Written in the web: more on Charlotte

It may well be, as I suggested in my last post, that EB White missed a great opportunity to expand children's perspective when he chose to project human emotion onto farm animals, instead of finding ways to introject the very strange "thoughts" of animals into his great children's book, Charlotte's Web. However, reading the book slowly gives us (both children and parents) the opportunity to see some very important things.

The book is almost interesting enough to do a line by line exegesis, but that would bore any reader of this blog silly (even so, it is tempting: consider where I could go with the father's line after Fern convinces him not to kill Wilbur, the runt of the litter: "This morning, Fern went out to right injustice in the world.  She came back with a pig."  Is there a better expression of the life of those of us trying to work for social change, the contrast between the lofty ideals and the hard, often dirty work of the day to day?  But I digress).  Instead, I want to focus on one idea, that Wilbur is a special pig, a particularly noteworthy animal, as he is lauded in his special prize at the fair or by all of his fans who come to the farm.

Truth is, Wilbur isn't at all special.  He's just a pig.  People see him as special because of the work of the invisible Charlotte, who almost literally disappears into the arrow she makes to point at Wilbur.  She begins with the very simple descriptor: "Some Pig."  The message is superfluous: of course Wilbur is some pig.  He is not no pig.  The writing in the web merely points to his existence: there is some pig here!  However, when the hired man Lurvy finds the writing in the web, he is so stunned by the miracle, that he cannot see the words as just a description.  Instead of "some pig [lives here]", the interpretation must be "Some Pig [this is]!"

As Charlotte sees a way to use these words to save Wilbur's life, the writing becomes more and more transparent: she describes Wilbur as "Terrific" and "Radiant" before the final understatement of "Humble."  But once again, the truly amazing character in the story, the one who deserves to be lauded as something truly out of the ordinary, is not Wilbur but Charlotte.  At one point, Mrs. Zuckerman points this fact out, but very quickly the focus of attention returns to Wilbur.

The references to miracles might make us think that something theological is going on, and it might be interesting to walk down that hermeneutic road.  We could see Charlotte as John the Baptist, who appears to have been a much more impressive preacher and political figure than Jesus, but who gets pushed to the back of the official story.  Or maybe mention the Rudolf Bultmann's idea that in Christian thought, we are confused by the fact that the messenger is the message: not anything that Jesus says, but his simple being-in-the-world.

There seems to be an easier interpretation, though, given who EB White was: a journalist.  Journalists write about other people, and those people get the credit and the fame, while the writer fades into the woodwork.  The New Yorker, where White worked, was very clear about effacing the journalist behind the journalism, drawing attention to the message instead of the messenger.

The basic point is what is interesting, though: what makes something special isn't necessarily anything essential to it, but rather what points to it.  Wilbur is a spacial pig, but not because he is really more radiant, more terrific, more clever than any other pig.  Charlotte points to the pig and says he is special, and because of the miraculous capacity of her writing, others come to see Wilbur as special.  When they then treat him as special, he becomes what they want to see in him.  Radiant?  Well, then we wash him in buttermilk, and he becomes radiant.

Kung Fu Panda does something very similar: the great secret to the Dragon scroll is not some esoteric wisdom that will give Po the ability to fight.  It is only a mirror, showing the panda to himself.  "There is no special ingredient in the special ingredient sauce," he reflects (upon finding that there is no magical spice in his father's noodle soup).  "It is special when people believe it is."  With that, Po magically can defeat the great warrior leopard... the story doesn't have as much verisimilitude as Charlotte's Web.

All of this is an empty, if vaguely interesting, interpretation, until we remember that both Charlotte's Web and Kung Fu Panda are directed principally to kids, and only secondarily to intellectual parents looking to find something interesting as they read or watch the stories over and over again.  Kids need to see themselves as special: it's the way that they find themselves in a huge and frightening world.  In a democracy, however, we can't let accept the specialness of aristocrats or kings, and we are reluctant to upset the delicate equality of people.  One solution is that "we are all special," but the son in The Incredibles has an easy response to that: "If everyone is special, then no one is."  Charlotte's Web, and to a lesser degree Kung Fu Panda, offer a more interesting answer to kids' anxiety: you are special because someone loves you, because someone sees you as special.

With that, we have to remember the social practice of reading Charlotte's Web.  My father read it to me.  I read it to Helena.  Though some kids may read the book on their own, mostly it is a family event, something that we do together.  The effort of reading many pages to a child says "I want to put this much effort into being with you.  I like to be with you and tell stories."  Both the message of the book and the messenger (the parent reading it) carry the same meaning to the child: "You are special because I love you."

And with that reflection, I think I understand a bit better why I loved the book so much as a child, and why Helena asked me to start reading ti to her again last night.

