You’ll never look at a walnut whip the same way again...

[steepholm]

Okay, I’ve been wondering about this for a couple of weeks now. At first I thought it was just a brain-maggot of little worth, but the more I went over it the more convincing it became. This weekend I put it to lady_schrapnell, in the hope that she’d tell me not to be so silly, but instead she became an enthusiastic collaborator in my hermeneutic folly. (And I thought I could rely on her!)

It’s all to do with the early works of Roald Dahl. It’s obvious, I hope, that the peach in which James drifts over the Atlantic is a kind of makeshift womb – but has anyone noticed that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory forms a diptych in its graphic portrayal of the male gonads?

The evidence for this? Let us begin with the name of the name of the factory’s genius loci. That name is... Willie Wonka. Need I say more? The book was first published in the States, so perhaps Dahl hoped that this fairly transparent wordplay would have been semi-submerged in the Atlantic, just as his sometime collaborator Ian Fleming assumed that “Pussy Galore” would mean little or nothing to British audiences. It's too late now.

But a name is not enough. Nor is it enough to note the amount of licking, sucking and swelling that goes on in this book. We must also follow the fate of the five children whom Wonka entices into his domain. At first I thought that these might represent rival sperm, each hoping to fertilize the goose that lays the golden egg (i.e. “to inherit the factory”). The celibate Wonka wants a child of his own, after all. But lady_schrapnell suggests an alternative reading, in which Dahl is warning us against various kinds of non-procreative sexual practice. Augustus Gloop, for example, is unnaturally fascinated by the river of chocolate (aka the Alimentary Canal) - by which conveyance he is at last deposited outside the factory via Port Esquiline. Veruca Salt’s very name is sufficiently suggestive of an STD, while Violet Beauregarde and Mike Teavee are both scopophiliacs - obsessed with looking rather than doing. (Isn't that what "Beauregarde" means?) Violet is eventually rejected as a “bad egg”, and Teavee reduced to a minuscule size, leaving Charlie to win through to the grand prize.

And what happens at that climactic moment? Why, Wonka and Charlie climb into a glass elevator, and in his ecstacy Wonka sends it erupting through the very roof of the factory. Why call it a Great Glass Elevator, when Jism Prism would be both more concise and to the point?

Or are we just reading too much into it?

Comments

[jadelennox]

The scariest kind of cracktastic litcrit is the kind that works in all it's cracked-out gloriousness.

Man.

You know, even as a kid I was weired out by the shapeshifting sperm aliens in Great Glass Elevator

[altariel.livejournal.com]

The Vermicious Knids! S-C-R-A-M.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

It's a truism of kiddylitcrit that eating is sublimation for sex.

Those of us who operate on a higher plane know the opposite is true everywhere else.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Jism Prism

Coffee, meet computer screen; computer screen, meet coffee.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Well, you can rely on me to continue with the inadequately-researched argument about Dahl and why he is Not a Good Thing (although perhaps I shouldn't use the word 'thing' so carelessly in this context!)

I think something's been left out here, due to our lack of note-taking, though I'm not sure I'll manage to get whatever it is back in its original glory. But I do remember taking Veruca quite a bit further: the STD is obvious, but having picked one of those up isn't necessarily going to be the result of non-procreative sexual practice. I will honestly and virtuously flag the admission for Steepholm's readers that Dahl's obvious antisemitism is a matter of dispute between us. I buy Michele Landsberg's reading of the depiction of Veruca Salt and her family as 'uncomfortably close to a common anti-Jewish stereotype', and so patched in the very Final Solution punishment of Veruca and her parents 'in the furnace', and ended up with a gloriously cohesive argument linking her inadvertent 'sterilization' by STD to Nazi eugenics. (Snipped and) sewed it up, indeed.

What I can't remember is whether we had more about Violet than the spill-over from Teavee. ('Spill-over'? Oh dear!) Could have something to do with the fact that I haven't read the book in decades...

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Very quick Wiki later... Violet's constant gum chewing -> oral fixation, so stuck in the infantile/oral sex phase of development? (Hey - don't blame me!) The novel's version of her song includes a line about Miss Bigelow (archetypal gum-chewer) who 'once chewed her boy friend's nose', which surely cinches it? And Violet - a tomboy - swells up, turns blue, and has to be taken off and 'juiced' by the Oompa Loompas lest she explode. Ewww, btw. I'd say it might be a Wiki inaccuracy if it were another book!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I do like the oral fixation - and the tomboyness is interesting too, especially given that she turns blue (rather than pink). Oh, and Miss Bigelow's castration of her boyfriend reminds me that we disovered that 'snozberry' (one of WW's flavours) is an alternative word for 'penis' - as explained, apparently, in My Uncle Oswald. Much food for thought, and mental mastication.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Er, have to say that I was going way beyond 'blue is for boys' in that interpretation of swelling and turning blue, and needing to be 'juiced'. But yes - I'd forgot about the snozberry. I'm glad you're awake and on-the-ball (ouch!) enough to write 'mental mastication' without mishap atm, steepholm my dear.

[leelowe.livejournal.com]

Now I'm finally beginning to see a reason for literary criticism.