Copyright 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.The Lion and the Unicorn21.2 (1997) 215-229

Self, Other, and Other Self:Recognizing the Other in Children's LiteratureRoderick McGillis

"Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics."(Jean Baudrillard)I intend to be unashamedly personal. My topic is the self as "Other," and I use myself as an example of what Julia Kristeva refers to as the foreigner who lives within us (see herStrangers to Ourselves1991). She describes the foreigner as "the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder." I face this stranger often: when I read something I wrote some time ago, when I'm faced with new experiences, when I'm uncertain of a friend, when I second-guess myself. Kristeva goes on to assert that only by recognizing the foreigner within ourselves are we "spared detesting him in himself." More importantly, the foreigner "disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities" (1). We are connected to community through foreignness. We cannot but be "Other" to the communities which contain us, and when everyone is an "Other" then everyone shares an experience that might keep people together not by the bonds of community but by the choice of community. Community, otherness, and the embracing of selves: this is my topic.The focus, in the first part of my paper, is the foreigner within myself, that part of the self we needfully embrace as strange and different from what we wish to think of ourselves. This is the person who sometimes trips us up, embarrasses us before we can step in and present the person we think we are. I will turn in the second two parts of my paper to two recent novels for young readers, one published in Canada, a realistic novel which deals with a Canadian boy's experiences in South Africa, and the[End Page 215]other a fantasy first published in Germany. The Canadian book is Lynne Fairbridge'sIn Such a Place(1992; winner of the sixth Alberta Writing for Youth Competition), and the German fantasy is Michael Ende'sMomo(1973). My choice of texts is, in part, practical. But it is also tactical: these books offer us realism and fantasy, the known and the unknown, a mixture of races and a mixture of cultures.1. Canny and Uncanny SelvesI speak of a large issue by examining a personal discovery. The large issue is the continuing struggle of all oppressed people to overcome imperialist forces. I note here that "oppressed people" takes in a majority of persons on this globe, to greater or lesser degree. And "imperialist forces" are all those institutional powers (Ideological State Apparatuses) that either subtly or openly attempt to fashion the way we think and behave. These forces invade all facets of our experience, from our billboards to the rest of our media, including our children's books. Their design is to maintain conditions of power and authority, and my dangling infinitive here is intentional in its facelessness. Forces are at work that both construct from the outside people of differing cultures and races, and that seek to assimilate other cultures, other peoples into one dominant culture. Stories have traditionally been one of the sources of social construction, one of the means by which a culture perpetuates itself and situates itself over against an "other" culture. Even when the stories of one culture do not refer to other cultures, they implicitly maintain the fiction of one culture's superiority to another, one people's superiority to another people. Or do they? Might it not be possible to argue that a culture's stories inevitably must present that very culture as "other"?1When we read about ourselves are we not reading about something distanced from ourselves, and therefore "other" than ourselves? If we were simply to read ourselves, we would not be reading; instead we would be, quite literally, reflecting. Or at least we might argue that all stories present a world other than the one we inhabit, and in doing so they bring us face-to-face, as it were, with the fictionality of all stories. All we know is fiction. And like fiction, all we know is duplicitous.Is it not true to say that each of us is duplicitous, each of us is a fiction? Take myself, for instance. It just so happens that my birth enrolled me as a member of two groups: one doing much of the oppressing around the world; the other a colonial garrison huddled along a narrow strip of land just north of the United States border. I have learned that one can look at[End Page 216]one's position culturally and socially in at least two ways. Being male and white and of Protestant background, I had an advantage from birth over people from other groups; for example, women and males of other cultural, religious, and racial backgrounds. On the other hand, being the son of a dissolute and spendthrift father who worked, when he worked, for the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railroad), I came from what we might term a working-class background, a background that brought with it certain social and cultural disadvantages. I was, simultaneously, a member of a distinctly self-serving group, and to a certain extent an "Other" to those with more money, position, and experience. Something similar might be said of all of us; I am not describing an unfamiliar experience.The personal discovery I mentioned at the outset derives from this "look back at my origins." Simple and self-evident as my discovery may seem to others, to me it came as a surprise. It is the realization that my past is another country, my childhood the experience of someone I no longer fully know. How