life would not be likeable at all. But does this accurately account for liking a story such as "The New Mother," and what is there about the story to like.

I'll begin with the negative: the story contains much for any reader to dislike. First, the obvious message about good behaviour, obeying parents, and accepting duty is rather heavy-handed. Second, the message that bad behaviour may be a result of peer pressure and the desire for the satisfaction of curiosity takes a downright unpleasant form. The little gypsy girl taunts Blue-eyes and Turkey and nudges them deeper and deeper into bad behaviour, and then she never does allow them to see the little peasant man and woman. Indeed, perhaps the little man and woman never existed in the first place, and the gypsy child is a small female version of Mephistopheles or Lucifer. The departure of the mother is disturbing, and so too is the "new mother" that appears to take her place. The end is stark and bleak and unforgiving. These children are babes in the woods at the end, and we know what happened to the babes in the woods. Should we conclude that this is an example of the kind of brutal didacticism popular in the heyday of the so-called Moral Tale? Is this story quite simply a warning to young girls to behave themselves or suffer the consequences? If it is, then for me it would be a particularly unlikable and even unsavoury story.

But I do like it. So what is there about this story to like? I'll approach a couple of things here: 1) the psychological story of absences, and 2) the initiation this story offers readers into the complexity of reading itself. This second point, simply stated, is: the story is about how we read, how we interpret. Interpretation depends upon what the little gypsy girl in the story refers to as "an endless variety in language" (205).

First things first, and so I''ll begin with absences. The first thing I notice about this story is its insistence on things absent. The two girls, Blue-eyes and Turkey, have names that derive from absence, Blue-eyes for her father who is absent at sea and Turkey for the wild turkey that is absent in the forest. The fair in the village takes place the day before the girls arrive and so it too is absent. They find no letter waiting for them at the post office, and this absence underlines the absence of the father. When they tell their mother that they aspire to be naughty--to absent goodness from their lives, she replies that if they do this, then she will absent herself and leave a substitute mother in her place. The plot turns on precisely these absences. The story is replete with absences of one kind and another. The little man and woman in the peardrum are always absent. I connect this absence with the psychic life, and to do so is to raise the spectre of desire. Desire, by its very nature, seeks that which it does not have, what is absent. What the little girls have in the beginning of the story is comfort and security, a loving mother and protective home; they are sheltered and cut off from the dngerous world beyond their ken. Yet their father is absent, at sea. Desire on the part of the mother and her two older daughters to receive communication from the father sets the story in motion. Then desire for the things the fair offers, for sight of the little man and woman, for the sound of the peardrum, for the little woman's secret, for the knowledge whether they have been naughty enough to satisfy the gypsy girl dominates the girls' lives. They desire that which they cannot have. And what they cannot have is that which they desire.

The story is a small Lacanian drama. Here two young girls living in harmony with their mother reach a stage in their lives when desire for that which is beyond the parameters of mother and home initiates a fall from unity with that mother. The little village girl is dark and mysterious, seeming to appear and disappear as if by magic. She is the 'other,' a person who, by virtue of her very otherness is both sinister and attractive. And she harbours two little people who dance and comport themselves suggestively. Whatever these little people represent, they clearly suggest the transgressive, that which the children's mother disapproves of, and that which the two young girls desire. The behaviour called for by the gypsy child subverts the calm of early connection with the mother. It disconnects the girls from their mother. The gypsy child convinces the girls that they lack something, that their lives are without fulfillment. Having been convinced of this, the girls set about trying to fill that lack, to accomplish fulfillment. What the story reveals, however, is that the thing the girls think is necessary for their fulfillment is non-existent in the first place. That which they desire is an absence, and therefore desire can never find satisfaction. What's more, once the acceptance of desire as something devoutly to be wished is set in motion, once the children leave the mirror stage as it were (remember that they throw the mirror out the window and it crashes on the ground), they lose contact with the mother they had known. They find only separation. The girls are doomed to a life of separation and frustration and fear. An absent father and an absent mother means a wilderness future for these girls. All they can do is "long and long, with a longing that is greater than words can say, to see their own dear mother again" (213). This is a longing that is doomed to remain frustrate.

Before I leave this Lacanian longing, I note the relative absence of males in this story. The father is at sea; a little man with a wide-brimmed hat proves absent; and the man with the dancing dogs lurks in the background, appearing before the girls meet the gypsy child and then later playing a flute as his two dogs slowly watlz round and round. What do we make of this grotesquerie? One thing seems likely: the absence of the girls' father makes the whole series of events possible. Their desire is to reach out to the father, and the little man accompanied by a little woman in the peardrum box is a reminder of male-female relationship. This couple compels the young girls's interest. Then we learn that the man with the dogs is somehow connected to the gypsy girl. The question that occurs to me is: does this man represent the master of the revels, the power in the background, the one who controls things? This is a parodic father and his two dogs are parodic children under his control. Perhaps the story is even more darkly pessimistic than I at first thought: disaster can happen when fathers are absent (I think too of Sendak's OUTSIDE OVER THERE), and disaster results when fathers control children. The Law of the Father ensures desire's dance will keep us unhappy and isolated from that which has kept us safe: the mother. The "new mother," after all, is a decidedly phallic mother with her long and wooden and powerful tail. In this story fathers win the day, but the result for women is dire.