Talking spiders: Charlotte's Web

When I began to write this Children's Media Critic, I wanted to focus on kids movies: I had seen so many parents dismiss these films as simply something to entertain the kids, and I wanted to show that like any work of art, if you look at KidVid carefully, you will learn many unexpected things.  I should remember, though, that books are also a medium of communication, and on a day-to-day level, Helena spends more time reading (or more accurately, listening to) books than she does watching a movie.  So today: Charlotte's Web, which we just finished reading last night.

For those who are a long way form childhood, a quick summary of the novel: Fern, a little girl form a farm, convinces her father not to cull the runt of a pig's litter.  She adopts little Wilbur, feeds him from a baby bottle, and takes him for a walk in a stroller.  Eventually, however, she has to sell him to her uncle, who has a farm big enough to keep the pig.  There, lonely Wilbur meets Charlotte, a gray spider, who writes words about him in her web -- radiant. some pig, humble -- thus winning attention for Wilbur, a win at the county fair, and a stay of execution from becoming bacon.  In the end, Charlotte dies, but several of her many daughters stay with Wilbur on the farm.

Like with any book, the genius is in the details, especially in EB White's elegant prose.  It was only years after my father read me the book that I found out that White was one of the great writers for the New Yorker and enough of an authority on style and grammar that his book was an obligatory reference in high school and college.

Rita, Helena, and I are now working in communities where, like in children's literature, animals and humans communicate.  There is, however, a profound difference between Charlotte's Web (all of the children's literature descending form Aesop, really) and Amazonian Indian thought.  When animals in European and North American children's books talk, we hear the voice of a human being. Wilbur's fears and prides are those of a small child; Charlotte cares for him like a (human) maiden aunt.  The purpose of putting animals in the center of the story is to elucidate human interactions and lessons.

Among Amazonian Indians, however, one tells stories about animals as animals.  You want to get into a jaguar's head because you want to know how he hunts, and so learn from him.  The shaman enters a trance and transforms himself into a caiman in order to understand why it hunts the children from the community.  Like in Charlotte's Web, animals in human stories are there to serve human purposes, but instead of projecting human characteristics onto beasts, the Amazonian narrative projects the beasts' perspective into us.

Helena just got a baby rabbit for her birthday, and it has been fascinating to watch her interact with the little creature.  At first, she treated it as a doll.  Then she saw it as her baby.  She is an observant little girl, though, and she has come to see that none of these relations come to terms with the profound otherness of the rabbit, the something else that lies behind the blue eyes of the furry white thing.  Animals have a very different way of seeing the world from people, and I'm sad that European kids stories miss that in their attempt to teach moral or personal lessons.

On the other hand, the freedom to play with ideas that comes with animal stories opens up wonderful possibilities for reflecting about all sorts of things.  Over the next couple of posts, I'll talk about that, more liberating, aspect of Charlotte's Web.

Colonialism and Chaos: The Jungle Book

Helena Iara had her Jungle Book phase about 4 months ago, but over the last couple of days she has been talking about it again, wanting to play at Baloo and Mowgli.  She sings the Bear Necessities, and sometimes asks to see the monkey scene.  As she watched it last night, I began to think about the story symbolically.  Here is the Louie King of the Jungle song, in case you don't remember it:

 

Before anything else, I think we need to do some symbolic unpacking.  The song is New Orleans Jazz, and the voice sounds like Louie Armstrong. It is actually Louis Prima who sings; Disney first wanted Armstrong to sing, but then was concerned about a black man voicing an ape.  The expedient of changing the race of the singer doesn't really resolve the problem, however, when we see that the movie isn't really abut American racism, but about colonialism.  Rudyard Kipling, who wrote the book upon which the Disney film was based, was the great apologist for the British Empire in India, and the movie actually nods rather honestly in that direction: the elephants, for instance, parody British military virtues.

Let's look at the basic message of the song:

"Now I'm the king of the swingers

Oh, the jungle VIP

I've reached the top and had to stop

And that's what botherin' me

I wanna be a man, mancub

And stroll right into town

And be just like the other men

I'm tired of monkeyin' around!

Oh, oobee doo

I wanna be like you

I wanna walk like you

Talk like you, too

You'll see it's true

An ape like me

Can learn to be human too..."

Here is the basic conceit of colonialism, especially in the "White Man's Burden" form defended by Kipling: the poor, black, deprived "other" in the non-European world wants to be like Europeans.  London is the culmination and apex of what it means to be human, so any way that the Europeans can help these poor deprived people become like Europeans -- even if it means stealing their resources, running their lives, destroying their culture, and even killing them -- is completely right and justified.  Perhaps some jungle kings did want to "walk like [Kipling], talk like [Kipling]," but the truth is that most people would prefer to be in charge of their own lives and make their own decisions.

