Today I went to San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum to see the new exhibit, "There's a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak." It's a great exhibit, with all sorts of drawings, paintings, and writings from Maurice Sendak (you know, the author of Where the Wild Things Are. I learned about tons of books he illustrated as well as a few he wrote, but was most interested in what he calls "the other story." For Sendak, it has always been important for him to illustrate the text as well as the ideas he finds behind it. Since he was born in 1928 to Polish-Jewish immigrants, the Depression and the Holocaust played a large part in his life and he chooses to allude to them in many of his books and drawings. One room in the exhibit focused on the idea of "the other story" and pointed out that there were a few books, such as Moby Dick, that he felt he could never illustrate because there was just too much already in the book for him to add his own interpretation.
This all prompted me to think about my problems with searching beyond the obvious story in a text. I had great issues with this in school, especially when it came to poetry, because I didn't want to think about all the meanings, for example, of the word red in a poem. Maybe the poet said her dress was red because he likes the color—does it have to mean he was a Communist, an insomniac, or Chinese? However, I would now like to go back and look at Sendak's books and see what I find as an adult. I know I read some of his books as a kid, but surely there was much that I didn't see because I just didn't know any better.
What do you think? Do you like to look for subtext or do you take things at face value?
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