Deconstructing Maurice Sendak's Postmodern Palimpsest

Abstract

Deconstructing Maurice Sendak's Postmodern Palimpsest Jean Perrot (bio) The Dual Child and Shifts in the Signifier The First Prize at the Bologna International Fair in 1989 was awarded to Maurice Sendak for Dear Mili, a series of sixteen illustrations of a story by Wilhelm Grimm. This recognition of the worldwide pre-eminence of the illustrator crowns the work in which Maurice Sendak, by means of mystery and hieratic figures, has attempted to extend the enigmas of Outside Over There (1989) and to give us a new episode in this story of the mythical child which he bears within himself: as he told Michèle Cochet, "the baby in Outside Over There is now the only child. It is the little girl, Mili. In my head, there is only this child" (Cochet 41). Are we to believe the declarations of a "master" who, since the interview given to Rolling Stone in 1976, has multiplied peremptory statements and has presented himself as the amiable and sometimes slightly teasing guide of his own critics? In the expression of this enthusiasm for the "last born," is there not the desire to control the gaze of the exegete, who is invited to take part in the cult of an aesthetic family which is part of the extension and complement to the psychoanalytical reconstruction of the "child-bound" artist? For what Sendak suggests to us here directly is that the child weighs heavy on the consciousness and unconsciousness of the territories defined by his work. To confirm this impression, we have simply to go back to the image of the baby kidnapped by goblins, which he proposed to illustrate another fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm: "The Goblins" in The Juniper Tree. There is no doubt about it: by its huge mass, this sort of pot-bellied divinity dominates the adult, who is reduced to the impassive face. This is indeed the enthroned child, "His Majesty the Baby" in person, as Freud said, the idol par excellence of contemporary imagination. Also one of the goblins in the plate has his ear pressed to the baby's belly and seems to be listening carefully to some prodigious sound, as though expecting some premature and monstrous birth, in a situation which reverses the position of the psychoanalyst. Maurice Sendak, whose psychoanalysis goes back to the time of Kenny's Window (1956) (Lanes 63), seems to touch on a paradox here: the defender of childhood is at the service of a public who has not really received the true status of a reader. There is indeed no academy of children's illustrators, but only a barely institutionalized criticism by relatively recent organizations, such as those who organize the book fairs of Bologna or Bratislava. The recognition of Sendak is therefore a new phenomenon: the entry of a hitherto marginal culture. Like feminist literature, like the self-expression of the Blacks or immigrants, the language of childhood and that about childhood, as an "ex-centric" discourse, belongs to the post-modernism described by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Post Modernism (16). The price of this recognition in the case of Maurice Sendak, however, is very dear: the latest book, Dear Mili , is far from being repetitive and accentuates the intellectual tension which could already be sensed in his earlier works, and which culminates here in the evocation of the Holocaust. Quite obviously, the somber tonalities and the final note of death which Wilhelm Grimm's tale sounds unambiguously, have laid bare the artist's sensitivity and, in his work of composition, have resonated in harmony with the emotion aroused by the Barbie affair in France, as Margaret Carter shows (Carter 27). Through the separation of a daughter and a mother, and in the vision of a family destroyed by the war, Maurice Sendak has touched the vulnerable psychological quick in the immigrants' son of his childhood. In this context, we should stress the importance of his first name, Maurice, the translation of Moishe which Jews were forced to use at this time. This forename is a constant reminder of the cultural duality inscribed in the symbolic representation of his person. This name may also contain an image of...