ENGL 3830, Literature for the Intermediate Reader

ENGL 3830, Literature for the Intermediate Reader Discussion of Gooding’s Essay/Homework Spring 2012

Gooding, Richard. “’Something Very Old and Very Slow’: Coraline, Uncanniness, and Narrative Form." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 33.4 (2008): 390-407.

Notes on the Text

1. Early reviewers of Coraline noted that the text reflected two characteristics that are commonly viewed as important aspects of a psychoanalytic reading: the sense of eeriness/instability evoked by the text and the sense that the text was concerned, in part, with subconscious processes. 2. Other reviewers pointed out that the nature of the text begged the question of whether it was appropriate for young readers. Gooding provides Gaiman’s response to the controversy: that the novel is meant for a dual audience and that adults are much more likely than children to find the novel frightening. 3. Gooding cautions that we must take a writer’s own interpretation of his or her work with the understanding of the potential bias that may exist. Gooding also calls into question the veracity of Gaiman’s statement that children would not be afraid of the text, and he provides examples from his own household to counter Gaiman’s claim. 4. Gooding then puts forward his thesis/plan for the essay: a. “despite the futility of assigning mutually exclusive readerly responses to adults and children, Gaiman's remarks suggest the possibility of theorizing a double audience, and the term they point toward is ‘the uncanny,’ a relative newcomer to the critical lexicon of children's literature.” b. “At the immediate level of style, uncanny effects disclose narratorial techniques that encourage the divergent responses upon which any double readership might rest. “ c. “Applied specifically to Coraline's affective responses, the uncanny offers clues to the psychological costs of Coraline's renegotiation of her relationship with her parents.” 5. Gooding turns to Freud in order to define the uncanny, which he sees as a “catalogue of elements that give rise to a queasy amalgam of recognition and unfamiliarity that (for the adult reader at least) ‘belongs to . . . all that arouses dread and creeping horror’ (368). These include doubles, déjà vu, the dead, the immediate granting of wishes, live burial, blinding, dismemberment, coincidences implying fate, inanimate objects coming to life, loss of distinction between imagination and reality, and occasions when a symbol ‘takes over the full functions and significance of the thing it symbolizes’” (398). 6. In a key distinction, Gooding notes that in order to appreciate fully “the uncanny,” a person must be able to recognize that a long ago repressed complex has been revived by an image or idea. However, because children are still in the process of repressing difficult or unpleasant ideation, they can’t really experience fully the uncanny in the way that adults can. This idea forms of the basis for Gooding’s claim regarding dual audiences. 7. In a very dense and complicated set of paragraphs, Gooding points out that in children’s fantasy texts, the uncanny is typically consigned to the fantasy world, while the realistic world provides the contrast. However, in Coraline, Gaiman blurs the border between the real and the fantastic right away: “The opening paragraphs, with their emphasis on agedness (‘It was a very old house . . . with huge old trees’[3]) and things being under other things (‘[I]t had an attic under the roof and a cellar under the ground and an overgrown garden’ [3]) are presented independent of Coraline's perspective and offer early indications that order is threatened by ancient and still hidden forces. The menacing undertones are soon intensified by the descent of a ‘mist that hung like blindness’ (21) and by the strange behavior of ‘the crazy old man upstairs’ (6), though at first his talk of mouse circuses can be explained away as the fabrications of a man who enjoys teasing children. Even the characters' names are subtly off-kilter: Coraline's defeats the adults around her, and the elision in Miss Spink's name hints at an identity collapsing in on itself.” 8. Gooding then goes on to consider how adults might find the world of the Other Mother to be very uncanny, as it is “a home that is familiar but unknown, an instance of what ‘ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light’ (Freud 376). There are doubles, the dead, talking animals, toys coming to life, the constant threat of blindness and mutilation (not only in the black button eyes of the other parents but also in Coraline's blinding of the other father and the bargain she strikes with the other mother), the apparent reading of Coraline's mind, immediate wish fulfillment, and so on.” 9. Gooding observes that children would be less likely to feel that the elements above are uncanny, and he notes that Coraline herself seems to accept some of these things without comment or overt reaction: “Coraline either does not understand or cannot confront her feelings, and the narrator teases out her emotions in a variety of ways. Spiders make Coraline ‘intensely uncomfortable’ (10), but with a single exception (81), subsequent references to spiders—literal and figurative—appear without clear indications of the emotions they provoke, and the reader is left the task of surmising Coraline's feelings.” 10. In the next section, Gooding focuses on Coraline’s state at the time before the adventure begins. Note that he quotes Coats’ article regarding the idea that Coraline’s boredom is a signal that she is entering puberty and must learn to think for herself, rather than expecting to be entertained by her parents. On the other hand, Gooding argues that Coraline has some legitimate grievances as well, and he points out that her first visit to the Other Mother’s mirror house involves wish fulfillment, not only for her but for other adults, such as Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, who are shown young again, and back on the stage. 