Creating a new children’s literature: Books and creativity

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

I am Otter is an example of books that allow one multiply experiences thanks to imagination and provide everyone with inspiration for his own situation in order to brighten it and let it evolve. As a children’s book, it plays a decisive role for this purpose as it contributes to creating first impressions which will influence the appreciation of future reading. Therefore, it is most important that books are perceived from the beginning as loyal and indispensable companions who help enjoy personal development as the best of one can do for himself. For that reason, despite all the stress he has with his job and with Otter, Keeper continues to read or, at least, tries to do so. Otter herself has an entire bookshelf filled within her own room. In fact, at a closer look, books are everywhere within Keeper’s home; they are vital to him because they help him take some distance from his own experiences by relating them with those of others in an inspirational dialogue which opens his mind to the diversity of life. They clearly appear the way to a more intense and conscious existence reconnecting adults with the primitive power of imagination like Keeper is linked with Otter.

With subtle humor, Sam Garton makes no difference between books and toys, underlining that both have a symbolic signification which exceeds their material consistence while they remain concrete objects which can be handled easily; they are like a joker could replace anything you need. They are practically useful and this usefulness hints to the mental function they favour since they educate imagination as the skill to interpret reality so that it becomes a support for personal invention. So, when Otter prepares the opening of the toast restaurant, she looks at a lot of books while she is sitting on a pile of them and when she takes her selfie with Teddy for its inauguration, she puts the camera on another pile - like building blocks - they help realize for which all you are dreaming. Yet, the funny detail when she reads one of the cookbooks upside-down, shows that you can do anything you want with books which are inspiring even if you use them in an unusual way.  There is no rule for how to use a book, so you just can’t go wrong taking one and let your fantasy just go.

This way, the author aims to create a familiarity with books as normal objects participating in normal life and to surmount the image of their intellectual prestige which let them appear inaccessible to common people. Letting Otter play with them, he suggests children they can appropriate them on their own while he encourages parents themselves to normalize their relationship with them. He hopes that his young readers will become the defenders of children’s books just because they love them and have special fun with them, because they haven’t been dissuaded by prejudices, and that they will be able through their positive experience with I am Otter to bring adults back to an autonomous appreciation of books which is no longer influenced by sociocultural filters, yet only by personal affinities.

That’s why the sequence when Keeper reads his newspaper underlines ironically its structural similarity with a children’s book hinting at the unconscious mental continuity in the way adults reflect on the world they live in whilst relativizing the seriousness of information. Both are composed of text and pictures. The only difference is the color since the paper is greyish like Keeper’s adult world is supposed to be in Otter’s mind because she can’t relate it to her own experience. Yet in fact, using grey instead of black like in real newspapers, Sam Garton also suggests the fictive character of that one Keeper reads: the difference between the children’s book and the paper seems actually to fade out as the pretended objectivity of its information appears rather illusory and even ridiculous. His illustration shows that its most standardized geometric frame, which suggests an organized and hierarchic thought, giving the superficial impression that there is a link between unrelated and weird news which is more unrealistic than the deliberate fiction of Otter’s adventures. Its headlines reflect a contradictory society where indifference coexists with eccentricity and where common interest and common sense got mostly lost because there is no balance between individual achievement and social responsibility for a better and freer life.

So, while with the first one “Important Thing Happens”, he criticizes the newspapers’ impersonal sensationalism creating dramatic events just for diversion, with the second “Climbing Trees Good for Health” he mocks their interest in marginal phenomena, they try to establish as trendsetters, as well as their support to the hysterical quest for healthy life and longevity which marks the intrusion of perfect irrationality into supposed objective information. This is underlined by its humorous allusion at Darwin remembering the primitive similarity between apes and humans which is turned into the contrary here because instead of the apes who came down form the trees to evolve men, these people get back to apes. Through this apparent detail, the author questions a medium which is taken seriously while celebrating an obvious regression to animalism as an innovation which could revolutionize our sophisticated contemporary society. He denounces the naivety of this kind of belief which proposes unrealistic, rather silly solutions based on the misunderstanding of science which becomes a pretext to justify the outburst of refrained unconscious desires to get back to nature instead of a real initiation to what evolution may look like at our cultural level.

That’s what Garton attempts to feature in his book by relying on the symbolic power of imagination which unites free minds attracted by sympathy who participate in its elaboration. He even goes so far as to suggest that newspapers, like they are at the moment, are no longer answering their public’s needs as they reveal incapable of creating communication, discussion and fructuous exchanges: their accumulation of pretend facts generates a feeling of distress towards the absurdity of a discontinuous and eventually meaningless life where instincts manifest in a risibly archaic form through which they have not the slightest chance to influence the future. However, when he insists on the structural similarity between the newspaper and the illustrated book– might it be dedicated to children or to adults – he initiates more than a humoristic inversion in favor of children’s literature. He demonstrates that texts and pictures must be related to a process of symbolization which gives them a representative signification so that they appeal to others and awake their personal interest as participants in a community which is affected in many of the same ways.

So, the newspaper has to evolve at the contact of the children’s book which reflects it and refocuses it on what really matters to everyone: to learn more about himself and others he feels related with to do the most of his life and enjoy it with all his senses. For that reason, the author introduces among the news private messages for those who know him a bit better and with whom he establishes a self-ironical complicity -“Sam and Becca married”. He plays with the desire of fame and recognition he aims at as a writer and illustrator while he relativizes it at the same time since it doesn’t objectively signify his professional success: the mention of the forenames makes it a significant information only for the people who are nearer to him and his wife and who in fact already got it. Thus, what he stresses, is his creative freedom as a book author which allows him not only to modify the content of the fictive newspaper and create through this trick a “fake reality”; it enables him to change its pretended objectivity according to what is important to him and to show that creativity is at least a personal achievement as it is a possibility to share what brightens his life with all those who love him and want him to be happy.

Sam Garton’s personal implication in his work contributes significantly to the renovation of children’s literature as it is based on a serious knowledge of the genre he transforms according to a great philosophical and psychological insight which however never affects anyway the pleasure of reading, so internalized it is in the creative process. His amazingly mastered art, which relies on the symbolical power of love as a mean to acquire an intimate knowledge of what is good individually for each one, restores indeed the fundamental energy of life which must only be recognized again to solicit valuable bonds between independent personalities knowing about their real limits, yet also about the strength of their empathic faculties. The dedication “To all who love Otter” sums it all up since you can’t understand her cheerful being and the author’s sensibility if you don’t love her. It is a clear statement in favor of non-conformism and an appeal to openly show it to let it get more space through education and by setting differences in everyday life, like Keeper with his colored clothes, to generate more tolerance thanks to a multitude of little gestures.

However, only art, he underlines children’s literature belongs to, gives creative people the opportunity to invert a social evolution which leads to an irrational regression of mankind who has fought their instincts for too long in the name of an illusory realism which let them become indifferent  and even lose their common sense. That’s why, as an author who writes for children, he attempts to restore, by awakening it from the beginning of self-consciousness, their capacity to be affected individually and to feel touched by what happens to others which adults are no longer able to, so often they had been manipulated in favour of selfish causes through the perversion of storytelling which solicits identification on the basis of artefacts just faking singular reality. With the renewal of humor as a means to keep some critical distance towards pre-shaped identities, he tries to help them believe again in the magic of books through those written for their children who haven’t been influenced by social prejudices yet. More precisely spoken, his radically personal approach, which is most courageous as it is actually innovative, invites parents to act non-conformistically too, following their own fantasy, and choose reads their children love and they can enjoy together. Opening himself with his own affection for Otter, he bets on the persuasive power of sincerity to resurrect the credibility of fiction and free the emotions of his readers who through his book learn to get back some confidence in them. In a very touching way which underlines the singularity of I am Otter and his author, he really creates a personal relationship with anyone who loves Otter which is not based on simple identification. One can’t imitate Otter because she is one of a kind. One must react to her and this way becomes a bit more himself thanks to her. That’s why we wish Otter (and Keeper and Sam) much luck for the books to come and that more and more people will get to know and love Otter.

