Outside Over There--- 1: The Title

Before we start, a few facts---the book was published in 1981  Since this is a children's book, we should look at demographics---we can always look at that, but with children's literature is probably more compelling. Where the Wild Things Are had been published in 1963, a year that lands as a transition from the old Western civilization to the new one, the end of the Baby Boomer generation and the beginning of GenX, and whatever meaning or lack of meaning one may ascribe to that. Likewise the year 1981 has traditionally come to mark the transition from GenX to Millennials. We may make use of this later, but for now, with regard to what any of these labels may mean, if anything, let's just make a note of it. In any case it is interesting to me that Sendak's work span this era of history in a significant way.

Let's also note that 1981 is late in the Sendak timeline. Even looking at the cover, it is obvious that the years have granted Sendak a mastery of drawing he did not possess in his earlier works. One might call this the development of the "High Sendak" style, as opposed to say, the "Low Sendak" line sketches of Open House for Butterflies, published twenty years before.

The Low style leverages the roughness to create an invitation to a loose-edged world we can step into, the way the roughening of language invites us into a poem. By contrast the High style drawings of Outside Over There, especially of the human figures, are lush beyond anything one might have anticipated in Sendak's earlier work. It is more conscious of its own power to overwhelm our senses, and reminds one of the pre-Raphaelites in its attention to organic detail in form and color. Like those artists, It evokes a distinctly spiritual quality.

Then there is the title: Outside Over There. Three adverbs in a row. We can abbreviate it OOT. Looking at those initials on the page they seem wrong somehow, compared to, say, WTWTA or OHFB.  Even remembering the title this morning, I struggled remembering what the first 'O' meant. Using only these adverbs gives it an vagueness of being beyond a place. We want a story to be somewhere, whereas we have a no-placeness. Until I committed the name to memory in a way that stuck, I found myself fumbling with the title:  Somewhere...there. Or more practically What happened to Ida, as I called it. But let us not put ourselves in place of the author yet. Let us trust that Sendak knows what he is doing here. He has earned that at least.*

Outside of what, though? We will learn in the course of the text that the phrase refers to the dreamlike realm of the goblins.who steal babies and spirit them away into their realm, the girls being married to goblins as brides. 

But we can and should expect another layer of meaning to "outside" here. Perhaps we can make more of it, when we get into the story, much of which takes place in the "real world" outside the goblin realm. 

*this is nothwithstanding the schools of literary theory in which one considers the intentions of the author to be of no value in one's own evaluation of the work.