Like many of you, I just posted grades (I hope most of you are finished as well.), attended graduation, and I am getting ready to spend time with family. Even though I need to catch my breathe at the end of a semester, one of the ways I do that is by checking off some books of my "to read" list. Another thing I do to recharge is to try on new ideas in order to get ready for new classes and writing projects. One colleague who keeps me thinking is Dr. Stacy Graber, an assistant Professor at Youngstown State, the home of the Youngstown State English Festival, (it will be celebrating its 40th Anniverary this year so check the link.) Some of their guest authors will be attending the YA Summit in Las Vegas this summer, but more on that in a couple of weeks.
Back to Stacy. She is a frequent contributor to Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday with three previous posts: (2015, December, 30). Reflections on Jack Gantos’ Dead End in Norvelt, Love It or List It, and Place Loyalty, Graber, S. (2016, Aug, 3) Engaging Students as Curriculum Designers: Reflections on an Insight Session at the 2016, YSU English Festival, and (May 16, 2017) "Let's Play a Game: 5 of..." . Stacy never fails to push my thinking. She has a knack for connecting YA to pop culture and film. Once again, she has me rethinking about book that I know and love. Let Stacy give you something to think about during your break.
Back to Stacy. She is a frequent contributor to Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday with three previous posts: (2015, December, 30). Reflections on Jack Gantos’ Dead End in Norvelt, Love It or List It, and Place Loyalty, Graber, S. (2016, Aug, 3) Engaging Students as Curriculum Designers: Reflections on an Insight Session at the 2016, YSU English Festival, and (May 16, 2017) "Let's Play a Game: 5 of..." . Stacy never fails to push my thinking. She has a knack for connecting YA to pop culture and film. Once again, she has me rethinking about book that I know and love. Let Stacy give you something to think about during your break.
Was it that time in the semester (--2 weeks out from final exams, when teachers are depleted and no shock of Emergen-C, Airborne, or Zicam is able to stave off the inevitable fever) which caused me to interpret DiCamillo’s (2000) Because of Winn-Dixie as a kind of kid-lit version of Buñuel’s (1967) The Exterminating Angel?
Perhaps. Yet, in this case, I think exhaustion did me imaginative good because, upon returning to that classic story of friendship, father-daughter conflict, and loss, I saw purgatory.
Perhaps. Yet, in this case, I think exhaustion did me imaginative good because, upon returning to that classic story of friendship, father-daughter conflict, and loss, I saw purgatory.
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I’m not talking about purgatory in the traditional, religious sense of a holding place for the expiation of sin, but rather as a liminal space or place of psychic paralysis, wherein ghosts perpetually rehearse and recycle old torments (e.g., personal tragedies, misfortunes, and regrets). I saw repetition and penance everywhere in my reading of DiCamillo’s classic, and suddenly Winn-Dixie did not seem that much like a children’s book at all. At least, not according to the definition provided by Short, Lynch-Brown, and Tomlinson (2018), as “books that children see as reflecting their life experience, understandings, and emotions” (p. 4). Rather, Winn-Dixie offered a peculiarly adult expression of suffering and remorse, like the one conveyed by T.S. Eliot (1930) in “Ash Wednesday,” when the poet implores: “And pray that I may forget / These matters that with myself I too much discuss / Too much explain…”
I do not think it diminishes the depth of kid-lit to say that a book does and does not sound like something written for children, but rather reinforces its complexity. For instance, the same argument might be made for Creech’s (1994) Walk Two Moons, which comes as close to rendering the lonely, interior lives of female characters as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or To the Lighthouse (1927). What I am saying is that, upon returning to Winn-Dixie, it attests to “strange matters,” not easily recognizable or reconcilable.
