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...