Everything out there is dangerous: "The Castle of Rose Tellin" by Kate DiCamillo

There is a bit of a joke in literary theory that with a certain brand of New Criticism, all poems tend to be about poetry. If I say that at least part of what "The Castle of Rose Tellin" by Kate DiCamillo is about is the forging of the psyche of a young writer, I hope it won't be seen as glib, nor will it cause readers to groan and think the story unoriginal. Readers shouldn't come away thinking, "Oh, writing about writing, how novel." The story is about a lot more than that. It's about the most important thing there is to write about, which is dealing with the disorienting sense of life in the universe, a sense that comes upon children at about the age of Pen during the course of events in the story. 

I remember when it happened to me. I was about six, the same age as Pen in the story, and I was coming in from recess at school. Like most kids, I didn't want to come in, and my mind wandered. Why wasn't life all recess? Why did it have to consist of things people didn't like? In fact, why was it mostly occupied with disagreeable things one had to do in order to get to the few good ones? Before we even began to file inside, I had someone gotten to the question of why life even exists, how weird just being somewhere was, and my head was swimming, and I don't think I've ever really recovered from that. 

Pen is equally thrown off balance in the story. How does she cope?

Contradictory threats

Pen's brother Thomas, who is three years older and three years more advanced in developing neuroses, tells her that "everything out there is dangerous."  Pen has already started to notice the same thing, although her fear manifests itself more as nausea than as paranoia. One characteristic of Pen's fears is that they are coming at her from two different sides. During the car ride to the family vacation in Sanibel, she feels claustrophobic. But she's also recently experienced a nearly opposite fear. Her mother took her to the circus, and when the clowns did their clown car bit, she was terrified. Her brother taught her the notion of "infinity" to describe the endless clowns, and she hasn't been right since. Infinity gives her an agoraphobia-like sense, that there are no borders and no limits, while claustrophobia gives her a fear of being too hemmed-in. She is suddenly aware of living in a universe in which both too little order and too much order are threats.

There are other indicators of similar fears. She is unnerved by the glass dining room table the family eats on during vacation, because she can see her feet below it. With the table she's used to, there is a visual limit that carves the world up into discrete chunks. The glass table removes those limits, and she feels disoriented. However, she also feels too hemmed in by the boxing gloves her father makes her wear at night to keep from biting her fingers. She worries that her hands won't be inside them anymore. So she worries when she can see her feet, but also when she can't see her hands. She's getting hit from both sides.

About those gloves

The gloves are the central image of the story. The father has decreed that Pen wear them in order to keep from messing up the shape of her mouth by sucking on her fingers in her sleep. The gloves are restricting, but they also have on them a kangaroo. This kangaroo is wearing boxing glovers with a kangaroo on them, which in turn has another kangaroo with boxing gloves. Pen imagines this repeating itself on into infinity, which then makes her woozy again, although she muses that an infinity of kangaroos isn't as terrifying as an infinity of clowns. (I think most people would agree.)

What Pen is experiencing is mise-en-abyme, "placed into the abyss" a technique in which a painting places itself inside itself, and then on and on. The Baroque movement in art was especially interested in this technique, perhaps because it was a time in intellectual history when the world seemed particularly unsettling. The Reformation had blown apart centuries of relative intellectual stability, and the introduction of novelties like calculus and the Scientific Revolution, which happened while the Baroque movement was already in progress, helped make the world seem even stranger, and perhaps much larger, in a dizzying way. 

It's appropriate that it was the father who forced the gloves upon Pen. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the father is the symbol of law in the form of language and cultural norms. The father impedes upon childlike imagination to bring structure. This is exactly what Pen's father does. He is, in fact, a literal lawgiver, because he is a judge. Pen calls him the "voice of reason and judgement." 

The law can be harsh, because it imposes penalties, but law always claims these penalties are for our own good. Without them, there would be anarchy, and so rules and discipline are a way of holding back one kind of threat, the one associated with infinity and too much freedom. The law is supposed to be like boxing gloves, something that is used to hurt, but not hurt as much. Of course, as soon as Pen introduces the idea of something not "hurting that much," she recalls how her father one pulled Thomas up by the hair in order to not "hurt him that much," but Thomas can only recall how much it hurt.

If too much freedom, represented in the story by Thomas and his willingness to invent facts and believe too many things, is one kind of danger, then too much law, represented in the story by the father, is another. Thomas worries that everything "out there" is dangerous, but the danger in their home is just as great. The father, most people would agree, is just abusive. He's wound up and on edge and Thomas, with his flights of fancy, drives him crazy and makes him violent. Pen is his favorite, but she suffers just as much from being near the violence. The mother chides the father, but she doesn't outright defy the law. In fact, she has submitted to it in many forms, including giving up her former dancing career. 

Pen's insight 

The family vacation gets more and more out of control as Thomas is determined to escape because he thinks everything is out to get him. Eventually, the car is wrecked and Dad is in a mental institution with a nervous breakdown. Unlimited imagination and rigid law have managed to nearly destroy one another, leaving Pen to try to figure out how to navigate her way between the two. It doesn't help that so many threats can't be seen, like the invisible flies that bite or the trap door from which the clowns emerge.

Pen's moment of insight comes on the beach after the father has gone to the mental institution. She is building a sand castle, and she looks around at all the shells. The shells are so numerous, they constitute a virtual infinity of shells, but instead of being made nauseous or unnerved by the infinity, she limits herself to only selecting a few of the shells to adorn her castle. She has used limitations to tame infinity, but she is not absolute in her application of the law, because she is still letting her imagination work on the construction of the castle. She builds a secret room beneath the castle to hide from the "Child Catcher," because "kids were against the law." If law helps her to control the dizzying effects of the infinite space of the universe and imagination, then imagination also allows her to fight back against the tyranny of law.

This is what writers and artists of all kinds do. They use form, like a sand castle, to shape reality and bring order to chaos, but they do not become such slaves to form that they are handcuffed by it. If her name, Pen, wasn't an indicator that she is a writer--whatever justification her father gives for naming her Penelope--then her final transformation is.

Pen also performs one other job of a writer: she is the memory for others. Her brother is unable to remember key points about the trip, but "Pen remembers it all."  He does remember the child catcher, meaning Pen's story she has created has helped him to survive the ordeal, too. 

I'm an idiot

I'm terrible with names in general. I knew my wife for months before I could remember her name. There have been times I've blogged about a writer and not realized I have blogged about them before. Because this story deals with what, to my mind, is the most important thing a writer can write about, I was interested in seeing if there was something more I could read by DiCamillo. Um, yes. She's the author of Because of Winn Dixie and several other hugely successful novels. 

I don't actually think my lack of knowledge of the landscape of contemporary authors hurts my ability to analyze fiction much. You can read a story for what's there without having any idea who wrote it most of the time. It was, however, an experience that Pen might have found vertigo-inducing to go from the minute details of a task like closely reading the text of this one story to realizing the person who wrote it is a really big deal.