So far, this shapes up to be a dreary story about the inevitable tragedy of human existence. But another reading is possible. The story delivers one surprise after another, most often linguistic surprise. This is a story of reversals. And the reversals more often than not derive from misunderstanding, from misinterpretation if you will. Examples are numerous: the peardrum has strings, but it is actually played by turning a handle, not strumming or plucking the strings; the gypsy girl appears to be crying, but she is cheerful; she says she is rich, but she looks poor; shabbiness is respectable; unkindness is being naughty without including your sister in the naughtiness; goodness is akin to a crime; and of course the most dramatic reversal is the "new mother" herself because she reverses (perhaps "inverts" is more precise) the good mother. Each of these reversals has something to do with a failure of interpretation on the part of the girls, a failure which is deeply related to language itself and the failure of language to be transparent.

The dark stranger the girls meet in town is vague and ill-defined; at first they think "it was someone asleep," then they think it is a poor sick woman in need of food, and finally they see that it is a "wild-looking girl" who seems "very unhappy" (195). They are wrong on all counts, except for the apparent fact that this is a female. Their interpretation fails; they misread what they see. The reason for this misinterpretation has something to do with a failure of precise connection between signifier and signified. The gypsy girl as signifier does not offer a clear and transparent signified. I keep calling her a "gypsy," but the story no where states this. The girl remains vague and mysterious, like language. As a signifier, she may point to many signifieds: child, gypsy, peasant, urban street arab, disenfranchised poor person, demonic force, daughter of the devil, Mephistopheles, absence itself, tempter, enemy, and so on.

Like language in its infinite variety, I might add. Note several instances of slippage between signifier and signified. "A little shabbiness is very respectable," says the gypsy child (197). If this is so, then what do the words "shabbiness" and "respectability" mean? Are respectable people shabby? And what constitutes a "little shabbiness," as opposed to a lot of shabbiness? Such questions remain open. Or what do we make of the gypsy child's assertion that her shabbiness is "quite lucky"? Just what does "lucky" mean here? Is shabbiness a matter of luck? At another point in the story, the two girls claim that they "are very fond of crying" (199). Is this true? And if it is, then why should crying be something they like? If this is not true, then the girls deliberately use language to obscure a truth. A simple and clear example occurs when the two girls urge the gypsy child to "go on" singing, and she replies "I'm going," as she walks away (202). Clearly the connection between signifier and signified is arbitrary, unpredictable, and slippery.

Twice in the story, the narrator alerts us to the failure of understanding. When the mother explains to her daughters just how love works to dispel unkindness, the girls reply: "We don't know what you mean" (200). A little later, the gypsy child tells the girls that language has an infinite variety, and the narrator informs us that "the children did not understand" (205). What the two girls cannot do is interpret; their grasp of language remains rudimentary and simple. Why can't we be naughty and still love mother, they think. Why can't naughtiness be something simple--like words. But words are not simple, the story indicates, and the girls are left at the end on the outside looking in. The darkness has drawn down and become impenetrable; this is inevitable in a world in which words are beyond human understanding. But the story as I conceive it here is not simply dreary and pessimistic; it is an object lesson in reading. The reader has the opportunity of understanding how language can work to isolate and obfuscate. Readers learn yet another Lacanian lesson: everything depends upon the letter.

THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN

This will be, perhaps, the most difficult of response papers for me. First, I have not had time to reread the book, and therefore I cannot offer a response to something just read. Even had I been able to get the book read for this occasion, however, I would still have to face the troublesome fact that I know the book so very well--or at least that I think I know the book very well. I have written on it more than once before and I have edited it for publication. I find it well nigh impossible to get back to something like a pure response to it. My academic response has focussed on the book's formal aspects, what I called somewhere its structure of opposites. I have written about it as if it were one of the most important children's books of the last century and a half, and I have consciously tried to present it as a book that speaks beyond its Christian sentiments. I have, in all this, assumed that I like the book. But do I really like it? And if so, then why do I like it?