Creating a New Children’s Literature - Understanding Evolution with "I am Otter"

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

With I am Otter, Sam Garton creates an interactive work which he uses to integrate the importance received by the visual media into an intellectual structure which had been since Gutenberg the symbol of rational progress allowing the diffusion of knowledge on a large scale. He most discretely advocates a literary revolution outgoing from children’s book which have been conceived initially on the complementarity of text and illustration, allying the two fundamental modes to transmit a cultural heritage. Stressing their functional differences, he reintroduces the associative power of imagination which needs to be adjusted by a living dialogue which confronts subjectivity with a critical otherness and leads to a better self-consciousness. Thus oral reading, which has survived in contemporary western societies thanks to children’s literature, gets a new psychological role based on ancient social tradition of popular tales which might be able to modernize the function of books and written culture as they are indispensable references for mankind who evolve by self-reflection from their own experience.  

The improbable encounter between Otter and Keeper he features is indeed a humorous illustration of a natural philosophy associating in a universal psychology as its cultural correlation which appears to be inspired by Darwin. The importance of this scientist and explorer for Sam Garton and the conception of his character has already been evoked through a wonderful “otterstory” where Otter and Teddy visit him – or better, try to climb his statue –  at London’s Museum of Natural History. For him, the remembrance of his evolutional theory is applicable to human creativity which is the only one able to reflect personal experience on its own and to interpret it through its symbolic representation. So, it generates the necessary freedom for a conscious adaptation based on tolerance as it can’t exist without a constructive dialogue which will also guarantee the actually threatened transmission of culture.

Childrens' books can rely on playing as life’s proper mode and are a privileged medium where to propose the mitigation between instinct, related with a mythic, immemorial past and an only imaginable future which must integrate this heritage to be efficient at transforming social relationships: thanks to this conception, they lead back to a living structure which has an active function as it perpetuates its autonomy through evolution. Children's books explain that literature and visual arts express symbolically life’s way to keep on developing and providing endlessly new arrangements by fusions and separations generating new shapes and forms humanity needs to evolve consciously through practical and intellectual challenges. They initiate to life as a whole, using its restless quest for perfection to help it surmount itself and stabilize temporarily in a symbolic form as a part of its evolution which is unfolding its own autonomy interacting with all that lives and exists at different levels of consciousness. So, they teach moderation and smartness which are indispensable for the active and constructive transmission of traditions for their own sake, not because of simple conservatism which becomes an obstacle to evolution, yet because it creates distance and self-distance which allow reflection and pondered action.

Thus, Sam Garton advocates a children’s literature which favors instinctive playfulness as the way how life keeps on passing from generation to generation while renewing via adaptation. It has a vital function in the context of our contemporary societies which have associated industrial productivity with morality and conformism and have deprived themselves of the benefits of creativity and invention which are based on transgression. Those have been inhibited indeed by a moral education which used threat to socialize instincts and relied on children’s books and tales eliciting primitive fears related with growth and autonomy. This has now led to a generation of adults who are nostalgic of and idealised childhood to escape the constraints of social standards which refrain individualism and therefore search for a reconciliation with their instinctive need of personal achievement. So, children’s books, which initiate an inter-generational dialogue, appear the most able to reconcile them with themselves while they change their offspring’s education from the beginning to prevent the regrets and the melancholy they associate with their own childhood.

Obviously, I am Otter has been conceived as the renewal and the reinterpretation of a traditional genre to make of it a universal read integrating children and adults in the same interactive structure with the author (who is at same time the writer and the illustrator) as the moderator providing moments of happiness which even legitimate transgression as it is useful for each individual who must have opportunities to test out his own limits and feel the thrill of being autonomous without fearing to be censored or morally judged: experiences even those which fail are constructive and only games can help acquire this wisdom as playfulness has been inherited from evolution which selects the best solution for the species. Moral education, which would censor even the thought of self-realization as opposite to common interest and let frustrations and reproaches unexpressed, would only teach a hypocrisy giving a completely unrealistic example of perfection trying to inhibit the survival instinct instead of giving it a self-critic humoristic outlet through art. That’s why I am Otter ends on her mischievously subversive behavior which ironically replaces the current moral happy ending of the genre by the triumph of survival instinct which can’t but lead to an open end relativizing the author’s efforts themselves. Otter rules eventually, showing her own creator his limits while remembering him that he better doesn’t take too seriously since writing for children is a humoristic task which is permanently questioned by the book characters themselves as well as by the readers in a reciprocal challenge their ability to interact and have fun together.

"I am Otter": Playing is Staying Alive

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

Keeper’s role appears to preserve Otter’s self-esteem by letting her guess that her role is not to identify with him under conditions which aren’t convenient for her.  She must learn to respect personal differences and not let her unconditional love turn into a fusional identification which will always disappoint her. Moreover, it would be a threat to the originality he loves her for and he wants her to appreciate in order to believe in herself and her own creativity and originality. So, in his mind, playing should not be restricted to childhood as it is essential for human health throughout life. Like Otter made him realize, everybody needs to readjust one's behavior through the experience of a disinterested relationship with others. That’s why he helps her understand at her turn now that it is a way to become conscious of her own limits to better know what is good for her and that her failure is not a shame. It is participating in an evolutional process which selects the best possible adaptation among various attempts and doesn’t consider perfection to be an achievement.  

Paradoxically indeed, playing teaches instinct to relate with reality and thus give up its deeper tendency to self-realization. So, it reveals to Otter that she can’t lie to herself as it only works if she is in harmony with her own abilities and doesn’t over-estimate them in her mind. It’s a self-regulator which doesn’t allow any cheating, especially because it has no objective stake on the contrary of what she thinks. She might accuse Teddy of her own mistakes, she can’t deny however that the incredible mess she made with her toast restaurant is only her fault since her invention didn’t lead to the expected result and let her lose any control regarding the situation, which she experiences as a terrible defeat, even as a betrayal by her most loyal companion, she definitively can’t admit. Her failure appears an insult to her self-esteem and her pride as it questions her positive identification with Keeper which gives a meaning to her life and motivates her carefree creativity which has never been sanctioned thanks to his loving understanding and because it never applied to actually existing social references.

She can’t but guess at this moment the objective difference between playing and working and that between being a responsible adult and living her own childlike existence. Yet, thanks to this experience, she will realize and appreciate the freedom it leaves her when she compares it with Keeper’s which is ruled by his alarm clock or the wrist watch she loathes. He helps her understand that he isn’t as omnipotent as she had imagined projecting on him her own fancy of almightiness she associates with being an adult and trying to test it in her relationship with Teddy. He shows her that she is still free and has this way the chance to learn how to do the best of herself by just attempting how far she can go on her own without fearing any real irreversible consequence. Instead of yelling at her, which would only let her feel more miserable than she already does, he points out to her that there are advantages not to have grown up yet and that she has a vision of his own power which doesn’t match his objective social situation. Eventually, she guesses that he is not that happy to leave her for work and that, unlike her, adults must submit to some obligations which separate them from those they love.

With most simple gestures, he enables her to recognize that being a grown-up doesn’t involve dwelling on an evident superiority or using it to harm others, yet that on the contrary, it means being conscious of it to moderate and adapt it according to each specific situation. Unlike what she did with Teddy, he is magnanimous and doesn’t blame or even judge her; he simply lets her deal with the consequences of what she did while supporting her practically because, what he wants her to notice, is that everyone is responsible for himself according to his stage of evolution: so he doesn’t leave her alone with the mess she did, yet she must do what she can to tidy up and clean the kitchen in order to hide all that was related to her unlucky game. Thus, thanks to his discernment, he transforms her guilt and her shame into a feeling of relief which reassures her as he gives her again some confidence in her ability to cope with tricky situations. He comforts her, showing her through the quickness with which they were able to put back everything in its place, that at this stage of growth, any activity is no more than playing and doesn’t lead to consequences which objectively impact life. The only thing he does is to use her instinctive playfulness to set her back at her own place where she is able to successfully act again. This way, she doesn’t lose the confidence in her imagination and keeps on playing with the same pleasure, discovering that this freedom is what makes her existence so happy and carefree.

