Baums Ambivalent Vision :: Literature Children Books Papers

Baums Ambivalent good dealPerhaps more completely than any other printr, the person who hopes to save successful childrens literature must become a child again, to write with that combination of seriousness, simplicity, and wonder children demand in their stories they will read no others. Arguably, then--because his books have been read and reread by generations of children--L. Frank Baum possesses this quality, this childlikeness, to a vast degree. It is a crucial attribute for writers, one that Erich von Neumann calls a special(prenominal) animation of the unconscious and defines asthe notional mans special kind of alertness. He usually possesses it even as a child, but this alertness is non identical with the reflecting consciousness of a precocious intellect. The childhood state of the creative individual can be characterized no better than in Hlderlins words und schlummert wachenden Schlaf (and slumbers in waking sleep). In this state of alertness the child is open to a world, to an overwhelming unitary reality that surpasses and overpowers him on all sides. At once sheltered and exposed, this waking sleep, for which there is as yet no outside and no inside, is the unforgettable possession of the creative man. (Creative Man and Transformation 180) The special, creative state Neumann describes is functionally an altered state of consciousness, one achieved in a writers fibre not by drugs, fasting, or meditation, but by simple tightness in a relaxed posture, the restriction of the mind to a blank fraction of paper as the writer sits at his or her desk, waiting for whatever will come. Because it is a variety of altered state, because most of the study phenomena of such states overlap (Mogar 385), because one of these phenomena is a shift toward increased imagery, and because the images themselves follow a remarkably regular pattern--it is possible to construct from various sources a aerial schema that indicates just how a particular writer reac ts to this heightened sense of the unconscious--with a sense of joy, of fear, or of ambivalence.The first of these sources is Aldous Huxleys Heaven and Hell, in which he identifies the major imagery of visionary states as a sense of light and colouring in intricate, geometric forms resembling jewels and/or flowers (103-04). This is true in both the dictatorial and the negative visions Huxley identifies, though the jewels and flowers seem divine in the first slip-up and demonic in the second. The latter, the terrible