Let me fudge. I think I like it. And I think I like it for precisely those reasons that make its status as a children's book doubtful. What I mean to say is that I like the book because it is difficult; it provides for me the pleasure of teasing me into thought. Let me do something prosaic and list my likes: I like the mystery of the great great grandmother at the top of the stairs who keeps changing identity; I like the comic portrayal of the goblins who act like duffers in the scene where Glump and family (Helfer, Podge, etc.) are moving house; I like the descriptions of the mountainside, the mines, and so on in the book because these descriptions seem to me to function meaningfully in the book (see for example the description of the King's garden in chapter 10); I like the poetic style of the book's language; I also like the way the language changes depending upon who is speaking (for example, the pompous rhetoric of the goblins in their Council); I like the reversal of roles in Irene's rescuing of Curdie; I like the questioning of reality in the book's confusion of dream and reality (see Curdie's dream when he is feverish as a result of his wounded leg); I like the approach to a vision of social equality in the bringing together of a princess and a miner boy; I like the pace of the book as it moves without hurry to its climactic battle between goblins and soldiers; I like the way that the book defers both its beginning and ending to suggest an ongoing story, a story without beginning or end since for MacDonald (as I read him) stories have no beginning or ending, just as life has neither; I like the Romantic conception of imaginative activity as superior to ratiocinative activity which the book presents; I like the vision of childhood constructed within the book, that is, I like MacDonald's Romantic notion of the child as capable of independence in both action and thought; I like the ecological suggestion evident in the book, that is, the suggestion that to undermine nature is to destroy harmony, to threaten the quality of life; I like the value placed on home and family partly shown in the fact that Irene's life is endangered once her family is disunited; I like the brooding atmosphere--great caverns, dark nights, large houses with many unexplored rooms--of the setting beause it suggests so many possibilities for reading: psychological probing, political satire, spiritual allegory; I like the way the book hinges on certain traditional images: sun and moon, mother and father, the great house, water, rocks, the thread, spinning wheel, flowers and others I cannot recall now.

Perhaps this is enough of a list. The important thing is to find out why I should even be compelled to draw up a list such as this. Clearly, this list helps me distance the book; in other words, it helps me keep from answering the question: why do I like this book. Oh, it offers a rationale, but this rationale does not really get at why I like the book. I might say that all of the above indicates that I like the book because I think it is such a good introduction to the literary experience for children. But this implies that the literary experience is entirely cerebral, and we ought to know by now that it isn't. If it were, then we could teach literature without any doubt as to what we are teaching. We could establish the "cerebral" or factual content that we wanted to communicate to novice readers, and then parcel out this content in stages. But none of us can agree on what the "content" of literature really is. We can't even agree on what literature is. This reminds me of something we must not forget: some readers will respond favourably to a specific book and others will respond unfavourably. We cannot dictate which books will work with all readers because no book will. Books speak to individual readers for reasons that are as individual as the readers themselves.

But I drift away from THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN. I suspect that I like this book because I hear in it a voice that calls to me to reevaluate my sense of reality. Clearly, any reader of this book will have to question the nature of reality at least as it is presented in the book itself. There the possibilities for mysterious, non rational forces affecting human life are actual. The existence of a supernatural godmother is something I can accept on an imaginative level, but this book tells me that the imaginative level can have real consequences for the life of common day. Belief in the great great grandmother can transform reality, can have direct affect on the quality of social life. In other words, this book tells me what all the literature I admire tells me: we imagine the life we live in--there is no other. I must put this another way: although I know that MacDonald was a Christian and that his book can be, and most often is, read accordingly, I do not find Christian solace in it. Instead I find that most sobering of thought: we, not another, fashion our world. And we do so out of desire.

Here I must switch into another mode. Desire in this book takes on male and female aspects. The male desire--a function of expulsion, of separation from the warmth and security of a time of innocence (in the book, when the goblins lived above ground among men)--is paternal, and attempts to control that which it thinks it has lost. The goblins' desire is to dominate the human community, and they intend to do this by capturing Irene, the princess. They wish to take her and turn her into one of them (remember how they plan to strip the skin from her toes). The female desire--a function of security and clarity of identity--is maternal, and seeks to give independence and strength of purpose. The world we live in, the world as evidenced by the goblins and their desire for power and control, is the world of false desire. In terms of the book, it is a world based on materialism where things are measured and valued only by how they appear. When we are turned to the law of the father, to the desire for power and control, then we cannot see someone as intangible as the great great grandmother. Only by renouncing the desire for control can we see her. Irene is privileged in that she loses herself near the beginning of the book. Her desire for amusement no longer finds satisfaction in her toys and she begins to explore her house. Her exploration leads to the loss of herself, and paradoxically to the finding of her other self--the mysterious other Irene who lives in the tower rooms of the great house. It is easy to see this Irene as the mother, the Virgin or whatever, and read the paradox of the lost/found self in religious terms. What I am suggesting, however, is that we see this other Irene as Irene herself or Irene in her reordering of desire. Through contact with this motherly Irene, young Irene forms relationships with Curdie, her own father, Curdie's family, and even Lootie--relationships based not on the achievement of selfish desires, but rather on giving freely of the self. Hence the importance of the kiss Irene promises Curdie.

