“Maurice Sendak,” says Russell D. Moore, “was, by all accounts, a lonely, misanthropic, cynical, homosexual atheist.” Yet, in an article he wrote shortly after Sendak’s death a few months ago for the Nov/Dec 2012 issue of Touchstone, he praises him for ”all that he has to teach a church he never embraced.”
Sendak is the author of the well-known and beloved children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. While some say the book is too dark, Moore believe that Sendak “had a more realistic view of evil than many Christians do, at least when it comes to our children.” The story’s protagonist Max is sent to his room after telling his mother that he will eat her up. His room then turns into a forest full of “wild things,” and he does not return to his room until he becomes “king of all of the wild things,” or until he gains self control over his own “wild things.” Moore says:
Sendak . . . at least in his artistic imagination, recognized something the Christian revelation tells us clearly. Worse than what’s “out there” is the uncontrollable “wildness” inside of us, those passions and desires and rages and longings and sorrows within our psyches that seem to be even scarier because they’re so hidden, so close, and so much at the core of who we are.
The “wildness without” we at least know we have little or no control over, which is scary enough, but the “wildness within,” we hope we to be able to control, and when faced with our human weakness it is often unbearable. I often think of Fr. Luigi Giussani‘s “disproportion before the total answer” (The Religious Sense): “The more an individual is implicated in an attempt to respond to these questions [about the core of our being and the need for a total answer], the more he perceives their power, and the more he discovers how disproportionate he is with respect to the total answer,” and how disproportionate any response of his would be in the face of the mystery.
Taking the scariness of the “wildness within” a step further than Sendak, Moore points out that the reason it scares us so is because even our own self-control is ultimately not full control and ultimately not ours, but only insomuch as God gives it to us by grace. We cannot save ourselves:
The problem is, our kids know there are monsters out there. God put that awareness in them. They’re looking for a sheep-herding dragon-slayer, for the One who can put all the wild things under his feet. Until we can address, with gospel honesty, what scares our children—and ourselves—we can never get to the joyous wild rumpus of gospel freedom.
“The Word came into the world, and the wildness did not overcome it.”
October 25th, 2012 | 1:47 pm
Right on. And that’s why Grimm’s fairy tales and other traditional stories are so valuable, and modern attempts to tame them so silly. No, so despicable. I sometimes worry about what the culture of niceness is doing to children’s psyches.
October 25th, 2012 | 9:48 pm
Beautiful to see Fr. Guissani, whose case for canonization is open, quoted and quoted appropriately. Although Sendak’s style and narrative techniques never captured my imagination or interest, I applaud him for avoiding the temptation to reduce fairy-tales and children’s literature to bourgeois sensibilities–a temptation that, with C.S. Lewis, we can trace back to Walt Disney. [although what Lewis critiqued in Disney's adaptions was mild compared to the way his namesake company vulgarized fairy-tales in the decades after his death]
The bourgeois watering-down of children’s literature reflects the bourgeois taboo on death and is ultimately as nihilistic as the objectivist materialization of death. Both deny the reality of death, albeit in different ways. The first superficially suppresses the reality of death via sentimental moralism and the later attempts an immunization toward death via hyper-violent and perverse dramatizations of death. Both reductions share a common nihilistic ontology since each reinforce the notion, at least implicitly, that nothing is beyond death. Sendak’s fiction, it seems, acknowledges the need to confront the reality of evil, intrinsic to the reality of death, while avoiding the bourgeois and materialist reductions. Yet, I sense in Sendak’s fiction tendency toward a voluntarism–as if fear of evil and death is something that we voluntarsticaly confront and get out of our system, essentially what Max did. His fiction is incomplete because his religious sense was incomplete during his lifetime. Death and evil are ultimately the furthest things from new or wild. Only the Christian proposition, in all its scandal and realism, the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection is the only really new and wild thing. The recognition of this novelty gives hope, not because everything is “nice,” but because the awareness of this fact allows one to remain in front of every fact with the promise and anticipation that something, Someone, more human than ourselves, greater than every evil, awaits at every plot-turn.
October 26th, 2012 | 9:36 am
Andrew,
Thank you so much for your comment. I assume you must be in CL by the way you talk? I am not a member of the movement myself but it is very dear to my heart. I agree whole-heartedly that
“Only the Christian proposition, in all its scandal and realism, the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection is the only really new and wild thing.”
So much so that I am surprised I hadn’t thought to add that to my article myself. Thank you for your wonderful contribution.
October 26th, 2012 | 3:57 pm
Katherine,
I am a part of Communion and Liberation and it’s funny that you recognized so because of the way I talk. It is often a temptation for all with the movement to reduce Fr Guissani’s charism to a lingo – just as it’ all Christians are tempted to reduce faith to repetition of ready-made formulas. Of course, if one reduces faith to a lingo or formulas, then Christianity seems sentimental, distant, removed from real life and thus less interesting (especially to nonbelievers as Sendak).
A couple last notes on the post and my comment: The Christian proposal is new and wild because it proposes something counter to both life ad-infinitude and annihilation. Myths hungered for something better than death, but the Paschal Mystery revealed and, continues to reveal, something unimaginable–too good to be true except it is. G.K. Chesterton said that “The birth of Christ was the death of Pan.” One could add that the birth, death and Resurrection of Christ is the death of Peter Pan.
