Copyright 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.

The Lion and the Unicorn 21.2 (1997) 215-229

Self, Other, and Other Self:

Recognizing the Other in Children's Literature

Roderick McGillis
"Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics."
(Jean Baudrillard)
I intend to be unashamedly personal. My topic is the self as "Other," and I use myself
as an example of what Julia Kristeva refers to as the foreigner who lives within us (see
her Strangers to Ourselves 1991). She describes the foreigner as "the hidden face of
our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and
affinity founder." I face this stranger often: when I read something I wrote some time
ago, when I'm faced with new experiences, when I'm uncertain of a friend, when I
second-guess myself. Kristeva goes on to assert that only by recognizing the foreigner
within ourselves are we "spared detesting him in himself." More importantly, the
foreigner "disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable
to bonds and communities" (1). We are connected to community through foreignness.
We cannot but be "Other" to the communities which contain us, and when everyone is
an "Other" then everyone shares an experience that might keep people together not by
the bonds of community but by the choice of community. Community, otherness, and
the embracing of selves: this is my topic.
The focus, in the first part of my paper, is the foreigner within myself, that part of the
self we needfully embrace as strange and different from what we wish to think of
ourselves. This is the person who sometimes trips us up, embarrasses us before we can
step in and present the person we think we are. I will turn in the second two parts of
my paper to two recent novels for young readers, one published in Canada, a realistic
novel which deals with a Canadian boy's experiences in South Africa, and the [End
Page 215] other a fantasy first published in Germany. The Canadian book is Lynne
Fairbridge's In Such a Place (1992; winner of the sixth Alberta Writing for Youth
Competition), and the German fantasy is Michael Ende's Momo(1973). My choice of
texts is, in part, practical. But it is also tactical: these books offer us realism and
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fantasy, the known and the unknown, a mixture of races and a mixture of cultures.

1. Canny and Uncanny Selves

I speak of a large issue by examining a personal discovery. The large issue is the
continuing struggle of all oppressed people to overcome imperialist forces. I note here
that "oppressed people" takes in a majority of persons on this globe, to greater or lesser
degree. And "imperialist forces" are all those institutional powers (Ideological State
Apparatuses) that either subtly or openly attempt to fashion the way we think and
behave. These forces invade all facets of our experience, from our billboards to the rest
of our media, including our children's books. Their design is to maintain conditions of
power and authority, and my dangling infinitive here is intentional in its facelessness.
Forces are at work that both construct from the outside people of differing cultures and
races, and that seek to assimilate other cultures, other peoples into one dominant
culture. Stories have traditionally been one of the sources of social construction, one of
the means by which a culture perpetuates itself and situates itself over against an
"other" culture. Even when the stories of one culture do not refer to other cultures, they
implicitly maintain the fiction of one culture's superiority to another, one people's
superiority to another people. Or do they? Might it not be possible to argue that a
culture's stories inevitably must present that very culture as "other"? 1 When we read
about ourselves are we not reading about something distanced from ourselves, and
therefore "other" than ourselves? If we were simply to read ourselves, we would not be
reading; instead we would be, quite literally, reflecting. Or at least we might argue that
all stories present a world other than the one we inhabit, and in doing so they bring us
face-to-face, as it were, with the fictionality of all stories. All we know is fiction. And
like fiction, all we know is duplicitous.
Is it not true to say that each of us is duplicitous, each of us is a fiction? Take myself,
for instance. It just so happens that my birth enrolled me as a member of two groups:
one doing much of the oppressing around the world; the other a colonial garrison
huddled along a narrow strip of land just north of the United States border. I have
learned that one can look at [End Page 216] one's position culturally and socially in at
least two ways. Being male and white and of Protestant background, I had an
advantage from birth over people from other groups; for example, women and males
of other cultural, religious, and racial backgrounds. On the other hand, being the son of
a dissolute and spendthrift father who worked, when he worked, for the CPR
(Canadian Pacific Railroad), I came from what we might term a working-class
background, a background that brought with it certain social and cultural
disadvantages. I was, simultaneously, a member of a distinctly self-serving group, and
to a certain extent an "Other" to those with more money, position, and experience.
Something similar might be said of all of us; I am not describing an unfamiliar
experience.
The personal discovery I mentioned at the outset derives from this "look back at my
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origins." Simple and self-evident as my discovery may seem to others, to me it came