Therefore, it is so important that she admits Keeper must go to work as there is only at home where she can be herself and express her fancies freely whilst his role is to live with this duality which is part of a realism he prepares her to because it is complementary with the consciousness of objective individual limits. He inflects her survival instinct, which thrives on expansion and aims at domination by revealing her that playing is a cultural pleasure which serves evolution at a higher level. He demonstrates her that being conscious of his own superiority makes him responsible for her and for her well-being as he knows the necessity to protect others to preserve the diversity of life which is based on adaptation and where humiliation makes no sense as it leads to self-destruction. Learning to play is learning to better appreciate oneself and moreover to be sovereign enough not to dwell on embarrassing situations and to be able to forgive since learning never ends.      

Hence, through one of the most brilliant series of illustrations, according to us, Sam Garton represents how Keeper helps Otter understand that leaving her at home is not being mean and unfair towards her, as she thinks.  It expresses his generosity and his confidence in her own instinctive capacity to enjoy herself in his absence. So, the highly emotional drawing when she clings desperately at his trousers in the morning, which could suggest his moral cruelty, is indeed relativized by the lovely humoristic episode when he comes back in the evening and she suddenly would prefer not to see him. She runs to hide in one of his large boots hoping he wouldn’t find her although she is almost sure that this wouldn’t help for long since Otters are very good at hiding. However, Otter Keepers are very good at finding Otters. The shortness and the parallelism of the text suggest most efficiently the quickness of Keeper’s reaction which seems to answer Otter’s flight/retreat she already knows wouldn’t hinder him to find her since she must acknowledge that he is cleverer than her. They underline the power of instinct both are linked with as if she would be the specific prey of Keepers – the plural form which seems to refer their relationship to their belonging to different species enhances this impression – in a kind of a desperate fight for life, yet the humor this inadequate reference expresses uncovers that she herself doesn’t take her own fear as seriously as it seemed first. One can see here the mischievous intervention of the author himself to stress that she has already experienced the harmlessness of being found by playing hide and seek with Keeper who transformed her instinctive fear into a cultivated behavior, he gave her the example of, when he didn’t take advantage of his superiority and didn’t follow his immediate instinct and catch her like a prey.

So, playing related with humor definitively marks the access to a cultural identity which is able to adapt reflexes and impulses to reverse them into a cooperative structure. It changes the relationship to others from the mythic remembrance of a life-threatening confrontation into the thankful acceptation of rules which liberate from the fear of getting caught in a situation of inferiority and having no chance to escape. Since Keeper knows her so well, he has no difficulty in finding her and for her to be found means, despite the circumstances, a proof of love as he cares where she is, which finally lets her ask the same question about Teddy. She might look quite a bit ashamed when he lifts his boot so that she can’t avoid a face-to-face with him. She knows at the same time that she is so cute that he wouldn’t resist her very long. Moreover, the effect of her charm is the stronger since the reader can’t see Keeper’s reaction, yet guesses immediately Otter’s sweet expression she puts on to beg his pardon, This reveals her fundamental confidence in his love she has grown up with which lets her trust in her cuteness to be loved by others. However, she needs to elicit again and again this relief to be found and recognized by him whom she feels still very dependent on and whose absence provokes her anger followed by the unconscious culpability to be punished for. That’s why she is thrilled by the expectation to be caught, yet she can’t wait for it to happen because it renews her sensation to be related to him by an instinctive power which fascinates her whilst it reinforces his symbolic authority.
While he comes home every day, his return seems a magic sanction to her this time because she can’t hide from him that her “business experience” went wrong and she feels caught in the act already before he finds her in the boot. Yet, at the same time, she guesses that he returns at the moment when she must acknowledge that she won’t be able to cope on her own with the trouble she made and becomes afraid of it. When he turns his search for her into a game she is familiar with, he helps her associate his daily return with the ritual of playing hide and seek which reassures her about their mutual love and lets her relativize the drama of his apparently unprepared arrival. She can’t but recognize her failure, yet she realizes that it frees her from a tricky situation when she was about to lose any control so that Keeper appears her savior who was there magically at the right moment.

Thus, this episode reveals the counterpart of the most dramatic separation which left her so desperate in the morning when he went to work as it lets her accept what she perceived as an unjust sanction. She sees it indeed from another side since she realized meanwhile that this authority she loathed, interpreting it as a denial of his love, was necessary to get back to normal and restore some order after the chaos she provoked. She guesses that there must be some limits to prevent excesses and that he is there to protect her against her own inadequate behavior so far it leads her to the loss of self-control which lets her get into trouble.

So, she really evolved through this experience as she recognizes that the ambiguity she associated his love with was in fact rooted in her imagination where she instinctively feared his superiority as a threat to her own survival she must neutralize by preserving a fusional relationship with him. When she clings at his trousers with the elementary energy of a wild animal which behaves instinctively and the anger of a child which feels abandoned while he himself remains steadfast. She helplessly revolts against his dominancy she can nor abuse nor break and must accept against his own will. Although she perfectly understands the symbolic meaning of his index, which intimates her to separate and to stay home, she experiences it as the rejection of her unconditional love which lets her feel miserable and angry at him. She only understands his real intention when she guesses at his return that his belonging to a larger world than hers and his ability to separate while she can’t endow him with the necessary authority to give her some hold and relativize her own implication in her failure she can’t bear. Funnily, he doesn’t understand when she tries to tell him that the mess was Teddy’s fault, which seems a communicational problem because Keeper needs no explanation for who was responsible for it. Yet with his usual intuitive thoughtfulness he only helps her end it without even evocating the question of who could have made this mess. He shows her that she can reverse the situation with his help since keeping her under his authority lets her evolve according to her rhythm without the fear to be confronted with challenges to which she can’t cope.

Everything seems very simple indeed from the moment he found her according to her comment: “The toast restaurant was shut down. Things had to be cleaned. And everyone was sent home.” This ending appears quite unspectacular and prepares the conclusion that “everything was normal again” when Teddy was eventually found: it underlines that most of the drama took place in her mind, which doesn’t mean it was less real for that, yet it shows that rules which assign specific places to everybody and everything are indispensable to prevent chaotic situations where love itself might turn into a tyrannical appropriation of the other and lets no more place for respect and self-esteem. Keeper demonstrates that games can and must be ended since they are necessary to let one evolve to a better appreciation of reality, yet they can’t replace it, as regularity is part of life; it is its instinctive fundament whilst imaginary transgression allows its progress to be figured and tested and makes it interesting for the improvement of personal initiative which it favors. However, rules are there to preserve what had already been acquired through evolution and had been integrated into a common culture as it is precious for survival. Games are helping imagination adapt for a later purpose by developing the ability to structure it according to a larger realization. This way, they can’t be conceived out of a social context they make fit for by favoring perseverance, practical judgement and modesty over empathy and humor to be able to give creativity a concrete hold in everyday life.  

Thus, while the illustrations express Otter’s distress and appeal to adult sympathy for how hard it is for children to accept their dependence on adults from the moment they awake to their own consciousness, they also let children realize that they cannot interpret properly all that grown-ups do precisely because they are still far from having reached them. Not showing Keeper’s face in the situation of confrontation with him she goes through, lets each parent free to tell his own feelings when he explains his reasons for staying steadfast in his decision. Yet it gives the children also the opportunity to understand that adults have learned to control their emotions for their common best. Thanks to Sam Garton’s presentation, their words would get more weight as they would appear authentic individual statements which had only been facilitated by Keeper’s example; children wouldn’t take them personally as they would be able to relate their own experiences of separation with Otter’s and admit that reality is more complex as they think because they don’t get its big picture immediately.  Learning requests time and rules to structure the mind so that it becomes able to do the best of life at any moment.

