Memory and Desire in Fly by Night

A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,On a branch.I laugh, as I see him abandon himselfTo entire delight, for he knows as well as I doThat the branch will not break.

—James Wright

At its best, a book written for a child is a narrative spoken by a mature adult who listens to his own voice and simultaneously anticipates how he might be overheard by his audience. The adult must remember what it was like to be a child and imagine possible paths that might lead the child-audience to maturity. The narrative itself is, of course, one of the paths the child takes; the author recognizes that different children will walk that path in a multitude of ways. Just as the author remembers his childhood, the child desires the mature sensibility of the author of the narrative. The interaction—of the author, the child in the author, the child, the author in the child—works against the notion that children are merely childish as they read and that authors must reduce themselves to childlike personae as they write for children. There must be no condescension.

Genuine fantasy, such as Randall Jarrell's Fly by Night (illustrated by Maurice Sendak),¹ is by its very nature an imaginative journey away from something: constraint, laws, normality. Like other fantasies, it contains the element of opposition: the quality imagined, wished for, fantasized is opposed and animated by what it rejects. As the naturalistic waking world at the beginning of the story opposes the night flight of fantasy, so Sendak's realistic illustrations (only those on the cover of the book and on pages 26 and 27 are fantastical) oppose the dreamlike quality of the text. In this way they present perfectly the quality of hallucination, which is only hallucination when we think it is real.

Fly by Night is a performance encouraging the participation of the audience. Jarrell and Sendak give the child-reader a narrative through which to pursue possible combinations of haunted fantasy and mature self-conscious adult perceptions. The narrative moves with the perspective of the main character, David, through three different levels of imagination and sleep, from David's conscious, naturalistic reality through his night flight of dream or hallucination to his most subtle power to create a fictionalized parable from his most painful deprivations. At all three levels the narrative voice is coeval with David's imagination, but the voice cannot be David's because he cannot yet use a language which would integrate dream and reality.

The line that announces that Fly by Night is fantasy is "At night David can fly." Up to that point the perspective is matter-of-fact, the completely naturalistic description of David's home following a strictly ordinary set of directions:

If you turn right at the last stoplight on New Garden Road and go north for a mile and a half, you come to a lake on a farm. Beyond, at the edge of the forest, there is a house with a window seat and a big willow.

[p. 3]

With the statement "At night David can fly," the fantastical non sequitur, we have the abrupt jump to the extraordinary or disordinary perspective. Most children blithely accept the non sequitur—the shift from one point of view to its opposite—by shifting their perspective. They have not yet been educated about the potential chaos of simply accepting a fantastical narrative as though it were "real." The non sequitur initiates their new, but still naturalistic, point of view. Adults, suspicious, trained to bifurcate fantastic and real, are confused and likely to remain so by the directness of the statement: Is it ingenuous? Is it meant ironically? Is it actually saying "At night David dreams that he can fly"? Narrative directions are harder for adults to follow because adults hear directions with more predispositions. The line indicates, basically, that participation in the story, involving suspension of the reader's sense of natural law, is welcomed. In fact, children, remembering their own vividly experienced fantasies, and adults who can...