Barking with the Big Dogs

by Natalie Babbitt

  Maybe, after all, there is one single purpose for literature—one foremost purpose, anyway. Maybe the giving of pleasure is the purpose. I find I could care about that. The purpose of literature is to give pleasure to the reader. I will leave it to somebody else to define what pleasure is. It could be a topic for some other paper: What is the purpose of pleasure? I hope nobody will ask me to deal with it.

  Illustration from The Something (1970), with a sketch for type treatment

  “We have always dealt with [fear] by giving it human form and naming it. If it’s named and given a shape, we can deal with it. That is how storytelling began, and that is what storytelling still is, even after centuries. Telling stories is one of the most civilizing things we do. Externalize the fear, bring the dark out into the light and look at it and memorize its features so you will know it when you meet it next time.”

  Darkness and Light

  (1990)

  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about dark and light. Some of this is because it’s November. November is not my favorite month. Winter is not my favorite season. But another part of the reason comes out of talk from our presidential candidates about hope and fear, and about leaving the world a better place for our children and grandchildren to grow up in. Of course we want very much to give them hope and we would like very much to make their fear as small as possible in these hard times. There have been hard times before, though. I was born in the worst of the Great Depression, but somehow managed to grow up with plenty of hope. It’s easier to feel hopeful in good times than in bad, certainly. It’s easier to feel hopeful in May than it is in November. But somehow there mostly seems to be enough hope to tide us over. What we need is a balance, and a sense of balance comes from rational thinking. Rational thinking is, I like to imagine, the best end product of being civilized. I want to try to make sense of this here, for you and for myself, because it’s a topic worth talking about for people who are interested in children. People who work for and with children—parents, teachers, librarians, writers, illustrators, and all the various sciences, too—all of us are doing, at bottom, the same thing: We are trying to civilize the next generation.

  There are a lot of different ways to define what civilizing means, but one meaning certainly is that we are trying to prepare children to function well in the society in which they will most likely live. Of course, it’s work full of frustration and uncertainty, today more than ever, because we don’t really know anymore what society will be like at any particular point in the future. It changes constantly. It has always been in a process of change, but in recent decades the process seems to have accelerated. Nevertheless, whether we are frustrated or not, we must make the effort.

  It’s interesting that human beings are born so uncivilized—are born without any idea at all about how to function successfully. I have a granddaughter now. She’s two and a half. She is utterly uncivilized. She does appalling things with food and drink. She is noisy in public places. She hasn’t an iota of consideration for other people, and no concept at all of give and take. We’re all absolutely crazy about her. Her dark side is as much on the surface as her light side. She will pat your cheek and then pinch you painfully on the nose. Her beautiful little face is a mask of tragedy one minute and a mask of comedy the next. And then there are times when she simply sits and muses, gazing off into space like Charles Dickens’s wonderful Captain Bunsby, who, even in port in London, always seemed to have “his eye on the coast of Greenland.” She is going to be what they call a “handful.” Civilizing her will not be a task for sissies.

  And yet I have seen domestic kittens, and so have you, whose eyes have barely opened but who are already well on the way to good functioning in their society. In eight weeks they’ll be on their own. Baby animals in the wild are trained by their mothers to hunt and survive, but the process rarely takes longer than a year. It’s different with humans for a great many reasons, but at least in part because of our complex brains and our complex societies. Our babies must be taught to survive on many different levels, and they must be taught self-control of a sort that kittens, tame or wild, never have to bother with. We are concerned, those of us who work with and for children, to teach those children moral and philosophical survival as much as, if not more than, any other kind. We want them to be morally and philosophically courageous because we know that at the bottom of every cruel or immoral act, there is fear. And cruel, immoral acts upset the delicate balance of our society.

  It seems to me that we are full of fear, we humans. It’s natural, but it’s dangerous. Unlike other animals, who don’t know and don’t care, we are painfully aware that we have no hard evidence about where we came from or where and when we’re going. So we live in a constant state of apprehension, consciously or unconsciously, and that sometimes makes for irrational behavior. Over the centuries we have invented and discarded and reinvented countless systems to answer our questions, shore up our hopes, and keep our societies functioning. Some of these systems are pretty wild: voodoo; animal sacrifice; self-flagellation; astrology; numerology; burial of the dead in trees, in jars, in pyramids; oracles; rabbit’s feet; face-lifts; knocking on wood. These things are charms to light up the dark. For the dark means the unknown and the unknown means danger, and danger is synonymous with fear.

