"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...