“Maurice Sendak’s Theater of the Abject”*

Karen Coats
Illinois State University

*Presentation will include slides.

             The three titles of Maurice Sendak’s famous picture book trilogy, Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There, name what Judith Butler calls “zones of uninhabitability,” places of abjection that form the borders of the self as both its constitutive outside and its intimate interior. These are dangerous places in the geography of childhood, places where the child’s very life and sense of self is threatened. More frightening still, they are present places, places that exist in the same time that the child inhabits, rather than the once upon a mythical time of fairy tales and legends. Hence they are places that beckon the child to trespass the boundaries of their current lived social and material landscapes and explore. What does happen where the wild things are? What goes on in the night kitchen? What fascinations lurk outside over there?

In the first book, Where the Wild Things Are, Max wants to be a “wild thing,” that is, he wants to live his body in a raw, socially unacceptable way. His mother is at first complicit (presumably it is she who has provided him with a wolf suit), but when he threatens to consume first his dog (he chases him with a fork—see first transparency), and then her (“I’ll eat you up!”), she responds by sending him to his room without supper. Hence Max is being forced to reject his animality and his cannibalistic impulses, his desire to consume the (m)other. The oral-sadistic drive is a persistent one in fantasy of the abject; it is a theme that Sendak plays with on more than one occasion. (show next transparency) Max is faced with a choice between his desire to negate the other through bodily incorporation—a move that involves the disavowal of loss that would lead to melancholy—and a desire to transcend the mother/other through identification with her phallic power. Sendak negotiates for Max the second option through a fantasy of reciprocity: If Max as a Wild Thing wants to eat the other, what is to stop the Wild Things from eating him? Indeed they say to him “we’ll eat you up, we love you so!  This sort of love is regressive and fundamentally narcissistic, a desire to retreat to an earlier state of being where otherness is foreclosed as such. The path of love that Max follows instead is developmentally progressive; instead of giving in to the drive to merge with her, he sets her up as Other, and sees things from her relatively more complex point of view by way of identification.

Hence, in the end, the cold fare of raw Wild Thing pales in comparison with the “still hot” food his mother offers, so Max opts to go home. It seems in some sense like a tragic loss—to give up one’s wild appetites for the domesticated pleasures of the social suggests a sacrifice of one’s desire to the field of the other. But psychoanalysis teaches us that the field of the other is the only playing field on which one’s desires may in fact romp—desire is the desire of the other. As the text reveals, giving up his cannibalistic desires does not entail a total loss of bodily jouissance for Max. Instead, he is strengthened and visibly satisfied by his visit to the borderlands of his socially constructed identity (show slide). In fact, Max’s identification with his mother works to manage his oral-sadistic drive in a loving way. Specifically, he has identified with her exercise of power over him as a wild thing. In taking up his scepter and instructing the wild things to begin their wild rumpus, we can see that his mother authorizes and lovingly supports his errant drive energies. Rather than attempting to repress them, Max remaps his room so that these forces are appropriately seen as part of who he is. He accepts responsibility for them, as Freud says we should accept responsibility for the evil impulses that appear in one’s dreams, and gives them a present home—it is where the wild things are, not where they were.  Max’s journey then is a triumphant, and relatively simple one; though he ultimately discovers that the island of the wild things is uninhabitable for him, since it precludes love, he nevertheless creates a place that will persist in and for Max whenever he needs to visit it.

