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.