I AM OTTER, by Sam Garton - A Children’s Book, Not only for Children or Otter Lovers

Part I of a in-depth exploration of Sam Garton's I Am Otter story
by Béatrice Dumiche

Otter and the troublesome appeal of idealized childhood

Otter and Keeper, a humoristic couple

I am Otter is far more than a children’s book although it will enchant them, transforming their environment, which they’ll discover from a very new point of view, thanks to an amazing fictional character - Otter - who will reveal a mischievous and clever companion to them. Otter indeed gathers the appealing features of a stuffed animal and a blanket – being total fluffiness without any angularity ‒ and the unpredictable spontaneity of a child’s mind. Like it tries by its games to find its own place in the strange world of adults, whilst they are dedicating to their serious business, Otter attempts to get herself an occupation when (her) Keeper is at work. Introducing this grown-up protagonist who reacts to her fancies, Sam Garton gives his story a twist which makes its originality.  With much humor, he shows, thanks to her and her two major toy-friends, how relative and questionable the compelling rules of adults’ life appear in retrospect from childhood which meant the freedom of just experiencing and improving one’s own faculties to grow up. However, there is no nostalgia in his story which only represents what our pretended common sense and our mental restrictions are likely to become from the moment we adopt another innocent perspective on them: it questions the rigidity of our mind when it gets used to a regular way of life which is mostly determined by the alternation of work -and holidays and doesn’t let much personal independence to even figure out an existence which wouldn’t fit this frame.

Otter’s uneducated, instinctive being shows what happens when you listen to your inner child and remember what a pleasure it is to do things only for fun instead of spending all the time at work to earn your living. So, when she decides to open a toast restaurant to imitate Keeper and have a business to be occupied during his work hours, Sam Garton uses her grotesquely failing experience to build up an alternative humoristic world where you can apparently take fun seriously whilst becoming aware of how ridiculously absurd it might be to follow the standards of a society. Otter reintroduces surprise in Keeper’s life. She troubles his well established, but dull order in life, without being aware of it since she just follows her instinctively playful being, she in fact sways away all his certitudes and expectations.

Thus, even her arrival to Keeper is a surprise:  she lands per chance someday out of nowhere at Keeper’s home in a little box and she is wondering what she is doing there, in these strange surroundings which are far too big for the tiny creature she is. She feels really intimidated by the personality of her human host who is so tall that she can see him in his full length only when he kneels down to her, when he is sitting at the table or lying in his bed. He himself is intrigued by her who is so different from him and whom he can’t get in touch with through his usual rationally understood language. Her arrival is a real personal challenge to him as she seems to have been sent to him by fate: although he doesn’t know why she had come to him, he instinctively guesses that she is there for him and whilst he accepts her at his home without any question, he is guided by his spontaneous attraction to her, postponing any reasonable judgement.

Teddy, the symbol of childhood

To help Otter become accustomed to Keeper himself and have something on her own in his world where she feels like a stranger, he gives her a teddy to be her playmate and also her advocate, or her scapegoat, in her relationship with Keeper. This gift, which stresses that kindness needs no words, seals the deep bond between Otter and Keeper; where it appears that she defines herself only related with him in an almost symbiotic union and considers that he should be exclusively devoted to her. This exclusivity will be at the origin of the trouble which she will bring them both into and which will give the first impulse to their adventures.

However, it would be too simple to reduce Teddy to what Winnicott calls a transitional object which for the child is a concrete substitute of its mother’s body to keep it safe, whilst she stays away, and help it accept its separation from mother. Teddy is indeed more than that: he is a real symbol as he is very significant for Keeper, being sort of a fetish; he lets Keeper get in touch again with unconscious and highly sought memories of his own childhood. Teddy expresses his own secret longings for someone to care for who would reward him for his love; then Otter appears in his life. Her childlike character reminds him not so much what it means to be a child, but how tiring it is to live with one. She might be fictional, however, she eventually leads him back to a more realistic appreciation of what his own childhood must have been and challenges him to integrate her untamed, overflowing vitality in his life and work.

