Pinocchio and Peter Pan: Aubrey Hirsch writes smart words

A lot of the people I know on facebook have small kids, some very small. They - the people I know, not the small kids - often post links to usually well-written but still tiresome essays and articles and blog posts about Being A Mom, or, less often, Being A Dad. I don't usually read all - or even any - of these pieces once I see the title and the source - websites with "babies" or "mommy" or "child" in the name.

Tonight I clicked through a link posted by a fellow grad student (now graduated), to a short piece written by another alumna of our department, an MFA who I do not know other than by her name, Aubrey Hirsch.
That piece is called "Why I Don't Think My Son Is Growing Up Too Fast," and it is terrific.
I don't need to comment much on it; it's brief and efficient. It's a little more mushy than what I normally prefer in my everyday life, but on the whole it's very reasonable. But it is a brilliant rebuttal, response, refutation of the parental lament about their babies growing up too fast.
Ever since I started seriously studying Peter Pan, in 1999, I have felt uneasy about perpetual children. Mrs Darling says it on the first page "Oh why can't you stay like this forever?" to toddler Wendy. But perpetual children are failures. If you never grow up, you never grow out, if that makes any sense. The sign of a parenting job well done is that your kid grows up and away and has its own life. It's why the narrator of The Little White Bird is so sorrowful over the "stealing" of David by Pilkington - once the child becomes enmeshed in its own life, away from guiding adults, it doesn't need or want those adults as much, even though the adults still need and want the child.
As Peter Pan also taught me, the only permanent child is the dead child - hardly the outcome hoped for by any parent.
What I admire about Hirsch's brief essay, aside from the blunt statement that she is content with her child growing up, is her statement that even if having a tiny kid is the ultimate, "then I’m not so selfish that I would keep him from having his own perfect moment with his own perfect child."
It is uncommon for me to read, or see, genuine unselfishness from parents like this. I think most parents feel something like it, and want to feel it, but it doesn't always register with the kind of sincerity Hirsch conveys. Having a kid - being responsible, creating, an entire human person - is about that person, not about you, and lots of people don't seem totally clear on that. The enormity of the task is one reason I don't want kids of my own; I am selfish enough to realize I don't want to organize my entire life, forever, around another person. I enjoy putting myself first, when I can.

After reading and delighting in this essay, I poked around a little for more info about Aubrey Hirsch and found a tantalizing reference to what she discovered lurking within the Pinocchio story. Which led me to this very short story, which has knocked my socks right off.

Pinocchio as trans.

Of course. Of course Pinocchio is trans. Of course Pinocchio is queer. Not just wooden puppet-to-human boy, but gender to gender.
Transformation stories are often queer-ish (The Velveteen Rabbit, the wonderfully queer Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse) but for some reason Pinocchio and trans never occurred to me in the same sentence. Hirsch's short story is a beautiful little commentary, re-telling (or just telling, maybe?), re-framing of the story we all know well. It's a reminder than the stories of transpersons are stories we know well. We all know what it is to feel like something other than what you seem to be, whether you're a nerd who wants to be a hero or a wooden puppet who wants to be human or a boy who knows she's a girl.
Hirsch's story makes Pinocchio and trans-ness both infinitely complex and elegantly simple. It's an "ah-ha!" and a thoughtful "ohhhhh." Exclamation and query. It is lovely. And brilliant.

I admit: the wonderfulness of her Pinocchio story makes me a bit afraid to seek out her collection of short stories (Why We Never Talk About Sugar), of which the publisher tells us: "Hirsch's compassion arrives on a knife blade. And you just may find your own heart cut open."

 Regardless of whether I ever read another word of her writing (I probably will), her 'Pinocchio' is enough to transform, forever, my thinking about that story. Go read it.