This way, the author helps stimulate a child's curiosity and their desire to know more about adults and their world through even more direct testimonies since they got aware of the necessity to really learn progressively to better understand them by exchanging with them and questioning them about what motivates their behavior. So, they can begin to switch softly from their idealizing identification to their more conscious appreciation while they guess that they are themselves implicated in a process they can’t influence and which is determined by time.  It is most significant that Otter’s major enemies are Keeper’s wrist watch and alarm clock because she perceives them as the pitiless symbols of an alienating structure separating her from him. Like children, she must recognize that she can’t go against it and that despite the almost unbearable pain caused by separation, there is also some advantage to being separated. This traumatic experience is part of life’s evolution which relies on its healing energies themselves - growth which favors autonomy and symbolic intelligence leading to the recognition of a cultural order featured by conventional signs which compensate fusional love and its uncontrollable assaults with a refined and diversified communication requesting the effort to really get to know others.

That’s why Otter includes text in her drawings; she has reached a stage in her evolution where she becomes able to integrate abstract symbols like alphabetic letters to create an understanding of her pictures for Keeper and for the readers, who are remembered through the conception of Sam Garton’s children’s book itself which is based on the same complementarity, that in a living society instinct and symbolic order are exchanging constantly to sustain evolution which is far from being a linear progress: it is submitted to the constraints of time and space and to the resistance of instinctive remnants which keep contradicting them in always new challenging forms.

Thus, I am Otter can’t conclude on a conventional happy ending which would celebrate the merits of education. On the contrary, it ends on a humorous point which expects the public’s mischievous complicity for the acknowledgement that moral perfection is an illusion which just leads to the denial of real life and of the surprising pleasures it reveals spontaneously so far it isn’t reduced to social conformism through a restricted interpretation of adaptation. Otter’s adventures promise to be as endless as her innate playfulness which gives innocence and initiation to life - as the current parameters of children’s books - a new dimension. Her originality relates to them with literature in general as they feature a kind of fantastic realism which transforms the book into a laboratory of imagination where concrete reality can be considered with some humoristic distance and even rephrased to compensate its frustrations as the heroine does constantly. Letting his public guess how she builds up her relationship with others, the author unveils how he works himself and how he expects to influence the evolution of children’s literature that it becomes an initiation to reading which doesn’t separate the objective learning process – the faculty to abstract and understand symbols – from the pleasure to be inspired and even to be transformed by the discovery of a fictional otherness which is more appealing than any real one because through imagination it revitalizes primitive instinctive structures of immediate communication. Thus, effort and pleasure are coupled while reading is experienced as an exchange which reaches far beyond the words’ explicit meaning because illustrations are able to shape the unsaid Unconscious, not only as a provisory, transitory mode to express oneself till adulthood, but as a way to take into account the increased importance of images in our contemporary society where they tend to be taken for real instead of being understood as participating in symbolism while entering into a dialogue with the text.

To be continued...

All Drawings © Sam Garton

Inadequate Games: a Criticism of Adult Social expectations in "I am Otter"

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

Otter's opening of her toast restaurant appears to be the paramount occurrence of the book as it leads to its climax - the contradiction between imagination and its concrete realization through the opposition between social reality and what she figures out it must be. It becomes a life lesson to her showing her the limits of her fantasy based on an identification which doesn’t rely on real practice. Yet her failure questions the existing society adults are responsible for since it stresses its inability to preserve creativity and satisfy individual needs. Although she prepares her business extremely well reading many cookbooks, she can’t get along with all the inspiration she got and fit it in a practical concept. She doesn’t manage either to adapt to normal standards or to satisfy the personal demands of her customers because she hasn’t acquired the discernment yet to outbalance the different interests according to what is realisable with the means she has. She becomes embarrassed by her own contradictions of running a business efficiently to make money and her aspiration to present an original cooking which is a real dilemma in the actually existing capitalistic society she uncovers naively.  She had pinned on the table two different toast models which describe the right and the wrong one - which is burnt - like in fast food restaurants and everywhere where there is an industrial production employing unqualified workers. The introduction of this surprising detail into her fanciful world creates a funny contrast which underlines her own difficulty coping and reduces her inventive creations, yet additionally demonstrates how simple-minded standards are as they address an illiterate public who hasn’t learned to interpret signs.  Ironically, her personal dilemma which is due to the fact that she tried to realize a project which didn’t suit her age, reveals “most innocently” the childishness of a society which is proud of its own degree of evolution and which appears ridiculously overrated.

Sam Garton denounces the reductive vision of achievement promoted by an industrialization at the service of materialistic mass consummation when it allies with informatics to impose an exclusively binary system whilst evolution is based on mediation and diversification. He stresses that the favor which is given to the principle of industrial reproduction is responsible for the confusion between reality and its representation and for the self-abuse it could feature the ultimate perfection as it destroys philosophically and ideologically the link between life and creativity which is at the origin of human evolution. His criticism becomes the more obvious when he makes a difference between his heroine and the social illusion he mocks: while Otter opposes “perfekt” and “wrong” toasts in her pictures, she unconsciously points to this absurdity, yet she does it innocently as the naïve desire to do her best, only someone who hasn’t had to take reality into account before, can represent through such incredible simplification. So, what he criticizes through her innocence is the extreme naivety of a society which imagines it has the authority to define how perfection looks while even life can neither feature nor predict. This kind of overestimation which might be cute when it underlines Otter’s lack of experience, it becomes ridiculous and inappropriate when it creates a collective alienation which is rooted in the unfounded conviction that life can be optimized through industrial reproduction and maybe even replaced by it. That’s why one of her toys is a robot with many blinking lights: it is like an ironic eye-twinkle from the artist, who signifies that in Otter’s world, he is no more than a toy she plays with and which has no power over her. He is far from having the pretended autonomy which he is associated in the visions of a future where robots are supposed to have overruled the humans who created them. Otter just puts this into perspective as Keeper has enough independence from his own society to teach her how to preserve her natural playfulness; he knows from his experience that this will be the most important for the survival of humanity. Therefore, that is why the author places his hopes in his readers who let their children follow Otter's adventures.

Through Otter’s childish behavior from the moment she takes herself seriously at the top of her toast restaurant, he indirectly questions the adult stage of mind she pretends to imitate and he illustrates thanks to this inverted perspective how regressive apparently modern management methods are as they infantilize those who use them.  They suppose a simple-minded otherness facing the caricature of an almighty authority who acts as if personal autonomy and individual choices were just unbearable. Her violent reactions towards Teddy and the customers ridicule their inappropriateness to cope with real life they appear to be opposed as they work against its natural need of diversity which is indispensable for its evolution. Her representation of adults reaches here a satirical dimension as it gives the impression that they don’t realize that they behave like immature children because their way of living hinders them.  They fail to recognize that they have regressed and that what they think pushes them deeper into decay every day.

That’s why Sam Garton mocks the hypocrisy of a discourse which transmits the illusion that one can tackle almost any problem if he refers to behavioral schemes which provide a solution for any case while it compromises on the possibility to elaborate a consent based on the reciprocal of individual needs. Otter’s ridiculous rage, which contrasts with the set phrases which are supposed to show her sovereignty and her objective neutrality while solving relational conflicts with her manager (Teddy) and unsatisfied costumers, introduces some grotesque black humor. Her outburst of anger, which expresses her frustration of not being able to deal with all her tasks because of her inexperience with diversity, denounces the pretended rationality of management strategies as a cynic's lack of care which can’t but end in tyrannical anarchy like the pictures reveal it. Only the fact it is part of a game and shouldn’t be taken seriously makes his criticism match the spirit of a children’s book since the readers can relate it with her immaturity and consider that as the decisive reason for her failure.  “After some basic training…we opened for business. Right away, though, we ran into problems. First, Teddy had forgotten to take the reservations. Next, Teddy hadn’t told anyone how much our toast would cost. As a result, no one brought any spending money, which led to some embarrassing situations. Finally, Teddy got several of the toast orders incorrect. Some of the customers complained and had to be asked to leave the restaurant. That was the last straw. So Teddy was fired and I gave his job to Giraffe. But even with a new chef, the restaurant still had big problems.”

