1. The Wind in the Willows attracts me for the tension in the book between the urge to conformity to group standards and expectations and the need for a radical making of the self. This tension appears in many books for children: Anne of Green Gables, The Chocolate War, Julie, Huckleberry Finn, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Witch Week, Julie of the Wolves are a few examples. Only several years after I began reading and thinking about this book did I connect this tension between acceptance of outside control and inner need for independence to early nineteenth-century Romanticism. Once I did this, the book's uneasy expression of imaginative release became clear to me. Grahame then appeared to me to express the Romantic paradox: solipsism or behaviourism. That is, he tries to find a way out of the impasse set up by a fear of outside control and an equally strong fear of subjectivity and relativism. Either we are creatures fashioned by our environment (that is, we have no freedom to create ourselves), or we have that terrible freedom akin to nightmare in which we create everything there is (that is, our deepest desires and anxieties are the only reality we can know). Obviously, on the final page of the book Grahame opts for a vision of benign social control, and earlier in the book he had tried to envisage a sort of pagan deity--Pan, the goat-god--as that which grounds us and gives our lives stability and order. I persisted in reading this Pan figure as an imaginative projection rather than as a reality separable from the human imagination. In other words, I focused on what I perceived to be the book's championing of imagination as the source of human meaning and hope, and I tended to lop off that last page in which the small creatures doff their caps and pull their forlocks in hommage to the animals higher in the social hierarchy. The passages I looked at most closely in the classroom were the "Wayfarers All" chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" chapter, and the final section with the "altered Toad." I even wrote an essay on the book in which I argued that the best way to read it was the "visionary way."
2. Now, however, I look for something new in the book, and I may have found this in what suddenly leaps out at me: the book contains many instances of storytelling. This is something I was aware of previously, but only in a vague sort of way. I connected the storytelling and Ratty's writing of poetry with the book's interest in imaginative and visionary experiences. Now, perhaps because I am more acutely atuned to the significance of the act of storytelling or perhaps because literary criticism has focused on the art of narrative so acutely these past fifteen or so years I see a different significance to the book's allusions to storytelling than I did before.
3. I begin simply. Storytelling is comforting. It provides the characters with a way to experience dangers and excitement without putting themselves in harm's way (see the storytelling at the end of chapter 1). It is also thrilling, filling as it does a lack in their lives. I use the word "lack" deliberately because I want to raise the spectre of Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis generally. In raising this spectre, I also raise the bugaboo subject in children's books: sexuality. I have in recent years noticed and told my classes of what I perceived to be the one passage of explicit sexuality in the book; it occurs in chapter 3, "The Wild Wood." Students have reacted negatively to my observation--oh, and I ought to say that my observation was that Grahame's only inclusion of sex in his book--a book he claimed was free of the "clash of sex"--was safe and sublimated. Nature itself expresses the act of love-making in all its ritual splendour. In case you are puzzled, I am referring to the passage in which the shepherd boy, the knight, and the prince are waited for by the lovely ladies of summer (near the beginning of chapter 3, "The Wild Wood"). The prince is to "kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love." The entire passage is redolent with the charms of romance, and as such it is distanced, kept innocent and safe. (Much the way Grahame's letters to his fiance distanced the reality of sex in their childish discourse and cutsy flirtatiousness.) In Grahame's world, nature is filled with acts of love and life, and it is to nature that this book bends in reverence.
4. What I did not notice, or at least raise to consciousness, until I glanced through Maureen Thum's article on The Wind in the Willows, is the connection between this passage and storytelling. Grahame makes it abundantly clear that what he describes in this passage derives from the stories Ratty and his house guests tell during the winter days. The previous summer was, he notes, a "rich chapter." Connected here are memory of a past season, stories, community sharing, and recreation of experience, a transmutation (or transfiguration) of experience into the language and conventions of romance. This activity fills in for the lost season. What the characters lack--i.e. summer with its warmth, comfort and womb-like security--they recreate through language. What they lack is not only warmth, but more fundamentally sensual pleasure of a particular kind. I say "of a particular kind" because, clearly, they have warmth and pleasure in their cosy home with their comfy friends and surroundings. What, then, is this "particular kind"? You guessed it: the pleasure of what we have no other word for than sexual pleasure. In psychoanalytic terms, this lost pleasure is experienced as a lack, a lack specifically of the mother and her all-encompassing protectiveness and pleasant nourishing. Before I move beyond this paragraph, I ought to make the following conclusion: storytelling is an attempt to fill the lack I have just called "sexual." The pleasure we derive from the text is, then, a sexual pleasure; this is the case for both the writer and the reader. (Check Roland Barthe's The Pleasure of the Text.)
5. Now this chapter, "The Wild Wood," turns on Mole's desire to fill another lack: the lack or absence of Badger. Mole wants to meet Badger, a figure he has heard so much about, a figure who clearly wields great influence in the River Bank world and its environs. He strikes off on his own while Ratty sits by the fire musing over some rhymes. What now catches my attention, and I state emphatically that I had not noticed this until today, is what for me is the fact that the language of sexuality does not end with the completion of Grahame's long paen to summer and romance. Thum, who does not notice the sexually charged language throughout this chapter, makes what seems to me a perceptive point. She points out that early in the chapter the animals perceive nature through the medium of story. In other words, the experience of nature is not unmediated; rather the characters perceive the world through the conventions of literature. In other words, they do not perceive the world for itself, but rather for how it has been perceived by others in an unending tracing of language in the past, back at least as far as medieval romance. She then speculates that Mole's trip into the Wild Wood in the winter time allows him to perceive nature as it really is, and she offers passages from the book to support her contention. She concludes that Mole's trip changes his consciousness, makes him a wiser Mole on his return home with Ratty. He has seem something for himself rather than through the rose coloured lens of romance. If I were to turn to Margaret Homans's reworking of Lacan, I would note that Mole has here turned from the symbolic language of the father to the literal language of the mother. In other words, Mole turns his back on male discourse and experience to reexperience that literal and unmediated condition he could only have experienced before in the womb. This is the experience of at-oneness. To experience literally is, if I understand Homans, to bear the word, to give birth to meaning within the self and not be imposed upon by another. The myth takes me back to the Romantic notion of self-engendered reality.
