the bunny question
I had no idea how much my powers of abstract thought and sustained attention had eroded over the past fourteen months until I tried to sit down and come up with words for this blog. Using the spare moments when the boy is sleeping and I'm not doing something else that had to wait until then, I've managed to put six or seven posts on the burners, but so far none is longer than a paragraph or two in actual human prose. During the adult portion of the day, after he's bathed and asleep for the night, and dinner is made and eaten and cleaned up, the last thing I want to do is sit down with the laptop again and think hard about babies and fatherdom.
Somehow in this state (albeit with help from babysitters), I managed to finish a master's thesis and pick up the odd freelance gig, but man, this self-directed, finish line-free business is difficult. I'm figuring out new ways to send my clear-headed writing self notes whenever thoughts or sentences arise throughout the day, to maybe get some of these things done by accretion.
The concise versions of children's favorites, however, just keep coming. Which reminds me of a question that has plagued me many a night as I flipped cardboard pages: why are bunnies so often the proxies for children and parents in children's literature? Why bunnies and not mice, or dogs, or kangaroos? Is this all a hangover from the world Beatrix Potter created, the kids' literature equivalent of so much fantasy literature using the categories and creatures Tolkien created? I'll solve this during the next few naptimes and let you know.
Somehow in this state (albeit with help from babysitters), I managed to finish a master's thesis and pick up the odd freelance gig, but man, this self-directed, finish line-free business is difficult. I'm figuring out new ways to send my clear-headed writing self notes whenever thoughts or sentences arise throughout the day, to maybe get some of these things done by accretion.
The concise versions of children's favorites, however, just keep coming. Which reminds me of a question that has plagued me many a night as I flipped cardboard pages: why are bunnies so often the proxies for children and parents in children's literature? Why bunnies and not mice, or dogs, or kangaroos? Is this all a hangover from the world Beatrix Potter created, the kids' literature equivalent of so much fantasy literature using the categories and creatures Tolkien created? I'll solve this during the next few naptimes and let you know.
OK, I've thought about the animal question a bit but first, Bunnies specifically: a particularly poignant scene in the movie "Wit" has Emma Thompson dying of cancer when her former professor stops by for a visit. She is on the way to visit her granddaughter and she has with her a copy of "Runaway Bunny." (Margaret Wise Brown--see, "Goodnight, Moon.") Anyway, the professor sits next to Emma Thompson on her hospital bed and reads her the story. She comments that it is an allegory of the soul and of God's constant but gentle pursuit of us. But I guess that doesn't explain "why bunnies?"
ReplyDeleteIn "Maus," Art Speigleman draws the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, the Poles as pigs, and the Americans as goofy, flop-eared dogs. I think this symbolism is fairly obvious.
I guess the larger question is, why is this so effective? Why are so many children's stories about animals (and not just bunnies)? Maybe it's because the simplified and symbolic story allows for intuitive understanding of larger and more complicated philosophical issues. Or maybe the underlying themes are too powerful for a direct approach. I've heard that in Navajo folklore the Devil is portrayed as Coyote, who is a trixster and a lout, but not explicitly evil. This is not to say the Devil is a bit of a joke, but since the stories are for children, they dilute his true nature.
And then there's the Doodlebops (www.doodlebops.com).
The Doodlebops, my god--what have you unleashed in my home, sir?
ReplyDelete"Runaway Bunny" bothers me too, but I think anything will start to get weird after 300 reads. I'll have to think about that Wit explanation but it seems a little too generous. Do you happen to know what order those books came in? Because there's a visual reference to Runaway Bunny in Goodnight Moon that has always seemed like a Hitchcock cameo or bit of postmodern self-referential cleverness to me.