            Mickey’s journey to the night kitchen involves a more complex repudiation and embrace. First he must give up his desire for his mother, indicated by the many suggestions that this is a primal scene fantasy (slide). As Mickey falls through the house into the night kitchen, he falls out of his clothes, passes his mother and father’s bedroom, and ultimately lands in a huge bowl of dough. The bakers mistake Mickey for the milk they need for their batter, so they stir him into the dough, which is then placed in a “Mickey oven.” Certainly a regressive fantasy, the book thus takes us through the fear and anger of the child’s relationship to the primal scene, into the potential reincorporation into the maternal body, which is what the primal scene hinges on anyway. Encompassed in that fantasy are the jealousy of the father’s access to the interior spaces of the maternal body, the drive to know one’s origins, and the fear/desire to return to the maternal womb. A “night kitchen” is an uncannily apt figure for this fantasy—the kitchen is associated with the mother, but the night is associated with sexuality as well as the unknown. Mickey seems doomed, as black smoke belches from the Mickey oven. But he emerges from the dough and asserts his identity, specifically as unconnected to the maternal body. “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!” (slide) Now, this triumphant rejection of his connection or indebtedness to the maternal body could easily lead to the abjection of embodiment per se, according to Kristeva in Powers of Horror. Indeed Kristeva asserts that the child’s acquisition of syntax represents his first victory over the mother; this is elegantly figured in Mickey’s breaking free of the suffocating dough with his verbal assertion of identity. But Sendak, in this story as in the previous one, continually reinforces the joys of embodiment. Mickey doesn’t reject milk, he simply rejects his assimilation to it. As does Max, Mickey renders his mother, this time her body as represented by the dough, Other, in order that he may identify with rather than be incorporated by her. When he falls into the raw dough, he pounds and shapes that dough into a plane and a suit of clothes, (slide) suggesting a motility that is usually sacrificed or displaced from the body onto the Symbolic as the child develops. In terms of identificatory possibilities, however, it also suggests the shape-shifting of the pregnant body, rendered through a child-like perspective of infinite possibilities—if a human body can change its shape as dramatically as it does in pregnancy, why couldn’t my body become a plane or a cookie?

In fact, the body Mickey inhabits is not a clean and proper social body any more than Max’s cannibalistic wild things are. There is something deliciously gross and sensual about falling naked into a big bowl of dough—but it is certainly not socially acceptable, any more than finding a naked, anatomically correct male child in the pages of a children’s book has proved to be for some librarians and critics. Moreover, its jubilatory shape-shifting is not acceptable social body-casting, either, though it is amazingly prevalent in children’s literature—ever since Alice, one never knows what one’s body will do. Mickey, as it turns out, goes on to produce his own “milk,” (slide) suggesting that he has acquired a boy body that is distinctly separate from the body of his mother, and yet remains connected to it. Instead of ignoring his debt to the maternal body, Mickey celebrates it—“I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me. God bless milk and God bless me!” Max finds a place within for his wild things, and Mickey finds a place within for the maternal body. Again, the iterability of this act is reinforced by Sendak’s language— rather than being a one-time triumph, Mickey’s feat is “why we have cake every morning” (emphasis added). (slide)

            In these first two texts, then, we have the makings for abjection which would leave the children neither subjects nor objects, and yet somehow that which is not clean and proper, with respect to bodies at any rate, is embraced; the fragile boundaries of the self are breached but the children manage to situate those boundaries as playgrounds rather than minefields. The final text of the trilogy is the most enigmatic, and, it would seem, the only text where the child gives something up without an accompanying surplus of jouissance. Significantly, the primary relationship in Outside Over There shifts from a boy and his mom to a girl and her father, suggesting perhaps that this relationship involves a firmer repudiation, a more absolute separation from one’s jouissance. Here it would seem that it is Ida herself who is abjected, when her parents’ desire turns elsewhere. But it soon becomes clear that this is an oedipal fantasy. Ida’s father has gone to sea, leaving Ida, her mother and her sister behind. As Ida’s mother languishes dejectedly in the garden, Ida takes on the role of mother to her baby sister. Ida seems on the verge of slipping into a depression herself—she ignores the specters haunting the garden, and ignores her sister as she plays her “wonder horn” as she longs for her father. This inappropriate desire for her father appropriately results in the replacement of her real sister with an ice baby (slide). Whereas Max and Mickey can identify with their mothers with positive results, Ida’s identification results in something that must be corrected—specifically, that must be ab-jected, in order for Ida to take her proper place. Instead of having a wild rumpus with her wild things, instead of teasing and ultimately assisting the bakers in the night kitchen, Ida must go “outside over there” to the abject borders of her identity and drive out her incestuous desires so that she can establish a properly desexualized relationship to her father.

