In writing about this book and letting my mind wander where it wants to go, I find myself hitting upon thoughts that all of a sudden give me a certain clarity regarding my own responses.
For example, the "quantum story" thoughts I had, themselves based on seeing different levels of interpretation of the events---at once it hit me that partly this arises from a very particular postmodern way of looking at stories. Here I mean movie adaptations. My mind was automatically transferring the story into a script for the cinema. For example, the "radical" concept that the story is an imaginative exercise of a little girl playing with a doll. Where did that come from? It is, I believe, precisely what a Hollywood writer might produce if tasked with turning Sendak's book into a screenplay. They would not tell the story straight and linear. They would do something exactly as I mention, giving it a contextual premise. Audiences would probably hate it, but they would do it anyway, because they have to do it that way [1]. In that sense it is incorrect to call most of my thoughts "interpretations" of the story but rather "story premises".
In many contemporary movies, we learn that part of the story is actually being imagined in the mind of a character in a larger story. This reached its apex with a spate of notable films in the year 1999, coincidentally the last great year of Hollywood cinema in my opinion. The archetypal example example of which is The Matrix, which explicitly explored this as high concept in a landmark fashion.
From this awareness, I step back and ask myself: why does my mind function as a postmodern story machine? For one thing, I think almost everyone's mind now functions like that to some degree. We have a meta-awarenesses of narratives, in our own life and in pop culture, in a way that would have been incomprehensible to earlier generations. We've been trained to do this by television primarily, and by the trends of cinema (which followed television), for decades. This is a subject that greatly fascinates me, how people are now aware of being "characters" in a narrative. The idea that civilization now functions as a giant theater production in which all of us are cast members, sometimes onstage and offstage, is an old one. Shakespeare explicitly invoked this, at the dawn of modernity. Yet in postmodernity now it seems part of our mindset to be consciously aware of this (subject of another post).
Sendak, writing in the 1980s, seems to me to a children's author who lives explicitly in Postmodernity and can write stories that appeal to the postmodern imagination, which expects interesting nonlinearities in the narrative structure, or at least the possibility that such things are lurking in every aspect of the story. Nothing must be quite as it appears, or at least we are led to believe that by his style. We want to find out that that were misled, with a deeper understanding revealed as we go along. The surprise is finding out that maybe we were not misled all along. We only thought we were. Perhaps children have always been able to do this with agility. It is just we adults who have finally caught up, due to technology which puts us into dreamlike awareness of story on a level unavailable to eras of the past.
Sendak is a master because he plays with us, and allows us to play with him on this level of story, with in the words and in the drawings. In Outside Over There, almost on every page one finds something dreamlike that makes us want to seek something more than is actually there (like Mozart). What does this mean? There is no guarantee it means anything more than what it is, yet our minds may race towards wanting to embrace it within our understanding of the story. There is no guarantee our inquiries will be satisfied, which is the part where we adults are less able to adapt than children, who must accept the world as-is, with partial understanding (like the rules of Goblinland).
All of this is perhaps of fancy and intellectual way of appreciating the lush artistry of this book, which overwhelms our senses on every page. One's thoughts flit around and perhaps land on something, then one opens the book again and starts all over, noticing something one did not even bother to see before. Yet at each reading one feels an unbroken unity. How could it get any better than that?
[1] I am reminded here of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), directed by Tim Burton, which was a separate adaptation of the novel of the same name by Roald Dahl, not related to the more famous Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971). I remember watching Burton's film and being struck by its cloying necessity to introduce a backstory for the Wonka character. We see him as a child experiencing trauma, which is meant to "explain" his adult behavior. This was part of a general trend in that era to "deconstruct" every adult hero, to diminish them so we know what makes them tick, and how to resolve their angst.
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