Exploring imagination and socialization within "I am Otter"

Part IV - Review of Sam Garton's I am Otter by Béatrice Dumiche

Moving from the exploration of Otter's imagination and growth, we begin to look at imagination and how that leads to socialization. 

By the way author Sam Garton adapts the tradition of myths and tales which were integrating children into the adult community, he brings about the key-role of imagination for socialization. He shows that only imagination lets Otter realize her physical evolution and figure out the continuity of her being. This enables her to relate to others through empathy and compassion despite apparently objective differences.

Through the relationship between Otter and Keeper, Garton illustrates concretely how the experience of being linked with others helps build self-knowledge and identity as well as self-confidence because it contributes to broaden the vision and the appreciation regarding the frustrating awareness of our own subjectivity. He demonstrates that imagination, when it is nourished and supported by others, is the opportunity to invent oneself; he proves practically that imagination is a way to find friends as nobody should be alone. For that reason, Keeper has Otter as a fictitious, yet vital companion and Otter has Teddy, whom she gives some personality through her fantasy, and their interactions create a multi-layered fantastic reality which helps provide a different look at everyday life. The author stresses that we all need fiction existentially because building up an original identity supposes the ability to appropriate other’s experiences according to what appeals to us and allows us to integrate them to evoke new associations which give a surprising, if not improbable, humoristic sense.

Fictitious existence, as it is incarnated by Otter, represents the freedom to relate to others’ fantasy in order to realize the most of what you are and which will always be more than you can be physically. It opens an endless opportunity for experiences. That’s why, in his book, Sam Garton stimulates his readers’ imagination, inviting them to interpret the story as they wish, incorporating their own truth.
The power of imagination reveals the link between all living beings who have realized that playfulness makes no sense if it remains only self-related, as it is destined to awake a communicative joy which is based on the intuitive belief in an understanding of otherness. It is the empirical proof that individual life cannot exist and persist without a symbolical link with others which will help structure its future evolution. Thus, it is the motor of creativity which lets the mind create alternatives and ways to experience them. So, it causes a feeling of tolerance which lets in an awareness of nature’s necessity to diversify for the continual development of life. Playing helps imagine changes without denying reality, it relativizes it as a transitional stage which can be modified by invention to better fit one’s personal development.

Sam Garton demonstrates that being creative is an innate faculty which needs to be trained from the very beginning of individual consciousness because it enables one to conceive otherness and cope with the difference, no matter how surprising it might be.  Otter’s arrival at Keeper’s home answers their reciprocal longing for an achievement which will make them both feel happier and more accomplished. Thus, their meeting unveils symbolically the challenge of creativity for the author himself, when Otter ‒ the creature he has imagined ‒ becomes an autonomous character who will play a role in a scenario which will feature from the beginning how she develops, confronted with Keeper, his own fictive alter ego. So, the realization of the book which actualizes his own imagination transforms him as it gets its own dynamic despite being a fiction. He has indeed to acknowledge that, as the protagonist of text he wrote for children, she however doesn’t respond to his desire to find a way back to an idealised childhood he misses. Otter’s troublesome personality lets him guess that his creative impulse had been motivated by regressive nostalgias which couldn’t fit her from the moment she became independent and began to challenge Keeper. So, the fiction itself forced the author to modify the relationship between his characters to save their credibility, showing that imagination can only exist in correlation with adaptation to differences which always always happens in any kind of being.