6. I have no quarrel with this, but what excited me is what Thum's insights have opened up for me. I repeat: Grahame's language does not lose its sexual charge. It does, however, change the import of this sexual charge. It does not return us to the literal; it does not provide Mole with an umediated vision. This is not an example of what Homans thinks of as women's writing, as the return to the mother. How could it be? Grahame is a man. But my excitement remains. I could not have the insight I do into this chapter without the prompting from both Thum and Homans. But what is this insight? Remember, Mole goes in search of Badger. In other words, he goes in search of this book's strongest father figure. I like to think of Badger as something of a Marlon Brando, the godfather of the forest family. He turns away from the storytelling by the fire with its opening of magic casements to the romance of summer, to the harshness of the forest and its winter covering. Could it be that what he turns away from is the world of romance, so often associated with women, to the cold contingencies of masculine experience? Mole's entry into the wood is bold and forthright. He "penetrated to where the light was less," to where "holes made ugly mouths at him." He begins, despite himself, to imagine things, things obsessively associated with holes. Faces, hard and hostile, stare at him from holes. What is it he is afraid of? He knows somewhere deep in this wood is the Father, Badger, but to reach him he must pass the gauntlet of all these holes with all these malicious faces. Before long the whole wood seems running, hunting, chasing. Perhaps the rabbit which brushes by Mole tips us off to the kind of running, hunting and chasing that is going on here. Mole's is a rite of passage, a rite that will lead him into the presence of the father. But not before Ratty turns up to rescue Mole. And before Ratty turns up, Mole takes "refuge in in the deep dark hollow of an old beech tree." Anyone who has read George MacDonald's Phantastes will recall the female associations of the beech tree. As Mole snuggles into the hollow he becomes aware of that dread thing--"the Terror of the Wild Wood!" What is this terror, really? As far as I can tell this terror is a terror of the "clash of sex," that direct penetration into the mystery that Grahame wished so to keep out of his book. The Wind in the Willows is a book that never does come to terms with its own lack because Grahame instinctively desires an easy return to romance. The only difference between the romance of summer's chivalrous knights, princes, and shepherds and the romance the Badger represents is the difference between the feminine graces of summer and the masculine toughness of winter. In terms of the book, Badger's form of romance involves storming Toad Hall to oust the interloper stoats and weasels. In the "Wild Wood" chapter, this masculine form of romance appears in the person of Ratty with his brace of pistols and cudgel. To underline the point, Shepherd draws Ratty in a Sherlock Holmes outfit. Holmes represents masculine aggression in act and thought. Holmes the rationalist differs from the nymphs of summer.
7. Ratty informs Mole that there are "a hundred things one has to know" before one enters the Wild Wood: passwords, signs, sayings, verses, plants, dodges and tricks. In other words, to partcipate in this cold world, this "real," but hardly literal, world, one must know the symbolic language of wooings and subterfuge. Life is much simpler lived on the river bank, and love is much safer when lived vicariously through story. Isn't much of the book about the neatness and safety of vicarious living? Mole steers Ratty away from leaving home to follow the Sea-Faring Rat by giving him a pencil with which to write verses; Badger and friends refuse to allow Toad to go his own way until he must retreat to his own room where he triumphs in song by himself. Perhaps this book really is an escape. But, of course, escape is impossible; sublimation is what is possible. And in this book sexual energy, imaginative energy, anarchic energy--all are sublimated in story. This might explain why, when Ratty and Mole succeed in finding Badger's house deep in the Wild Wood, they arrive at a place rich in story. Badger is the character in the book most resistant to the urges of desire; he appears to have no desire, being content to lead a sedentary and solitary life. Yet he too must have periods when desire rears its disturbing head. But his house contains the stories of a long past history, a history of human settlement dating back probably to the Romans.
8. So what does all this add up to? What do I want my audience to learn from this paper? Believe me, I have no desire that you accept the incipient psychological reading here; I do not expect you to go out and read Lacan, or Homans, or Thum. But I do want you to know that for me The Wind in the Willows becomes more exciting when I find others who prompt me to keep thinking about the book. Stagnation is fatal to mental growth, and without others to keep us moving mentally we would stagnate. Left on my own, I would fall into a pattern of recycling well polished ideas about this book, and in time the polish would itself become dim. All of us need to converse. To understand what we read as fully as we might, we need conversation. Thum and Homans and Lacan provided me with some conversation. In short, the lesson here is that the reading of literature needs to be a communal activity, not a private one.
9. Second, although I have no wish that you assimilate what I think about the book, I do hope that the conversation I spoke of is ongoing and that you find something in what I write to react to or against.
10. Third, I think it is clear that I think this book is complex and compelling. It goes without saying that I have only scratched the surface of it. Yet this is a children's book. Grahame wrote it for his young son; it has been published on the children's lists for a century now; and I presume children have accepted it. This should tell us that books for the young need not be pap. Children deserve the challenge of satire, allusion, complexity, parody. Whether this book will cpature the imaginations of young people today or not remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: if adults won't read a book like The Wind in the Willows, then it is unlikely children will. The same is probably true of any book for the very young.
No comments:
Post a Comment