Kiss me, Hardy

In 1805, much of Europe - and Great Britain - was embroiled in war - one phase of the Napoleonic wars. The combined fleets of France and its ally Spain were massed at Cadiz, and the British and their allies were growing nervous. Enter Horatio Nelson, Viscount of the Nile, with a scad of ships to command and some exceedingly clever, new battle tactics.
On 21 October 1805, the British met with French & Spanish fleet in battle - the Battle of Trafalgar, won by the British, and memorialized by the very famous Trafalgar Square and its statue of Nelson atop a column.
Nelson's rout of the Franco-Spanish fleet, whose losses included 18 ships, 6,000 killed or wounded, and over 20,000 taken prisoner, so stung Napoleon that he never initiated another naval campaign. The battle, and Nelson, became a large part of British national mythology. Nelson's death aboard the HMS Victory, captained by Thomas Hardy with whom Nelson had sailed since the mid-1790s, is a big part of that mythology; shot while on deck at the pitch of battle, Nelson hung on to life for three more hours, long enough to learn that a number of the enemy's ships had surrendered. Never under any illusions about the severity of his injury, Nelson prayed, asked to be remembered to friends and family, and, at the very end, said "Kiss me, Hardy," to his captain. Commonly believed to be his last words, "Kiss me, Hardy" was actually not the last thing Nelson said (it was the made-for-propaganda "god and my country"). But accuracy doesn't matter that much in national myths, and "Kiss me, Hardy," has resonance as the last words of one of the greatest British heroes.

"Kiss me, Hardy," has resonance throughout Elizabeth Wein's phenomenal Code Name Verity, as well. One of the brilliant but unusual aspects of Wein's book is that to discuss many details of it, even minor ones, is to destroy part of its effectiveness as a whole. Going into reading it, I knew nothing at all about the book except it was a WWII novel and people had said it was great.
I read it in about half a day; I forced myself to put it down for a few hours in the early evening, but by 10pm had picked it up again, and didn't stop until the very end. I cried my face off, almost continuously from about the midpoint to the end - but that's not giving anything away, either.
The main characters are young women (old teenagers, really) volunteering in the British War Effort around 1943. One is a pilot, supremely skilled at navigation and mechanical work; one is multi-lingual, exceedingly clever and quick on her feet, a great actress. Both become involved in secret operations - spy work, really - for the British. Wein makes wonderful use of Peter Pan, as well, something I always enjoy encountering, and in this case, enjoy even more, because Wein - unlike so many others - seems to get the tragedy at the heart of Peter Pan, the melancholy of it - and it's not that children have to grow up.

That's all I'll say, because again - to say more is to ruin the unfolding of the book, and its unfolding is a key part of the narrative. Wein's novel is one of those rare examples where the interdependent relationship of story and form is so great as to be absolutely unmistakable even to the least perceptive of readers. How the tale is told is always important, of course, but Code Name Verity takes that concept to glorious new heights.

It is not a short book, nor even a quick read, though I did run through it in a day (but I am a quick reader). Any passages that may feel too slow, too irrelevant, too random - they all pay off in the end, in quantity. You will turn back chapters to re-read passages, conversations, explanations, and you will get shivers down your spine as realization seeps in.

So far this year I haven't read as many great books as I would have liked (especially compared to last year's bumper crop). Railsea, this spring, was great, intellectually, creatively, imaginatively, literarily. Code Name Verity was great creatively, literarily, historically (Wein has clearly, clearly done her homework), but above all emotionally. Wein somehow manages to weave incredible depths of emotion - of all kinds, really - into her book; you get caught in the web almost instantly, and it only binds tighter as the novel progresses. It is a devastating read, and wonderful in its devastation.

I'll cast my vote now for Code Name Verity for every prize it could possibly receive. I don't think I've been so blasted, so pulled in and wrung out, by a novel since reading How to say goodbye in robot, and I think Code Name Verity has actually outdone even that. It's a far, far, far more meaningful meditation on famous last words than Looking for Alaska could ever hope to be.
Because in Wein's hands, those famous last words (that weren't, really, the last words at all) of Nelson's - that "Kiss me, Hardy" - take on an almost unbearable, haunting meaning, an emotional verity that outstrips almost anything else i can think of.

Kiss me, Hardy.
I'll leave a window open.

breaking through, or: the challenges of teaching literature

I'm not teaching children's/YA lit classes this year, for the first time in more than two years. Of course I write my syllabi to play to my strengths, and so I include Alice and Peter Pan, which is always a delight to teach because it's just so weird.