as a surprise. It is the realization that my past is another country, my childhood the
experience of someone I no longer fully know. How these two disparate concerns--the
dominant culture's desire to situate people as "self" and "other" and my knowledge of
my own self-otherness--are connected is the subject of my paper, and I borrow from
bell hooks a question that sets my subject going: "Why do we have to wipe out the
Otherness in order to experience a notion of Oneness?" (234). I will connect this
subject to children's books near the end of what I have to say. To begin, however, I turn
to the large issue: imperialism and its relationship to children.
I take it that among the oppressed and colonized we can number children. This is one
aspect of Jacqueline Rose's argument in The Case of Peter Pan, and Perry Nodelman
has argued something similar in the ChLA Quarterly. Children have little or no power
and they are vulnerable to social and cultural forces. We used to call this, and perhaps
still do call this, "innocence." 2 From an adult perspective, children are the "Other,"
mysterious beings who in turn attract us, repel us, and bedevil us. As someone who
regularly goes into the schools to perform as a storyteller, I confess this: children are to
me the "Other." I am not easily able to enter into their way of thinking. In order to deal
with one child or a group of children, I must organize them, get them to conform to
certain ways of behaviour, even if this behaviour simply requires them to sit still. To
confess this is not, however, to accept the absolute necessity of exploiting or taking
over young minds. I mentioned the ideological effect of stories, but I also questioned
this effect. In fact, my experience of the storytelling situation informs me that teller
and audience, adult and children can experience a notion of Oneness that breaks down
authority. Through story [End Page 217] a disparate group can come together without
the intrusion of authority and power; such a group can, as Jack Zipes argues, build
community and change lives (Creative Storytelling). Having stated my subject, I now
come to my thesis: we can answer bell hooks' question by saying that we do not need
to wipe out Otherness in order to experience Oneness because we have a constant
reminder of the possibility of Oneness through our experience of story. Our experience
of story is both communal and personal.
This is, perhaps, simple and obvious to others. But I came to realize the profundity of
this disparate Oneness, this self-evident Otherness that does not threaten, does not
need control, only understanding, when I began to reflect on the stories I myself was
telling to audiences of adults and children. I began telling stories ten years ago, and at
first I told stories I had heard from other storytellers. Soon, however, I began to reflect
on my own childhood and to construct stories based on memories of incidents and
people I once knew. Many of the people I used as characters have long since died, and
nearly none of them have I seen for thirty years. Perhaps the most spectacular example
of just how "Other" these people have become is the case of my father. He has become
one of the most insistent characters in my stories. He is still alive, although I have not
seen him since 1969, nearly twenty-seven years ago. When I started telling stories
about him, I thought I was trying to come to terms with a flawed and troubled
relationship. I thought I was trying to capture the person I knew, to picture this person
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who was as close to me as kinship can allow. I thought I was trying to put my own past
into perspective, to engage in some therapeutic exercise. And I suppose I was. In short,
I thought I knew my father as I knew myself, and to articulate this knowledge would
somehow cure me of bitterness and resentment.
But therapy is for those who are in some way ill or in convalescence, for those who are
bitter and resentful perhaps. As I looked at my stories, I began to realize that
"convalescence," "illness," "bitterness," and "resentment" are words which do not
seem to apply to me. Even more to the point is the fact that the character who is/was
my father is someone I never really knew. If I thought I knew him as I knew myself,
this was because I did not really know myself. The only father I know is an "Other"
whom I construct each time I tell a story about him. This character I construct from the
fragmentary memories of my parent both is and is not my father. The fact that he is my
father and that he appears in some silly situations in the stories I tell provides me with
some satisfying sense of power over him, I guess, but more and more he is simply
someone whom I can only know from a distance and try to understand as what, for
lack of a better term, I am calling an "Other." [End Page 218]
The same is true of the little boy who was myself. I say "was" because I realize that the
small character who goes through the actions I remember from my past both is and is
not me. I can only relate to this small person as an "Other," someone who has links
with me but who is clearly not me. Obviously, this little boy shares experiences with
me and even perhaps character traits and character flaws; without him, I would not be
here now. At the same time, he is not me; we do not exist in the same time; we do not
use the same language; we do not know the same people; we do not share the same
experiences. I am an "Other" to myself. If this were not so, then I could not have the
distance from myself to reconstruct my own past, to fashion it into story. (At the
moment, the question as to whether I do this well or not is irrelevant.) And it might be
worth reflecting that none of us can tell stories until we have come to terms with those
"Other" than ourselves; everyone who creates story does so from a distance. In other
