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.