`Sit Back and Allow the Words to Wash Around You'

For the last three nights I have been reading Matilda, by Roald Dahl, to my 6-year-old son. I knew the book only through the 1996 film version, with Mara Wilson perfectly cast in the title role, and which I took my oldest son, now 19, to see. As a writer for both children and adults, Dahl bypassed me entirely. That’s a shame because I’m enjoying Matilda, and I feel a temperamental affinity with Dahl and his heroine – an affinity I once felt with Charles Dickens and his plucky young heroes and heroines. It’s easy to see Dahl as a self-conscious successor to Dickens, and he makes the reading of books (including those by Dickens) seem like a subversive act in a barbaric age.

In Matilda, he confirms the suspicion entertained by all bright, thoughtful children that most adults are casually malevolent beings, never to be trusted and always to be outwitted, which seldom proves difficult. Matilda’s parents are vulgar, self-centered brutes who chastise their daughter for her preternatural mathematical and linguistic gifts. While her father cheats customers at his used-car lot and her mother plays bingo, 4-year-old Matilda visits the town library. After reading all the children’s books, she asks Mrs. Phelps, the librarian, for “a really good [book] grown-ups read. A famous one.” The wise Mrs. Phelps gives her Great Expectations.

“Over the next few afternoons Mrs Phelps could hardly take her eyes from the small girl sitting for hour after hour in the big armchair at the far end of the room with the book on her lap. It was necessary to rest it on her lap because it was too heavy for her to hold up, which meant she had to sit leaning forward in order to read. And a strange sight it was, this tiny dark-haired person sitting there with her feet nowhere near touching the floor, totally absorbed in the wonderful adventures of Pip and Miss Havisham and her cobwebbed house and by the spell of magic that Dickens the great story-teller had woven with his words.”

Within a week Matilda finishes Great Expectations, and asks Mrs. Phelps if Dickens has written other books. Over the next six months, under Mrs. Phelps’ enlightened tutelage, Matilda reads 15 novels, beginning with Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist (my first Dickens), and including The Sound and the Fury and Brighton Rock. The notion of a 4-year-old making sense of Benjy’s idiot monologue is a scream, and I think Dahl is having fun with the reputations of some renowned writers, four of whom are Nobel Laureates.

Dahl published Matilda in 1984, six years before his death. Were he writing it today, I’d like to think Mrs. Phelps would still encourage Matilda to read Kipling and Faulkner and not the badly written, politically correct pap (Heather Has Two Mommies) often served prescribed for children today. We’re not doing kids a favor when we force-feed them moralistic tracts. Listen to Dahl:

“`Mr Hemingway says a lot of things I don’t understand,’ Matilda said to her. `Especially about men and women. But I loved it all the same. The way he tells it I feel I am right there on the spot watching it all happen.’

“`A fine writer will always make you feel that,’ Mrs Phelps said. `And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.’

“`I will. I will.’”

Matilda’s parents, of course, are appalled by her devotion to reading. Each night, they sit before the television, ritualistically eating TV dinners, and compel their children to join them. Matilda demurs:

“She knew it was wrong to hate her parents like this, but she was finding it very hard not to do so. All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.”

Is Dahl’s ethical schema and narrative strategy a tad cartoonish? Of course. So was Dickens’, at least most of the time, and I think this perfectly appropriate in books aimed at bright children we wish to encourage. My six-year-old has started reading “chapter-books” on his own, and would zip through Matilda if I let him but I want his first reading of the book to be mine as well. E.M. Forster said many of Dickens’ characters are flat but vibrating very fast, and that certainly describes Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood, Matilda’s parents. Consider James Wood in his notorious essay “Hysterical realism”:

“Dickens makes caricature respectable for an age in which, for various reasons, it has become hard to create character. Dickens licenses the cartoonish, coats it in the surreal, or even the Kafkaesque (the Circumlocution Office). Indeed, to be fair to contemporary novelists, Dickens shows that a large part of characterization is the management of caricature.”