words, those who would have stories told only by those who directly experience what
happens in a story or who directly fit into the culture or society depicted in the story
are arguing, tacitly and unconsciously I'm sure, for the erasure of all story.
Now about this reconstruction of my own past. I need to rethink what I have just said.
To reconstruct my past is, of course, to take control over it, to colonize it, if you will.
My past self has no independent existence aside from my fashioning it. In this sense, I
have constructed the "Other" and cannot know it in and of itself. I can never know my
own past self from the inside. I can never know anyone other than my immediate self
from the inside, and this includes my children. This does not mean, however, that I do
not respect, sympathize with, love, and embrace these people I cannot know from the
inside. I can learn to respect my own "Other," whether that person is my "child" self or
the fellow whose reactions sometimes catch me unawares even now, and to make the
effort to understand what this other self gives me: memories, memorabilia,
photographs, humility, perhaps even words in the form of diaries or letters or whatever.
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The feeling of "Oneness" I might attain in contemplating my own "Other" self does
not transform that "Other" self wholly into me as I am now. The reconstruction is, in
effect, two ways. My "Other" self is to a certain extent something I construct; by the
same token, my present self is to a certain extent something constructed by that
"Other" self. I am always and of necessity constructing a self.
The same is true of the space which the self inhabits. That country which my "Other"
self inhabits is, in its turn, an "Other" country. This is most obviously the case when
we contemplate the past. You cannot go home again. I know the world I inhabited
thirty and forty years ago is far [End Page 219] different from the one I inhabit now.
In some ways, that country is a country for old men and women. I mean, only those
with age can remember a certain time and a certain place. We can choose to forget that
time and place, but to do so is to cut oneself loose from participation in a community.
To forget that time and place is to lose the ability to connect with anything outside the
here and now. It is not a question of returning to a cultural moment long since past;
rather it is a question of maintaining contact with that culture in order that we have
something to reflect with our present cultural situation. We need to know how we got
here. We also need to know how here compares to all the heres possible.
Let me turn to a story that has recently forced itself upon me. A while ago, I began,
almost casually, to write a story about a place just across the tracks from where I grew
up. I do not know what prompted this, but I found myself writing short sections in
voices different from the one I had started with. Before long I had some fifteen or
twenty voices going, one of which I had thought to begin with was mine. Through
some mysterious alchemy, this voice--the one I thought was mine--receded in
importance and two other characters began to emerge as central to the plot that was
unfolding: a Chinese-Canadian boy of about sixteen or seventeen and a Caucasian girl
of about the same age only older in experience and savvy. The boy was someone I
remembered from my past; the girl was no one particular person from my past, but I
remember people like her. Anyhow, I did not think what I was doing was tactless until
I happened to mention the story to a Chinese friend of mine who asked me point blank
whether I could, in fact, write about the experiences of a Chinese boy. Could I be fair
to the experiences of another culture? Could I know what it felt like to be that boy?
The answer to the last question is, of course, no. I could not know what it felt like to be
the real boy who appears in disguise in the story. But that is the point: the character
reflects--it does not reproduce--reality; the character is in disguise, in reversal if you
will. The disguise, the reality that the character reflects is the reality I am able to
create, not some accurate creation of an absolute reality. In other words, to construct a
character is to make an imaginative leap into the possibility of other lives. Sometimes
such a leap is successful and sometimes it is not. Sometimes we create good stories
and sometimes we do not. What we cannot claim is to reflect accurately and absolutely
the experiences of anyone who actually lives in this world we inhabit. Literature is not
life. In short, each attempt at story is an attempt to understand what it is like to be an
"Other." Or to use the vocabulary of my section's title, each attempt at story tries to
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show how what is known and familiar, the canny, is also simultaneously unknown and
unfamiliar, the uncanny. [End Page 220]
I am trying to sort out how the constructing of stories about my own past has prompted
me to respond to what we in Canada face as official government policy. I refer to the
government's policy of multiculturalism. This is, I hasten to add, a policy I accept and
even endorse. Official government acknowledgment of the variety of cultures that
constitute our country seems to me only sensible; the government here provides an
example of tolerance and acceptance, at least on the surface of things. We need now, as
much or even more than ever, tolerance and respect for other ways of thinking, for
other peoples, and for other cultures. By extension, our children need exposure to
literature which reflects the cultural mix of our countries. They also need exposure to
literature which brings to their attention the larger global community to which we all
belong.