With much thoughtfulness, I am Otter introduces a modern conception of parenthood based on psychology and common sense which corresponds a highly developed and differenced society. It gives an artistic answer to a message of tolerance; it demonstrates that imagination is a gift accessible to anyone; one who accepts for love’s sake to change one’s usual perspective. That’s why empathy and love become the significant and determining aspects of the relationship between Otter and Keeper, who don’t communicate verbally; Teddy becomes the symbol of their unlikely cohabitation which reveals how much feelings can be shown through unconscious projections and body language and therefore need to be adjusted by one’s experience.

Keeper becomes aware that childhood is reachable for him only through empathetic recalling which requires that he adapt his personal memories to Otter’s unusual and unpredictable being causes him to feel a bit helpless. Getting in touch with Otter requires an imaginative effort from Keeper, which is highlighted by the story’s artwork.  When Keeper introduces Teddy, he must kneel down and wave with him to attract her out from behind the armchair, and while he does this, he looks pretty humorous for those who aren’t involved in the story. Even for those who are indulging with the storyline, guess that Keeper’s willingness to adopt Otter’s perspective is a gesture of kindness, setting himself apart from other adults who wouldn’t have done the same. Teddy is his welcome gift and he will help express her feelings towards Keeper which she can’t express directly as he seems out of reach to her, like a god with whom she will never be able to establish immediate contact. Teddy reduces the distance between Otter and Keeper with Otter recognizing immediately the calming effect Teddy has upon her.

Teddy is Keeper’s representative - whom she can voice all the grievances she wants to utter against Keeper and his authority when he leaves her alone to go to work which also hurts her love of him and  her desire to be a grown-up like him. She is also unaware that, while she uses him to vent her frustrations, she already accepts him as a real companion with whom she can share all she couldn’t with Keeper because he is an adult and has no longer the same needs and personal interests. Yet, she only realizes that he is her loyal playmate when he gets lost; she misses him as a real friend whom she loves to stay with when Keeper is away because she can play with him and let her imagination go free without referring to him as an authority. He symbolizes Keeper’s alter ego when he was a child and who still would enjoy spending his time playing with her, whilst he himself has evolved and can only look back to it with sympathy and humor, which gives him the strength to be an adult without any regret. This appears clearly with the concert she gives for him where he looks rather bored and self-ironic whilst Teddy is sitting there quite impassibly as the partner who will be much more able to respond to her exuberant character which he is too old to immediately deal with. With Teddy, she can experience life by testing her skills and exploring her environment without any fear since he will be there to take over the responsibility for any mistake she makes and let her take the credit for any success and, moreover, unlike her, he won’t plan any revenge for anything she might accuse him of. Thus, since Teddy is Otter’s personal toy, but not a person like Keeper, he is able to tolerate her unconscious contradiction between her desire to be secure and simply enjoy the freedom to do whatever she wishes, whenever she wishes it.

So, her relationship with Teddy illustrates in a caricatured way what she projects, both positive and negative, on Keeper who is in the role of the annoying, yet highly praised and idealized parent, whose authority she can’t deny for that may cause her to lose his love and protection. By his mere presence, Teddy teaches Otter that there is the reality she lives, yet another reality in which Keeper lives, which overrules her reality despite his sympathy for her own reality of play and games.

 Teddy’s evolution from a toy to a soul-mate

Teddy helps Otter forge bonds. Although he might just be a toy she imagines she can manipulate as she wishes, he defies his own material resistance: he apparently has no will of his own with which to answer her high expectations, yet this flaw appears to be his strength because he allows her realize that she is not omnipotent, and that she needs a friend for reasons other than to just rule over him. She begins to understand that she has flaws, like when she regrets having reacted with so much anger against him as she never imagined he could have his own will and disappear. She becomes aware that she can’t do without him not because of his docility, but because of his apparent indifference, which forces her to assume the responsibility for the consequences on her relationship with him. So, she begins to develop empathy and to think like a person.