I should also point out that if the ape wants to be like Kipling, then Kipling (and other beneficiaries of Empire) don't have to think so hard about whether their life is really all that good.  If they want it, well then I'm happy to have it.  (This, by the way, is the essence of the French Feminist Critique of Freud's idea of penis envy, but that's a story for another essay)

Helena, her friend Luc, and her cousin Gabriela.

At first, then, the song looks like an apology for colonialism, white words put into the mouth of the ape/primitive.  As it continues, however, it becomes a much more interesting story.  After all of the dancing and singing, Louie and the apes become aware that Baloo is really a bear, and they try to chase him out of their city.  As they run around and fight with the great bear, they destroy their entire city.  As Baloo and Mowgli flee at the end of the scene, the entire beautiful place falls in on itself, culture turned to rubble.

And what happened with colonialism?  Europeans, unable to see the wealth and depth of African, American, and Asian cultures, didn't care in the least what they destroyed.  Sometimes the destruction was architectural, like in The Jungle Book: think of Cortés in Tenochtitlan or Pizarro in Cuzco.  Other times, it was cultural, as with the British and French in Africa.  But in the end, colonialism knocks it all down.

Even worse, it appears that the apes themselves have destroyed their own city: their act of resistance is what brings the stones down on their own head.  Those who have lived through wars of independence know this situation perfectly: fe years before the Jungle Book was released on screen, we saw the same thing happening in Algeria, as the French blamed the Algerians for destroying their own cities.  

Is the Jungle Book an anti-colonialist screed?  Probably not.  But if we look at it carefully, it does tell the truth -- if in a coded way -- about a nasty episode in world history.

A film for adults: Shrek 4

I'm not quite sure when the Shrek franchise started to tell the story of my life.  Not in 1 or two, clearly (I haven't rescued many princesses or defeated any evil fairy godmothers), but somewhere in Shrek 3, about the moment when Fiona is yelling out to Shrek on the boat leaving the harbor, the movies began to get too close to home.  Painful, incapacitating anxiety about fatherhood?  Yep, got that one.  Nightmares about vomiting babies?  That too.  And then, Shrek 4.  I'd seen it when it came out, right after Helena was born, but yesterday they had it on TV here in Brazil, and it hit hard.



The plot line is pretty amazingly complex, and I found myself explaining what was going on to Helena and her cousin more than a few times.  Family is great for Shrek... except that all of those good parts repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat, ad nauseum.  (Literally, in fact, given the tendency of the little ogres to throw up on their parents)  Family life, for all of its charm, has become meaningless.  Finally, Shrek explodes at a birthday party: he longs for his old life of adventure and violence, when the villagers would hunt him with pitchforks and he would destroy them with strength and fear.

Been there, done that.  OK, not the nostalgia for violence and pitchforks, but in the first years that Helena was with us, I could only remember the wonder of climbing so high in the Andes that I couldn't breathe, hiding behind concrete walls in Medellín so that bullets wouldn't hit me; lonely nights camping in the jaguar preserves of Central America or hitching across northern Colombia with drug traffickers.  From the outside, why would these sort of things inspire nostalgia?  They seem as miserable as Shrek's lonely life in the swamp.  But that kind of a life breeds stories worth telling.  When you look back, it seems adventuresome and meaningful and special, while the day-to-day pleasures and pains of caring for a child, as wonderful as they are at that moment... they don't make for epic narrative.  The Iliad, as far as I know, includes no scenes of changing diapers.  Or of making faces at a baby and sharing a joyful first laugh.

Shrek thinks he has found a solution, or at least a break, when the evil Rumplestiltskin gives him the chance to go back to his old life in exchange for "one little day, one you don't even remember" of his life.  That day, of course, is the day Shrek was born.  By losing that day, all of history will change, and Rumplestiltskin will be king.  Shrek has to re-conquer Fiona, overcome the evil King... but the more important struggle is to see that "You don't know what you got till it's gone."  Only from the outside, from the perspective of loss, can he see the wonder of his family.  And, in the process, the experience becomes a story, worthy of being told, being filmed, being proud of.

Helena liked the movie.  It's funny, it's well animated.  But the moral of the story isn't for her.  It's for me, and for fathers and mothers like me.  A simple moral, I suppose (even an 80s heavy metal ballad I remember from hight school includes the lyric "You don't know what you got till it's gone" (followed, melodramatically by "Every cowboy sings the same, sad song").  But as a wonderful philosophy professor of mine once told me, "Truth of it is, most important things that philosophers say, everyone already knows them.  Not clever, not worth a huge book and a tenured job.  But we should still say them, again and again."