Kissing Wicked Things: Alice in Reverse

This is the third response to the Alice books I have written for class. In the previous two, I concentrated on ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, something I always do when I turn to these books either for teaching or for writing about. Shocking as it may be, I do not change my mind about the book year after year after year (I first published on Alice in 1977). But also I have never come to grips with my reaction to THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. This is perhaps strange since I recall clearly one of my first experiences with the book: a reading of the White Knight passage by one of my instructors in my fourth year of undergraduate studies. The course was Romantic Poetry and I have no idea why the professor read this passage without warning one day, although I suppose he made some connection with Wordsworth whose "Resolution and Independence" Carroll parodies in the White Knight's poem, "The Aged Aged Man." The reading was very funny. But nothing of what I have said has any real relevance to this book or to my response to it. What might have relevance is the fact that the instructor who read this passage had the worst speech impediment I have encountered. He had an extreme stutter, so much so that most of our classes with him gave rise to embarrassment both on his part and on the students'. Yet he read through this long episode without so much as a hesitation; he read quite brilliantly. In fact, this was the only time in the entire class that he either spoke or read without stuttering. Perhaps the irony that Lewis Carroll himself was a stutterer was not lost on our instructor, nor the conventional belief that Carroll thought of himself as the White Knight. With this in mind, I might note that the White Knight is one of the few characters (the gnat is the only other one who comes to mind) who elicits sympathy. The incident contains an emotional edge not found in ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND.

In any case, how do I explain what happened? Frankly, I can't. I can, however, say that this passage had obviously captured our instructor's imagination. I say "captured" because he quite literally lost himself inside Carroll's text. Is it too much to say that our instructor saw himself as the White Knight? The White Knight's stutter is his inability to ride. Here is a Knight whose function in life includes riding, and he can't ride worth a tiddle. Our instructor's function in life included speaking in public, and he did this with great difficulty, falling from his linguistic seat often. I might also add that Carroll's book is so evidently about language and mastery of language. Who is the master, asks Humpty Dumpty, the speaker or the language the speaker uses? Now Humpty's point has to do with the control of meaning, but in the context of stuttering we might also see the question about mastery as applicable to a stutterer. How can someone who stutters get through such tongue twisters as "Twas brillig and the slithy toves," or "I'll tell thee everything I can"? The answer is--with ease because the book releases the speaker from himself or herself.

Well, this is not a very adequate answer. But I want to keep with the looking-glass theme: reversal. Everything in the looking-glass world is backwards or reversed. Perhaps if we enter this world with a stutter, we find that once we are there the stutter is gone. That's what our instructor found. I like this idea. I like the notion that the text releases us from ourselves and at the same time gives us our real selves. I mean surely the man with the stutter knew that his real self could articulate eloquently, and here in the pages of this book he found that this was true. Reading this passage from THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, our instructor became his own invention, or to put it another way, he invented himself. Or to put it yet another way, he is like the flowers Alice meets early in the book: he can talk when there is anyone worth talking to, or rather when he has anything worth reading out loud.

The White Knight is, after all, an inventor. He fits that line of distinguished inventors that has culminated most recently, perhaps, in the BACK TO THE FUTURE films or the HONEY, I SHRUNK or BLEW UP THE KIDS films. True, the White Knight is not a scientist but he is an intrepid inventor whose inventions protect his horse from sharks and mice, and ensure a person's hair will not fall out. He also invents a discourse, one in which words loosen and begin to mean what he wants them to mean. For example, he says the wind is as strong as soup, and when he speaks of himself stuck inside a sugar-loaf hat, he says he was "fast" as lightning. And of course he sings the beautiful song about the aged aged man a-sitting on a gate.

Alice does not kiss the White Knight goodbye; she shakes his hand. And he is not a wicked thing; he is a dotty thing. But this is what I like. The White Knight, as far as I'm concerned, is little different from the black kitten who unravels the ball of worsted at the beginning of the book. Alice calls the kitten a "wicked, wicked little thing" and then kisses it. In other words, Alice too controls language, makes words mean what she wants them to mean. Imagine kissing wicked things! If we allow words independence, then "wicked" denotes something unpleasant or at least morally reprehensible. In this world we are not encouraged to reward the wicked with a kiss. Alice is, in effect, inside her fictional world before she passes through the looking-glass.

Of course, this reversal effect is a fiction. Nothing is, in fact, reversed. The story moves resolutely forward, and the experiences Alice has within her fictional (or her dream) world are perfectly straight forward within that world. Living backwards entails accepting reversal as its opposite. This entrance into a world with its own rules is what releases us from the strictures and rules of our waking, non literary, existence. When we don't ask questions and simply accept the topsy-turvy world we are free to read without stuttering. Perhaps the only place where the looking-glass world and the real world we live in connect is in the White Queen's remark that the rule is "jam tomorrow and jam yesterday--but never jam today." Now this sounds less like the looking-glass world than the world we inhabit. Hope deferred; rewards deferred; pleasure deferred: this is the way of the world. In looking-glass land deferral is not really the order of the day. If Alice desires to be Queen, she will be queen. Important here is whether this desire, once satisfied, will deliver the pleasure Alice anticipates, and the answer here is, of course, no.

