To be sure, we have expended a good deal of effort in trying to establish our own personal literature. It wasn’t easy. In fact, it has been observed that American literature has only been “self-perpetuating and self-sustaining” since about 1850. If this is a date impossible to pin down, still it came about, however gradually, not so very long after Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge in 1837, said sternly, “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.”
So ours is a young literature and we should be proud of what we have accomplished. But perhaps it is time to turn a corner, to grow up, for Brooks has said that American literature is still “immature.” Perhaps we should try to get past these polar views of life-as-disillusionment and life-as-utopia, and admit in our novels, for whatever age, that it is neither and both, a fine mixture that needs interpreters who are objective, not subjective, and who, though certainly serious, are still mature enough not to be so boringly mirthless.
John Barth, one contemporary American novelist for adults who, in my opinion, fits the needed mold, gives one of his characters, in his splendid book The Sot-Weed Factor, the following speech:
We sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma?… We are dying men … i’faith, there’s time for naught but bold resolves.
If The Sot-Weed Factor is a great American novel, and I think it is, and if it happens to be neither glum nor beamish, but rather matter-of-fact—if, in other words, it departs in interesting ways from Brooks’s dictum that success for novels hinges on a low view of the human condition, and yet if it still manages to be polled by Book Week as one of the best American novels since 1945—why then should not novelists for children aspire to be the John Barth of the children’s world? Why, instead of acquiescing to the popular view that our novels must be sugarcoated lies—and therefore non-literature—can we not make our own bold resolves and write novels that discard utopia and hell alike, interpreting instead the real ambivalent world to children as human beings, with as much honesty and skill as we can muster?
You will think from this, perhaps, when I speak about the real ambivalent world, that I am saying we must talk straight from the shoulder, give the kids the facts, no more fantasy, no more magic, no more fun. No. I am saying that we should use the language in all its infinite richness and variety, and use our imaginations in all the freedom that the medium allows, to tell stories that illuminate both for us and our young audience our common human roots. If we can find a way to look at childhood as we knew it ourselves to be, to cut through the cloud of half myth, half amnesia that so often distorts our view, then we can write and communicate honestly and seriously. Not in a loud voice and with a barbered vocabulary as if we were speaking to someone who does not understand the language. And certainly not as moralizing old fuddy-duddies. What do we know, after all? We are all on this “blind rock careening through space,” and children who are old enough to read children’s novels are well aware of the fact. They have their own metaphors, to be sure, but we have access to those metaphors. They are, in fact, more universal than our own. Fantasy in particular is ancient, common ground, and one of the most fruitful ways of interpreting and ordering fact. I am talking, however, about Tolkien’s brand of fantasy, not the grocery-store-book variety. The difference is the difference between literature and blather, between a searchlight and a blindfold, between a magic carpet and a bath mat.
We can, in other words, aspire to create literature. Any kind of writing is hard work, so why not try to have something worthwhile to show for it? There is no reason why children’s authors should have to serve up the sherbet of the literary feast and then be forced to apologize to our colleagues in the adult world because our creations melt on touch. We have had so little respect for our work that we do not even do it carefully, and many of our own editors, critics, and reviewers allow us to get away with sloppiness that could never pass in novels for adults. No wonder American children’s novels have a questionable literary reputation. Sloppy craftsmanship, sloppy philosophy, all okay so long as it is colored Pepto-Bismol pink. This is not art. As Anthony Burgess wrote in a recent article, “Art that merely soothes is not art at all; it may even be thought of as anti-art … Anti-art dulls awareness; art enhances it.”
Why should we not aspire to enhance the awareness of our children? I refuse to believe that we do not have it in us to tell tales that can be works of literature—works of art—and American, and for children, all at the same time, if we are willing to fly in the face of what is after all a very young sacred cow. It is necessary to be hopeful to write successfully for children, yes, because children themselves are generically hopeful, but the quality of hopefulness is not an immature quality. Quite the contrary. If it is something we have abandoned in our adult literature, that is one of the reasons why that literature remains immature. Despair is not a philosophy; it is a whine, a fashion, and a boring one at that.
So there is work to be done. We are only just beginning. There is a wasteland to be irrigated, and who knows what fine stuff can be grown there? It would be very good to get down on our hands and knees and work in real soil and raise real plants, the very best we are capable of, knowing we don’t have to conjure up some plastic representation of a flowering Eden which must, for the sake of an underrated audience, remain forever serpentless. And how nice for that audience to be respected at last—readers who won’t have to undergo the silly and needless trauma of expulsion from some plastic literary Eden straight into an equally plastic literary hell. We can instead give our children great books—we can give them literature if we really want to, if we are willing to sweat a little and get our hands dirty. Just think of it! The great American novel for children! Why not?
