Maurice Sendak's Ritual Cooking of the Child in Three Tableaux: The Moon, Mother, and Music

To Music Mother of Memory and Feeder of Dreams.

—Edmond Rostand¹

Written Riddles for a Curtain-Raiser: Jewish Salt in the Pot

To enter the fantastic world of Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen brings the sheer literary delight of discovering a peculiar inventive process at work: a child is being "cooked" with all the author's literal refinements, and with what typical ingredients, in what a whimsical universe! The illustrator's tale abides by rules progressively defined in English humorous writing for children. In some ways it recalls the surprising events in the Duchess's kitchen of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: the flying saucepan, the baby that Alice would like to nurse like a doll and that is transformed into a pig, the cook "busily stirring the soup" (16) are major figures in a rite of nineteenth-century English girls' education. In like manner, Mickey's adventures transform him into an efficient cultural auxiliary to adult catering; no mere saucepans fly in his night kitchen, but Mickey himself takes off on his toy plane, copes with three angry bakers, and is finally changed not into a pig but into a rooster who crows his joy standing on the milk bottle.

Yet there is a major difference between Lewis Carroll's and John Tenniel's illustrations and those of Sendak, where a hidden god seems to have left imprints of his word in the shape of fragmentary messages written on boxes and house fronts. These tags turn the scenery of the night kitchen into a book within a book that initiates a reader's guessing game. Innuendo and inscribed hints about some private and much treasured secrets suggest the tempo and the very spirit of this fanciful story.

To peek behind the screen thus demurely drawn, let us glance at the image of Mickey about to disappear naked into the batter. With one leg stretched out and the other foot half buried in the dough, the child appears to sleep and dance at the same time. This impression is associatively reinforced by the nearby bottle labeled with a mass of stars matching those of the night sky, a full moon, and the trademark "Kneitel's Fandango." This split stance and echo create the illusion that Mickey is skipping about to some lively but silent tune ("Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter"). On second thought, the whole punning scene appears artfully devised by a mischievous author, who tersely and ingeniously unites cooking and music as he dallies with his reader's attention.

No further doubt remains as to the playful purposefulness of Sendak's composition when we sight the word "SALT" above a yellow Star of David on a box held out by one of the three cooks, who screws up his eyes knowingly and points unequivocally to Jewish "salt," or humor, as the secret law governing the narrative; the trademark "Woody's" alludes directly to Woody Allen's merry jesting. Through these devices Sendak sets up a "game of puzzles" similar to those described in Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter." According to Dupin's famous analysis, each player in the game is required to "find a given word upon the motley perplexed surface of the chart" (Poe 467); while novices try to find "the more minutely lettered names," experienced players immediately know that what is "concealed" and escapes the reader's attention is written in large letters. In the enciphering of his text, Sendak acts upon the principles of Poe's Minister, the "Poet" and "Mathematician" who "deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world by preventing any portion of the world from perceiving it" (468). In such a context, reading becomes a matter of initiation and double entendre; onlookers must take every image and word with a pinch of salt. This salt, cleverly added to the batter for the happy seasoning of the child, is more elusive and less hysterical than the pepper which Lewis Carroll's cook lavishly throws into the soup and air and which...