To become Queen is to grow up, and to grow up is to leave the zany life of the looking-glass creatures behind. I don't know why I always avoid confronting this book, but maybe those cold winds and that falling snow always just outside the comforting house with its looking-glass world discomfits me. Also I don't play chess (I did play a little when I was a boy, but I hated the game, its rules and squares, and logic, and strategy, and precision), and the game structures this story. When I say structure, I want to have the force here of a determining structure. The spontaneity of Wonderland seems to me more controlled in this book. Alice's moves are too carefully pre-planned; the dream dissolves are a lie. This is no dream, but a foreordained journey from a state of innocent invention to mature awareness that talking to people is impossible when they always say the same thing.

"Do Cats Eat Bats?" Having Fun at Alice's Expense

This is the first time I have written a response to a book that I have previously written a response to. Yes, I have written three academic articles on ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, and when I came to write my first response I was what I then called "stingy" in my willingness to be open regarding my emotional response. This second attempt faces me with the choice of either repeating my, by now well-rehearsed, ideas or somehow facing up to the connection that the book undoubtedly has to my inner life. Let me say clearly at the outset that I think this is a book which can and does live for young readers, but not for all young readers; I have tried at least once before, in an article published in CHILDREN'S LITERATURE IN EDUCATION, to explain my reasons for thinking this. I don't want to repeat those explanations here. What I do wish to say is that I know that this story did effect me strongly when I was a child.

I cannot remember when I first encountered Alice, and I don't even know whether I ever read or had read the book to me when I was young. It seems likely we had a copy kicking around somewhere in the house; we had copies of several of what were considered improving books for the young. I remember abridged versions of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, ROBINSON CRUSOE, TOM SAWYER and HUCKLEBERRY FINN in our house; I can't recall that I read any of them, although I do recall beginning one or two and then setting them aside as tedious. But what I do remember, vividly, is seeing Disney's version of the 'Alice' books. And what sticks in my mind is its craziness and its frightening bits. The Cheshire Cat, the bellicose Queen of Hearts, the spades who paint the roses red, the dark and forboding woods in which Alice, while following a path, meets a dog whose tail is a brush that wags and as it wags it brushes away the path leaving Alice in the middle of nowhere (not in the book), the Caterpillar who pronounces his words queerly and who blows smoke in the shape of letters at Alice, and the wierd insect glasses that crawl onto her face (not in the book)--all remain clear in my mind. In short, I know I was captured by this story. (I must say "story" because, as I indicated, my memory draws more on the film than on the book.)

Interestingly, I am now aware that many readers find the book troublesome; Joan Aiken, as I recall, thinks the book is a nightmare and sees nothing redeeming in it. My interest here is not going to be with this issue of whether the book is scary and therefore unsuitable for children, because I think that what is scary for some will be a ho-hum for others. I am also not interested in taking up here the question of whether the book is too difficult for today's young readers. Nor will I offer a reading or interpretation of the book simply because I have done this those several times before. Finally, I will skirt the issue of my present response to the book since think I dealt with this in last year's response paper. No, what I will follow is the track of what I remember of my first encounter with the story.

Unavoidably, this exercise in reminiscence will necessitate several flaws in my argument. First, I will not be speaking directly or intricately of the book; rather I will be trying to examine how I responded to the version I encountered as a child. Second, I cannot, of course, remember with certainty my responses as a child; what I say is inevitably a reconstruction and as such must be coloured by my more mature mind looking back. The danger is that I will reconstruct my responses to conform to what I now think about both reading and about the story. And third, I cannot remember what age I was when I met Alice, although since the Disney film was made in 1951 I can make a pretty good guess. I think I saw the film on T.V., but I'm not certain; if I did, then I was at least ten years old when I saw it. I cannot, however, make any sensible comment on the suitable age for this book. What I can do is point out that Alice herself is seven, and I suspect that Carroll had an audience of about that age in mind for his book.

Okay, so why did this story have such a strong effect on me? First let's look at some context. I was (and I still am!) a male growing up in a culture which was aggressively gender specific: girls read books, boys played sports and if boys read books at all, then they read manly works of adventure by such writers as Kipling, Burroughs (Edgar Rice of Tarzan fame), Twain, or Stevenson. Adventure consisted of forays into the jungle, trips to the Spanish Main, or encounters with robbers and even worse--murderers. What did not constitute adventure was encounters with swimming mice or dodos or caterpillars who force the hero to recite poems or Mad Hatters who say such things as "Twinkle twinkle little bat/How I wonder what you're at." In short, I don't think Alice was a story ready made for a young boy socialized to spurn anything "girlish." And yet I liked it.

