This morning I re-read The Cat in the Hat to my juvenile delinquent son (he is on Double-Secret Daycare Probation). It is a very cool book. In fact it is the only children's book I have seen where the primary character lies repeatedly to the kids.
Instance #1 - "My tricks are not bad" he says, before torturing a fish and doing a crazy juggling act that creates an enormous mess. By ridiculing and harassing his only credible critic, he anticipates modern political practice by twenty or thirty years.
Instance #2 - "These things are good things" he says, before Thing #1 and Thing #2 run amok, destroying the house with their games.
Then, after utterly destroying the house, he magically puts things right, and mother never knows that anything was wrong.
Is that a subversive message or what? There is no way this book would be greenlighted today.
Coming Up: Curious George and the colonial experience.
Art, music, and literature is full of wonderful subversion, subversion with contempt for power, suspicion of wealth, the ennumeration of ignorance, piercing the veneer of Order, the suspicion of ennumeration, knowing the absurdity of rank, erasing the illusion of authority, and bursting with a cool love of all things, particularly those not ordinarily loved. In kid's lit especially, from Good Dog, Carl to Where the Wild Things Are, it's a rich stew of liberation ideology.
ReplyDeleteIt's too bad- and by design- that people forget this stuff when they grow up, obliterated by religious and secular authority, a twisted illusion of responsibility and the ubiquity of marketing.
The cute truth is tolerated - the raw truth costs dearly and threatens much. But I think that we like to tell the cartoons of truth to kids, with a hope they might take them and do better than us.
So say the Sneeches.