Subscribe"The more I think about Charlie and the character of Willy Wonka and his factory, the more I am reminded of McLuhan’s coolness, the basic nature of his observations, and the kinds of things that excite him. Certainly there are several interesting parallels between the point of view of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and McLuhan’s 'theatrical view of experience as a production or stunt,' as well as his enthusiastic conviction that every ill of mankind can easily be solved by subservience to the senses."What followed was a knock-down, drag-out, letter-writing brouhaha, refereed by Horn Book editor Paul Heins, with librarians, parents, teachers, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Roald Dahl himself joining in, and it was one of the main causes of the book's revision that year.
Children are innocent and love justice while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.Still trying to find the original source (which can be maddeningly impossible when there are thousands of "good quotes" sites which never cite any sources, just repeat themselves over and over again, it seems that most of them are drawing from a really interesting essay by J.R.R. Tolkien called "On Fairy-Stories."* On page 12 in the pdf of that essay, which is also reprinted in his book Tree and Leaf, he quotes Chesterton:
Chesterton once remarked that the children in whose company he saw Maeterlinck's Blue Bird were dissatisfied “because it did not end with a Day of Judgement, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless.” “For children,” he says, “are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”From there, with the reference to Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (a play about a girl called Mytyl and her brother Tyltyl seeking happiness, represented by The Blue Bird of Happiness, aided by the good fairy Bérylune), I was led to the original source itself: a rather fascinating little essay by Chesterton called "On Household Gods and Goblins" (collected in his book The Coloured Lands) which opens with the paragraph Tolkien quoted, and goes on to discuss the wild and terrifying nature of elemental domesticity:
This is especially true of the sort of house represented by the country cottage. It is only in theory that the things are petty and prosaic; a man realistically experiencing them will feel them to be things big and baffling and involving a heavy battle with nature. When we read about cabbages or cauliflowers in the papers, and especially the comic papers, we learn to think of them as commonplace. But if a man of any imagination will merely consent to walk round the kitchen-garden for himself, and really looks at cabbages and cauliflowers, he will feel at once that they are vast and elemental things like the mountains in the clouds. He will feel somehing almost monstrous about the size and solidity of the things swelling out of that small and tidy patch of ground. There are modds in which that everyday English kitchen plot will affect him as men are affected by the reeking wealth and toppling rapidity of tropic vegetation; the green bubbles and crawling branches of a nightmare.It's an excellent little essay (and strangely appended on that webpage with a poem by Emily Dickinson, but no matter).
What I object to in Charlie is its phony presentation of poverty and its phony humor, which is based on punishment with overtones of sadism; its hypocrisy which is epitomized in its moral stuck like a marshmallow in a lump of fudge — that TV is horrible and hateful and time-wasting and that children should read good books instead, when in fact the book itself is like nothing so much as one of the more specious television shows.I get what she's saying, but from my multiple readings of the book as a child, it simply isn't true. She's accusing the book of being nothing but fluff, when practically every chapter is meant to impart some sort of lesson. To me it always seemed less about the naughty children and more about their nasty parents, who spoiled their children to the point of ruining their character. Charlie, on the other hand, grew up eating cabbage soup and providing for his grandparents. No, it's not a realistic portrayal of poverty - it's a children's book. In Dahl's books, the good protagonist is always rewarded in the end, while the baddies are punished or humiliated. Sure, that's unrealistic, but it always seemed like a pretty good message to me. And I turned out just fine.
It helps that it's such a very good entrée: "What a lot of hairy-faced men there are about nowadays. When a man grows hair all over his face it is impossible to tell what he really looks like. Perhaps that's why he does it. He'd rather you didn't know." To my mind Dahl's flatly authoritative statements have a universal sweep and psychological penetration to rival the first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, with the added bonus of actually being true; I mean, there are undoubtedly many happy families that are altogether unalike, while – speaking with all the authority of the recently barbellate – I can assure you that when a man grows hair on his face, he definitely has something to hide.
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posted by mccarty.tim at 5:40 PM on October 15 [1 favorite has favorites]