sendak: hermoso cuento sin moraleja

esta mañana de domingo holandés buscando en "hoy empieza todo" el programa de ángel carmona en rne radio 3, una antigua playlist sobre beach house versus cocteau twins y al gato flaubert por la ventana y entre los libros y por razones que no vienen al caso, buscando el libro sobre apogeo y fin de los estudios culturales de carlos reynoso, me he encontrado con que hace semanas murió Maurice Sendak



además de pensar (otra vez) que los nacidos en diciembre (decemberist o diciembristas) iremos siempre por detrás del mundo y de las cosas, que iremos como epimeteo comprendiendo tarde (cuando ya es tarde) el mundo y las cosas, además de pensar digo en el retardante significado de nacer en diciembre y en epimeteo, en el mundo y en las cosas y en el gran aliento que para nosotros (decemberist o diciembristas) supone tener la radio "a la carta", me ha dado pena y he pensado que lo de Sendak, que la muerte de Sendak, merece una entrada doble, aqui como "sendak: hermoso cuento sin moraleja" y allá en "la norma y la imagen" como "sendak: imprescindible imagen sin norma" lanormaylaimagen

Ilustración Sendak: Where the Wild Things Are, 1963

¿por qué? porque Maurice Sendak, un personaje fascinante, un escritor de la talla de Carroll, tuvo tres virtudes que aquí apreciamos mucho. En esa literatura a menudo descalificada como literatura “infantil", Sendak:

1) escribió para gustar a los niños y no para gustar a los adultos

2) trató a sus lectores como personas sensibles e inteligentes

y lo que resulta realmente impagable, una lección de Sendak que aún no han aprendido tantos críticos de Sendak y tantos adultos que no tienen ni idea, ni dicho sea al pasar, tienen gana alguna de saber quién es Sendak: en la imaginativa obra de Sendak y como sucede con la vida...

3) los cuentos no tienen moraleja

digna y poética versión para el cine where the wild things are, spike jonze, 2009

los cuentos sin moraleja o cuentos-sendak, la belleza de los cuentos sin moraleja que fascinan a los niños la conocí de niño cuando Joseph Conrad ("el confidente secreto") y Henry James ("otra vuelta de tuerca") asaltaron mi bibloteca infantil: fascinación por los relatos sin norma, sin enseñanza moral ni moraleja con los que, sin embargo, se conoce un poco mejor el mundo, las cosas y las personas que lo habitan 


de The New York Times, 8 de mayo de 2012 (edición digital)

"Maurice Sendak was widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, whose works wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche. He died on May, 8, 20121, at the age of 83.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper & Row, are “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There” (1981), which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy; “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and “The Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes comprising “Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre.”

In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at the end in a neat, moralistic bow.

Mr. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. (In “Pierre,” “I don’t care!” is the response of the small eponymous hero to absolutely everything.) His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped, parents disappear, a dog lights out from her comfortable home.

Background: In 1963, a 34-year-old Mr. Sendak put together a small, handmade volume with which he had been struggling for eight years. Titled "Where the Wild Things Are" it used just 338 words and some occasionally disconcerting illustrations to tell the story of a boy named Max, who, sent to his room with no dinner, rebels by running away to a creature-infested island where he is named king of the beasts.

After a brief but exhausting adventure — “Let the wild rumpus start!” the book reads — Max returns to his bedroom, where he finds “his supper waiting for him.”

That much-honored book about childhood anger is the best-known work by Mr. Sendak, who had the gift of connecting with his childhood fears and pleasures in ways that made his most screwball concoctions feel perfectly plausible and universal.

He was a sickly child of protective parents, so fears tended to dominate. He was afraid of being kidnapped like the Lindbergh baby, who was taken from his parents in 1932, when Mr. Sendak was 4. He was scared by movies, by books, by the vacuum cleaner. He was afraid of his family, the Eastern European Jewish immigrants whom he transformed into the monsters in “Where the Wild Things Are.”

'‘I’m a typical ’30s kid,’' he said in a 1988 Times interview. '‘We had every disease. There was no penicillin, there were no sulfa drugs, and you almost died of any number of what now are considered trivial diseases. I have a memory of my childhood of often wondering about my mortality.’'

In the Sendak world, stories unfold like dreams, where images connect emotionally and serendipitously, not by the logic imposed by grown-ups when they are awake. In much of his work, beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand.

“That’s the tradition into which Sendak was born,” John Cech, author of “Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak,” and a professor of children’s literature at the University of Florida in Gainesville, told The Times in a 2005 interview. “His whole life’s work in some way is an attempt to understand and fathom the complexity of that heritage, with its almost unbearable legacy of loss.”

Mr. Sendak’s children’s books have often been greeted by controversy, specifically over their suitability for children. '‘Where the Wild Things Are’' was thought by some people to be too scary, and '‘In the Night Kitchen’' drew complaints because of its anatomically complete drawings.

His work became more melancholy as the Holocaust began emerging as a more powerful force — sometimes overtly, sometimes less so. The work gives children the power to conquer through art and ingenuity, reminding parents of the complicated responsibility that requires them to be hopeful but realistic about the terrible wild things out there.

He has written that what interests him most '‘is what children do at a particular moment in their lives where there are no rules, no laws, when emotionally they don’t know what is expected of them.’'

'‘Children make crucial decisions at that point,’' he said, '‘and it happens in the wink of an eye. It’s those crucial seconds when the mother and father can’t watch. This was so absolutely, beautifully, rendered for me when I was very young and I saw ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ There’s a scene that I think was a little bit St. Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus for me. It was near the end of the movie, when Dorothy is imprisoned in the room with the Wicked Witch, and the witch takes the hourglass and turns it over and says: You see that? That’s how much longer you’ve got to be alive.

'‘And Dorothy says, I’m frightened, I’m frightened, and then the crystal ball shows Auntie Em, and Auntie Em is saying, Dorothy, Dorothy, where are you? and Dorothy hovers over it and says: I’m here in Oz, Auntie Em. I’m locked up in the witch’s castle. Don’t go away, I’m frightened. And I remember that when my sister took me I burst into tears. I knew just what it meant, which was that a mother and child can be in the same room and want to help each other, and they cannot. Even though they were face to face, the crystal ball separated them. Something separates people now and then. And I think it’s that moment that interests me, and compels me.’'

the decemberist: "the crane wife 3"

RNE Radio 3: Hoy empieza todo - Playlist: Maurice Sendak - 10/05/12