these two disparate concerns--the dominant culture's desire to situate people as "self" and "other" and my knowledge of my own self-otherness--are connected is the subject of my paper, and I borrow from bell hooks a question that sets my subject going: "Why do we have to wipe out the Otherness in order to experience a notion of Oneness?" (234). I will connect this subject to children's books near the end of what I have to say. To begin, however, I turn to the large issue: imperialism and its relationship to children.I take it that among the oppressed and colonized we can number children. This is one aspect of Jacqueline Rose's argument inThe Case of Peter Pan, and Perry Nodelman has argued something similar in theChLA Quarterly. Children have little or no power and they are vulnerable to social and cultural forces. We used to call this, and perhaps still do call this, "innocence."2From an adult perspective, children are the "Other," mysterious beings who in turn attract us, repel us, and bedevil us. As someone who regularly goes into the schools to perform as a storyteller, I confess this: children are to me the "Other." I am not easily able to enter into their way of thinking. In order to deal with one child or a group of children, I must organize them, get them to conform to certain ways of behaviour, even if this behaviour simply requires them to sit still. To confess this is not, however, to accept the absolute necessity of exploiting or taking over young minds. I mentioned the ideological effect of stories, but I also questioned this effect. In fact, my experience of the storytelling situation informs me that teller and audience, adult and children can experience a notion of Oneness that breaks down authority. Through story[End Page 217]a disparate group can come together without the intrusion of authority and power; such a group can, as Jack Zipes argues, build community and change lives (Creative Storytelling). Having stated my subject, I now come to my thesis: we can answer bell hooks' question by saying that we do not need to wipe out Otherness in order to experience Oneness because we have a constant reminder of the possibility of Oneness through our experience of story. Our experience of story is both communal and personal.This is, perhaps, simple and obvious to others. But I came to realize the profundity of this disparate Oneness, this self-evident Otherness that does not threaten, does not need control, only understanding, when I began to reflect on the stories I myself was telling to audiences of adults and children. I began telling stories ten years ago, and at first I told stories I had heard from other storytellers. Soon, however, I began to reflect on my own childhood and to construct stories based on memories of incidents and people I once knew. Many of the people I used as characters have long since died, and nearly none of them have I seen for thirty years. Perhaps the most spectacular example of just how "Other" these people have become is the case of my father. He has become one of the most insistent characters in my stories. He is still alive, although I have not seen him since 1969, nearly twenty-seven years ago. When I started telling stories about him, I thought I was trying to come to terms with a flawed and troubled relationship. I thought I was trying to capture the person I knew, to picture this person who was as close to me as kinship can allow. I thought I was trying to put my own past into perspective, to engage in some therapeutic exercise. And I suppose I was. In short, I thought I knew my father as I knew myself, and to articulate this knowledge would somehow cure me of bitterness and resentment.But therapy is for those who are in some way ill or in convalescence, for those who are bitter and resentful perhaps. As I looked at my stories, I began to realize that "convalescence," "illness," "bitterness," and "resentment" are words which do not seem to apply to me. Even more to the point is the fact that the character who is/was my father is someone I never really knew. If I thought I knew him as I knew myself, this was because I did not really know myself. The only father I know is an "Other" whom I construct each time I tell a story about him. This character I construct from the fragmentary memories of my parent both is and is not my father. The fact that he is my father and that he appears in some silly situations in the stories I tell provides me with some satisfying sense of power over him, I guess, but more and more he is simply someone whom I can only know from a distance and try to understand as what, for lack of a better term, I am calling an "Other."[End Page 218]The same is true of the little boy who was myself. I say "was" because I realize that the small character who goes through the actions I remember from my past both is and is not me. I can only relate to this small person as an "Other," someone who has links with me but who is clearly not me. Obviously, this little boy shares experiences with me and even perhaps character traits and character flaws; without him, I would not be here now. At the same time, he is not me; we do not exist in the same time; we do not use the same language; we do not know the same people; we do not share the same experiences. I am an "Other" to myself. If this were not so, then I could not have the distance from myself to reconstruct my own past, to fashion it into story. (At the moment, the question as to whether I do this well or not is irrelevant.) And it might be worth reflecting that none of us can tell stories until we have come to terms with