There are several points of interest in this complex fantasy. First, the bodies of the goblins who kidnapped her sister are baby bodies, (slide) suggesting that the infant body—naked, unmarked, prediscursive--is that which must be abjected.  If it isn’t, it becomes an unnatural, subterranean threat to social existence. At first, Ida can’t distinguish her sister among the goblins. This absence of particularity is the result of a logic of abjection wherein we develop identities based on exclusions of what we are not rather than affirmations of what we are. But Ida hears her father’s voice—he tells her that playing her wonder horn will break up the goblin wedding. In fact, Ida’s playing on her horn dissolves the goblin bodies by making them dance against their will until they melt into a stream. (slide)This can be read, I think, as a cautionary tale in two senses: in the first place, the unholy drive energies of the goblins spell their own doom—repressed drives become our masters, hence Ida must clearly not simply repress the fantasized circuit of adult/child erotic desire (the goblins steal her sister to make her a “nasty goblin bride”), but must somehow make a space for it, as do Max and Mickey. But since Ida’s desire is sexual (and is also likened more to a drive than to the substitutionary logic of desire) rather than a fantasy of consumption or incorporation, it seems that Sendak is unwilling to leave her with a corporeal register for it. Instead, she sublimates her drive through her music—the playing of the wonder horn. (This reading is reinforced by the repeated and otherwise inexplicable presence of Mozart throughout the book.) Ida’s playing “cures” her of her own desire for an unholy alliance—an incestuous relationship with her father. Hence the second lesson, after not giving into or simply repressing certain kind of drives, is to do something with them, to sublimate them through art or music, and hence to escape their bodily remnant. Ida returns from outside, over there with a renewed sense of responsibility to her father and her mother and sister, articulated, significantly enough, in a letter from her still absent father. He is not there to help her lovingly take responsibility for her drive energies, or to restore her sense of the jubilant connectedness of bodies. For the first time in Sendak’s trilogy, going into an abject space is figured as a “serious mistake.” It is only the father’s disembodied voice that helps Ida negotiate that space successfully, suggesting that for Ida, at least, a repudiation of the body is what is necessary for her to acquire her proper place. But since it is only, again, with his disembodied voice that her efforts are rewarded, the satisfaction of her victory is substantially less than that of Max and Mickey. (slide)

            Reading this trilogy as it bears on the logic of abjection suggests to me that childhood itself has come to represent a “zone of uninhabitability,” precisely because it is a place where we keep a certain kind of excrement that must be expelled from the clean and proper social body. Who does reside in this zone of uninhabitability? For Sendak, wild things, phantasmatic bakers, goblins. For other writers, witches, ogres, talking animals, animate puppets, living toys, sensate plants, uncontrollable appetites, unlimited sleep, unbounded sensual pleasures. But what do these beings signify? Why are they the specific abject inhabitants of this region? What we leave behind in childhood is unreconstituted drive energies as well as our prohibited desires—these beings represent the excretions of our jouissance. Max must excrete his wild things—his corporeal existence itself as animal, violent, cannibalistic. Mickey must excrete his desire for his mother, and Ida must excrete her desire for her father. Despite the triumphs of Max and Mickey, the embodied desires of our childhood selves are intimately connected to our adult selves, and yet must be abjected in order that we might inhabit those selves, on both a personal and a social level.  These books outline the fraught fantasies of embodiment that must be worked through in childhood—fantasies of cannibalistic consumption, of the morph-ability of bodies, of infantile sexuality—in order to construct the lived body of adulthood. But as Sendak understands, these fantasies never completely go away, but always return to haunt or thrill the adult subject as terror and jouissance.

Works Cited:

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

Kristeva, Julia. “Place Names.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.

-----. Powers of Horror. Trans. by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Sendak, Maurice. In the Night Kitchen. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

-----. Outside Over There. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

-----. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.