Before pressing on to speculate why, I need to supply a more personal context than I have yet done. My home was not an especially happy one. I don't want to overplay this and drop into melodrama, because many children's homes are not especially happy. In any case, tension ran high in my family, and as a child I could not, of course, fully appreciate the reasons for this tension; it was enough that it was there making life a strain. Fear was a large part of this strain, fear that the house would erupt in argument, fear that violence might follow harsh words, fear that a personality change would come over one of my parents.

In this context, the story of Alice offered a wonderful release. First there are the pent up tensions within the story, perhaps best exemplified in the Queen of Hearts who is a walking paranoiac. For whatever reason, she trusts no one and loves herself to distraction. Her desire for self projection is monumental. I know that I was scared during the painting of the roses, and I now know that the Disney animators worked on the potential for this fear by drawing an analogy between the red paint and blood. The parts I responded to were the parts that involved fear, violence, isolation, disorientation--all those parts that confirmed my own worst nightmares. In other words, I too, I think, reacted to the nightmarish aspects of the story that offend the adult Joan Aiken. But I did not react negatively. Quite the reverse. I think my reaction was akin to what I now think of as catharsis. As a child I loved scary things. We--my sister and I-- used to look forward to Saturday nights when we were allowed to stay up until midnight when our one T.V. channel played The Witching Hour, a late night movie which was, as the title of the programme suggests, a spooky one. God how I loved that Witching Hour.

But something else caught my attention, something I also remember from Disney's version of THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS. I refer to the clear vein of lunacy in these films, which I remember best in Alice in the mad tea party scene. Here the out and out zaniness, the iconoclastic energy of the scene puzzled me, but fascinated me. I suspect what was so powerful here was the combination of something which bordered on the frightening--frightening because so unavailable to sense--and something which was so wildly liberating. All those adult pretensions associated with the dinner table, with polite tea parties, with propriety and convention are simply thrown asunder by the Mad Hatter and March Hare. This whole scene subverted the world into which adults tried, with amazing success, to induct children into. What sticks in my mind are the buttered and then shattered watch, and the spinning eyes of the characters. I have little doubt that I liked the powerful spirit of revolt against time and tide.

As an adult I can think of the book's themes: identity, satire of education, the nature of language, growing up, the quest, adults versus children and so on. And I can argue that the book offers children a humourous use of language combined with nonsensical characters and events. I can, in short, say that it offers much to the imagination, much food for imaginative play. But really, I do not know whether I reacted at all to the linguistic subtlety of the story or to the parodic and satiric aspects it so clearly contains. I reacted purely and simply to the visceral delight of the possibility of heads rolling and children being lost in the woods.

So: what to conclude from this? This is one reader's story of reading. It is a story because it may be part fictional. But I want it to demonstrate one thing: stories do matter. If we can catch the right match between story and reader, then something happens that is permanent. My guess is that ALICE is not a book for every child, but I suspect there are children to whom this book will speak, not necessarily the way it spoke to me, but in its own way matching the child's needs and personality and context.

Cinderella Makes the Rounds: Stories for Children?

Frankly, I haven't much to say about this book, a collection of Cinderella stories from around the world. I am trained to read works of literature, and what this book offers, for the most part, are oral tales transcribed. In other words, most of these stories are not "literary tales." I ought to like this book because I spend much of my time telling tales I have heard but not read. In fact, one of the stories I tell is a version of "Cinderella" called "Molly Mop-Top," and it resembles the Grandmother's version of the story in "Cinderella in Tuscany." I heard it told in North Carolina in 1985. But I deviate from the task at hand which is to respond to Neil Philip's THE CINDERELLA STORY. My response is to the ingredients of the various stories, and what I like about these is their uncompromising bluntness, even their brutality. As Cinderella makes her various rounds from continent to continent and country to country, one thing remains constant: the folk versions do not conform to what we think of as children's stories.

The first story in the book is the prototype for all modern versions of the tale written for children. It is Perrault's "Cendrillon, or, the Little Glass Slipper." This is the easiest version for me to respond to because it is a literary version. Perrault's wit and irony reflect his position in the French court of the late seventeenth century. Clearly, he has fun with female vanity, evident for example in "two-layered head-dresses" and "beauty spots." Even Cinderella comes in for this male smirk; she is vain. For one thing she never gets bored hearing the Prince speak "sweet nothings" all night long. In addition, Perrault winks at his fellow courtiers with the vulgarism, "Cinderbutt," and he implies that the ball is part of a sexual ritual. In true sexist fashion, he tells his reader that what a female requires is not intelligence, wit, cunning, or education, but rather "charm." I can appreciate the fun in this story, but I do not, in the final analysis, like it. I regularly avoid it when I teach the fairy tale.