2. The Self and Foreign Places

This brings me to Lynne Fairbridge's In Such a Place. Here is a well-told story which
deals with both international and inter-racial relationships. The plot is not complicated,
but the issues it takes up are. The plot concerns sixteen-year-old Mark whose father
sends him to South Africa while he (the father) is away doing research in northern
Alberta, in Canada. Mark is typically Canadian: doubly displaced. He feels alienated
from his father because his father has remarried (Mark's mother has died), and he feels
alienated both from his friends in Canada who are far away and from the people he
meets in South Africa whose cultural experience is so different from his own. South
Africa differs from Canada in climate and social conditions. The story takes place
prior to the removal of apartheid and the elections of 1994. Mark quickly learns about
child beggars in the city, about an educational system that has for many years
disadvantaged black people, about urban crime, about life in the townships, and about
friendship between persons from differing racial and cultural backgrounds. Coming
from Canada, Mark carries certain assumptions concerning the country he now
experiences first hand. His experience will test his assumptions, and in doing so it will
teach Mark much not only about South Africa, but also about his own country.
Fairbridge is subtle in her evocation of the "Other," showing rather than telling how
intricate an issue the self and "Other" is. As well as articulating differences between
the two countries, she points out similarities between life in Canada and South Africa,
both on a personal and a public level: Mark's father left home to find work and so did
the father of the black South African boy, Sipho, privilege and class affect the attitudes
of both Canadians and South Africans, the dominant society in both [End Page
221] countries has traditionally mistreated others less powerful, an immigrant
population has colonized an indigenous one, all people desire a good life, a life of
independence and self-reliance. Such similarities, however, do not rule out differences
between the two countries: the marketplace with its cornucopia of flowers and its
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child-beggars is something new in Mark's experience. The constant reminders of the