11. Gooding notes that “as if in answer to an anger that is implied but never articulated, the other house is a place where all wishes are fulfilled—and not just for Coraline. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible return to the stage as their young selves to perform before an admiring audience ’f]or ever and always’(44), while their dogs eat nothing but the chocolate they are denied in the real world. For Coraline, the first trip establishes a family romance in which all her complaints against her parents are answered and her wishes fulfilled.” 12. Gooding demonstrates that in addition to putting forward the idea of wish fulfillment, Gaiman wants his readers to focus on Coraline’s adventurous behavior and outlook. In this way, the text plays into childhood frustrations at adult rules – and it is this aspect of the text that again divides the audience, as younger children are more likely to identify with Coraline’s desire to set up an identity in contrast to what her parents may wish. 13. Next, Gooding considers how Coraline works through her ideas about both her parents’ ways of expressing their love for her, and her sense for what that love should mean. “Coraline's fear that the increasing independence her real parents demand of her amounts to rejection and abandonment” plays out in the fantasy realm when the Other Mother shows Coraline an image of her parents supposedly celebrating their independence from her. 14. However, the Other Mother’s own form of parental love is shown to be suspect – something that Coraline must reject in order to grow up: “The ‘exploring game’ (92) therefore becomes a test of Coraline's capacity to surmount an infantile desire for permanent (re)union with the mother. In other words, although Coraline imagines the game as a struggle against a hostile antagonist, it is more fundamentally a struggle against her own desire for dependency and identification, a desire not far beneath the explicit demands Coraline makes of her real parents. To lose the game would be to accept perpetual childhood—to become a ‘bad copy’ (120) of a real person or suffer the more radical infantilization that afflicts the ghost children, with their slow loss of language, memory, and gender.” 15. Coraline must also develop a clear sense of who she is, but paradoxically, that also involves the recognition that identity is not entirely stable and that we will always struggle with some remnants of infantile fear. I am not as concerned that you pick up on the specifics of Lacan’s theories as I am that you see where they lead Gooding: “Coraline has certainly renegotiated her relationship with her parents—recognizing, for instance, that her increasing independence and engagement with the outside world miraculously entails no loss of their affection or approval—the initial joy of the return home proves impossible to sustain, and Coraline again finds herself needing to outwit the other mother. Looking for the causes of her renewed troubles inevitably leads to a reconsideration of elements of the other house that, despite Coraline's characteristic emotional restraint, hint at her susceptibility to uncanny effects, thereby signaling complications to her psychic development.” 16. Gooding then suggests that the seeming resolution – the encasing of the other mother’s hand and key in the well – actually points to the lack of resolution, as there is always the possibility that the other mother may return to unsettle Coraline. Gooding argues that this scene underscores an important aspect of maturation – no matter how we attempt to repress subconscious anxieties, they are always lurking just under the surface. 17. In fact, Gooding compares Coraline to earlier children’s fantasy, suggesting that Gaiman’s text works differently: “In its more traditional manifestations, the form offers false assurances relating to moralizing and educational tendencies inherited from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century models of writing for children: the psychological work that takes place in the fantasy world reaches closure, the protagonist returns home, and the magical effects, no longer being necessary, are suspended….Gaiman's final technical innovations to the pattern, which entail the infection of the ‘real’ world—by now the quotation marks are necessary—by the psychic forces at play in the other house, are tacit recognitions of Coraline's continued developmental struggles.” 18. Gooding then concludes that his essay has opened up questions of narration, dual audience, and reader response, but he admits that his own children’s reactions to the text give him pause.

Linking the Notes to the Homework

1. In his article, Gooding discusses Coraline in terms of the uncanny. Write a one-page response in which you explain how the term “uncanny” has evolved from Freud to the contemporary day, and then discuss what elements Gooding brings up from Coraline that he considers to be uncanny.

The core points from the notes above that would support an effective answer are 5- 9.

2. In his article, Gooding defines the typical way that children’s literature authors handle the idea of a portal – the space that joins the primary and secondary worlds in fantasy: “the psychological work that takes place in the fantasy world reaches closure, the protagonist returns home, and the magical effects, no longer being necessary, are suspended” (403). However, Gooding notes that Coraline does not follow in this pattern. Write a short essay in which you discuss how the blending of the primary and secondary worlds blend in Coraline and explain why Gooding thinks that Gaiman avoids a pat conclusion to Coraline’s adventures.

The portal discussion is best summarized in point 17, and points 15, 16, and 18 would best help with the discussion of the ambiguous ending to Coraline.