New life, the possibility and hope that a man can be born anew once he is old, is different than perpetual childhood. Eternal life, Christian rebirth, doesn’t mean never growing up but rather recognizing that the very real challenges that accompany existence are birth pains that anticipate a new life that begins here and now. This hope, this realism, allows one to remain in front of reality and accept the pains and responsibilities of maturing and growing-up. Thus, the Christian invitation to child-likeness, far from never growing-up, is a challenge to truly grow-up into a man or woman who lives faithfully to reality with interest and without censure. In other words, in educating faith to maturity–a lifelong adventure–we are born anew. Neither J.M. Barrie’s, in his quasi-Romanticist nostalgia for uncultivated youth nor Sendak’s voluntarism could conceive such a hopeful realism. One sought to con
One last note: The bourgeois watering-down of fairy-tales is really a consequence of the reduction of Christianity to bourgeois sensibilities. A perfect real-life example, last Easter, an in-law essentially said, not in so many words, that she told her daughter a revised Easter story because she thought that the whole part involving Jesus’ death would frighten her child. This misguided and wrong-minded censure reflects the bourgeois taboo on death and, perhaps implicitly, a lack of seriousness toward the hope of Resurrection. The watering-down of fairy-tales, which as I previously said traces back at least to Walt Disney, is direct consequence of this taboo on death and which in turn reduces Resurrection hope to a sentiment.
The bourgeois reduction of Christianity is ultimately nihilistic because, as aforementioned, such a heresy recognizes nothing beyond death. Such a purview reduces the Resurrection to a sentiment or idea used to repress or suppress the reality of death. The hard reality of evil, illness, suffering and death prove all sentimental facades flimsy and false—useless when the facts confront. Thus, a mother cannot tell her daughter that Jesus died on the Cross, rose from death and is risen because, perhaps implicitly at least, she only recognizes death as real. The Resurrection is a disincarnate idea or sentiment and thus Jesus is disincarnate character than we can revise according to our sensibilities the same way we revise Rapunzel.
Yes, death is frightening, perhaps especially to the young (although thoroughly post-modern adults seem more in denial about death than children). Yet, one can recognize—in a completely unsentimental way–that the awful reality of death is necessary for the awesome reality of Resurrection. The realism and hope that Christians display when they are confronted with evil and death is the greatest evidence of their faith in Christian Resurrection.
Chesterton said that “fairy-tales are important not because they say that there are dragons but because they say that dragons can be slain.” The great fairy-tales, in their true form, illustrate a realistic outlook in the sense that these tales convey an awareness of evil and, more importantly, the awareness that evil can be and ultimately is defeated. Chesterton–as Tolkien and Lewis after him–would agree that fairy-tales point to and anticipate the victory of life already won over evil. Hence, the strong sense of free-will that Chesterton recognized in fairy-tales–true heroes are never paralyzed for fear of dragons because they know that the true dragon slayer has already won; a hero falls only if he allows evil to influence him, he is free to affirm good. Dragons certainly remain, yet the certainty that victory is already won allows one to affirm life, truth, goodness and beauty with her whole person–despite all opposition–in the Hope and Faith that the adventure is not in vain.
Absent this hopeful and faithful realism, life becomes about avoiding reality–or at least seeing it in parts rather than in its totality–rather than affirming truth, beauty and goodness. Thus, Christianity becomes Christ-less and fairy-tales become boring, sappy and vulgar.
P.S.
If you are interested, there are CL School of Communities at Fordham University and Columbia, as well as a Young Workers SoC that meets in the city but I’m not sure where. I actually attend a SoC at St. Joseph’s Parish in Bronxville. The movement is far from anything resembling a club–there are no membership cards or anything. Anyone can a attend a SoC.
Just FYI.
October 26th, 2012 | 4:10 pm
Andrew,
I couldn’t have said it better myself! Wow. Thank you for taking the time to write that response.
My CL friends from back home keep asking me if I have met anyone from the movement in NY yet, but I didn’t know when/where they had SoC, so thank you for that as well.
October 26th, 2012 | 4:21 pm
On somewhat of a side note, I have often wondered why my favorite children’s story growing up was Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, which now looking back seems what most parents these days would deem “dark.”
Squirrel Nutkin and his cousins spend their days taunting Old Brown the owl until finally Old Brown catches Nutkin and plans to skin him. Squirrel Nutkin barely escapes but not without losing most of his tail.
Perhaps it was one of the stories I read where I got a sense of real danger (which the Beatrix Potter books have plenty of, often with impending death) or perhaps it appealed to my sense of justice. In any case, I do tend to prefer these stories to the softies.
October 28th, 2012 | 6:30 pm
Every year at this time I sense the absence of wildness and fun that is modern Hallowe’en. A warm and cozy costumer party isn’t quite the same thing as running wild in the streets from house to house begging and occasionally threatening in glee for free candy. And it is exactly that strapped-in-the-car seat upbringing that has spoiled it. Sendak and the above commenters seem to be onto something.
November 4th, 2012 | 12:36 pm
As I read the article the Ghost of Walt Kelly whispered in my ear from the voice of Pogo;”We have seen the enemy and the enemy is us.” In western theology of late we have turned over the boogey man to the Scfi folks and have forgotten that the scary things the wild and woolies are real our demons are real and need to come to grips with the reality that the blood of Christ and the power that lies in it is real also.
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