those "Other" than ourselves; everyone who creates story does so from a distance. In other words, those who would have stories told only by those who directly experience what happens in a story or who directly fit into the culture or society depicted in the story are arguing, tacitly and unconsciously I'm sure, for the erasure of all story.Now about this reconstruction of my own past. I need to rethink what I have just said. To reconstruct my past is, of course, to take control over it, to colonize it, if you will. My past self has no independent existence aside from my fashioning it. In this sense, I have constructed the "Other" and cannot know it in and of itself. I can never know my own past self from the inside. I can never know anyone other than my immediate self from the inside, and this includes my children. This does not mean, however, that I do not respect, sympathize with, love, and embrace these people I cannot know from the inside. I can learn to respect my own "Other," whether that person is my "child" self or the fellow whose reactions sometimes catch me unawares even now, and to make the effort to understand what this other self gives me: memories, memorabilia, photographs, humility, perhaps even words in the form of diaries or letters or whatever. The feeling of "Oneness" I might attain in contemplating my own "Other" self does not transform that "Other" self wholly into me as I am now. The reconstruction is, in effect, two ways. My "Other" self is to a certain extent something I construct; by the same token, my present self is to a certain extent something constructed by that "Other" self. I am always and of necessity constructing a self.The same is true of the space which the self inhabits. That country which my "Other" self inhabits is, in its turn, an "Other" country. This is most obviously the case when we contemplate the past. You cannot go home again. I know the world I inhabited thirty and forty years ago is far[End Page 219]different from the one I inhabit now. In some ways, that country is a country for old men and women. I mean, only those with age can remember a certain time and a certain place. We can choose to forget that time and place, but to do so is to cut oneself loose from participation in a community. To forget that time and place is to lose the ability to connect with anything outside the here and now. It is not a question of returning to a cultural moment long since past; rather it is a question of maintaining contact with that culture in order that we have something to reflect with our present cultural situation. We need to know how we got here. We also need to know how here compares to all the heres possible.Let me turn to a story that has recently forced itself upon me. A while ago, I began, almost casually, to write a story about a place just across the tracks from where I grew up. I do not know what prompted this, but I found myself writing short sections in voices different from the one I had started with. Before long I had some fifteen or twenty voices going, one of which I had thought to begin with was mine. Through some mysterious alchemy, this voice--the one I thought was mine--receded in importance and two other characters began to emerge as central to the plot that was unfolding: a Chinese-Canadian boy of about sixteen or seventeen and a Caucasian girl of about the same age only older in experience and savvy. The boy was someone I remembered from my past; the girl was no one particular person from my past, but I remember people like her. Anyhow, I did not think what I was doing was tactless until I happened to mention the story to a Chinese friend of mine who asked me point blank whether I could, in fact, write about the experiences of a Chinese boy. Could I be fair to the experiences of another culture? Could I know what it felt like to be that boy?The answer to the last question is, of course, no. I could not know what it felt like to be the real boy who appears in disguise in the story. But that is the point: the character reflects--it does not reproduce--reality; the character is in disguise, in reversal if you will. The disguise, the reality that the character reflects is the reality I am able to create, not some accurate creation of an absolute reality. In other words, to construct a character is to make an imaginative leap into the possibility of other lives. Sometimes such a leap is successful and sometimes it is not. Sometimes we create good stories and sometimes we do not. What we cannot claim is to reflect accurately and absolutely the experiences of anyone who actually lives in this world we inhabit. Literature is not life. In short, each attempt at story is an attempt to understand what it is like to be an "Other." Or to use the vocabulary of my section's title, each attempt at story tries to show how what is known and familiar, the canny, is also simultaneously unknown and unfamiliar, the uncanny.