In the night kitchen

Helena Iara loves the story of Mickey, who heard a racket in the night, and screamed, "Quiet down there!"  Many other parents can say the same about their own kids and In the Night Kitchen, but the popularity of the book shouldn't hide from us how deeply strange it is.  From the first moment -- when the child (and not the parents) call for quiet -- to the last page -- "And that's why, thanks to Mickey, we eat cake every morning" -- the text is just weird, at least if you look at it with any critical distance.

I'm not the first to point out that something psychoanalytic is going on here: the secondary literature is full of claims that In the Night Kitchen is oneiric, onanistic, and ontological.  What interests me is actually that frame, the first and the last pages where Mickey first hears a sound he can't understand, and the end, turning the whole tale into a kind of "just-so story" that isn't actually true (we don't "have cake every morning.").  Since Helena's nascent storytelling address the structure of the tale than the content, it's worthwhile to think the same way about the stories she likes.

Here's the way that Mladen Dolar summarizes the Freudo-Lacanian theory of fantasy:

When the infant hears, he should not be able to understand anything; when the adult understands, he should not be traumatized; but both of these extremes are impossible: the non-understanding is being derailed, and the understanding does not put it back on track.  The subject is always stuck between voice and understanding, caught in the temporality of fantasy and desire.  In the simplified retroactive perspective, there is the "object voice" in the beginning, followed by the signifier which is a way of making sense of it, of coming to terms with the voice.  But we can see by this simple little scheme that the signifier is always taken hostage by fantasy, it is "always already" inscribed in its economy, it always emerges as a compromise formation.  There is a temporal vector between the voice (the incomprehensible, the traumatic) and the signifier (the articulation, the rationalization), and what links the two, in this precipitating and retroactive temporality, is fantasy as the juncture of the two….

Maurice Sendak seems to be explaining the same process, but with less complicated words and better pictures: Mickey hears his parents having sex, and doesn't understand it.  His brain scrambles around to understand what he hears, and though subconsciously he knows there is something sexual going on (he is naked for the whole book, after all), it makes more sense to fantasize a world under his own where bakers make cake and a boy can turn bread dough into an airplane.  By the time that he makes it back into his bed, he has developed a whole theory of the world ("and that's why") that also seems to catch a bit about reproduction.

(I wonder if Mickey had heard somewhere that old and almost vulgar euphemism that a pregnant woman "has a bun in the oven"?  Rita and I worked with a group of kids from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to re-tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and their version ends with Granny marrying the Big Bad Wolf.  We've always wondered if that didn't emerge because the storyteller has heard that "so-and-so ate so-and-so", a Brazilian way of referring to sex.  So if the Big Bad Wolf already ate Grandma, they might as well get married...).

In the end, the process that creates fantasy may seem like detour on the way to truth, or an actual impediment to understanding.  But I think this walk between "I don't understand" and "ahh...", whether it relates to sex or not, is one of the most beautiful things about childhood.  It's the way we learn, create, and come up with explanations that are much more interesting than the boring truth.