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Self, Other, and Other Self: Recognizing the Other in Children's Literature

1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.1997.0041

1080-6563

Roderick McGillis,

Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies

Self, Other, and Other Self: Recognizing the Other in Children's Literature Roderick McGillis (bio) "Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics." (Jean Baudrillard) I intend to be unashamedly personal. My topic is the self as "Other," and I use myself as an example of what Julia Kristeva refers to as the foreigner who lives within us (see her Strangers to Ourselves 1991). She describes the foreigner as "the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder." I face this stranger often: when I read something I wrote some time ago, when I'm faced with new experiences, when I'm uncertain of a friend, when I second-guess myself. Kristeva goes on to assert that only by recognizing the foreigner within ourselves are we "spared detesting him in himself." More importantly, the foreigner "disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities" (1). We are connected to community through foreignness. We cannot but be "Other" to the communities which contain us, and when everyone is an "Other" then everyone shares an experience that might keep people together not by the bonds of community but by the choice of community. Community, otherness, and the embracing of selves: this is my topic. The focus, in the first part of my paper, is the foreigner within myself, that part of the self we needfully embrace as strange and different from what we wish to think of ourselves. This is the person who sometimes trips us up, embarrasses us before we can step in and present the person we think we are. I will turn in the second two parts of my paper to two recent novels for young readers, one published in Canada, a realistic novel which deals with a Canadian boy's experiences in South Africa, and the [End Page 215] other a fantasy first published in Germany. The Canadian book is Lynne Fairbridge's In Such a Place (1992; winner of the sixth Alberta Writing for Youth Competition), and the German fantasy is Michael Ende's Momo (1973). My choice of texts is, in part, practical. But it is also tactical: these books offer us realism and fantasy, the known and the unknown, a mixture of races and a mixture of cultures. 1. Canny and Uncanny Selves I speak of a large issue by examining a personal discovery. The large issue is the continuing struggle of all oppressed people to overcome imperialist forces. I note here that "oppressed people" takes in a majority of persons on this globe, to greater or lesser degree. And "imperialist forces" are all those institutional powers (Ideological State Apparatuses) that either subtly or openly attempt to fashion the way we think and behave. These forces invade all facets of our experience, from our billboards to the rest of our media, including our children's books. Their design is to maintain conditions of power and authority, and my dangling infinitive here is intentional in its facelessness. Forces are at work that both construct from the outside people of differing cultures and races, and that seek to assimilate other cultures, other peoples into one dominant culture. Stories have traditionally been one of the sources of social construction, one of the means by which a culture perpetuates itself and situates itself over against an "other" culture. Even when the stories of one culture do not refer to other cultures, they implicitly maintain the fiction of one culture's superiority to another, one people's superiority to another people. Or do they? Might it not be possible to argue that a culture's stories inevitably must present that very culture as "other"? 1 When we read about ourselves are we not reading about something distanced from ourselves, and therefore "other" than ourselves? If we were simply to read ourselves, we would not be reading; instead we would be, quite literally, reflecting. Or at least we might argue that all stories present a world other than the one we inhabit, and in doing so they bring us face-to-face, as it were, with the fictionality of all stories. All we...