[End Page 220]I am trying to sort out how the constructing of stories about my own past has prompted me to respond to what we in Canada face as official government policy. I refer to the government's policy of multiculturalism. This is, I hasten to add, a policy I accept and even endorse. Official government acknowledgment of the variety of cultures that constitute our country seems to me only sensible; the government here provides an example of tolerance and acceptance, at least on the surface of things. We need now, as much or even more than ever, tolerance and respect for other ways of thinking, for other peoples, and for other cultures. By extension, our children need exposure to literature which reflects the cultural mix of our countries. They also need exposure to literature which brings to their attention the larger global community to which we all belong.2. The Self and Foreign PlacesThis brings me to Lynne Fairbridge'sIn Such a Place. Here is a well-told story which deals with both international and inter-racial relationships. The plot is not complicated, but the issues it takes up are. The plot concerns sixteen-year-old Mark whose father sends him to South Africa while he (the father) is away doing research in northern Alberta, in Canada. Mark is typically Canadian: doubly displaced. He feels alienated from his father because his father has remarried (Mark's mother has died), and he feels alienated both from his friends in Canada who are far away and from the people he meets in South Africa whose cultural experience is so different from his own. South Africa differs from Canada in climate and social conditions. The story takes place prior to the removal of apartheid and the elections of 1994. Mark quickly learns about child beggars in the city, about an educational system that has for many years disadvantaged black people, about urban crime, about life in the townships, and about friendship between persons from differing racial and cultural backgrounds. Coming from Canada, Mark carries certain assumptions concerning the country he now experiences first hand. His experience will test his assumptions, and in doing so it will teach Mark much not only about South Africa, but also about his own country.Fairbridge is subtle in her evocation of the "Other," showing rather than telling how intricate an issue the self and "Other" is. As well as articulating differences between the two countries, she points out similarities between life in Canada and South Africa, both on a personal and a public level: Mark's father left home to find work and so did the father of the black South African boy, Sipho, privilege and class affect the attitudes of both Canadians and South Africans, the dominant society in both[End Page 221]countries has traditionally mistreated others less powerful, an immigrant population has colonized an indigenous one, all people desire a good life, a life of independence and self-reliance. Such similarities, however, do not rule out differences between the two countries: the marketplace with its cornucopia of flowers and its child-beggars is something new in Mark's experience. The constant reminders of the need for security are also new to Mark. Most powerfully new, however, is the life his friend Sipho lives and has lived, the life in the township, the life that accepts a need for violence to achieve significant change. Mark's shift from non-involvement to a commitment to change derives from the shock he receives when Sipho asks him, in the name of friendship, to negotiate with arms, to take up arms on behalf of oppression.The book raises issues relating to the infiltration of political concerns into private life, and in doing this it amounts to the story of one boy's rite of passage from rather naive self-concern to a mature acceptance of social responsibility.3Mark decides, at the end of the novel, to stay in South Africa and to assist a local clergyman in teaching young disenfranchised children how to read, write, and do arithmetic. In other words, Mark comes to understand the importance of education in changing people's lives. Early in the book he had attempted to talk Sipho into skipping school and going "cruising for girls or something" (41). He did not understand Sipho's desire to learn, and the drive that sent Sipho to two jobs besides going to school. By the end, however, Mark has learned to understand. Education is the key to improving life.But something remains to be said. The politics this book investigates are the politics of the "Other." We never forget otherness inIn Such a Place. The book insists on binaries: Canada/South Africa, father/son, teacher/pupil, rich/poor, male/female, city/townships, reason/emotion, violence/nonviolence, privileged/underprivileged, black/white. Such binaries insist on otherness, one term reflecting the familiar and accepted, the other the unfamiliar and unaccepted. For example, for Mark who comes from Canada violence is unacceptable; he has no understanding of a situation in which violence might be perceived as the only means to change. He takes a nonviolent position regarding political activity, but he learns that he himself holds a double standard since he unconsciously condones and even participates in violence in his personal life. I refer to his interest in and practice of Karate. I do not want to suggest that Fairbridge argues for another point of view; that is, I do not want to argue that the book comes round to condoning violence. It doesn't. But Mark comes round to understanding how a situation can become so desperate that violence seems the only answer.