Despite the fact that most of the other stories in the book disarm my critical faculties, I like them. I like them because they reveal just how basic this story is. Versions here deal openly with such things as child abuse, as it manifests itself in incest, in abandonment, and in violent treatment of the child, in cannibalism, in relationships between humans and animals, in greed, envy, care, and selfish desire. Females and males fit into the Cinderella plot, and this ought to remind us that the folk tale is not, necessarily at least, sexist in the way Perrault's tale is. Not all stories end happily. In short, despite all the fantastic goings on in these stories--a child born with a snake about its neck, a cow with small golden slippers near her heart, a girl who turns into a golden turtle, and so on--the world they depict is starkly realistic. Frankly, I can't imagine telling many, maybe even any, of these stories, but they do tell me a lot about the folk mind. And the folk mind is, after all, the mind of us all.

Take one story as an example: the Brazilian story, "Dona Labismina." The mother's wish for a child, even if this child is a snake, is extreme, but it does capture the intensity of the woman's desire to give birth. What might be more surprising is the story's turn of events: the mother does indeed give birth to a snake (this brings to mind E.B. White's STUART LITTLE in which Mrs. Little gives birth to a mouse). I take it that the child with the snake about its neck is shorthand for twins or for the familiar doubling in folk tales, that is, a good mother is balanced by a bad mother (usually called a step-mother, sometimes called a witch), or for the child's presexual protection from violation. The snake remains with the child until "she became a young woman." In other words, with maturity the female child loses the direct protection of the snake. The snake's name, Labismina (cf. labia minora and labia majora--tissue related to the vulva), seems to suggest a sexual metaphor. Maria, the other sister, confronts danger after her mother dies. The danger is incest; her father chooses her as his next bride. For protection and advice, Maria turns to Labismina. Labismina advises her sister to ask for three dresses, each one related to a different element--one to earth, one to water, and one to air. The King provides the dresses, but Marian flees on a ship provided by her sister. The second half of the story now ensues, and the prince replaces the father. The dresses and Labismina's assistance ensure Maria of the Princes's love. The Prince, significantly, throws a jewel (perhaps related to the fourth element, fire) into Mria's lap, and it is this jewel that identifies her as the girl he loves. Whereas Maria's early sexuality was serpentine, her mature sexuality is gemlike. This might explain why she forgets her sister, the snake. Perhaps, as in Grimm's "The Frog Prince," Maria moves from premature, immature, and unpleasant sexualty, to healthy and mature sexuality. This story might reflect the way primitive people help their children make the transition from childhood to maturity.

These stories seems so sure of themselves, as if the snake, the jewel, the dresses and so on posed no difficulty of interpretation. These are not literary stories which might draw on arcane material; they are simple chronicles of growing up. However, becasue they are oral tales they exhibit various states of completion or integration. Take for example, the Irish story, "The Bracket Bull." This story has four distinct sections, each of which might make a story on its own. We have the story of the Bull and the stepmother's jealousy; the story of the Bracket Bull's death; the story of the three giants; and the story of the rescue of the Princess from the fiery dragon. This story appears to be about male power and the importance of fathers, but the four parts suggests to me a story that has been patched together--what Philip calls somewhere a "portmanteau" story.

So I like some of these stories for their frankness, their quirkiness, their open use of violence, their colloquial and matter-of-fact tone. What I find less successful is the attempt to capture the oral situation. This is most clear in "Cinderella in Tuscany" where the family storytelling appears in dialogue form. True, this does instruct us in the way oral stories change with the person who tells them, but reading of this dramatic and dynamic situation is no substitute for experiencing it.

The Cinderella Story serves the purpose of informing us of just how widespread a story like "Cinderella" is. Its appearance in so many cultures might testify to the power of cultural imperialism, or it might indicate just how similar people across the globe really are. We might also notice that some of these versions were collected not that long ago, and I note that the Tuscany versions represented in the penultimate story in the book clearly have children as part of their audience. Is it significant that these versions contain little or no violence?

Speaking a common Tongue: Grimm's Fairy Tales

What follows are a number of short pieces on various topics related to children's literature, literary theory, and related subjects.

The task I set myself tonight is to write about why I like fairy tales, especially those by the Brothers Grimm. My usual tack is to move into one or two stories and read them as if they were poems, but I want now to organize my thoughts on some tales I do not normally teach or write about. In fact, I shall turn my mind to two stories--"The Bremen Town Musicians" and "The Wind and the Sun"--which I clearly recall from my childhood. I grew up in a house with few books; I did not like to read and I read very little except comic books, but I know that when I was quite young my mother would read to my sister and myself from an old and battered volume of fairy tales. The two tales I mention are the two I remember most vividly. I cannot remember with any accuracy what I felt about the stories when I was young, but I know that I heard them, especially "The Wind and the Sun," repeatedly. And I know that these stories have stayed with me since then. Why?

