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Exploring the Levels of Childhood: The Allegorical Sensibility of Maurice Sendak

1984; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.0.0260

1543-3374

Geraldine DeLuca,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Exploring the Levels of Childhood:The Allegorical Sensibility of Maurice Sendak Geraldine DeLuca (bio) Upon the publication of Outside Over There, released by Harper and Row in 1981 as a book for both adults and children, Maurice Sendak commented to Selma Lanes that he had "waited a long time to be taken out of kiddy-book land and allowed to join the artists of America."1 One can understand the problem as Sendak sees it: perhaps in his eyes even the praise has missed the point. Children's literature critics—the "custodians of children's books" in Hilton Kramer's words—may not be thought capable of recognizing the symbolic nature and artistic origins of Sendak's work.2 And the charges are, no doubt, sometimes justified. Children's literature is particularly subject to the thumbnail sketch that tends to take either a lighthearted or a moralistic approach toward the books reviewed. And works like Sendak's tend either to be reverentially overpraised—as, ironically, we see in Selma Lanes's book about him—or condemned for their experiments. But children's literature, as we all know, is a particularly difficult field in which to make judgments, encompassing as it does literature for various age groups—none of them our own—and including pictorial art as well. Moreover, even the most knowledgeable and perceptive critic may become anxious and somewhat conservative when his or her own child's psyche seems to be hanging in the balance. The question of audience has always been a difficult one in the field, and discussions about it are usually full of apparent paradoxes. What does the child see in these books we are reviewing? Sendak has asserted repeatedly that the child understands what is really going on while the adult lumbers along too worried and distracted by the effect on young minds of naked boys and scary beasts to find out what the books are actually saying. And those adults who claim to have a special ability to understand how children respond—the artists and editors—frequently invoke the "child inside themselves" to explain how they create or make judgments. But this child inside [End Page 3] us is in some ways an unconvincing creature, burdened as it is with a sense of irony and nostalgia that children do not have and that is hard to ignore. Moreover, while children may bring to the works the sense of wonder that the children's book artist presumably longs for, they cannot make critical judgments. They may like Sendak's work better than something else but they usually cannot say why. There are some books that seem to touch us all, children and adults, in a primary way. Charlotte's Web comes most immediately to mind. But Sendak, in his quest for both audiences, may actually be leaving the child behind. Higglety, Pigglety, Pop and the selections of Grimm tales for The Juniper Tree suggest his interest in taking the forms and genres of children's literature into the adult world. Neither work really seems appropriate for children. And his most recent work, Outside Over There, despite its handling of sibling rivalry and oedipal feelings, seemingly so close to a child's experience, may also be a heavier burden than some children can be expected to bear. The difficulties, the obscurities of Outside Over There seem to spring from what is essentially an allegorical sensibility, a sensibility that needs to charge its works with layer upon layer of meaning, one that is obsessive, that thrives on detail, that must cover every inch of literal and metaphorical ground. This is not, of course, a negative quality in itself. Some of the greatest artists of our culture seem to have worked from the same impulses. It does account, however, for the extravagant, secretive quality of Sendak's work and may explain why he sometimes passes the child by. Even in art for adults, allegory has not, at least since the nineteenth century, been a particularly popular form. It has traditionally been regarded with suspicion and impatience as being too doctrinal and mechanical, in contrast to "symbolic" literature, wherein the symbol is felt to inhere in the work, to...