The old phrase has it that the only difference between a fairy tale and a war story is that one begins, “Once upon a time,” and the other starts, “This is no shit.”
Repression exists to allow social interaction through the maintenance of an acceptable self-image. In the fairy tale, this repression is lifted, and the individual is given a satisfying journey through a world unfettered by reason. The individual enjoys the fairy tale, on two levels. Consciously, he appreciates the whimsy and the release of an imaginary world. The unconscious—and this is, I think, the true font of the conscious sense of satisfaction—freed from the task of “making sense,” perceives and revels in the discovery of a deeper, a necessarily repressed meaning.
These two levels are analogous to Freud’s manifest and latent dream: the dream itself (the manifest dream) is elusive, suggestive, perhaps provocative, enjoyable, disturbing. Its experience affords a real discharge of psychic material not accessible to the conscious mind. But this manifest dream is itself encoded. The contents of the manifest dream can be analyzed, restructured, interpreted to reveal the original, repressed, disturbing, perhaps terrifying thought, the latent dream.
“Goldilocks” may be considered as a pleasant, idyllic, childish romp. One can enjoy the naiveté of the simple, dear problem of the forest folk. But the fable persists and is enjoyable and repeatable not because of its whimsy, but because it exercises the hidden wish to murder. “Goldilocks” is about the latent wish to kill the new baby.
Mother, dad, and infant are one, and happy. Their happiness (the scent of their porridge) attracts an outsider (so much an alien that she is even of another species). She destroys the simple perfection of the home. The family wonders for a spell what has caused the furor, and follows the clues to the source of the problem. NB: The problem lies in bed and, in fact, in the bed of the previous champion and household idol, the baby.
Note that it is Baby Bear himself who discovers the solution that seems to elude his parents: “If you want to find the trouble, look in my bed.” On his discovery, the enemy is banished (in fact, we are told, “And she never came back in the forest again”). Psychologically, she has been killed.
Following Freud, one might suggest that the latent dream itself masks a more primal, infantile experience—at which one might arrive through a further restructuring:
a) A little girl comes into the home of the three bears and disrupts their house.
b) An enticing aroma draws the new baby into a home which, prior to her arrival, was running perfectly. She wreaks havoc until the older sibling calls attention to her unfortunate presence, at which point the grown-ups have her killed.
c) We may come to the primordial, infantile experience by examining those elements which draw attention to themselves in b) (the porridge, the bed); and those which, in despite of the highly charged atmosphere of the dream, continue unremarked. The child points out that the the solution lies in the ruined bed, and that the problem was engendered by exposing to the open air the magnificent, aromatic treat, or: everything was fine in the bed until the promiscuous flaunting of the vagina-which reveals the importance of the previously unremarked players in the tale, Mama and Papa.
Goldilocks is active, Baby Bear is active, but Mama and Papa are mere ciphers, existing only to complain. How is it that they are blind to the problem? Because they are the problem.
So restructuring of the latent dream reveals: things were fine in bed until Mama wearied of her affection for me and enticed Papa back to her bed. I wish that both of them were killed.
The wish to murder the father is destructive enough, but the wish to murder the mother—the height of the unreason, for the mother provides the infant with nourishment/life—must be trebly enciphered. And the wish to murder the new baby, in the repressed infantile material, stands for the wish to murder the mother (the wish is abstracted and clothed thus: I want to kill not you, who have made such a ruinous choice, but the new object of your affection, begotten by your original betrayal of me, your supplanting of me in the bed by a sexual object).
Inherent in this analysis is, of course, the recognition (conscious or more probably unconscious) on the part of the dreamer-reader-protagonist (the consumer-protagonist of the fairy tale) that the parents are having sex, and that sex brings about the new baby. (Most probably the two disasters are linked, not causally but associatively, that is, as two consonant and disastrous betrayals.)
The fairy tale is a creation of the unconscious; that is to say, it is art-the creation, whether of the individual, or of the consortium, community, or race, of a formally beautiful expression of the human spirit. That it exists to be told to children does not diminish but increases its merit, for it allows children to experience and relive the disturbing, while endorsed in so doing by adults—that is, in safety.
Children’s literature takes the naturally occurring tone or genre of the fairy tale (whimsy, fantasy) and adopts it. This literature naturally operates under the convenient flag of harmlessness, accessibility, childishness, in effect. That which in the fairy tale was mere “tonal” choice (whimsy) becomes in children’s literature something close to totality. But the suggestiveness of the form is so strong, the unconscious associations are so strong, that even the most proclaimedly and aggressively innocuous of children’s literature contains (rather clumsily) hidden, upsetting, sexual material.
