Educating by love - detailing a way back to natural creativity

Part VI: Review of Sam Garton's I am Otter by Béatrice Dumiche

We left off in early December discussing how Otter & Keeper educate each other through humor - let's pick up here detailing how education through love can get us back to a natural creativity. 

Special note - black & white drawing herein of Mij © Gavin Maxwell & courtesy of The Ring of Bright Water

So, I am Otter represents the initial story of a series which aims to gather a community of readers who enjoy playfulness because they find back on their own - however unconsciously guided by Otter like Keeper - to what made the success of human evolution and to become inventive again.  For that reason, it questions a traditional education which relies on idealized models of adults to conserve social values as if they were natural and therefore eternal.  It teaches conformism as a way to materialistic achievement which would be the only valuable form of personal recognition. More precisely, it takes position against the heritage of nineteenth century’s positivism which related behavior to moral patterns in which to submit if one wants to play a significant role in society.  The highly improbable couple of Otter and Keeper can appear as a grotesque provocation to this crude realism which extends its censorship to imagination: Keeper’s symbolic femininity along with Otter’s innocent vitality are indeed a provocation for all who consider life according to pre-determined categories while negating life’s natural evolution by exchange and adaption. The synergy between

Otter and Keeper demonstrates that the oddness is not there where it is normally supposed to be because their undeniable reciprocal love lets the readers guess that the quest for perfection is properly absurd.  It means running after an abstraction while losing the consciousness of the natural faculties which effectively guaranteed the survival of humanity and which Otter is there to remember and promote in a contemporary adequate form by revealing to children the power of their own fantasy to transform adults and let them travel back to a more adapted way of living making them actually happy rather than projecting their hopes of personal achievement on their offspring.

Sam Garton’s choice of an otter who bears a generic name is nothing but just a fancy: she is the emblematic representative of a species which perfectly matches his educational purpose and is already associated with a narrative tradition where an otter and its keeper became famous book-characters much loved by the public.  So, Garton, in his interviews, refers to Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water which tells the story of Mijbil - probably the first otter ever kept as a pet in urban surroundings – tells how he borrows major traits from him to feature Otter. More generally, her encounter with Keeper is inspired from the Maxwell’s humorous account of his life with his unpredictable playful animal whose mischievous and exclusive being transformed his existence deeply. There is some resemblance between Mijbil’s revengeful attacks on the contents of Maxwell’s home when he left the otter alone and Otter’s mess while Keeper is away: Gavin Maxwell’s and Sam Garton’s book both show that living with an otter is a fight to keep one’s own space and not let the otter totally overwhelm by its exuberant energy. Garton’s originality is that he had transposed this realistic, yet already literary exploited, element in his own narration to give it some inner consistence and credibility. Otter appears not his subjective invention as if she would come out of nowhere, there are former references even for her as a drawn character since Gavin Maxwell himself studied Mijbil’s movements in sketches which revealed the remarkable flexibly of his otter body. Hence, Sam Garton’s reference to The Ring of Bright Water is actually the quest for a caution to legitimate his own Otter book as a fictional story founded on real characters, giving it both: existential density and veracity.

Otter’s evolutionary ability to change forms and adapt physically wouldn’t have been possible without Gavin Maxwell’s inspirational drawings which have a symbolic meaning linking natural capacities and psychological needs.  The animal’s flexibility becomes the symbol of Otter’s function as a transitional object which is no longer only associated with childhood and the special role it plays for acquiring personal autonomy at this stage of evolution. The fact that she is the companion of an adult, who, like Gavin Maxwell himself, is not an average man, underlines the specificity of the challenge. Keeper is a pioneer, as was Maxwell, because like him who explored the behavior of his pet otter and advocated for his species through its personalization, Keeper tries to understand the mystery of Otter’s vitality: their humoristic face-to-face however is more the look at a mirror as his passivity, his exhaustion, let him recognize how distant he has become from a creature who incarnates the success of evolution throughout ages. Unlike him who has lost the contact with his childhood, Otter represents the only species where the individuals keep playing throughout a lifetime. So, her natural existence becomes Keeper’s personal challenge - it is up to him to reconnect to his childhood by reacting to her and learning to live again.

With Sam Garton, Gavin Maxwell’s narration of his unusual experience with an otter which hits the imagination of readers becomes a symbolic dimension on a philosophical and psychological background which elevates the children’s book to the rank of an artwork: the simplicity of its language is just that of life which hides an unconscious complexity since evolution is instinctive and based on playfulness to sort out the fittest adaption for the survival of the species. Keeper’s encounter with Otter features a contemporary man meeting his imaginary, yet symbolically matching, origin where animal and man are intricately linked through the same evolutionary process despite their divergent development. This allows the author a cultural criticism of an unnatural way of living and the irrational behaviour it generates opposing a hyper-standardized social existence and most irrational individual quests for nature which create stress and frustration because the contradiction between both seems to have become insurmountable.

Otter lets Keeper’s crisis become evident while at the same time, she figures a way to distract him, as entering into a dialogue with her, means he already has transformed his relationship with childhood and has integrated it symbolically into his actions; freeing himself from the nostalgias which paralyzed him and hindered his evolution. She leads him and the readers of the book to change their minds about the meaning of childhood from the evolutional point of view. On the contrary, it appears their symbolic link with its primary energy which needs to be favored all the time for individual well-being and the development of a tolerant, yet coherent sociability. Thus, comforting and developing the structural power of childhood by encouraging, from the initial stages, creativity and autonomy in order to preserve lifelong adaptability becomes the state of modern children’s literature and not its adjustment to adult standards. Hence, children’s books play a fundamental role for literature as they set the relationship between reality and fiction training the public to recognize and interpret symbols according to their own vital needs and to put them in a larger perspective, often thanks to and encouraging humor. Sam Garton underlines that reading must be taught for the sake of human evolution to resolve the discrepancy between their aspirations and their materialistic culture which has inhibited their ability to relate to themselves and each other, crippling their fantasy and imagination along the way.