  In civilized societies—and by that I mean civilized as we like to define it, though the word has many different interpretations—bees in their way are civilized if by that you mean individuals working for the good of the group—but, anyway, in civilized societies we do two things to control fear and promote moral and philosophical survival: We invent rules for behavior, and we externalize fear as much as we can so that it seems visible and controllable. This is right and that is wrong, we say to our children, hoping they will learn moral survival. And—this is good and this is evil, we say to them, hoping they will learn philosophical survival. And by doing this we create an uneasy but maintainable balance. Things happen to upset the balance all the time. Small things, big things. A girl is raped and beaten in Central Park. An army officer tells lies. A president is shot. We rock and wobble for a while. Some of us ask hard questions about the value of a system where such things can happen. Children, the very children we are trying to civilize, ask hard questions. But after a while the balance is restored. Time helps. Hope helps. We settle down and go on with our lives. But the balance is always uneasy. I think it is like one of those nursery toys with a round, weighted bottom. You poke it and it teeters and rolls like a drunken man—and then it rights itself. It always rights itself.

  Even when the balance is maintained, however, there is still fear. We have always dealt with it by giving it human form and naming it. If it’s named and given a shape, we can deal with it. That is how storytelling began, and that is what storytelling still is, even after centuries. Telling stories is one of the most civilizing things we do. Externalize the fear, bring the dark out into the light and look at it and memorize its features so you will know it when you meet it next time. And if you have learned the rules for moral and philosophical survival, you will know what to do, how to behave, how to fight, and how to regain your balance.

  It’s no accident that dark has long been the word used to describe evil and danger. It has to have come out of prehistoric feelings about night—a time of risk when you couldn’t see your enemy coming. And words related to dark—words like shadow and gloom and shade—are common in phrases about frightening things. The valley of the shadow of death, for instance. The dead of night—that’s a good one. Poets have used the word shade to mean a ghost. And logically we have used dark words to describe ignorance, while wisdom is related to light. The Dark Ages, for instance, as opposed to the Age of Enlightenment. One of my favorites comes from my Ohio childhood: My father would say, if someone made a stupid or uninformed remark, “You talk like a man up a dark tree.” Dark is used as a synonym for blindness, also. It’s interesting about that. Physical blindness has absolutely nothing to do wit
h morality. But language takes its metaphors where it finds them. In Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a seeing-eye dog pulls its charge out of Scrooge’s way on the street as if to say, Dickens suggests, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

  If dark is the absence of light, shadow is darkness in the presence of light, so it’s a little different, if you want to be literal. But metaphorically, dark and shadow are the same thing. Dark is the other side of light. Dark and light are fraternal twins, and inseparable as the two faces of Janus, but in storytelling we can and do separate them and let them fight it out for control and supremacy.

  Where storytelling is concerned, the dark side is indispensable. Where would a plot be without the villain? Villains are easy to spot in fantasies, for fantasy is an ancient story form that has its roots in the deliberate and often transparent attempt to name and control evil. In fantasy, the hero is pure good, the villain pure evil, and good always wins. Fantasies written for children are the easiest to take because they have child heroes, and we like the notion that children are born pure and good, in spite of the concept of original sin and in spite of the fact that we know children are born neither good nor evil but merely neutral. If this were not the case, we wouldn’t have to work so hard to civilize them.

  Adult heroes who are pure and good, like Lancelot in the King Arthur stories, tend to be rather irritating. They’re not like anyone we know. The adults we know, emphatically including ourselves, are at least a mixture. But storytellers have managed to create a few pure adult heroes who, even if they are without sin, are at least charmingly bloodthirsty where the destruction of villains is concerned. And sometimes they have bad habits. Western marshals frequently chew tobacco and spit, for instance. Sherlock Holmes is a drug addict. And Dickens is chock-full of secondary heroes like Mr. Micawber, who are deeply flawed and yet can save the day with the best of them. Dickens does, however, nearly always provide a primary hero who is pure as the driven snow and relentlessly sinned against by large numbers of irredeemable villains. Dickens does villains better than anyone. He’d never have gotten anywhere without them. And he destroys them better than anyone. If you’ve never read Dombey and Son, I urge you to do so if only to see the horrifying and magnificent and utterly just destruction of the villain, Mr. Carker.

  But it’s been a long time since anyone wrote a novel for adults where the hero is pure good and the villain pure evil. You see the convention occasionally at the movies these days, or on TV, but rarely in a serious novel. It’s not fashionable anymore, at least for adults, to misrepresent what we knew all along: that good and evil, dark and light, coexist in us all.

  In books for children, however, the convention rolls along as merrily as ever, at least in fantasies. Noble innocence for heroes, foul purposes for villains. All very neat and satisfying.

  An interesting exception is Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Whether or not Sendak knew what he was doing in that book—as a writer myself, I know that writers aren’t always aware of what they’re doing—anyway, whether he knew it at the time or not, Sendak was creating something very unusual when he wrote about Max, because Max is a mixture of good and bad in his real world—he is a real, ambivalent child—but when he goes to the place where the wild things are, he becomes a classic fantasy hero. He fights the demons of his subconscious, as Joseph Campbell would put it, and wins. Then he comes back again and, we like to think, will be a normal good-bad child all over again. Librarians and teachers and parents were nervous about Max at first—nervous about a story in which a child hero behaves badly. But children have always seized on Max and taken him to their hearts. Of course they love the pictures. Of course the happy ending is satisfying. But I think they love best the fact that Max is a mixture of good and bad, just like themselves.