Babbitt’s cover mock-up for an unpublished manuscript. “I ran out of Bs,” the author notes to her editor in the margin of the design.
“I couldn’t make the story work because, among other reasons, the characters should, I knew, have been animals from the beginning—old animals who were turned back into young animals by the stork. But I find it exceedingly difficult to write about talking animals. I like to read stories that have talking animals in them, but I can’t seem to write such stories.”
You Must Go Home Again
(1978)
All of us writers and readers of fantasy are in a trap, have always been in a trap, and there’s no escape. I didn’t know this until a few years ago. Of course, there were hints. For instance, I often wondered why it seemed so essential to take the young heroes and heroines of my stories away from their bed and board and send them out alone into the world to have their adventures. It was very hard, and is very hard, to keep inventing reasonable excuses for separating them from their parents. You can’t go on forever making orphans of them—it’s tiresome and it doesn’t always make sense. But beyond grumbling over this single problem, I didn’t recognize the trap for what it was until one day in 1972.
I had been working for nearly a year on a story which refused to be good. It was about a group of people, staying at a lakeside summer hotel, whose lives were all stalled in one way or another. They had lost their dreams and hopes and were not enjoying themselves very much. Each one had the physical characteristics of a different animal, and a name to match (Eunice Woolsey Merino, for instance, was a woman who was a whole lot like a sheep), but each had forgotten how to appreciate life on the simple, innocent level of young animals or, if you will, children. In the course of the story, each was turned into the animal he was most like, and carried off by a character called the Animal Man (who himself had turned into a stork) to a small abandoned island just offshore from the hotel, where, when they were all assembled, they remembered their childhood and their dreams and were refreshed into a happier, more hopeful view of the future.
During the same period I had been reading Roald Dahl’s book James and the Giant Peach, urged on me by one of my children. It was a splendid story, I thought, but there was something the matter with the way it ended. I couldn’t figure out exactly what bothered me, though, and since I was working on my own troublesome story, I forgot about James.
Then, on that fateful day in 1972, a student of mine gave me a book she had been reading in a philosophy course. It was called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the author was a man named Joseph Campbell. My student was very excited about the book. Spurred by her enthusiasm, I sat down and began to flip through its pages. And as I did so, my eye lit on a few lines at the end of the first chapter:
This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the “call to adventure”—signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, [or it may be] a secret island …
I was dumbfounded. What had I done? Had I somehow forgotten a story I had once read that had a secret island in it exactly like mine? A zone unknown to which a character was summoned? Was I a closet plagiarist? So I began to read the book in earnest, and that is how I discovered, to my delight and annoyance, the trap I told you about a few moments ago.
There is no point in trying to explain in any detail what The Hero with a Thousand Faces has to say. It is a dense, scholarly work which has finally more to do with religion, and particularly Buddhism, than it does with the writing of fantasy. There are large portions which I had great difficulty in following. And it never even mentions children’s literature (except for the classic fairy tales, which after all were not created for children alone). But the gist is simple enough.
The book shows that the fantasy hero and his adventures are universal to all cultures, and the ancient path he follows, though it leaves room for certain variations of detail, is in the main unalterable and inescapable. In Campbell’s own words: “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is … separation, initiation, return.” Once you understand the pattern, you see it everywhere in all fantasy literature, as well as in classic myth. As I trace it for you, I’ll use Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz (Baum’s version, and also Hollywood’s), and Alice in Wonderland for examples. That will help in showing how the pattern emerges.
The hero’s story begins with a “call to adventure,” usually from a character of some sort which Campbell calls “the herald.” The herald can be ugly or beautiful, frightening or attractive or odd, but whatever form it takes, it summons the hero to cross a threshold from the real world into mystery, from life into death, from the waking state into dream. For Campbell, these are all one and the same threshold. For Alice, the herald is the White Rabbit, and she leaves her sister’s side to follow him down the rabbit hole. For Wendy and Michael and John, Peter Pan himself is the herald. For Dorothy the herald takes the nonhuman form of a cyclone.
“Once having traversed the threshold,” says Campbell, “the hero moves in a dream landscape … where he must survive a succession of trials.” But he will be assisted by some kind of protective figure who will give him charms to help him in his struggles. For Alice, there are a number of these protective figures, but the Caterpillar is the most obvious: He gives her the hint about the sides of the mushroom which will eventually make it possible for her to get through the tiny door into the beautiful garden. For Wendy and her brothers, Peter Pan, in addition to being the herald, is the protector as well. For Dorothy, it is the Good Witch of the North who starts her on her way and provides the charm: the mark of a kiss on her forehead. (In the book there are no ruby slippers—only silver ones, the magical qualities of which are unknown.) And Dorothy has beside her throughout the story the very protective Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion.
