Curious Kai
“Daddy, daddy, yet’s read dis big big big dump truck book.”
Kai climbs onto my lap and nestles in for a story. I study the cover of Margret and H.A. Rey’s classic work, Curious George and the Dump Truck, an acknowledged picaresque-genre masterpiece and a defining treatise on the “collective psyche,” if you will, of mid-20th century America. As Truly Composte states in his noted essay on post-World War II literary currents, “Atomic Age Lit” (1954), “Curious George is the optimist’s refutation of (Arthur) Miller’s Willy Loman.” Kai is unaware of literary criticism and the subtextual themes in this great work. Like its protagonist and title character, the young chimpanzee, Kai is innocent, and out of this innocence arises naturally in him curiosity. When you’re young, you taste the fruits of the garden in great gulps, peel and all, the whole banana.
As I open the book and read those familiar, fateful first words, “‘I have to go to town, George,’ said the man with the yellow hat. ‘You can come along,’” Kai pulls on a cherubic blond curl. He is so much like young George, of whom Till Itchy writes, “…a Christ-like goodness, a saintly countenance upon simian features” (Animals of the Gospels, page 29). Itchy regards the Curious George series as “a modern collection of parables written in an updated style, but with subtle echoes of the Greek translations of early Christian texts” (34). I see George as more of a man of the world, albeit a very small man, and I refer you to Gnome Chimpsky’s excellent postmodern analysis, “Hesse’s Sidhartha, Rey’s Curious George, and Sabu the Elephant Boy: Three Buddhahs.”
Many scholars have previously expounded on the psychosexual imagery of the Curious George series. Who among us can deny that H.A. Rey compensated for his personal doubts about virility and gender identity by bestowing (equipping?) the “man in the yellow hat” with the tall, (always erect!) yellow hat; the blue convertible sports car and the freedom and promiscuity it implies (where was he always driving off to when he left George alone to get in and out of trouble: the classic absent father); the phallic symbols that decorate the page like fezzes at a Shriners convention.
This text is no exception. In fact, the male symbol is a central plot device of Curious George and the Dump Truck. When George climbed into the dump truck, he “was curious. What were all those levers? He pulled one after another”(9). (Many Freudian analyses have identified George as in the Oral Stage of psychosexual development, while missing the fact that his comfort food is the banana. Clearly George is in the Phallic Stage, commensurate with his other character traits typical of a 5 to 6 year old boy.)
George’s curiosity (or the fulfillment of the urges of the Id) leads him to the discovery of pleasure, climaxing in the spilling of the truck’s contents onto the street (10). Accompanying the text (“It dumped sand all over the street. The sand spilled over a lady in a flowered hat” (11)) is a scene of blatantly sexual imagery. Trapped by the spilling sand – the product of George’s autoerotic awakening – are a woman clutching groceries, a man with bow tie and umbrella, a girl, and a dog. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Chapter 10 of Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis will surely recognize the bow tie as male genitalia and the flower as the corresponding female symbol. The hat is half sunlit and half shaded, suggesting the Pre-Conscious State as it embodies equal elements of the Conscious and Unconscious. In the background are two storefronts. One store sells pipes, an allusion to Freud’s own oral fixation as manifested in smoking; the other sells books, including a barely visible copy of The Interpretation of Dreams. I leave it to the bolder among my fair readers to consider how the girl and the dog relate to this graphic scene.
But, as I said, Kai is unaware of all this, at least on a conscious level. Would we expect a two year old to understand why Hamlet’s Oedipal lust for his mother, Gertrude, impels him to plot against Claudius –
“– Yook-it daddy, I’m a big fast dump truck!”
Does he mean that the protagonist is not George, but actually the dump truck itself? I realize that H.A.’s sister, Doe (Rey) Mead, wrote the famous deconstructionist analysis of the role of Marxist ideology in the underpinnings of the theory that the Mississippi River is the true protagonist of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in her essay entitled “A Deconstructionist Analysis of the Role of Marxist Ideology in the Underpinnings of the Theory that the Mississippi River is the True Protagonist of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” As Huck and Jim float farther away from innocence down the proverbial River of Experience – but wait! – I see something on page 17. Look at the laborers. They remind me of WPA workers pouring concrete for the Hoover Dam. And there, on page 23, doesn’t the red van used in the jewelry store robbery look a lot like the elephant on Hoover’s 1932 campaign pin? And the green bandana on the face of the robber on page 25? I’ve always wondered why Margret Rey strayed from primary colors on this particular illustration. Now I see it. It’s Woody Guthrie, who wore the same green bandana in the cover photograph of the original edition of Bound for Glory. The policeman on page 26 even resembles young FDR when he was governor of New York.
“Hey Daddy, yet’s yisten to some moosic.” I know just the song. I go over to the records and choose “Planet Waves.” I think about when my father used to read the Sunday comics to Sharon and me, and make funny voices for the characters. He read Blondie’s parts in falsetto. This was before anyone had heard of Deborah Harry’s band, before I recognized Mr. Dithers as John D. Rockerfeller, before I knew why they called the artist “Chic” Young. Before, for that matter, I had heard of Neil Young, and his sad farewell to innocence, “You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain, though you’re thinkin’ that you’re leavin’ there too soon.”
Seeing Woody’s face has made me nostalgic, and so I drop the timeworn needle into the pre-digital groove and feel the raucous rhythms of Dylan and The Band fill the room. A harmonica whines above the din like a sour wind blowing down the hills of old Duluth, and then the voice of my generation, the Bard of the North Country, joins in:
May God’s blessing keep you always, may your wishes all come true, may you always do for others and let others do for you, may you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung, and may you stay forever young –
“Yook at me, Daddy”
– Forever young, forever young –
“Yook at me”
– And may you stay forever young.
“YOOK-IT DADDY, yook at me, I’M DANCING!”