That’s the point when she learns that she determines her own impact on reality by the link she establishes between imagination and sympathy. At the edge of consciousness, she is able to make both levels meet, such that she finally finds him on her own, through an intuition that allows her associate her decision to dismiss him as the manager of her toast restaurant in their game and the rude way she treated him when she threw him, without caring, into the box with all the other toys. She realizes Teddy didn’t leave her because he was angry at her like she was at him, he got lost only because SHE considered him an insignificant thing instead of the symbolic friend he represents to her because he had been given to her by Keeper as his soul-mate. From the moment she admits him as a real friend because of her affectionate link with him, and no longer treats him like any other toy, she also accepts that Keeper leaves every day for work.  She has internalized his symbolic role and is happy with her own world, which she guesses is quite different from those adults live in. Her failure to incorporate that into her job experience also revealed to her that she was not only unprepared for it, but it also let her recognize the worth of friendship as independent and know that it is far more precious than an uncertain social success. So, finally, she stays on the windowsill with Teddy waving to Keeper, who sadly, reluctantly goes to work, bending his head forward as if still half asleep. Unlike him, she can enjoy her life by spending it with games that broaden her mind, becoming aware of herself and what she loves. They help her improve her skills whilst she develops creative answers to the psychological challenges they confront her with, according to her own evolution.

Teddy is the indispensable stimulator of her imagination in a multi-layered story which features mostly types defined by the function they were given in the plot. Neither he nor Keeper, nor even Otter herself, have been endowed with many individual traits.  Those are revealed only through the drawings, which make the personality traits more clear. The only difference with Otter is that they create constancy that is opposed to her changing imagination and spontaneity; there just to react to her and her fancies and to help her get mentally involved.  So, she is the only one of the trio who gains a more sophisticated personality which is unveiled through the story where she transforms into having a dialogue with herself where her “ramblings” are confronted with the substantiality of the illustrations. Sometimes, the account of what happened in Keeper’s absence or her interpretation of his reactions and his instructions actually match, yet only the readers get the whole insight of the situation, since they are “eye-witnesses” of the events she relates “innocently” from her subjective point of view which differs a lot from what the readers “objectively” see in the drawings. Her personal interpretation is therefore never disqualified, no matter how unbelievable it might be, it is simply realized to be Otter’s own perception which is changed by her total emotional implication in her story. Her version is questioned by the drawings, but she is never viewed as a “fibber” although it is obvious she takes advantage of embellishing her tale. In fact, her example lets those who are prone to judge her become aware that she has a naiveté and innocence – daring to speak freely as many readers would like to, yet don’t, because they fear being ridiculed.

Paradoxically – and this is the touch of humor which makes Otter’s selfishness so cute and appealing, for either an adult or a child – Otter appears to be the most sincere creature ever to have transgressed the social codes as well as the narrative logic and conventions. She incarnates the dream of an innocent being with no other reason to be than to generate fun by thinking outside the box and is then confronted to rules which appear meaningless to her as they do for any child growing up into the adult world and thereby, acquiring socialization, which often also means adaptation to rules for which they don’t necessarily agree. That’s also why she is without any doubt the main character: her fictional being meets child and adult perspectives, both projecting their secret desires and expectations on her. The child must recognize that innocence is not an excuse for being rude to others and the adult must acknowledge that he himself would like to sometimes break social rules, but understands the need to be empathetic and at times indulgent towards others. Otter will initiate a dialogue based on the sympathy she brings forth in both children and adults which leads to an interaction beyond the book itself. From the beginning – even before Sam Garton published his first book ‒ he created Otter as an interactive character who communicated with her readers by commenting on her “ramblings”. You can find these pre-book publications on the website: www.iamotter.co.uk where can even play with Otter. There is especially a hilarious game called Dress Otter where she will comment on choices that she finds silly and inadequate.

To be continued....