This material, in the fairy tale, tends to be complete—that is, the expression of a powerful, cohesive (if terrible) chain of thought. The repressed sexuality of the innocuous children’s story or poem, on the other hand, tends to be more of a confession: “I am having difficulty with my penis. It has been suggested to me that I would be happier without it. I will cut it off.” This is a fairly straightforward interpretation of Edward Lear’s “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” His illustrations show an enflamed, throbbing, unsightly member; the text informs us that its removal makes the writer-protagonist happier; and all, reader and writer, smile happily along. There is no further primordial, infantile (which is to say rational, i.e. capable of being expressed as a coherent if terrible) wish. Lear stops with the unresolved wish that his self-emasculation might bring peace.
(The only suggestion of an alternative, less destructive solution lies in Lear’s choice of toes as the body part to be removed. For one might, of course, live without toes. But in the grand scheme of things, reflection or observation must reveal that, though easily excised, they must, each, have a purpose.)
So the poem may be viewed as a strangulated, childish, pitiful, necessarily hypocritical confession: I have been wrong, my elders have been right, I will now “grow up.” The child’s poem, although possessing the provenance of the fairy tale, has itself been pressed into the service of the repressive mechanism.
Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham, similarly, co-opts the superficial innocuousness of fairy-tale fancy. Here the author unconsciously confesses the desire to perform or receive fellatio.
The one animal nags the other to try Green Eggs and Ham. The courted states that under no circumstances will he/she attempt it. He/she is offered various inducements, and every time demurs. The courted is then pleaded with to try it just once, does so, and is converted.
Green Eggs and Ham are pictured thus: two sunny-side-up eggs separated by an upthrust fork. The unconscious mind, inspired by the election of fairy-tale form, employs it to confess—but the production itself (the children’s literature), while enjoyable for its doggerel and whimsy, operates on no level deeper than the mechanical: the creator refers to the fairy-tale form to frame a work specifically to appeal to an adult estimation of the needs of or desires of the child.
The true fairy tale, however, was not created by an adult for a child—it evolved through the interaction of the child and the adult. In telling the fairy tale, the adult allows himself (or herself) to suspend the rational and enter into a creative trance both with the listener and with the child’s memory he or she still bears—complete with the repression of that period and the traumas which it continues to mask.
Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, similarly, is about masturbation. The child, Mickey, makes and pounds and shapes the flaccid dough until it becomes an airplane, conveying him up into a bottle of milk, from which bottle the milk is poured, allowing the bakers to bake a delightful cake, which delights everyone, and Mickey is a hero. There is no trauma, merely the licensed expression of delight in a socially proscribed activity.
In the children’s book the unconscious associates (or, perhaps better, remembers) the form of the fairy tale as a relaxation of the repressive mechanism, and the result is not catharsis but confession.
In the American war novel, similarly, a relaxation of the repressive mechanism prompts sexual confession.
The Thin Red Line (1962), James Jones’s novel of the Pacific war, has as its main players the soldiers Queen, Doll, and Fife. Fife is courted by his assistant Bead into incidents of mutual fellatio: “I just don’t want you to think I’m no queer, or nothing like that.”
“Well, don’t you get the idea that I am either,” Fife had answered.
Homosexual activity and its acceptability are dealt with explicitly here, and implicitly in the rather continuous hazing imposed on the company by Welsh, and on the company members by each other.
The question in the novel, the question which combat prompts the author to raise, is: Who is a man? “On the night before his outfit went into its first combat, he lay awake a long time, wondering whether he was a homosexual.”
The repressive mechanism is weakened here, not by the invocation of childhood, but by the proximity of death. One fear, “Am I sexually deviant,” is loosed by, and in fact stands to obscure, the greater terror.
In Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), similarly, scenes of combat are bracketed by the rather thinly vetoed sexual teasing of Cummings, the company’s commanding officer, on the part of Hearn, the raisonneur.
And James Salter’s The Hunters (1956), a novel of the air war in Korea, is built around aggression, not toward the North Koreans, but by the novel’s hero, Cleve Connell, against another American flyer, Ed “Doctor” Pell. The mainspring of the book is Connell’s unbeatable envy of and loathing for Pell, and Pell’s greater list of “kills.” The virulence of Connell’s feeling prompts one to conflate (as in In the Night Kitchen) success “in the air” with success “in bed,” and to understand the book as sexual confession.
And see young Prince Andrei on the eve of his first battle in War and Peace (1869).
One infers that the exposure to combat is so terrifying that even though it appears to be confronted directly (in the combat novel), its true terror is so destructive (or is deemed by the unconscious to be so destructive) that it must be masked by a manifest dream: “It is not that I was terrified to the point of dissolution by the idea that men I could not see were constantly trying to kill me—no. But I was somewhat nonplussed by being in an all-male environment; and the necessity of re-evaluating my own status caused me to (consciously or unconsciously) entertain questions as to my sexuality.”
Why sexuality? Because the most latent, infant consciousness associates sexuality with survival. (See “Goldilocks.”)
David Mamet is a playwright, director, novelist, and screenwriter. His scripts include Glengarry Glen Ross and Wag the Dog.