need for security are also new to Mark. Most powerfully new, however, is the life his
friend Sipho lives and has lived, the life in the township, the life that accepts a need for
violence to achieve significant change. Mark's shift from non-involvement to a
commitment to change derives from the shock he receives when Sipho asks him, in the
name of friendship, to negotiate with arms, to take up arms on behalf of oppression.
The book raises issues relating to the infiltration of political concerns into private life,
and in doing this it amounts to the story of one boy's rite of passage from rather naive
self-concern to a mature acceptance of social responsibility. 3 Mark decides, at the end
of the novel, to stay in South Africa and to assist a local clergyman in teaching young
disenfranchised children how to read, write, and do arithmetic. In other words, Mark
comes to understand the importance of education in changing people's lives. Early in
the book he had attempted to talk Sipho into skipping school and going "cruising for
girls or something" (41). He did not understand Sipho's desire to learn, and the drive
that sent Sipho to two jobs besides going to school. By the end, however, Mark has
learned to understand. Education is the key to improving life.
But something remains to be said. The politics this book investigates are the politics of
the "Other." We never forget otherness in In Such a Place. The book insists on
binaries: Canada/South Africa, father/son, teacher/pupil, rich/poor, male/female,
city/townships, reason/emotion, violence/nonviolence, privileged/underprivileged,
black/white. Such binaries insist on otherness, one term reflecting the familiar and
accepted, the other the unfamiliar and unaccepted. For example, for Mark who comes
from Canada violence is unacceptable; he has no understanding of a situation in which
violence might be perceived as the only means to change. He takes a nonviolent
position regarding political activity, but he learns that he himself holds a double
standard since he unconsciously condones and even participates in violence in his
personal life. I refer to his interest in and practice of Karate. I do not want to suggest
that Fairbridge argues for another point of view; that is, I do not want to argue that the
book comes round to condoning violence. It doesn't. But Mark comes round to
understanding how a situation can become so desperate that violence seems the only
answer. [End Page 222]
Sipho tells Mark that he has lost a baby brother because his family was too poor to buy
food and medicine, and he also tells him that some soldiers have shot his sister, Faith.
Here is Mark's reaction to this information:
Mark was shamed into silence. Sipho was right. Life was easy for him. And he recalled
his fight with Kevin, how angry he had been then and how easily provoked to
violence. (95)
Throughout the book, we see that Mark enjoys physical aggression; he does not grasp
the implications of this enjoyment until now. He too can erupt violently, so why should
he be surprised that others, and others with far more provocation, do likewise. In short,
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Mark cannot understand others until he comes to understand himself. Once he realizes
that he has "to make my own decisions" (111), he is ready truly to enter the world of
the "Other." He does this by disguising himself as a black person in order to find Sipho
in the townships. Fairbridge remarks: "There was something disturbing about having
to become black in order to enter Sipho's world" (128). Although she does not spell out
what this "something" is, I think we can understand that to enter the world of another,
we ourselves must become "Other" than we are. We are always faced with the "Other."
We cannot escape otherness.
This is what Mark learns, and this is why he does not return to Canada at the end of the
book. Canada is his home, but it too is a place with its own unfamiliarity; Mark has
never met his stepmother, and he feels he has never known his father. He decides,
however, that what he experiences in South Africa presents, for the moment, the most
compelling unfamiliarity. He remains so he can assist in the teaching of young
children. He feels he can "change something for the better" (143). The "something"
here relates to the "something disturbing" I noted in the previous paragraph. The word
is a signifier, but what it signifies remains undefined. The "something" remains
attached to the notion of "otherness" I have been discussing--always just out of reach,
always unknowable, and always an aspect of each of us. To accept this "something,"
this "otherness" is to share a oneness with others.