The apparent logic presentation of the facts is actually an indictment against Teddy who is the scapegoat for Otter’s own faults which come from her ambition to realize a project which exceeds her own faculties because she wants to create a real business instead of playing to do so. Through her taking her fantasies for real, the author uses the fiction to ridicule the pretended objectivity of a schematic and insignificant language which denies conflicts whilst turning them into primitive personal revenge motivated by the instinctive need to impose one’s superiority for the own survival. Unlike the real politically correct account, Otter’s explanations can’t sustain the hypocrisy to the very end because she is fundamentally sincere and she can’t either hide her own frustration or her resentment towards Teddy while trying to objectively summarize the reasons for her business going wrong. The inner contradiction lets the whole criticism remain in the register of humor instead of satire which is nevertheless slightly present through the excessive simplification of her arguments culminating in the anger against everyone as well as in the illustrations which definitively contradict the text revealing to be a grotesque litotes.

He criticizes a pre-shaped language which pretends to find solutions by only suggesting harmony while it only postpones the outbreak of conflicts which are the more violent the more they have been denied because nature needs contradictions to evolve and invent new forms of coexistence: those can’t be found if language is deprived of its symbolic and critic dimension because it is misused to sustain the illusion of a perfect reality which doesn’t tolerate any question and which would make any fiction superfluous and even worse: impossible. That’s why Otter gets so upset; she neutralized her own playfulness and thus, gets stuck in a circular reproduction of the same scheme without any progress. As she recognizes dismissing Teddy for Giraffe didn’t help at all. Her belief in personal solutions doesn’t work because the system, which she is relying on, hinders her find back to what characterises her lovable being: thoughtfulness which is indispensable for an adapted social behavior which will precisely help individuals to resist the dullness of “nine to five” jobs instead of getting trapped in them.

Moreover, Sam Garton highlights through this episode that this society perverted the meaning of work as it does no longer provide personal achievement. Reproduction has replaced transmission which meant the learning of complex skills which any artisan adapted to his own projects refining this way ancestral techniques which have proved their efficiency over centuries. What remains then is mere boredom and the indifference towards products which don’t tolerate any originality as they have been made to satisfy mass-consumption and methods to earn money. Economic success has indeed become the new motivation and Otter fails because her innocent soul had never let her think of earning money. Like children, she has had much fun preparing the opening and had spent much time with pleasant details when she took the selfie with Teddy for instance and she just enjoyed browsing through cookbooks at the search for some inspiration. Yet, from the moment she tries to integrate the process into a business scheme all goes wrong because she is too inexperienced for this. However, her failure reveals also more fundamentally a weak point of the economic system itself which has important difficulties for integrating invention and originality when they don’t fulfill the logic of increasing financial profit. Wanting to be rewarded by the love for his creature situates the artist’s own courageous position as he underlines his own profound love for her which allows him her desire to be recognized as the individual she is for him. He couldn’t imagine as a commercial product to earn money despite the social logic he can’t totally free from. At least, his statements make clear what matters for him - to be recognized as an author and an artisanal toy-maker who enchants life.

That’s why he advocates through this example the completely uninterested and carefree stake of his book which he aims to preserve children’s creative freedom with contradicting an education where adults project their own frustrated ambitions on them. He questions without any dogmatism an ideology which praises precocity and financial success and rushes a child's adaptation to adult norms depriving them of a happy and creative childhood, which would have taught them patience and tolerance and given them the inner resources to feel independent to make their own choices. So, he criticizes games which are supposed to prepare for future social roles they are not supposed to fit in at the moment and which they have no chance to transform as they have never really experienced what it means to play. Otter fails exactly for that reason from the moment she wants to imitate real business instead of just having fun with Teddy,  She can’t figure out in a game a reality in which she doesn't relate. Thus, treating children as if they were already grownups puts them in a situation where they can’t help but fail and become frustrated while they haven’t had any chance to experience what they can do on their own in order to gain confidence in themselves.

To be continued...

Thoughtfulness as a way to Surmount the Fear of Others

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

There can’t be a better homage to evolution indeed than creating by love for love to be spread around as the best means to be at peace with oneself and others thanks to tolerant humor. It appears the most efficient way to adapt a creative individuality to the challenges of survival in a society based on Manichaeism and simplification as the result of industrialization which aims only at rationalized productivity. It is a strategy which reacts at its global ambition by restoring imagination as the unique faculty which can bear contradictions as part of personal realisation leading necessarily to the refinement of social relationships which will have consequences on the whole organisation of the society where any individual behaviour matters even if it only surprises or disturbs. Assuming one’s difference is an indispensable challenge for his mental flexibility and his capacity to evolve whilst it is a provocation for conformism which is confronted with the strength conscious adaptation gives him as the accurate expression of his inner sovereignty under the existing conditions. That’s why Keeper bets on evolution as the aptitude of life to renew itself and surmount the obstacles which might been opposed to it although it might seem currently inappropriate, or even weird. Otter never appears as a fantasy which would let him look silly because from the very beginning, he believes in her autonomy and treats her like a sensible living being he can communicate with and he is sure will be able to evolve at his contact, how different they might apparently seem to be. That’s why the readers themselves perceive her transgressions as fun and keep her in their hearts as precisely her unpredictability let them look at her like Keeper does - with much love and indulgence because her exceptional vitality gives them again confidence in life and its resources to strike its inner balance on its own. Keeper’s love proves its efficiency and reinforces at the same time his public’s trust in their own as a constructive feeling which will not been disappointed when it is expressed with discernment towards individuals who are able to appreciate it, Otter answers his attentions by evolving and learn to know him and his needs better. So, she recognizes that he needs sleep to spend time with her and she even accepts eventually to let him go to work after she got able to tie symbolic bonds with Teddy whom she begins to love as her personal friend. The way he played with her responding to her desire to express herself while interacting with him, opened her mind to respect his own needs from the moment she got more aware of them and even guessed that the more one grows up, the more diverse become his activities. She slightly develops her own occupations whatever might be their outgoing since she becomes aware that she must share Keeper with others although she doesn’t guess who they might be.

Thus, thoughtfulness reveals the evolutionary integration of love into a culturally responsible behavior which surmounts the fear of being contradicted and hurt by others as it strengthens self-confidence to do what appears to be right at the moment even if it can’t be explained yet: it sums up a feeling which relies on experience to aliment an instinctive trust in the future which will be able to relativize oppositions through better reciprocal knowledge and the constructive energy it will release. So, the disappearance of Teddy after Otter had treated him badly reveals the saving power of the deep link she has with Keeper and which she owes to their common life and the trust in the other’s kindness it developed. From the beginning, he has explained to her their relationship is based on individual actions one is supposed to be responsible for. That’s why she has been taught very early by him the meaning of an emergency. It allows to wake him up as love tolerates transgressions and exceptions so far they are motivated by a reflected appreciation of the situation, even if it refers to subjective standards: thoughtfulness is indeed the faculty to act adequately thanks to an acquired consciousness which also lets one guess his ineptitude to solve a problem autonomously and the necessity to ask for help as something perfectly natural. This enables her to surmount her pride being confident in Keeper’s love who will help her unconditionally and avoid whatever could humiliate her and would let her regret the choice which symbolizes her belief in the best in others. Her cuteness is particularly touching at the moment when she decides to involve Keeper because she tries first all she can to get Teddy back being so ashamed by the way she behaved with him. She would prefer nobody knew of it although it is already evident for the readers that it is too painful a secret for her to keep; when it becomes obvious she can’t sleep, plagued by remorse. Her dilemma underlines that she is most sensible and unable to calculate.  Her decision to wake up Keeper is mostly instinctive since she can no longer bear her guilt and the anxiety she might have lost her most precious companion because of her uncontrolled reaction. Before she does so, she had indeed spent a certain time sadly staring at the photo of them both which she took when they opened their toast restaurant. She had also drawn posters with his portrait asking for help to get him back. So, she had done all she could on her own when she wondered whether Teddy’s loss could be an emergency serious enough to wake up Keeper. This thought is an immediate relief for her as it frees her immediately from a responsibility she can’t take over alone and this is even more important than the object of the emergency since her trust in him is almighty and highlights simultaneously how much she loves him.