First, I suspect that these two stories, like all the fairytales, speak with what I call a "common tongue." By this I mean that the tales are earthy and homespun, akin to extended jokes. One feature of folk narrative is this spareness and this unpretentious quality. The stories present a world in which animals and aspects of nature such as the sun and the moon speak and function as if they were human; this is not so much anthropomorphism as it is animism. In other words, the world of the tales is an innocent world which seems made for, rather than set against, human beings. Provided one is careful, prudent, kind to nature's creatures, or crafty and sharp-witted one will succeed in one's tasks or quests. And over and over in the tales, those who exhibit such prudence, kindness, and wit are the smallest ones or the lowliest ones: old soldiers, children, maids, third sons or daughters, tailors, decrepit animals, a miller's daughter. Often characters succeed despite foolish behaviour: e.g. Hans, the young prince in "The Golden Bird," Jack with his beans.

"Common" too is the thinly veiled aspiration of the peasant people, their desire for power, position, wealth. The tales seem to hold conflicting notions concerning upward mobility; some are optimistic and suggest the possibility of the common man or woman rising in the world (e.g. "The Gallant Tailor" and "Rumplestiltskin"), and some are satisfied with the way of things as they are (e.g. "Hans in Luck" and "The Fisherman and His Wife"). Whether the tales take the one stance or the other, they invariably take the world as they find it. And what they almost always find in the world is the inevitable fact of death.

If the tales are as concerned with common things as I think they are, then it should not surprise us that they are concerned with sex. Sex and death: these are the common themes of the fairy tales. The two are implicated in each other as a story such as the beautiful "The Almond Tree" makes clear. Human beings experience in their sexual experience a futile stay against death, and at the same time that sexual act is a death or at least a sign of impending death. The fairy tales are constantly reminding us that procreation involves its opposite: the beginning of life implies the end of another life. I think I react positively to this aspect of the tales, an aspect that sometimes irritates other readers of the tales, especially those readers who think the tales should be "free of the clash of sex" because small children either read them or have them read to them. For myself, the sexual aspect of the tales is part of the literary (as opposed to the psychological) aspect of the tales. In other words, the sexual themes have to do with familiar literary themes: power and its abuses, rites of passage, transgression and independence, generation and the cycles of nature, the quest for a renewed earth.

But I wander far from my two stories. Why did these two stories stay with me in ways that are deeper than the way some other stories have lingered in my mind? As I think about it now, I am comforted to suspect that even at a young age I was attracted to a story ("The Bremen Town Musicians") which is about the creation of a counter-culture group, in this case a group of aged and washed-up old animals no longer considered useful by their owners. Cast aside by the power brokers, these old guys form a community and oust a group of robbers from a very attractive home in the woods. Perhaps I should like this story even more now that I too am becoming one of the old guys, but the fact is I am less attracted to the idea of community now than I obviously was when I was younger. I suspect that living in a home which my father often compared to a motel was one reason why the community of animals attracted me. In any case, I tell a version of this story when I visit elementary grades (Division 1) and I note that children continue to appreciate it. Whatever the reason for this, I know that its creation (even through the telling) of a community is a strong part of its appeal.

The same cannot be said of the other story I remember with such clarity. In fact, I have not read or seen a copy of this story since I was a child. Yet the vision of the man blown about by the blustery and burly wind is still strong. You will recall that the story involves a competition between the sun and the wind to see which of them is the stronger. To test themselves, they decide to see which of them can make a lone traveller take off his cloak. The wind tries to blow the cloak away, but the man simply holds on with more and more firmness as the wind blusters about him. When the sun trains his hot beams on the man, the man soon removes his cloak. The sun wins. I realize the story is openly didactic: the warm sun bests the blustering and bellicose wind. Perhaps I was a sucker for a good lesson. But I suspect what spoke to me most forcefully from this story was its message of non-violence. To get what you want, you don't need to buffet and beat your object. A warm caress works wondrously well--and quickly. Certainly, I have grown into an adult who supports non-violence. Whether it was that my own childhood home was not without its violence or whether it was simply my own natural bent, this story filled a need.

And now I will close out this short paper on this idea of filling a need. To make my point, I must draw on a personal anecdote not from my childhood but from my recent past. A few years ago, I told stories one afternoon in an early childhood education classroom in a school located in a lower economic area of the city in which I live. The stories--mostly folk and fairy tales--which I told, contained lots of violence: shot and decapitated cats, drowned fish, headless men, young girls tossed in deep wells, and so on. Some days after my visit, I received a package from the school. In this I found pictures drawn by the children depicting the stories I had told. Also, the teacher had written the children's comments by their pictures. These comments indicated to me that my violent little stories had filled a need for these children. It was clear to me that the stories acted as something of a catharsis for children whose real lives experienced all too vividly and closely real violence. In these stories they had the opportunity of organizing and distancing the violence in their lives. I suspect some of this was also true for me when I was young. In any case, I find these stories compelling and powerful.