3. The Grey Eminence of Politics: Otherness and Sameness

I turn now to a final example, a book that illustrates clearly the necessity of
"otherness." I refer to Michael Ende's Momo (1973; first English ed. 1974). At first
glance, Momo is not a book one might think of in connection with the self as "Other"
because its concerns are so resolutely [End Page 223] social. Momo takes its form
from a tradition of fantasy that dates back at least to late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century German romance, to the work of Novalis, Tieck, Hoffmann, and
others. Ende focuses on the theme of time, and by doing so he places his book in a
tradition of fantasy for children that includes such works in English as Phillipa
Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958), the "Green Knowe" books of Lucy Boston,
William Mayne's Earthfasts (1967), and others. Such books are deeply psychological.
Ende gives the traditions in which he works a social conscience by focusing on latetwentieth-century corporate living. The world he envisages in Momo is unsettlingly
reminiscent of the world we inhabit with its work-induced panic and its pressures of
conformism. The cigar-smoking, bowler-hatted men in grey who mysteriously and
unobtrusively infiltrate society represent the corporate mentality that sees everything
as working toward the same ends: conformity and productivity. To put this in a way
closer to my theme, I simply point out that these grey men represent the drive to
oneness, the desire to wipe out difference, "otherness." That which is "Other" is a
threat to these men. Ende connects this theme of the otherness with time by arguing
that the desire to wipe out difference has something to do with the desire to control

