“Here is the repulsant snozzcumber!” cried the BFG, waving it about. “I squoggle it! I mispise it! I dispunge it! But because I is refusing to gobble up human beans like the other giants, I must spend my life guzzling up icky-poo snozzcumbers instead!”
— from Roald Dahl’s The BFG
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously claimed that the interests of reason combine in three questions, one of which is “What may I hope?” . . . His solution: We may hope for the ultimate good, the summum bonum — happiness in proportion to virtue.
— from Jacob M. Held’s “On Getting Our Just Desserts: Willy Wonka, Immanuel Kant and the Summum Bonum,” collected in Roald Dahl and Philosophy
Roald Dahl was born a hundred years ago this week — on September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, Wales (now part of Cardiff). Dahl’s Norwegian parents were not involved with it directly, but coal mining dominated South Wales, the hardships of the pit the only option for many of Dahl’s contemporaries. The dark vein that runs through many of his tales for children reflects, in part, his observation that life sometimes offers only snozzcumber to those who deserve chocolate.
But Dahl’s dark streak has other roots. Dahl dedicated The BFG to his daughter, Olivia, who died from measles in 1962, aged seven. Two years earlier, his infant son was severely injured when hit by a New York taxicab; three years later his wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered a series of cerebral aneurysms that put her in a coma, leading to years of rehabilitation. Dahl’s older sister died of appendicitis when he was just a three-year-old, and then weeks later his father died of pneumonia. In his biography Storyteller, Donald Sturrock reads Dahl’s first adult novel, Sometime Never (1948), as a reflection of the psychological scars that resulted from his WWII service in the RAF and perhaps triggered his career as a writer. The story is a nuclear holocaust fable; the protagonist is a pilot who loved to fly but whose only recourse now, says Sturrock, is flight of fancy:
His reasonable exterior disguises “a black despair, a deep and certain fatalism which made him impatient with the great importance which all men attached to their own individual lives.” . . . And this despair, this loss of rapture and fantasy, will remain uncured. “A solemn person, whose quick and distant eyes told of a mind behind the eyes which travelled often in remote outlandish places far away.”
The pilot is killed suddenly, by the bomb that launches World War Three. Dahl himself built a writing hut at the bottom of his garden and moved on to children’s stories, devising the remote, outlandish places that have charmed the world — his books translated into sixty languages, his grateful readers leaving toys and notes on his grave in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.
Dahl may or may not be “the world’s number one storyteller” (his website), or the “greatest storyteller of all time” (his publisher), but he is ample proof for the thesis behind Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Gottschall’s book discusses new developments in the sciences and humanities that shed light on “the primate Homo fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind.” He explores “the deep patterns in the happy mayhem of children’s make-believe and what they reveal about story’s prehistoric origins.” He analyzes how fiction “powerfully modifies culture and history,” how our brains impose narrative structure on our daily lives and provide us with “the psychotically creative night stories we call dreams.” And he offers this warning about the empty-calorie fictional foods that surround us today:
[I]t could be that an intense greed for story was healthy for our ancestors but has some harmful consequences in a world where books, MP3 players, TVs, and iPhones make story omnipresent — and where we have, in romance novels and television shows like Jersey Shore, something like the story equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies. I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd [On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction] is right to wonder if overconsuming in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a “mental diabetes epidemic.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2cmfCdk
Sig Nordal 