That’s why she dwells with a sort of jubilation on the importance of her decision which she is sure was well reflected and taken despite her own fears and sensibilities. At last, she found a way out of her torments by soliciting help from Keeper whose authority she respects. The illustrator writes “emergency” in red letters when she notes: “This was an emergency”. Her conclusion sounds like a sigh of relief when she deduces - “Luckily, in an emergency, you are allowed to wake up Otter Keeper.” He gave her the certitude that he would help her every time she needed it making her subjective feeling the only motivation which matters to him since he trusts the self-appreciation she learned while living with him. He foresaw the case when she would have to ask for his help and he gave her the opportunity to decide on her own when she needs it to let her experience her autonomy, so sure he is that she would bother him only for reasons which she believes serious even if they might be incomprehensible for him. He knows her so well that he trusts her thoughtfulness and her discernment according to her own level of consciousness. So, she wasn’t disappointed when she followed her instinct, hoping he would understand her distress even if Teddy has only such importance for her. Although it was quite hard for him to wake up and to search for him almost everywhere in the house, he is fully aware that from her point of view, this is an emergency which can’t be postponed until morning.

Thoughtfulness needs no words as it is based on the intuitive understanding of otherness which Sam Garton favours with his drawings, demonstrating that you need not be at the same level of evolution and maturity to guess what is essential for the other’s well-being. So, they might look not well assorted at all when they try to find Teddy in the middle of the night since Keeper wears his pyjamas while Otter is equipped with her backpack and her gear clothes as if she was going on an exploration. What matters is their inner harmony which lets them work in the same direction since it is essential for both to get well although only one of them is directly implicated. Those who laugh at them, at Keeper because he let a minor incident disturb his sleep and at Otter because of her unappropriated wear appear are unable to figure out symbolic significations which are however essential to notice what’s really getting on in the others mind. Only the ability to appreciate individual situations lets them react adequately even though it doesn’t look like this from an external point of view. Normality is an abstract notion which doesn’t make any sense here as it is based on an average which nobody corresponds to while love is able to consider emotions an objective reality although they can’t be materialized. It kept in touch with instincts throughout evolution and led them to a cultural expression which includes the ability to integrate strangeness as taking part in life and generating curiosity and an adventurer’s spirit.

He comforts her just because he takes her fear seriously and doesn’t use the opportunity for any kind of moral considerations which would increase her distress. His full active support lets her find back to a reasonable and adapted appreciation of the situation. Since she is no longer left alone with her self-minoring feelings, she becomes able again to concentrate on what he shows her really matters: searching systematically for Teddy and whilst she gets involved in this action, she loses her fears and surmounts her inhibition. She notes: “After hunting almost all night, we were running out of places to look. Then all of a sudden I had a clever thought….” while the drawing shows her grabbing the box with the toys and then hugging Teddy in the next picture while shouting his name. She guesses that she found the solution on her own because Keeper didn’t leave her alone when she didn’t feel good: he did exactly what she needed at the right moment since he was there when she feared to be abandoned by Teddy because she did wrong. So, this experience she shared with him, becomes a symbol as it gives her the assurance that love has its own rules and doesn’t judge as it is based on reciprocal tolerance: that’s why it helps put things in the right perspective, even the fact that she was rude to Teddy. That’s why the highly emotional scene when she hugs him is compensated by the humoristic drawing once the acute crisis has been surmounted. With the caption “Now everything is normal again”, it features both, Keeper and Otter, sleeping at the breakfast table. Even she is sleepy and no longer only him since their common adventure they brought to a happy ending let them get closer than they already were so that she got included in Keeper’s tender self-derision, underlined by the artist, who at the same time mocks a normality which he shows doesn’t exist as such in life since it is only due to the temporary exhaustion of the two protagonists.

Through this example, Sam Garton stimulates again the dialogue between adults and children as he stresses that moral is an obstacle to their understanding because it uses guilt to educate and inhibit feelings instead of giving them an opportunity to evolve through an adapted action as the result of a better self-appreciation. It’s because Otter can’t cope with the consciousness of her own responsibility for Teddy’s disappearance that she lost her clear mind and Keeper only readjusted her to reality by reassuring her that she was lovable.  This was enough to give her back the self-confidence she needed to find him on her own while a sense of morality wouldn’t give her an opportunity to get over a mistake she made in a careless moment when she was in trouble herself. It always supposes the other to be an abstract authority instead of a living being who will be able to interpret an individual behaviour and give it again a social orientation. The humorous and ironic touch is that Teddy is “just a toy” personalized in Otter’s mind, which lightens the drama for the readers who are in Keeper’s position and know he will turn up. Yet it stresses how naturally sensible she is as she reveals much empathy with him as well because she has been educated by Keeper’s love which let her feel related with any creature who has a soul. This stresses the inappropriateness of moral considerations in children’s education as they transform their innate consciousness of what is right or wrong, which love must only encourage, into the fear of an irrevocable sanction by an abstract pitiless otherness which might catch them up wherever they might be. Keeper does exactly the contrary with Otter according to his personal experience of evolution which he owes his faith in the self-surmounting power of life and to the wisdom it leads.

While moral judgements remove children’s innocence letting them believe there is a causality between what they do and what affects them as if there was an immanent justice, Keeper helps Otter activate her own survival resources since she has guessed she couldn’t do without Teddy. He gives her self-confidence at the same time he lets her feel that love is what relates every creature who has a soul for someone. Casting this way a very original symbolical bridge between reality and fiction inside the book itself, he teaches her that love is unconditional as it is able to liberate all the instinctive power of imagination which activates unconscious links with others and helps assume even the most improbable relationships. Otter gets Teddy back from the moment when thanks to Keeper’s support she loses the fear provoked by her guilt and has no other purpose than to find him because she is sure now that her love is stronger than her pride and she believes that it will be the same with him. There is no obstacle left from the moment the faith in it has been restored as it is unconditional and grows with the generosity to forgive and not dwell on the other’s mistakes.

Sam Garton underlines that children need to be sure adults will not leave them alone with emotions they can’t cope with whatever might have provoked them. He makes clear that they have no right to use them to serve their own purpose and add their natural superiority they already have as grown-ups an abstract moral authority they have no chance to understand since they can’t experience it. This usurpation will only make them doubt the confidence they had naturally in their disinterested care. It will make them become hesitant and ready to adapt to their expectations even if this means to them a self-denial which they might not get conscious of because their natural instinctive qualities have been abused by a narrow-minded conception of love which doesn’t trust nature. At the opposite of that, Keeper’s unconditional love doesn’t need any justification as he recognizes that everyone has the right to have his own secrets so far he is an autonomous person who instinctively learned to protect his own weak points in the interest of his survival;  what is of higher value is his preservation for what he represents to another one whom experience taught that it can be worth surmounting self-protective instincts for the enrichment of life and one’s own pleasure.

Hence, the search for Teddy turns almost imperceptibly into a game from the moment Keeper helps Otter, entering her world to solve a problem he knew it was motivated by a fantasy although he had no idea which one. This sympathy which lets her appreciation appear wronged by her emotions changes the meaning of their common search and transforms her excessive affective implication into adapted activity through a trick relating her with what he is sure she can - playing.  Thanks to his participation, her gear wear, which signified how seriously she was taking her task, makes readers smile as the foreseeable happy ending lets it appear as a disguise suggesting that at her stage of evolution most of life is still a game and has to be it. Any projection of adult values on her behavior is just inappropriate and those who try to do so aren’t part of her life so long as Keeper is watching over her.

