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.