Today was the last day of Peter Pan discussion, and, as often happens, students expressed some of the usual claims against critical interpretation. One student referred to the text as a "fairy tale," which is technically inaccurate but theoretically quite interesting; "myth" might be a better term, since Peter is a mythic character, to himself and everyone else. I tend to think somewhat strictly about the definition of a fairy tale; there's a category of story, with character types and plot structures of its own, that comprises fairy tales, and anything else must fit into some other category. But what if I expand my definition? What might we get if we play around with the idea of "fairy tale," not just as a formal designation but as a kind of reception practice? I think there's something there, though I'm not sure what.

One of the biggest challenges in teaching literature to non-lit students, to non-majors, to non-readers, is convincing them of the value of critical interpretation. Most of my students throughout my teaching have been non-majors; they've been psych majors, and biology and engineering, and political science, and business, and nursing, and a few rare history majors. I get a scattering of writing majors as well, but their approach to reading literature also tends to have its own bias; they read, in part anyway, to learn and study their craft. This can make for staggeringly good class discussion, as when one writing major pointed out a strange flaw in Sarah Dessen's Someone Like You. This book, he said, has no adjectives. He pointed to a passage that recounts the protagonist's birthday; she tells us she received "a keychain" from her best friend. The writing student said: "just a keychain? why not a keychain shaped like a pig? or a joke keychain? it's a detail - the mention of the keychain - that totally fails to tell us anything about any of the characters."
This launched us on a discussion of the Missing Adjectives in the book, and how that had a kind of flattening effect - it was great.
Other writers get wrapped up in defending the intention and prerogatives of the author no matter what; those often stem from a writer's own anxiety about her work being mis-read, misunderstood. This I can appreciate, but is also a critical and interpretive dead end.
But the overwhelming criticism - the biggest block I have to chip away at - is the idea that the texts are "just stories. just entertainment. just a kid's book."
In discussing Peter Pan in class, I asked the class something to the effect of "how do we feel about Peter's fate, his never-growing-up-ness, by the end of the novel? Is it good, bad, neutral?"
Several people responded with varying answers (and how I love when they have diverse reactions), and one said "it's not like he's a real person." She seemed to be suggesting that this unrealness made answering my initial question almost moot: how can you form an opinion, or an emotional reaction, about a person who doesn't exist?
In some ways, it's not a bad question, though for me as a reader it's both frustrating and baffling. But I think my bafflement is a mirror image of that (and other) student's frustration. My sense of why read, why books, why stories, has so many facets and many of them have to do precisely with my opinions and emotional reactions to nonexistent people. I read for plot and pleasure, of course, but my brain also runs a kind of critical background scan all the while, thinking about representations of women and children and play and reading and toys and so on. For me it makes almost NO sense - in an almost-literal way - to not do this kind of critical reading. But for today's student (and many like her who have expressed identical positions), I think her worldview, her brain, is calibrated in such a way that it makes NO sense to do that kind of critical reading.
It's a really fundamental difference in how one sees reading and story. Obviously, I'm terribly biased and think that my way is the right/best way, but this isn't a question with right or best answers. In the way that I think and see in stories and texts, other people think and see in numbers or logic patterns or mechanized forms. I'm essentially incapable of thinking in numbers, and I shook off my mathematical training as quickly as I could (after junior year of high school, I let it all slide out of my mind). For other people, including students like these, they did that with their english classes.

The difference, I think, comes in how we handle being confronted with the opposite of our way of thinking. I sulked through math classes, and repeatedly asked my parents why such a hideous thing was being inflicted upon me, since it clearly had no practical application (don't know why I was a math-only utilitarian, but there it is). My parents' answer: it's training different parts of your brain.
This is actually an excellent answer, possibly the only answer, to why am I being forced to learn/do this?
It was not satisfying to me as a 15-year-old, but even fairly early on in college, once the book-nerd part of my brain was being trained effectively for the first time ever, I began to understand and appreciate the idea of math training.
If I got plunked into a math class of some kind, I don't think I'd put up a wall of resistance. I wouldn't, though I'd be tempted, to pull a Calvin & Hobbes "math atheist" move. Being a hippie-dippy liberal-artist literature nerd has the effect of making me open to multiple interpretations, lots of possibilities, to the idea that there are no hierarchies or essential right/wrong, good/bad binaries.
But science-oriented people often function in the opposite way. They do see hierarchies and right and wrong binaries. These are the students who ask, at the end of a class, "so what DOES this book mean?" as if there was one simple answer. I always turn that question back to them, and sometimes I can see their frustration: "you're the teacher, why won't you just tell me the answer?!"
And maybe, as a corollary, their minds work in such a way that if there is no answer (no right answer), then that thing loses a lot of its meaning and value. So a text becomes "just a story," just a thing with no intrinsic value, a thing that is good or useful only for the length of time it takes to read. Once you set the book down, it's a done thing; it's used, used up, and you'd no more spend time pondering it than you would spend examining a grubby paper towel.