[End Page 222]Sipho tells Mark that he has lost a baby brother because his family was too poor to buy food and medicine, and he also tells him that some soldiers have shot his sister, Faith. Here is Mark's reaction to this information:Mark was shamed into silence. Sipho was right. Life was easy for him. And he recalled his fight with Kevin, how angry he had been then and how easily provoked to violence. (95)Throughout the book, we see that Mark enjoys physical aggression; he does not grasp the implications of this enjoyment until now. He too can erupt violently, so why should he be surprised that others, and others with far more provocation, do likewise. In short, Mark cannot understand others until he comes to understand himself. Once he realizes that he has "to make my own decisions" (111), he is ready truly to enter the world of the "Other." He does this by disguising himself as a black person in order to find Sipho in the townships. Fairbridge remarks: "There was something disturbing about having to become black in order to enter Sipho's world" (128). Although she does not spell out what this "something" is, I think we can understand that to enter the world of another, we ourselves must become "Other" than we are. We are always faced with the "Other." We cannot escape otherness.This is what Mark learns, and this is why he does not return to Canada at the end of the book. Canada is his home, but it too is a place with its own unfamiliarity; Mark has never met his stepmother, and he feels he has never known his father. He decides, however, that what he experiences in South Africa presents, for the moment, the most compelling unfamiliarity. He remains so he can assist in the teaching of young children. He feels he can "change something for the better" (143). The "something" here relates to the "something disturbing" I noted in the previous paragraph. The word is a signifier, but what it signifies remains undefined. The "something" remains attached to the notion of "otherness" I have been discussing--always just out of reach, always unknowable, and always an aspect of each of us. To accept this "something," this "otherness" is to share a oneness with others.3. The Grey Eminence of Politics: Otherness and SamenessI turn now to a final example, a book that illustrates clearly the necessity of "otherness." I refer to Michael Ende'sMomo(1973; first English ed. 1974). At first glance,Momois not a book one might think of in connection with the self as "Other" because its concerns are so resolutely[End Page 223]social.Momotakes its form from a tradition of fantasy that dates back at least to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German romance, to the work of Novalis, Tieck, Hoffmann, and others. Ende focuses on the theme of time, and by doing so he places his book in a tradition of fantasy for children that includes such works in English as Phillipa Pearce'sTom's Midnight Garden(1958), the "Green Knowe" books of Lucy Boston, William Mayne'sEarthfasts(1967), and others. Such books are deeply psychological. Ende gives the traditions in which he works a social conscience by focusing on late-twentieth-century corporate living. The world he envisages inMomois unsettlingly reminiscent of the world we inhabit with its work-induced panic and its pressures of conformism. The cigar-smoking, bowler-hatted men in grey who mysteriously and unobtrusively infiltrate society represent the corporate mentality that sees everything as working toward the same ends: conformity and productivity. To put this in a way closer to my theme, I simply point out that these grey men represent the drive to oneness, the desire to wipe out difference, "otherness." That which is "Other" is a threat to these men. Ende connects this theme of the otherness with time by arguing that the desire to wipe out difference has something to do with the desire to control time.I might slide into digression here to point out that the form of Ende's book--fantasy--itself belies any effort to control time. Fantasy, by its very nature, is beyond time in that it exists in a timeless zone. The "Author's Postscript" points out that the events recounted inMomoappear to have already happened, but they might just as well lie in the future (237). Of course events in a fantasy have never happened, will never happen, and yet have already always happened. The thing to insist on when we speak of fantasy is its "otherness." Fantasy presents things as other than they are; in this otherness lies fantasy's very familiarity. Fantasy returns us to the theme of the uncanny and its relationship to the unconscious. In the unconscious time holds no sway.Time, however one defines it, is that within which we operate as conscious subjects. Each of us has time to spend and how we spend it depends upon what we desire. If we desire, as Momo does, to share ourselves with others, then we might spend our time listening to others. If we desire to explore possibilities, then we might spend our time playing and allowing things to happen. If, however, we desire to shore up defences against an unknowable future, then we might spend our time working furiously. In other words, our attitude to time, our use of time, reflects our sense of ourselves as subjects. And our sense of ourselves as subjects is deeply connected to our subjectivity within a social and economic[End Page 224]structure. How we view ourselves is a reflection of how we are prompted to view ourselves by the society within which we live.The men in grey make it their business to promote desire, for as long as we desire we are vulnerable to the authority and control of those who produce objects of desire. In effect, what the men in grey produce is nothing other than an ersatz desire, a manufactured desire, one that disrupts natural desire. The men in grey, themselves simulacra, encourage everyone to seek for simulacra, Baudrillard's term for that which substitutes "signs of the real for the real itself" (Simulations4). What I mean by "natural desire" is quite simply the desire each of us feels for unity, oneness, for that lost innocence we think we remember from our childhoods. In psychological terms, natural desire is the desire to return to the comforts of the mother before self-consciousness separates us from