Considering Otter’s autonomous and already unshaped being from the empathetic point of view of the socialized adult, places Keeper automatically in the position of an educator who realizes how subjective his vision of childhood was compared to that which he actually lives with. Instead of passively identifying with the fictitious creature the author has created, he faces a living character that reminds him of the anxieties and the troubles he had forgotten, surmounting them while growing up. In the story, Keeper must find real solutions as an adult who must cope with problems generated by Otter’s hyperactive, infantile imagination which challenges his own imagination as it must react adequately, relating his experience with an unconscious past in order to help Otter evolve. This leads him to the realization that he can get back to childhood only symbolically through an activity which stabilizes her fantasy without hindering its evolution. Staying in a playful dialogue with her thanks to her own drawings gives him an insight into what she feels and with the illustrations which show her behaviour, he orients her towards a more realistic appreciation of herself. Sam Garton emphasizes here that growth is a never ending process of reciprocal symbolic exchanges where imagination plays a decisive role as long as it helps surmount differences by empathy. It is not a linear progress, it is the actualization of an emotional interaction which Garton features in I am Otter where he replaces the unilateral concept of teaching by that of adaptation which supposes reciprocity, yet not equality since it relies on experience which helps strike the balance between imagination and its best application at the moment.

Thus, beyond the story he tells his young public - through the unlikely relationship between Otter and Keeper - the author additionally features how he transformed himself while inventing her. Like in the book, she let Garton transform his interests from the narrowness of a “nine-to-five job” to his own personal artistic achievement despite the sleepless nights this meant for him. This personal implication - makes Otter lively and appealing as if she were real - gives her a credibility even for adults. She unconsciously interjects them into her fictive environment, bringing them into her playful adventures.  She lets them follow their creative experience in their own way; reactivating their imagination, which had been forced out by everyday life. Otter’s inventive vitality pesters adult readers to let go as doing so would make them feel much happier. From this, Garton adds a new dimension to his story which creates a beautiful metaphor for the profound mental transformation the birth of a child generates. He represents it as a universal experience which makes the mystery of life symbolically understandable to anyone who is able to develop an empathetic imagination, and therefore, to find its own original expression which provides the infinite imagery of collective Unconscious and its feminine grounding. The author’s great talent reveals in his specific understanding of the well-known female characteristics of fantasy since he goes beyond the idea that artists can feel what it means to give birth through their creations. He stresses that this consciousness is accessible to anyone who is curious enough to explore life and to link its experience with the reactions it provokes in his imagination which reaches deeper into pre-existing affinities. Thus, contrary to some contemporary children’s books, I am Otter doesn’t take part in the debate about the social definition of gender; it demonstrates the power of fantasy which is able to create mental correspondences that are strong enough to transform the conception of life by its own inner means. Undertaking to change men’s psychology by letting them experience that they can give their proper expression to the feminine determination which is at the unconscious beginning of their lives signifies however working according to the sense of evolution to restore its creative dynamism independently from any social improvement. This is a necessity for the human species, which needs to readjust the balance between imagination and the way to live it out through appropriate symbols at any stage of consciousness.  

That’s why Sam Garton’s empathy with his public consisting of children and adults reflects in his dual language the interactions between text and images through which he expresses discretely the transgression of gender as the proper characteristic of fantasy which at this moment of children’s development has no erotic connotation: the written discourse which is associated with masculine symbolic order is reporting Otter’s subjective opinion whilst the illustrations, which are related with the rather feminine power of imagination, help getting a more objective insight of what was actually going on. Their reciprocal humorous interferences regenerate the primitive pleasure of playing as the possibility to enjoy life through seemingly endless transformations. Hence, the author represents fantasy as the vital need to animate what you feel attracted to in order to get into a dialogue with it which will unveil the energy of an unknown part of yourself. He features it as a form of constructive love which enables one to guess affinities while enlarging one’s own emotional experience where the adult he had become reconnects with the representation of his childhood and recognizes that his life is a permanent dialogue with an idealized feeling of difference. This way, Garton underlines that childhood is far from being the idyllic era of mere innocence; it is remembered in sentimental memories. Thus, finding one’s way back to childhood is the contrary of encouraging nostalgia; it is the pleasure to create a fictional world inside reality as its critical humorous replica to question its conventionally admitted superiority. Playfulness becomes a most innocent argument to favor what is good for his evolution, which will eventually change social relationships. It does indeed suggest to question the prevalence of so called realism just because we are used to it and show that it leads to ridiculous distortions generally attributed to fantasy.

To be continued next week....