So the challenge then becomes how can you break through that, even for a bit, even just for a semester? How can you bring those students to a position where they are at least willing to start from the belief that there IS more than a story?

I wonder, sometimes, at the students who come in on day one, and leave on the final day, firmly believing that it's just a story. They must feel they've wasted their time terribly. But it also makes me wonder what is at stake for them; what is the fear/anxiety/resistance an expression of? What would it mean for them to accept the multiplicity of meanings, the idea that books can move people, that they can have an affect and an effect, that they can reflect and shape cultures?
Many of these "resistant" students are quite bright; they're not apathetic slackers. Very often, they're extremely smart and good at their fields - the engineers, the pre-med kids, the math majors, etc. So I can't chalk up their resistance to a lack of intellectual ability, or even a lack of curiosity.

Is it that for them to accept that their are many truths, and no fixed Truth, is as horrifying as it would be for me to accept that there is just a fixed Truth?

If this is the case, then, how do I negotiate some kind of middle way, some path that isn't horrifying to either of us?

It's a complicated question, and though my kneejerk reaction is to simply say: Well, this is a disciplinary issue; in literature, it's truths not Truth, and you'll just have to suck it up.
But then I think: how would I feel, dropped into a class where my instructor was insisting that it's Truth, not truths?


I do wonder how other instructors deal with this; how do you go about convincing those devout unbelievers that literature has value at many levels?

A Peter Pan aside

listening to an archived episode of BBC Radio 4's amazing nerdy-intellectual program "In Our Time," (about fairies) one of the guests said, in a most matter-of-fact tone:

What Peter Pan is really about is dead children. Every Wendy-house is a kind of tomb, really.

I love that the guest (Diane Purkiss) says this in such a decided tone, as if there were no disagreement at all about the place of dead children in Peter Pan.

Purkiss also mentions - and my mind is blown - a Persian demon or spirit called Kubu, who is evidently a lost dead child, much like Peter Pan, who seeks other children to keep him company (in other words: Kubu will kill your babies so he can have friends). Some quick googling doesn't turn up much except - oddly - a geography paper about salt and henna and spiritual beliefs, which mentions Kubu, a "manifestation of a stillborn child."

For more Peter Pan thoughts (including a guest post by me!), please see Jonathan Auxier's excellent, and excellently written, blog The Scop.

(disclaimer? note? Jonathan Auxier is the partner of a former classmate of mine at Pitt, children's literature scholar/current grad student Mary Burke Auxier. it's a small world)

boys in tights in tutus....

Friday night I went to see the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre's performance of PETER PAN. Despite having written my master's thesis on Pan, along with a number of smaller papers - I have never seen any kind of live production of the story. So despite not feeling overly enthused about a Pan ballet, I went.
(The Benedum center where the ballet is performed is EXQUISITE, incidentally, and was almost the highlight of my night).

I was encouraged when I opened my program to see that the choreographer is Septime Webre, the man who brought me this year's Washington Ballet version of The Nutcracker (which I saw, and LOVED).

But the ballet was uncompelling, and I'm not sure this is Septime Webre's fault. What makes Barrie's play/novel interesting to me - and so interesting, moving, dark and funny - is NOT the plot; it's the stage directions, the narrator's asides. The ballet, of course, being wordless, strips out all of this oddness and leaves us with only the bare bones of the story which - to tell you the truth - is not too compelling.

The ballet opens on a tediously long scene in the Darlings' nursery, with unspectacular choreography for the whole family - including one clever/creepy bit in which Wendy and her mother mirror each other's steps around Mr Darling. Nana is played by a dancer in a dog costume. John needed a shave, and Michael looked creepy in large-sized sleeper pajamas.
Eventually, Tinkerbell, in the form of a spotlight, turns up and flits around to what sounds like a cellphone ring tone. I sighed. The music for this was swoopy and treacly and canned - no live orchestra - and made me want to vomit. Imagine a cross between a Disney soundtrack, a bad John Williams score with a little hoked-up Gershwinian freneticness thrown in, and you've almost got it.

