The Journey As Cosmic Reverie: A Reading of Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen

Abstract

The Journey As Cosmic Reverie: A Reading of Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen by William F. Touponce It indicates something of the latent puritanism of our expressivity as critics that we have not yet developed an adequate vocabulary to talk about the aesthetic pleasures of reading children's literature, especially picturebooks. This kind of vocabulary is sorely needed in discussing an author such as Maurice Sendak, who intends to convey, in the case of In the Night Kitchen at least, an intense sort of aesthetic pleasure involving the whole body (Cott 52). Not being a critic himself, Sendak only provides us with a few general indications about how his texts should be read. He particularly objects to critics who have complained about the lack of plot in his picturebooks. Barbara Bader's reading of In the Night Kitchen could serve as an example here. She concludes by finding it inadequate as an aesthetic experience because its story of a journey, "Mickey's pleasant dream," as she calls it, lacks tension. There is no struggle or dramatic series of events developing a narrative interest (Bader 524). She compares the book unfavorably to the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, to which it alludes, because the hero of these stories always has exciting, frightening adventures. It seems to me that Bader, and other critics like her (with the exception of Jill May, who discusses the actual responses of children to this text), are missing something essential about this picturebook, namely, that its sources of aesthetic pleasure lie elsewhere than in the plot. What I hope to show is that the book is above all a cosmic reverie of well-being and pleasure of the sort described by Gaston Bachelard. I want first to outline some pertinent features of Bachelard' s critique of reading which is founded on pleasure and not on cognition as are most reader-oriented theories. Then I will go on to produce an oneiric reading of Sendak's In the Night Kitchen. To begin with, Bachelard's critique of reading is not a psychoanalytic one, narrowly speaking. Rather it is linked both phenomenologically to the cultural enjoyment of identity, and to the archetypes of the collective unconscious as investigated by Jung. It is the presence of an archetype in a story which assures for Bachelard the possibility of an author's communicating his/her reverie, for we communicate with the writer because we already possess these primordial images in the depth of ourselves. In his Poetics of Reverie, Bachelard speaks often of a permanent core of childhood which sustains reverie in each of us throughout life. Furthermore, the subject engaged in reverie is free of unconscious repression. Unlike the situation in the nocturnal dream, the subject of reverie is capable of piloting his/her own journey. Above all, reverie can be spoken. It communicates by means of poetic word-images that transcend whatever torment the author went through in producing them. Bachelard does not seek the meaning of reverie in the author's badly lived past, for the literary work in his poetics dominates the artist's life, has made a complete break with it. Therefore we should not seek the meaning of reverie in that past, but "above" it, in the jouissance des images by which the work came into being (8-10). No doubt this is a mode of subjective criticism, but Bachelard does not give us, besides the archetypes of reverie, some general coordinates by which to orient ourselves. Appropriate to his imagistic method of reading while dreaming in the state of reverie (lire-rever), they are coordinates of the imagination. In searching for words and images which stimulate reverie in the reader, Bachelard is led to distinguish broadly between those produced by the formal imagination and those produced along the axis of the material imagination (the implied foundations of which are the archetypes of earth, air, fire and water and their mixtures). It is only images produced from the latter axis which truly sustain us and commit us to a journey. The formal imagination invariably leads to fixity and conceptual definition. What is more, in reverie based on the material imagination, we can...