  Because we are all of us in the business of trying to civilize our children—to give them guideposts and road maps and systems and labels to help them become balanced adults capable of maintaining the balance of our societies—we are, in spite of Max, uneasy about admitting to children that dark is inseparable from light, that bad is inseparable from good. Maybe, we wonder, if we tell children it is in the nature of humans to be both things at once—an ethical hot fudge sundae, if you will—maybe we will be telling them that it’s all right once in a while to be cruel and immoral. It’s never all right to be cruel and immoral, no matter how natural the impulse may be. But on the other hand, shouldn’t we be willing to admit that bad feelings—angry feelings that make us want to lash out—are all right? Or natural, anyway? As long as we keep them under control?

  Dickens’s primary heroes and heroines almost never seem to have bad, angry feelings. They nearly always leave the punishment of villains to secondary characters, or to heaven itself, and in a Dickens novel, secondary characters and heaven itself are more than ready to oblige, sometimes in wonderfully imaginative ways. But life is not a novel by Dickens, and we are not heroes and heroines except possibly to ourselves. We are not, and children are not. So how do we teach children to face and control their fear and anger? How do we teach them that their dark side is normal, not “bad,” so that they can be generous and forgiving with themselves and other people?

  It isn’t easy. I went to a series of very unhelpful Sunday schools which managed to confuse me and which taught me guilt instead of love. It seems to me now that my Sunday schools set up impossible goals and then made sure I knew I’d be kept out of heaven if I didn’t achieve them. My Sunday schools implied that if you had a dark side, it was there because you deliberately allowed it to be there. You chose it. You opened the door of your soul and invited the Devil in. My reaction to this was not alarm, however. I don’t know why not. All I remember is that somehow or other, I simply decided it was silly. I think books helped to lead me to that conclusion. Fairy tales and Greek myths and Alice in Wonderland. My favorite fairy tale, “Graciosa and Percinet,” had a bumbling—if beautiful—heroine who was always doing the very thing she was told not to do. But Percinet loved her anyway. That was very nice. In my favorite Greek myth, the one about Jason and the golden fleece, characters did all kinds of terrible things, but it was the gods who led them to it. It was all laid out ahead of time by all those planners and meddlers on Mount Olympus. And Alice in Wonderland was the best of all. Alice is a good-bad child, like Max. But, oh, the adults who populate Wonderland! Rude, sarcastic, short-tempered, quick to get their feelings hurt, irrational, full of senseless advice. Alice stands up to them. She doesn’t let them push her around. When the King of Hearts notices in the trial scene that Alice has begun to grow, he reads from his book:

  “Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.”

  Everybody looked at Alice.

  “I’m not a mile high,” said Alice.

  “You are,” said the King.

  “Nearly two miles high,” added the Queen.

  “Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,” said Alice: “besides, that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now.”

  “It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the King.

  “Then it ought to be Number One,” said Alice.

  How I gloried in that exchange when I was a child! I still glory in it.

  The Alice books don’t deal overtly with the dark side of our natures, but it is always implied, sometimes painfully, as in the scene with the fawn in the wood where things have no name. I understood it. I recognized it. The books I liked best did not inform; they confirmed what I already knew perfectly well by the time I read them. Children learn a great deal from observing adults and other children and, I suppose, themselves as well. If their books are not honest, they will not like their books.

  And yet we have to draw a line. And that is very hard to do. How much of life’s casual cruelty and injustice must a child see in order to be well armed but not made cynical or thrown into despair? For storytellers it’s a special problem, no less for writers of fantasy than for writers of realistic ficti
on. Gone are the days when all a children’s writer had to do was lay out the proper path and move his hero down it, strewing villains behind him as he went, thereby showing young readers how to live. Who knows anymore whether life was really simpler in those days? Maybe it was, so that moralistic, protective storytelling fit right in. But maybe it wasn’t, so that moralistic, protective storytelling did more harm than good, if only in boring its readers into a stupor. We need to remember that the children in Dickens’s novels live in an England very different from the one Kate Greenaway shows us, in spite of the fact that these two authors were writing at more or less the same time. Certainly there were some hard truths that children in the 1800s could not escape. Today there are certainly many. Children always knew sometime before the age of ten that death was a certainty—their own and that of the people and animals around them. Certainly they know it now just as early. Casual cruelty and injustice have always been a part of children’s lives, back to Dickens, back to the very beginning. So we cannot protect them from the dark side. And if we cannot protect them from it, then perhaps we can help them to accept it and be strong in the face of it.