A book to all who love Otter

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

The book’s dedication “to all who love Otter” is definitively programmatic. Sam Garton stresses the structural link which relates playing with reading and shows that playfulness is indispensable for mental development and must be favored for a lifetime because it is the foundation of human love which helps mankind evolve continuously by integrating individual experience in a larger culture to refine its perception and generate a better adapted behavior. Then, education is no longer a canonized curriculum anyone has to go through. As it gives value to the personal implication in shared experiences which won’t create a standardized equality on abstract expectations but restore the reciprocal balance between emotional sensibility and rational thinking. It will lead to the respect of adults’ authority which will eventually be understood by the children as being in their interest to preserve their freedom to learn how to adapt according to their age and their maturity since educating by love can’t mean demanding to answer the representations others have of one’s life. The author makes clear that, on the contrary, it has to stimulate self-confidence and discernment of what is good for each of them personally in a dialogue which is oriented by adults according to their larger experience to alleviate them from becoming involved in situations in which they can’t cope. The tensions which might result of it as the expression of an over-exalted and impatient imagination aiming at an exclusive identification with adults to hopefully get more freedom are most useful from this point of view - Otter’s experience demonstrates that this generates inadequate projects provoking chaos which request Keeper’s intervention to be solved. It highlights that imagination must be used adequately according to one’s personal abilities which can be properly appreciated only through adapted experiences. That is why it can’t be disassociated from love to be efficient and generate the readers’ own constructive sympathy.

Those who are in the privileged situation to observe Otter and Keeper interact and comment on them from the point of view of the author, who is involved in the story, discover that they are becoming actors in it at a symbolic level - they guess that it is developing instantly through a succession of episodes and become aware that the tensions between the protagonists, which come from their different stage of evolution, form actually the plot progressing by associations through the illustrations. This autonomy, which makes the whole story evolve according to the action of the two protagonists in their quest of reciprocal recognition and understanding, lets them experience that imagination serves love as the natural evolutionary response to the challenge of otherness because it can create unpredictable links to surmount it which will enrich life with new forms of cooperation generating a new autonomous dynamism. Initiated by the participation of the artist who nevertheless avoids any naïve identification with his heroine, the readers discernment is solicited by the multiple different impressions to make their own opinion about what is getting on whilst taking into account the different perspectives to interpret the characters’ behavior and realize that Otter appears so cute also because she is loved by anyone she comes in contact with. They experience that being loved makes one lovable and that empathy can transform not only the judgement on somebody else, it can change the person itself by giving it the consciousness it will never lose this fundamental support which responds the unconditional love which has been at the origin of its birth. Love appears a never ending involvement in life through the ability to imagine its continuity through the intimate knowledge how it evolves which the story itself features from the moment you not only read it, but live it and transmit your own interpretation of it.

The complexity of Sam Garton’s multi-layered book takes into account this perspective as it doesn’t reveal all its stakes at the first read although its plot is plainly efficient from the beginning as it evolves through interaction at different levels of understanding. Yet only the reflection on the images in relation with the text reveals Keeper’s secret through the illustrator’s smiling compassion: his self-ironic distance which expresses his inner strength not to renounce of his individuality and his authority so far he knows it is rooted in his life experience to which he owes his survival. So, he might sometimes appear mysterious and difficult to appreciate for Otter, for those who are able to observe him properly and understand what he is aiming at, he reveals a humorous character who has internalized self-irony as the best way to adapt in a society he isn’t able to change as a whole without losing his temper and failing like Otter when she tries to create her toast restaurant out of nothing.
That’s why his wisdom exists in the primitive form of the drawings, which conciliate the artist’s and Otter’s perspective instead of the text which expresses exclusively her ramblings although it is the current medium of rational thought: this inversion hints to his intellectual flexibility which enables him to bear contradictions for the sake of evolution. He has understood indeed that looking back from a higher stage of development doesn’t lead to a ruthless feeling of superiority towards others, yet to a reflection on the person he had been before and whom he can but love if he has enough self-esteem to still consider himself evolving and enjoy life as a never ending adaptation the challenges of which represent a permanent stimulation for his mind and its creativity. He will always be able to express his own personality – even despite Otter’s narration – because he knows how to master all sort of communication.

Only this exceptional subtlety lets him appreciate Otter’s unique personality and relate it for those who are getting to know her through her relationship with him; so, he is indulgent to her because, whatever she does to hinder his behaving like the adult he is and go to work, she reveals so originally and inventively that he can’t but sympathize and feel happy to be loved so much by such an amazing creature. The illustrations showing her mischievousness, when she drowns the alarm clock in the fish bowl or when she is sitting, puffed, amidst his lunchbox, point this complicity he can’t express openly to not lose his authority, yet makes the readers’ smile or even laugh at her cute smartness, he unveils the secret of his tolerant love - the capacity to understand others without giving up his own cleverness and the conviction that there will be enough readers who will be able to sympathize with him. Otter must recognize that all her attempts to keep him home failed, yet the drawings which reveal how Keeper sees her, let everyone feel how much he enjoyed to be challenged by her just because she brightens his life in such an unforeseeable way. The artist, as Keeper’s self-commenting alter ego, can’t but stress through his humorous illustrations that she is the source of his inspiration which originated his own change and led him to his philosophical distance towards his past he now considers a necessary part of his development to find back to himself from a higher perspective. Otter, whose passion is to draw almost ragingly everything which affected her, made him aware of his own talent which allowed him to express his emotions and let him hope to share them with those who would feel stimulated by Otter.

Thus, his book as his major work is his intimate, symbolic response to the pressure of social standards he can’t get into a direct confrontation with: it represents his personal change and the serenity it brought him just to dare being himself whatever others might think. He underlines that Otter transformed him imperceptibly, letting him look quite maladjusted and odd whilst he was in fact getting nearer to what he would like to be. He has enough humor to be conscious of this contradiction and to accept it, as the creativity Otter awoke in him, let him relate social values to which he tried awkwardly to adapt before and convicted him that he would find his own support among “those who love Otter”. Thanks to her, he ceased to be passive, yet instead of opposing to an impersonal, abstract society, she instigated in him the use of his fantasy with the same originality and cleverness as her to gather around him people who aim at being creative and symbolically express their originality. While he appears always sleepy in the morning because Otter’s vitality exhausts him, he begins to spread around him some of the color she brought into his life with her drawings. He accepts that evolving means to be considered quirky by those who didn’t experience it and stick to immovable principles preventing them from an originality the contradictions of which they fear: the “zzzzz”, Sam Garton adds to the drawings representing Keeper at Monday mornings or after he had been searching for Teddy overnight, hint to his self-irony while the multi-colored clothes worn when he reluctantly goes out into the grey workday-world, let him look quite heroic. He appears a precursor who doesn’t fear to show his difference openly, without caring about others since his self-confidence is rooted in his relationship with his creature and “those who love her”. So, his book reveals a modest and however ambitious project to change mentalities individually to break conformism which relies on mass phenomena. Moreover, it invites his readers not to trust the appearances and not to follow too easily public judgments which are quick at discrediting an otherness which disturbs their habits and which they prefer to evacuate by considering it “strange” instead of surmounting this first impression via empathy.

Nature versus Society - a symbolic challenge

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

Exploring Love & Evolution in I am Otter

Playing and reading are – if used to cultivate and brighten life – representative of actual social existence because they restore the nexus between love and imagination which serves a double aim - it prepares to fit real living conditions, yet relates their absolute power on each individual who is still able to negotiate the adaptation because he received enough self-consciousness to not accept them passively and retract into anger and frustration. It gives the intimate strength based on personal conviction to express social criticism on the behalf of humanity and their preservation for the unequaled degree of development they represent and not for partial political reasons which only advocate material adjustments and thus, aggravate conflicts and jealousy as they are only oriented towards an immediate and collective satisfaction. They will only increase the demand for more since they can’t compensate the individual need for recognition of personal qualities which makes everyone unique. Sam Garton’s perspective underlines the necessity to separate at last the amalgam between materialism and well-being which had been made in the 19th century to find back to a more philosophical and universal conception of mankind which encourages critical sense and freedom: both indeed are at the service of reciprocal understanding since they are based on self-preservation which paradoxically implies the respect of the other in the interest of the species’ own survival which is essential for the diversity of life. As a mental prevention from the enrollment in collective movements, self-consciousness helps therefore preserve the other’s freedom as it is indispensable for a society to evolve with the consent of those who make it a structure which everyone feels good to live in. It let's us find symbolic compromises supporting the change of mentalities instead of revolutions which are the result of authoritarian socializations where the efficiency of life has already been alienated by an education which didn’t respect personal freedom and autonomy because they try to create an actor of everyone - responsible for his own life.