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time.
I might slide into digression here to point out that the form of Ende's book--fantasy-itself belies any effort to control time. Fantasy, by its very nature, is beyond time in
that it exists in a timeless zone. The "Author's Postscript" points out that the events
recounted in Momo appear to have already happened, but they might just as well lie in
the future (237). Of course events in a fantasy have never happened, will never
happen, and yet have already always happened. The thing to insist on when we speak
of fantasy is its "otherness." Fantasy presents things as other than they are; in this
otherness lies fantasy's very familiarity. Fantasy returns us to the theme of the uncanny
and its relationship to the unconscious. In the unconscious time holds no sway.
Time, however one defines it, is that within which we operate as conscious subjects.
Each of us has time to spend and how we spend it depends upon what we desire. If we
desire, as Momo does, to share ourselves with others, then we might spend our time
listening to others. If we desire to explore possibilities, then we might spend our time
playing and allowing things to happen. If, however, we desire to shore up defences
against an unknowable future, then we might spend our time working furiously. In
other words, our attitude to time, our use of time, reflects our sense of ourselves as
subjects. And our sense of ourselves as subjects is deeply connected to our subjectivity
within a social and economic [End Page 224] structure. How we view ourselves is a
reflection of how we are prompted to view ourselves by the society within which we
live.
The men in grey make it their business to promote desire, for as long as we desire we
are vulnerable to the authority and control of those who produce objects of desire. In
effect, what the men in grey produce is nothing other than an ersatz desire, a
manufactured desire, one that disrupts natural desire. The men in grey, themselves
simulacra, encourage everyone to seek for simulacra, Baudrillard's term for that which
substitutes "signs of the real for the real itself" (Simulations 4). What I mean by
"natural desire" is quite simply the desire each of us feels for unity, oneness, for that
lost innocence we think we remember from our childhoods. In psychological terms,
natural desire is the desire to return to the comforts of the mother before selfconsciousness separates us from both ourselves and our mothers. What I mean by
ersatz desire is a desire for objects that cannot satisfy desire, but which can only
encourage the desire for more objects.
In Momo, the men in grey leave on the steps of the old amphitheatre where Momo
lives a doll by the name of Lola. Lola speaks and tells Momo she is "the Living Doll"
(81). I cannot avoid the thought that Lola, the Living Doll, traces her origin to the
Marlene Dietrich character Lola-Lola in von Sternberg's 1930 film The Blue Angel,
although another obvious source is the automaton, Olympia, in E. T. A.
Hoffmann's The Sandman (1816-17). For those of us in North America, Barbie will
come to mind. In any case, Lola is a doll that talks, and the very fact that she talks,
saying the same things over and over again, renders her uninteresting to Momo. The
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idea is that the talking doll negates the necessity for imaginative interaction between
the doll and its owner. It provides everything its child-owner might require, leaving the
child with nothing but boredom, or more importantly, nothing but the desire for
something more exciting, another doll or at the very least things for the doll, clothes
and accessories, all those things that come with entry into the world of Barbie in our
own culture. As the man in grey tells Momo: "As long as you go on getting more and
more things, you'll never grow bored. . . . There is always something left to wish for."
When a child amasses everything she can for Lola, then she can acquire another doll,
Butch, the "perfect boyfriend for Lola" (85). Once Butch has everything, then another
doll is the perfect girlfriend for Lola, and so on and on and on. With such a plethora of
dolls and accessories, the child need never want for friends. Instead of friends, Momo
can have simulacra, substitute friends, talking dolls. The result of accepting this world
of things will be [End Page 225] a world of similitude; nothing need differ from the
corporate norm, nothing need deviate from the focus on accumulation and production,
nothing need interrupt the sameness of things.
Take Guido Guide for example. Guido is a storyteller, someone who sees himself as
sharing with others. He shares his stories with those who will listen, and he finds
inspiration for more stories in that very interaction with his audience. To function as a
storyteller, Guido needs to know that his audience is "Other" than himself. In short,
Guido needs Momo who represents in herself the "Other": "When Momo was in the
audience a floodgate seemed to open inside him, releasing a torrent of new ideas that
bubbled forth without his ever having to think twice" (44). Once Guido accepts the
importance of what the grey men term success, and once he loses contact with Momo,
his inspiration dries up. Guido becomes famous, a celebrity, but his fame has a cost.
Guido loses his enthusiasm for life and even for story. He finds himself constantly
pressed for time, and he plunders his stories for ideas that will allow him to make other
stories. His storytelling loses its life; as he says, "I've nothing left to dream about"
(185). And yes, strangely, his audience does not appear to care. All that matters is the
illusion of story, the simulacrum of story. People require occupation rather than
vocation; they require familiarity rather than difference. At least this is what the grey
men convince the people of Momo's city to believe.
Momo, then, is a book about the destruction of "otherness," and the consequences of
this destruction. Once the "Other" is controlled, even negated, then individual liberty is
lost. The people in this story--Guido the storyteller, Beppo the roadsweeper, Nino the
innkeeper, the children who once played with Momo--find their lives controlled by the
grey-suited time thieves. The world becomes colorless once difference disappears.
What gives the world its color is diversity. This is what makes Momo so important.
She is diversity itself, or more bluntly "otherness." She appears at the old amphitheatre
at the beginning of the book, a strange and ambiguous figure. Neither clearly male nor
female (she turns out to be female, but at first she appears distinctly androgynous),
neither child nor adult, neither old nor young. She dresses like a vagabond: "Her
ankle-length dress was a mass of patches of different colours, and over it she wore a
man's jacket, also far too big for her, with the sleeves turned up at the wrists" (13). She
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lives beyond the usual frame of reference: she has no family, she has no origins, she
has no job, she has no responsibilities, she has no education, she has no possessions.
And yet she is a powerful force in the lives of those who know her. Her power derives
from her ability to [End Page 226] listen. By listening to others and by being different
from others, Momo becomes a force in creating a community.
From one perspective, what makes Momo different from others and what makes her a
good listener is time. She takes the time to listen, and she does not require time to
work and to horde possessions. Momo, as her name might suggest, lives for the
moment. She has no desire to shore up defences against some future time; she has only
the desire to be. She is one and individual, although she finds her pleasure in
participating in a group. She needs her friends, her stories and her games. From the
perspective of the grey men, Momo is immature, childish, and irresponsible. From a
psycho-analytic perspective, Momo is the unconscious, that rag-tag collection of
colorful bolts of cloth that unravels willy-nilly without our control. Momo is, then, a
danger to the men in grey who function with deliberation and conscious control. They
encourage Momo, as they encourage everyone, to enter a world governed by the laws
of productivity and time-saving, a world subservient to the reality principle. In their
world everything is geared to the same ends, ends specified by what we might call,
after Althusser, the Ideological State Apparatus. This is a collective and social version
of what psycho-analysis terms in the individual the superego.
Momo and her friends enjoy their lives together; they experience pleasure in playing
and talking and creating. The men in grey come to set aside pleasure; they nudge
everyone beyond the pleasure principle. The fiction they perpetrate is that life runs
better when everything is the same, when everyone accepts the same goals in life.
Professor Hora, the mysterious figure at the center of the book who controls all time,
articulates what it is that their fiction effects when he remarks that the grey men have
brought a disease to the city and that this disease is "called deadly tedium" (215). This
disease of tedium is difficult to avoid; either characters accept the hypnotic force of the
grey men's rhetoric or they run away like Momo. Only when Momo ceases to run,
when she "ceases to worry about herself" (198), and when she confronts the grey men
can she effect any release for herself and others from the somnambulence the grey men
have set upon the city.
In defeating the men in grey, Momo accomplishes a victory for otherness. Ende does
not explicitly offer a vision of the unity of "otherness" that bell hooks asks about, but
implicitly the end of Momo confirms an affirmative answer to the question: can we
have unity without destroying otherness? What we see at the end of this fantasy are
children playing in the streets, drivers of cars patiently and happily waiting and [End
Page 227] even joining the children in their games, people stopping on their way to
places of work in order to admire flowers or feed birds, physicians caring for their
patients, and labourers enjoying their labour. Most people do not know what has
caused this change, but if they were to find out they would acknowledge a small waiflike person whose distinction is simply her difference from others, her own
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"otherness." What the book offers is a romantic vision of unity amid disunity,
similitude within dissimilitude. Even Momo herself participates in this paradoxical
"otherness" of the self: she is both a child and a metaphor. She participates in the life
of the city--that is, she participates in human time, but she also represents something
beyond time, something other than the conscious order. She is herself both conscious
and unconscious, self and other. In this, she represents us all.
Roderick McGillis is Professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the
author of The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children's Literature and A Little
Princess: Gender and Empire (both Twayne 1996).

