The dog, Jennie, eats the flower that tries to convince her to stay. Her journey is entirely led by her appetite: first to a theatre, then a milk truck, then a castle, where she becomes a nurse to a bad baby who won’t eat. She herself is almost eaten by the baby’s lion, until a couple characters she had met before show up to tell her she has enough experience to join the theater. Whereupon she becomes the leading lady, writes a letter of explanation to her prior owner, and lives happily ever after.
Sendak is good at making outlandish events seem ordinary, the text is clever, and the chiaroscuro black and white illustrations add to the dreamlike quality, but this story of romantic escapism seemed to come right out of the lecture notes a friend sent me for his “last lecture,” in which he critiques the romantic belief that happiness is found out there somewhere. I keep seeing this theme everywhere, most prevalently in my own daydreams. Is Sendak feeding a belief that an ordinary life is dull and meaningless, but if you follow your appetites, you might find an exciting life out there somewhere? Whereas naughty Max in Where the Wild Things Are returns home to find his hot dinner, Jennie completely rejects domestic life. (A counterpoint we also read: The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats where Peter finds wonderful snow adventures right outside his window.)
My friend made the point that while everyone longs for happiness and wholeness, for intense emotions, the Romantic believes he must escape his current condition to find them, leave behind the fetters of ordinariness, while the Christian believes they will only be found in union with God. So desiring to escape for the Christian should be a desire for freedom from his condition of selfishness, not from domesticity. The journey is more interior, and intimations of this union are found in the beauty of the ordinary things all around him.
But it is all too easy to imagine “if only” situations, even in the desire to make New Year’s resolutions: If only I do these things, my life will be happier. After the highs of holiday travels, I spent a few doldrum days daydreaming about what our life would’ve been like if, six years ago, my husband had taken a job with one of his architecture professors who is designing beautiful churches, instead of staying in the military. We wouldn’t be making 12 hour trips for Christmas visits. My own romantic fantasy: we’d live in one spot, in a cute little bungalow with a cottage garden, or in a house with enough acreage for goats and chickens (hmm, this is really an alternative domestic fantasy). We might travel to construction sites or take research trips to Europe, but I wouldn’t have to keep starting over, making new friends, sorting through pictures to hang, finding a new parish, a new place to fit in. My husband wouldn’t be leaving for a war zone or earning frequent flier miles on trips to international meetings.
But he wouldn’t be as happy, either, I think, drafting someone else’s designs. Or maybe he would’ve been just as happy doing that, but he is also happy doing what he’s doing now with the Seabees. (Which isn't just warfare construction: he just sent a detachment to Haiti.) And I probably would find plenty wrong with that little bungalow, would want to escape the community I was in, would still complain about messes and having no time. My small discontentments would find other sources.
The January Magnificat editorial by Peter John Cameron, OP, addresses this:
“One of the biggest temptations of daily life is to think that our circumstances are against us. We presume that the reason why we are not happy is because we have been saddled with circumstances that make happiness impossible – circumstances that conspire against us. But then how can Saint Paul say, “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10)?”
Fr. Cameron answers this with this quote from Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ,
“What God arranges for us to experience at each moment is the best and holiest thing that could happen to us. . . . You are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one: Making use of whatever he offers you. Everything leads you to this union with him.”
So I guess I should have resolved to look for God’s presence where I am, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, to surrender to circumstances and let go of impossible,delusional daydreams, and instead admire what we have and make use of it to find God where we are.
8 comments:
Thanks for this. I fall into that circumstances are against me trap so often! If only I had a bigger house, I could be better organized and neater and a good housekeeper.
Also, many of Sendak's books strike me as not quite appropriate for small children. It's interesting that it lost her attention.
But Jenny (who is a little pig of a dog, to be sure) does put her head in the lion's mouth and beg him to eat her instead of baby. This act of self-sacrifice is what leads to the achievement of her dream of being the leading lady of the World Mother Goose Theater. I don't think there's anything too deep in the story, I do think there's something in Jenny, who has consumed throughout the entire story, offering herself to be consumed, even if she does sigh that "I need the experience."
We have a charming audio version that we listen to quite frequently, with rather Mozartean water harmonica music for accompaniment.
Mrs. D, you're right, I stand corrected. I did leave out Jennie's act of virtue in saving the baby, although her motives are questionable, seeing as she's going to be eaten anyway if no one comes to the rescue. The book just happened to strike a cord with this idea of escaping the ordinary. And the fact is, reading itself is a way to escape the ordinary. And books celebrating the ordinary often come across as saccharine. Sometimes I can hardly stand to read some of the treacly books like The Kissing Hand.
I have mixed feelings about Sendak; for instance, I love the little picture books about the boy, the dog, and the frog, and the humor in the little cautionary tales, but like Melanie, I get the feeling that some of his books aren't quite right for children. I never really got the Miami Giants book and thought In the Night Kitchen dark - more nightmare than sweet dream. That he worked with the Monks of New Skete with his dogs is a nice bit of trivia, though.
Here's a confession though: I tear up nearly every time I read "All the Places to Love" by Patricia Maclachlan.
Yes, In the Night Kitchen was one that I was remembering as being disturbing. For some reason it sort of left me with a general distaste for Sendak even though I had previously liked his stories.
Oh and I always tear up at "All the Places to Love". Maybe that's why Bella almost never asks for it. I suspect it's one of those picture books that are really meant for adults.
If you find "In the Night Kitchen" disturbing, you might not want to read his "Outside Over There", which is about a girl who has to rescue a sibling who is stolen by goblins. Very interesting, very odd.
I'll have to look for "All the Places to Love". We used to have a book (as in the girls destroyed it, practically) called "Daddy's Lullaby" about a father who comes home very late at night and walks through his house carrying the baby to look at all the sleeping members of his family. It always made me mist up.
The comments are all caught up on the Sendak's book, but me, I got caught up on surrendering to accept the extraordinary in an ordinary life. Sounds a lot like the thoughts I have been kicking around my head lately.
I was trying to think about books that find the ordinary in the extraordinary (Anne, your poem about feeling like a turtle struck me as expressing a similar theme), and Tomie de Paola's Clown of God came to mind. Beautiful!
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