both ourselves and our mothers. What I mean by ersatz desire is a desire for objects that cannot satisfy desire, but which can only encourage the desire for more objects.InMomo, the men in grey leave on the steps of the old amphitheatre where Momo lives a doll by the name of Lola. Lola speaks and tells Momo she is "the Living Doll" (81). I cannot avoid the thought that Lola, the Living Doll, traces her origin to the Marlene Dietrich character Lola-Lola in von Sternberg's 1930 filmThe Blue Angel, although another obvious source is the automaton, Olympia, in E. T. A. Hoffmann'sThe Sandman(1816-17). For those of us in North America, Barbie will come to mind. In any case, Lola is a doll that talks, and the very fact that she talks, saying the same things over and over again, renders her uninteresting to Momo. The idea is that the talking doll negates the necessity for imaginative interaction between the doll and its owner. It provides everything its child-owner might require, leaving the child with nothing but boredom, or more importantly, nothing but the desire for something more exciting, another doll or at the very least things for the doll, clothes and accessories, all those things that come with entry into the world of Barbie in our own culture. As the man in grey tells Momo: "As long as you go on getting more and more things, you'll never grow bored. . . . There is always something left to wish for." When a child amasses everything she can for Lola, then she can acquire another doll, Butch, the "perfect boyfriend for Lola" (85). Once Butch has everything, then another doll is the perfect girlfriend for Lola, and so on and on and on. With such a plethora of dolls and accessories, the child need never want for friends. Instead of friends, Momo can have simulacra, substitute friends, talking dolls. The result of accepting this world of things will be[End Page 225]a world of similitude; nothing need differ from the corporate norm, nothing need deviate from the focus on accumulation and production, nothing need interrupt the sameness of things.Take Guido Guide for example. Guido is a storyteller, someone who sees himself as sharing with others. He shares his stories with those who will listen, and he finds inspiration for more stories in that very interaction with his audience. To function as a storyteller, Guido needs to know that his audience is "Other" than himself. In short, Guido needs Momo who represents in herself the "Other": "When Momo was in the audience a floodgate seemed to open inside him, releasing a torrent of new ideas that bubbled forth without his ever having to think twice" (44). Once Guido accepts the importance of what the grey men term success, and once he loses contact with Momo, his inspiration dries up. Guido becomes famous, a celebrity, but his fame has a cost. Guido loses his enthusiasm for life and even for story. He finds himself constantly pressed for time, and he plunders his stories for ideas that will allow him to make other stories. His storytelling loses its life; as he says, "I've nothing left to dream about" (185). And yes, strangely, his audience does not appear to care. All that matters is the illusion of story, the simulacrum of story. People require occupation rather than vocation; they require familiarity rather than difference. At least this is what the grey men convince the people of Momo's city to believe.Momo, then, is a book about the destruction of "otherness," and the consequences of this destruction. Once the "Other" is controlled, even negated, then individual liberty is lost. The people in this story--Guido the storyteller, Beppo the roadsweeper, Nino the innkeeper, the children who once played with Momo--find their lives controlled by the grey-suited time thieves. The world becomes colorless once difference disappears. What gives the world its color is diversity. This is what makes Momo so important. She is diversity itself, or more bluntly "otherness." She appears at the old amphitheatre at the beginning of the book, a strange and ambiguous figure. Neither clearly male nor female (she turns out to be female, but at first she appears distinctly androgynous), neither child nor adult, neither old nor young. She dresses like a vagabond: "Her ankle-length dress was a mass of patches of different colours, and over it she wore a man's jacket, also far too big for her, with the sleeves turned up at the wrists" (13). She lives beyond the usual frame of reference: she has no family, she has no origins, she has no job, she has no responsibilities, she has no education, she has no possessions. And yet she is a powerful force in the lives of those who know her. Her power derives from her ability to[End Page 226]listen. By listening to others and by being different from others, Momo becomes a force in creating a community.From one perspective, what makes Momo different from others and what makes her a good listener is time. She takes the time to listen, and she does not require time to work and to horde possessions. Momo, as her name might suggest, lives for the moment. She has no desire to shore up defences against some future time; she has only the desire to be. She is one and individual, although she finds her pleasure in participating in a group. She needs her friends, her stories and her games. From the perspective of the grey men, Momo is immature, childish, and irresponsible. From a psycho-analytic perspective, Momo is the unconscious, that rag-tag collection of colorful bolts of cloth that unravels willy-nilly without our control. Momo is, then, a danger to the men in grey who function