Outside Over There -- 4: The Story as a Quantum System

In writing about Sendak's work Outside Over There, or any of his works for that matter, I make no claims regarding whether my interpretations are anything that could considered "correct".  I don't think about it that way. I learned from a brilliant Yale professor that such questions about literature are mostly beside the point. It's easy to say that, of course, and it was pleasing to have receive an education about why that is so, that makes sense to the rational mind.

Mostly I just play around with interpretations. Sometimes there are rather creative and spontaneously, as if fragments of Sendak-inspired poems are coming to my mind. These I might turn over in my mind and refine them with a logical structure that makes them into something like academic writings. 

I like to think of all the ways Outside Over There might be taken, even its raw story elements. Last night it occurred to me that one could "think" of the story in an even more radical fashion, which is that there is not only no mama and papa, at least as portrayed in the plates, but there is likewise no baby.  It is the story of girl playing with a doll. In that sense, the changeling is closer to "story reality" than anything else. 

The point is not at all that is "the" correct way to see it. It would feel unsatisfying to assert such a thing. Rather the point is that the story functions on all of these levels at once, and that is arguably what makes it so potent and satisfying as a work of art.  As adults we can see these levels, and one can say that breaks the symmetry of childhood awareness about the story. Personally I don't have any problem reverting to the literal as-is childlike interpretation of the story, the way a child would hear it as a bedtime story. If you can't do that, then you are in trouble. It's really the only interpretation that is "mandatory." My mind uses that as a baseline, like the "ground state" in a quantum mechanical system, and the other interpretations are higher harmonics, "excited states", as we would say, into which my mind might leap. Moreover, like a real quantum system, my mind can see the story in both levels simultaneously, in analogy to a quantum wave function overlap.

The use of modern physics jargon to explain this is a product of our times but hardly new. The simultaneous interpretation of the Bible on both a literal and an allegorical level, as well as other levels, is a part of the western tradition going back thousands of years. The Church fathers taught explicitly there are four ways to interpret scripture, and this part of the official catechism of the Catholic church today.  As in a quantum system, all four may be valid at once, but--in analogy the quantum wave function collapse that occurs during a measurement---our human minds tend to grasp only one at a time, and two people who are in different "states" may argue over the interpretation. Our conscious minds are quantum measuring devices for a "story state vector," a physicist might say.

More recently in the Twentieth Century (right around the time quantum physics was emerging), we have literature and films that bring out this multi-layered interpretations explicitly. Even something as simple as the "unreliable narrator" brings this to mind, and invites us to ask "what's really going on?", followed by "am I allowed to ask that question?"

We might say we're not used to seeing that kind of thing in a children's story, which is true perhaps, until one considers the possibility that all good children's story like in some kind of quantum state of overlap of interpretations, and that this is accessible even to children, even if they cannot vocalize it they way I am doing here.