If it were not for these protective figures or devices, which Campbell calls symbols of “the benign, protecting power of destiny,” the hero would never be able to survive the trials of his adventures to come. And though in every story the trials are different, they all represent, according to Campbell, a coming face-to-face with the confusions, terrors, and pains hidden in the hero’s subconscious mind, that stand between him and the achievement of spiritual perfection.
This concept can best be described, where children’s fantasy literature is concerned, as the lesson the hero must learn before he can become an adult. It takes many forms, that lesson, and in Alice in Wonderland it is very difficult to see it clearly at all, for though Alice’s adventures are full of trials, there is no overt lesson to be learned. For Wendy and her brothers, the lesson is clear, though it is the author’s lesson, not Peter’s: When the time comes to grow up, it’s best to do it and leave childhood behind. And for Dorothy, the lesson is equally clear, though Hollywood spells it out differently from Baum: The real lesson here is that we can control our own destinies if we want to. As Russell MacFall says in To Please A Child, his biography of Baum, “What we want, [Baum] the moralist whispers, is within us; we need only look for it to find it. What we strive for has been ours all the time.”
Having survived the trials, then, and learned the lesson, the hero is free to return to the real world or the waking state or life—however you wish to define it—to recross the threshold, bringing with him his new knowledge. In classical myth, this knowledge, what he has learned in that other place, may be used to enlighten the world. But sometimes the knowledge, or “boon,” as Campbell calls it, is too difficult or too bizarre to be understood by ordinary people. “How [can the hero] communicate,” he says, “to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses, the message of the all-generating void?… Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss?” Dorothy makes no attempt to explain Oz to Auntie Em on her return, and even in Hollywood’s version, though she does try, the people around her don’t believe her and she soon gives up the effort. Wendy and Michael and John are likewise silent, though their mother, Mrs. Darling, would have understood Neverland very well indeed. Alice, on the other hand, gets around the problem quite easily: She calls her adventures a dream, and as we all know, anything can happen in dreams. Tolkien has said that Alice in Wonderland is not a true fantasy, since it dismisses the adventures this way. He claims that in true fantasy, the world across the threshold is as real on its own level as the everyday world we inhabit, and continually coexists with it. But Campbell would say, I think, that it doesn’t matter that Alice calls her adventures a dream; for him, dreams, myth, and fantasy are all the same world, all using the same symbols to the same ends.
Where does all this—the pattern of the classic hero’s path—leave the writer of fantasy? Once Campbell spelled it out for me, I could understand why I was trapped into separating my c
hild heroes from their parents: I was following a route laid down thousands of years ago. It was strong in my subconscious, even though I didn’t know it. Adventure means exposure, danger, and growth, and there can be very little of that if parents are present. They have to be done away with, kept out of sight, left behind, if anything interesting is going to happen. They belong to one reality while the adventure belongs to another. And on top of that, they are symbols of overprotection, and can retard development. The hero cannot grow if he is shielded from the very elements which create growth. So acceptance of the call to adventure represents the great rite of separation, the cutting of the apron strings.
One does not have to cross the threshold into adventure and danger all alone. Hansel and Gretel have each other. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie Bucket takes along his grandfather. Sometimes, as in The Wizard of Oz, the young hero will take an animal along. In the immortal words of Hollywood’s Wicked Witch of the West: “… and your little dog, too.” But the hero never takes a parent along. The apron strings, which are a symbol for the umbilical cord, are severed forever when the call to adventure is answered.
After this, the hero’s path is clear. He has his trials, survives them, receives his boon or learns his lesson, and then returns to the real world. And seeing this final step, I knew at once why the ending of James and the Giant Peach was disturbing to me: James goes to a magic world and stays there, rather than returning. That is a violation of the pattern, a remaining in the dream state, the death state, a rejection of the notion of rebirth. In myth, in dream, in fantasy, if you are the hero, you must leave the real world, you must face and successfully complete your trials, and then, with your newfound knowledge in hand, you must go home again. In every case, home, though it is safer, is less attractive than the other world. Kansas, compared to Oz, is a wasteland. London, compared to Neverland, is dull. And sitting under a tree being read to by your sister is far less exciting than being in Wonderland. Nevertheless, if you are the hero, home is where you have to go.
Barking with the Big Dogs Page 4