That’s why Otter’s great educational challenge is to admit Keeper’s independence when he gets to work since she can’t guess that what she perceives as his personal will corresponds in fact for him to a social necessity which he must accept to be free to live with her at home. She must acknowledge that she isn’t able yet to figure out what his life without her looks like and that there is an age for everything so that she can’t skip a stage in her evolution whilst Keeper is able to look back and to sympathize with her in order to help her integrate constructively her own childhood experiences in an attractive vision of being adult which let her grow up happily. Hiding her a part of his own reality is part of his wisdom since knowing too much about it would hinder her evolution: it would confront her with problems she wouldn’t be able to understand and generate useless anxiety of getting autonomous. What he doesn’t deny however, is that, unlike her, this awareness enables him to join her games doing as if he would share spontaneously her innocent pleasure while relating her own excitement since she hasn’t experienced anything else yet and is curious of anything new. This strikes his empathetic discernment because he shares her emotions appreciating what they mean to her as he revives his own more consciously through hers. He treasures these moments which offer him the opportunity to live a symbolic pleasure from childhood and enjoy as a gift the total gratuity of her unconditional love towards him which he must thwart nevertheless for her own sake to get autonomous as he also knows it is the best he can do for her.

Sam Garton’s merit is to stress, through the dialogue his drawings initiate with his public, that Keeper’s attitude represents an evolution signifying a refinement of love from one generation to another and the best example for it remains the concert for which Otter extends an invitation. While the text reports her own impressions: “Now I love Otter Keeper and Teddy very much. We have much fun together, you wouldn’t believe it! Especially on the weekends”, the drawing commenting upon this last sentence features an Otter Keeper who had surrendered to an over-excited Otter who had organized a show for him with Teddy and who was eventually singing for him after having played all kinds of instruments which were already lying under the table.

Children who become able to compare both point of views and evaluate Otter’s limited consciousness guess that there is an age for everything and that, when grown-ups participate in their games, which they know are the real existence for them, they do it because of an empathetic memory based on their own experience and maybe even rather more on what they have missed during their own childhood: the interest and the recognition of their own parents which wasn’t evident a few generations before when adults – especially men - didn’t enter their children’s imaginary world because it was unusual and psychological knowledge wasn’t grown so far to consider it important for their later development. Yet, this doesn’t mean that they now enjoy it at the same primary level as they do because they have different priorities in their lives: they accept to postpone them for a while even if they might look a bit ridiculous and displaced, like poor Keeper in this sequence, because they love them and know that they need their support for whatever creative they do, so far it expresses their faith in life, to get more self-confident until they become autonomous and can do without their actual presence.

Sam Garton points to children that adults make an effort of real understanding when they play with them and he highlights that they aren’t childish however they might look so. On the contrary, he underlines that they are aware of what it consciously means to play since they plainly guess that it is an essential need for the transmission of a survival instinct they have already experienced and refined to a kind of wisdom which helps them evaluate a situation from different perspectives and accommodate their own action with a life-serving dynamism. This way, thanks to the mediation of the author, Keeper appears even to the young readers an unquestionable authority who educates them as well as Otter – the only difference between them and Otter is that they understand a bit more what he is doing. Yet, as they observed that he accepted to enter her game, even if he looked risible, just not to spoil her pleasure, they have no reason to feel superior to her or maybe even to mock her as they realised that behaving like that would let them fell off the circle of love which protects all those who participate in in her life and automatically exclude them from the story itself.

He sets an example which lets them understand that nobody acting because of uninterested love should be considered ridiculous, as he intends to do the best for the other, which doesn’t mean to be uncritical towards him. So, Otters’ exaggerated mimic, when she is singing, as well as the obvious difference between an actual concert and the perception of it she reproduced with the modest means she has at her disposal can’t but conjure a smile at the readers’ face. Yet, at the same time, they will sympathize with Keeper who accepts to play his supportive role and credit her imaginary world so that she can feel as if it was real and plainly enjoy the success of her performance. The drawing indeed shows how entering someone’s perspective by imagination transforms a possible feeling of superiority, the readers – adults and children both - might feel incline to, into tenderness towards Otter and Keeper through a sort of associative chain reaction: it creates sympathy for Keeper’s thoughtfulness who knows that he would hurt and discourage her if he judged her from his adult point of view and according to the completely unrealistic scale of objective reality which would be even more ridiculous given the fact Otter guesses that her performance is something very special only for Keeper. This can’t but touch the readers who must sympathize with both the protagonists since they realize that they are only motivated by love and gratefulness to have each other.

Reciprocal love reveals indeed the source of vital energy which allows evolution as it doesn’t discredit any attempt to refine its process. That’s why it is only based on self-irony as a way to learn from the other’s experience without any prejudice and without any fear of losing his self-esteem: if someone finds you ridiculous whilst trying to make the best of your life by exploring different possibilities, he himself hasn’t guessed yet what matters for him because he is still unconscious of his abilities he hasn’t learnt to use in his own interest and reveals therefore more immature than you.
This way, the author teaches both categories of his readers a lesson without any pedantry as he does it implicitly by inciting them to improve their observation and associate their impressions to relate them to each other and get the most nuanced appreciation of the situation as a whole to include it at its best in their own perception of life, which, at last, can’t be but an individual evolution to more self-consciousness and awareness of others. To the younger ones, he points that grown-ups are tolerant with them because they know they have to learn by experience and that the credit they give to their games develops their faculty to imagine oneself at the other’s place which is essential for their own survival as unconditional love might be touching, however it didn’t stand evolution, creating too much trouble due to its excessive expectations, like Otter’s example shows it. Yet, while he underlines her cuteness, he requests the adult’s attention for taking their children’s games seriously as they are decisive for their evolution and need their implication to be plainly efficient. He makes them get aware of their importance for the development of their intelligence as they valuate their instinct which attracts them unconsciously to others and prepares them to interact with them in a creative process to elaborate a symbolic balance between their individual interests.

That’s why he insists so much on the constructive role of love which transforms the readers’ consciousness of Otter’s awkwardness into deep sympathy for her cuteness as they realize that she can believe in herself despite being still like a child because Keeper supports her faith in life and in the improvement of her talents, when he plays with her. Although he is an adult, he enjoys to do so as he loves her and feels responsible for her future: for that reason, he strengthens her perseverance and her independence towards inappropriate judgments which could harm her whilst he lets her experience that clever adaptation to better understand others is an advantage for self-preservation and tolerance as well. He lets her find out on her own that she can’t participate in his world because she isn’t ready for it yet and not because he wanted to deprive her of an experience she should be jealous of. This way, he gives her a life lesson as well as the readers so far they will feel like reacting at what she does. He never judges the failure of her toast business, the mess of it she has just to clean up with him, because he doesn’t turn his superiority against her at any time and thus, behaves like an adult should towards a child or like older children should towards younger: he tries to let her realize that what helps conciliate different experiences and the different perspectives which result of them is thoughtfulness as it solicits reciprocal adaption at an individual level to preserve everyone’s self-esteem and freedom whilst fortifying the symbolic authority of the fittest. His behavior, which appears always well adapted whilst preserving Otter’s space at his home, underlines that love is not an easy going feeling, it is a permanent challenge for everyone’s autonomy which must be accepted to become able to do the best of one’s life. So, the readers of the book can’t but be in the disposition to learn from their relationship since, although Otter’s mischievous innocence puts a smile on every face, she must as well as Keeper been taken seriously because she believes in herself and in the world she lives in thanks to his understanding love which will let her evolve mentally according to her growth without being bothered by his expectations.

To be continued....