with deliberation and conscious control. They encourage Momo, as they encourage everyone, to enter a world governed by the laws of productivity and time-saving, a world subservient to the reality principle. In their world everything is geared to the same ends, ends specified by what we might call, after Althusser, the Ideological State Apparatus. This is a collective and social version of what psycho-analysis terms in the individual the superego.Momo and her friends enjoy their lives together; they experience pleasure in playing and talking and creating. The men in grey come to set aside pleasure; they nudge everyone beyond the pleasure principle. The fiction they perpetrate is that life runs better when everything is the same, when everyone accepts the same goals in life. Professor Hora, the mysterious figure at the center of the book who controls all time, articulates what it is that their fiction effects when he remarks that the grey men have brought a disease to the city and that this disease is "called deadly tedium" (215). This disease of tedium is difficult to avoid; either characters accept the hypnotic force of the grey men's rhetoric or they run away like Momo. Only when Momo ceases to run, when she "ceases to worry about herself" (198), and when she confronts the grey men can she effect any release for herself and others from the somnambulence the grey men have set upon the city.In defeating the men in grey, Momo accomplishes a victory for otherness. Ende does not explicitly offer a vision of the unity of "otherness" that bell hooks asks about, but implicitly the end of Momo confirms an affirmative answer to the question: can we have unity without destroying otherness? What we see at the end of this fantasy are children playing in the streets, drivers of cars patiently and happily waiting and[End Page 227]even joining the children in their games, people stopping on their way to places of work in order to admire flowers or feed birds, physicians caring for their patients, and labourers enjoying their labour. Most people do not know what has caused this change, but if they were to find out they would acknowledge a small waif-like person whose distinction is simply her difference from others, her own "otherness." What the book offers is a romantic vision of unity amid disunity, similitude within dissimilitude. Even Momo herself participates in this paradoxical "otherness" of the self: she is both a child and a metaphor. She participates in the life of the city--that is, she participates in human time, but she also represents something beyond time, something other than the conscious order. She is herself both conscious and unconscious, self and other. In this, she represents us all.Roderick McGillisis Professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author ofThe Nimble Reader: Literary TheoryandChildren's Literature and A Little Princess: Gender and Empire(both Twayne 1996).Notes1. I think here of the Brothers Grimm and their project to collect German folktales in order to preserve and to promote an idea of "Germanness." Of course we know that many of their stories are not specifically "German" in origin deriving as they do from Huguenot tellers and who knows where else. In the very idea of story as an expression of a nation's "self" lies the inevitable reality of the self's miscegenated origin. See, for example, Jack Zipes,The Brothers Grimm.2. "Innocence" is a word replete with a sense of the otherness of those we label "innocent." The innocent are those we take to be somehow both freer than ourselves and more limited in what they know and can do. We often locate innocence in childhood or simplicity and regard it nostalgically. It is that "Other" country from whence we came, but to which we cannot return. This is not, I hasten to add, the only way to conceptualize innocence (it is not Blake's way, for example), but it is a familiar conceptualization in our culture. The innocent are "Other," and our relationship to this other is ambivalent precisely because it is both attractive and beyond our complete ability to emulate.3. I use the word "mature" here because this is, I think, what Fairbridge wants us to think. However, my use of this word slides over what is perhaps an important question in the book: does Mark's decision to stay in South Africa reflect his mature acceptance of social responsibility or does it reflect a continuing colonial attitude on his part? Why does he not return home to Canada to take on the responsibilities of social amelioration there? So often we have in books for the young plots in which the white person is the one to fashion a better world for others. I think, for example, of Jerry Spinelli'sManiac Magee.Works CitedAlthusser, Louis.Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.Baudrillard, Jean.Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Ende, Michael.Momo. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Puffin, 1984.Fairbridge, Lynne.In Such a Place. Toronto: Doubleday, 1992.hooks, bell.Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.Kristeva, Julia.Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.Nodelman, Perry, "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children's Literature,"Children's Literature Association Quarterly17 (1992): 29-35.Rose, Jacqueline.The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.Zipes, Jack.The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.------.Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.

Self, Other, and Other Self: Recognizing the Other in Children's Literature | Un artculo sobre Momo1