Notes
1. I think here of the Brothers Grimm and their project to collect German folktales in
order to preserve and to promote an idea of "Germanness." Of course we know that
many of their stories are not specifically "German" in origin deriving as they do from
Huguenot tellers and who knows where else. In the very idea of story as an expression
of a nation's "self" lies the inevitable reality of the self's miscegenated origin. See, for
example, Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm.
2. "Innocence" is a word replete with a sense of the otherness of those we label
"innocent." The innocent are those we take to be somehow both freer than ourselves
and more limited in what they know and can do. We often locate innocence in
childhood or simplicity and regard it nostalgically. It is that "Other" country from
whence we came, but to which we cannot return. This is not, I hasten to add, the only
way to conceptualize innocence (it is not Blake's way, for example), but it is a familiar
conceptualization in our culture. The innocent are "Other," and our relationship to this
other is ambivalent precisely because it is both attractive and beyond our complete
ability to emulate.
3. I use the word "mature" here because this is, I think, what Fairbridge wants us to
think. However, my use of this word slides over what is perhaps an important question
in the book: does Mark's decision to stay in South Africa reflect his mature acceptance
of social responsibility or does it reflect a continuing colonial attitude on his part?
Why does he not return home to Canada to take on the responsibilities of social
amelioration there? So often we have in books for the young plots in which the white
person is the one to fashion a better world for others. I think, for example, of Jerry
Spinelli's Maniac Magee.

Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
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Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman.
New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Ende, Michael. Momo. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Puffin, 1984.
Fairbridge, Lynne. In Such a Place. Toronto: Doubleday, 1992.
hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York and London:
Routledge, 1994.
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia
UP, 1991.
Nodelman, Perry, "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children's
Literature," Children's Literature Association Quarterly 17 (1992): 29-35.
Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction.
London: Macmillan, 1984.
Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New
York and London: Routledge, 1988.
------. Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives. New York and
London: Routledge, 1995.

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