One of many cowboys who turn up in HE WAS SOME KIND OF A MAN (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009)
Sunday, December 20, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Friday, December 18, 2009
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.
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