Peter flies up into the window, hurrah for theatrical technology. A long strange sequence of Peter and his black sheer fabric shadow. Eventually, after much awkward and ill-disguised rigging (the dancers backed into the curtains at the nursery window to be hitched into their flying apparatus) the children fly off to neverland.

which is represented by a series of filmstrip-like rudimentary cartoons of a receding view of London.

sigh again.

Neverland. blah blah Lost Boys including three lost girls (which irked me badly). Wendy is shot and dangles to the stage, looking frighteningly like she's been hanged, and is twisting at the end of a rope, rather than simply falling from the sky.
Instead of causing Wendy to be shot, Tink (now a full-fledged ballerina) twinkles around preciously and revives her. Three cheers.

Various divertissement from Lost Kids and Pirates. Hook was quite dashing and made me think of Jack Sparrow. Hook, textually, has always been a bit of a dandy, a bit queer, to my mind - seeing the Sparrowesque treatment made me think perhaps Johnny Depp wasn't being quite so original in his vision of Jack Sparrow afterall.

The showstealer - the Crocodile - appears. A dancer in quite an awesome croc suit, the Crocodile slithers on stage to a vaguely disco beat (plus the ticking clock). eventually, he becomes bipedal and rocks out some great little hip-hop/disco dance steps. Everyone laughed and applauded uproariously.

The second showstealer - the Indian maids (dressed weirdly in red with what looked like waitress aprons) did a GORGEOUS piece with good music. Tiger Lily, performed by one of the principal dancers, was wonderful. I was pleased as well because, other than being marked in the program as "Indian maids" there was virtually NOTHING about their costume or dance that was "indian." This is good because the Indian sequence of Pan is often a big fat offensive mass of nasty stereotypes. But Tiger Lily's choreography was beautiful, beautiful - and also repeated a wonderful combination that Webre used in the "arabian" divertissement of his Nutcracker (which, incidentally, also used native americans instead of 'arabians').

Happily sighing over this bit of beauty - the score here was lovely as well - I was vastly disappointed with everything else except the crocodile. Peter puts on a fluffy tutu and veil and dances in drag with Hook to get Tiger Lily free. This was great because it got at some of the utter queerness and unfathomableness of Barrie's original, but it was also sort of overdetermined and creepy to see (I found the ballet's Peter quite disturbing to look at, regardless of costume).

Intermission. Many children in the audience rush to the lobby to have stuffed animals bought for them.

Resume ballet. Extraordinarily drawn out and uninteresting Pirate Dancing on the ship. Undercutting the earlier queerness of the first Pirate dance number, we now have Pirate Wenches boozing it up. boring.
the kids are kidnapped.
Michael is forced to walk the plank, and reappears moments later riding the back of the Crocodile, doing the john travolta "eyes" move from Pulp Fiction. the two boogie across stage, discoing off into the sunset.
Peter shows up in time to rescue wendy. flitting around. Fight sequence. Peter does a few flips in midair (thanks, harness!) which get a lot of applause. Hook is eventually vanquished. This is represented with the final awesome bit -

Hook and the Crocodile dance together. Not just any dance - they do a modified TANGO. it was great - really brilliant.

but it's time for the little Darlings to fly away home, so Peter sends them on their way. Now we get another tediously long and boring sequence in the Darling home. Peter sways back and forth outside the window, clearly unable to control his flying apparatus. he looks very peculiar and pendulumic as he ticks back and forth.
All the Darlings but Wendy exit, I'm not sure why, because Wendy only does a few lame steps before also vanishing offstage after clasping her hands to her bosom and gazing halfway toward the window (through which Peter Pendulum is ticking).

Show's over.

The Crocodile got the most applause. Tiger Lily got the second most. I gave her a standing ovation, because her dance was truly exquisite.

Lesson learned: the story of Peter Pan is not very interesting, and makes for poor ballet theatre.

The Pgh Ballet announced though, that next spring, they will have the North American premiere of ALICE IN WONDERLAND. I will attend. I think Alice should translate significantly better to a wordless stage, provided the choreography and sets are done right.