I do not think it diminishes the depth of kid-lit to say that a book does and does not sound like something written for children, but rather reinforces its complexity. For instance, the same argument might be made for Creech’s (1994) Walk Two Moons, which comes as close to rendering the lonely, interior lives of female characters as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or To the Lighthouse (1927). What I am saying is that, upon returning to Winn-Dixie, it attests to “strange matters,” not easily recognizable or reconcilable.
 |  1st edition cover https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17701246 |  1st edition cover |
For instance, everyone in DiCamillo’s town of Naomi, Florida is hostage to aching grief and regret and, in this state of limbo, the spirits move through a semblance of life hollowed out, continuously reiterating personal disappointments and calamities (--except for the cheerful dog who functions as the presiding deity in the ghost town). Opal’s father, the Preacher, guiltily replays the abandonment by his wife. Miss Franny, the librarian, retells her family story of hubris and death. Gloria Dump, the purported “witch,” maintains a “mistake tree,” the liquor bottles suspended from which echo her errors of past excess. Otis, the Orphic guitarist, re-inflicts the sting of his jail sentence by consigning himself to work in a place consisting entirely of cages. Amanda, the “pinch-faced girl,” wears an expression contorted by pain, haunted by her brother’s drowning. Opal, DiCamillo’s protagonist, ceaselessly repeats the fact that she is motherless and methodically recites a catalogue of descriptors for the parent she will never know. And, everyone in the town eats a magical candy that acts as like a gustatory rewind button accessing old heartbreaks and disasters. This Mobius strip of pain signals only purgatorial angst (ergo the inescapable dinner party reference in the beginning).
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The impulse for reoccurrence in the book is strong and may be most viscerally captured by Opal who describes the feeling of her mother’s desertion as a searching tongue returning to the site of a lost tooth and feeling the bloody gap forever (DiCamillo, 2000).
| What is going on here? Before you cleave too comfortably to the saccharine old, redemptive power of friendship and community theme that seems to have satisfied reviewers, think about this additional, micro-act of repetition: Opal returns to Gloria Dump, ostensibly, the only person of color in the book, and reads her the first two chapters from—of all things--Gone With the Wind (recommended by the librarian, Miss Franny). You don’t have to be James Loewen to know that’s bad news, considering the controversy surrounding Mitchell’s (1936) offensive stereotyping and romanticization of slavery. Although we learn that Gloria enjoys hearing of the soap-operatic doings of pampered Scarlett, surely Ms. Dump would have no patience for the racial epithets, the bigoted portrayal of Mammy and Jeems, and the absurd characterization of Gerald O’Hara as a “tender-hearted” slaveholder. Related to that, one of my students reminded our class of Miss Franny’s disdain for the “wild men” and “wild women” (possibly a pejorative reference to the Seminoles) who tried to enter her library back in Floridian history (DiCamillo, 2000). At first the connection seemed puzzling, but Loewen (1995) writes that the Seminole Wars were fueled by “the Seminoles’ refusal to surrender their African American members,” and that the Everglades were pursued not for their worth, but as a means “to eliminate a refuge for runaway slaves” (p. 151). At that point, I started to wonder whether the purgatorial town of Naomi, Florida was a sort of allegorical critique of the nation’s failure to attain racial equality. |  |
Basically, everyone in Naomi seems incapable of forward movement and the stasis suggests collective corrosion…until Opal copies the idea from Gone With the Wind to host a big dinner party, like the barbeque held at the Wilkes’ plantation, and then an Old Testament-level storm washes away the egg salad and punch. The smiling dog is lost and found and, by the end, readers are meant to believe that, like the magical candy, life is the inescapable unity of “sweetness and sorrow.” However, thinking about the situation more deeply, it doesn’t seem convincing when considered against the reality of, say, the violence of racism, which isn’t something externally visited upon us but locally produced.
In materials issued by Candlewick Press, DiCamillo remarks that Because of Winn-Dixie is “a hymn of praise to dogs, friendship, and the South.” The celebration of dogs I get, but the rest perplexes me because I am not convinced this is the most flattering regional portrait. Likewise, the strange conclusion or point at which the story unaccountably flat-lines signifies a larger problem: the stall in the public imagination to think productively outside of binaries or the ghosts of division.
Stacy Graber can be reached at sgraber@ysu.edu
Until next week.
Stacy Graber can be reached at sgraber@ysu.edu
Until next week.
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