Elephant or Elebird?: dialogic formation of truth and subjectivity in Dr. Seuss s Horton Hatches the Egg & Horton Hears a Who!

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1 International Journal of Children's Spirituality ISSN: X (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: Elephant or Elebird?: dialogic formation of truth and subjectivity in Dr. Seuss s Horton Hatches the Egg & Horton Hears a Who! Mohammad Mehdi Kimiagari To cite this article: Mohammad Mehdi Kimiagari (2017): Elephant or Elebird?: dialogic formation of truth and subjectivity in Dr. Seuss s Horton Hatches the Egg & Horton Hears a Who!, International Journal of Children's Spirituality, DOI: / X To link to this article: Published online: 10 Feb Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [ ] Date: 10 February 2017, At: 03:09

2 International Journal of Children s Spirituality, Elephant or Elebird?: dialogic formation of truth and subjectivity in Dr. Seuss s Horton Hatches the Egg & Horton Hears a Who! Mohammad Mehdi Kimiagari English Literature, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran ABSTRACT The voice of the other seems to become more than just a marginal voice in Dr. Seuss s Horton stories. Throughout these two narratives the character of this big elephant constantly reinforces the marginal voice of the other through a dialogic relationship. Horton the elephant cannot and will not stand a ruling voice. He persistently searches for the other. He is big and he does big things for small things. His acts of compassion and solicitude can best be explained through Mikhail Bakhtin s views on dialogism and language. The aim of this essay is to analyse the mentioned stories in the light of Bakhtin s theories on discourse and subjectivity. All through both of these books in children s literature, readers can detect the dialogic formation of truth and subjectivity as Horton experiences the clash of marginal with dominant. Margin crosses the borders of the centre and therein lies the rub. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 21 October 2016 Accepted 30 January 2017 KEYWORDS Mikhail Bakhtin; Dr. Seuss; dialogism; Horton; subjectivity Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You. Introduction Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You! Horton is an exceptionally sweet-hearted elephant from the books Horton Hatches the Egg (1940) and Horton Hears a Who! (1954) written by Theodor Seuss Geisel under the pen name Dr. Seuss. Both of these stories revolve around Horton who is consistently exerting himself to lend a hand to others. In the first story he goes through lots of troubles and hardships to save an egg which belongs to Mayzie the bird. Mayzie leaves her egg behind and it becomes Horton s duty to look out for the vulnerable egg. Horton safeguards the egg through voyage, storms, threats from hunters and acts of humiliation done by his own jungle friends. Eventually, the egg hatches and a creature which is a strange mixture of elephant and bird jumps out. Horton goes back joyfully to the jungle with the Elebird baby and Mayzie ends up with nothing. CONTACT Mohammad Mehdi Kimiagari 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group mmkimiagari@icloud.com

3 2 M. M. KIMIAGARI In the next book, Horton enters a much more complicated scenario. Splashing in the pool, he hears a small speck of dust chatting with him. He starts speculating and later discovers that the speck of dust is the place where an entire society of microscopic creatures live. He pledges allegiance and vows to protect the extremely small and infinitesimal planet of Whoville. Horton believes: a person s a person, no matter how small. Again, the elephant stomachs many misfortunes and adversities to deliver on his promise and watch over the tiny planet. Ultimately, the citizens of the planet manage to make noise and Horton is able to convince the members of his own community that the people in Whoville really exist so that they will all keep the planet safe. Throughout the stories, what seems to be puzzling and problematical is that the protagonist persistently counts on small and tiny things like an egg or a speck of dust. He endures humiliation and ignominy just to protect small and seemingly unimportant and negligible objects. He does big things for small things. This is the type of attitude that we constantly encounter in the course of both of the stories. We can trace and discover a dialogic relationship established among characters that assist a heteroglottic and linguistic context. The aim of this article is to analyse the mentioned stories in the light of Bakhtin s theories on the formation of subjectivity and truth to shed new shades of light on the small things that turn out to be big in Dr. Seuss s Horton Hatches the Egg and Horton Hears a Who! Approach and methodology Dialogism plays a pivotal and decisive role in Bakhtin s theories. In point of fact, his dialogism counts on existence as an event which is the source of change and alteration: The world in which I, from my own unique place, renounce myself does not become a world in which I do not exist, a world which is indifferent, in its meaning, to my existence: self-renunciation is a performance or accomplishment that encompasses Beingas-event. A great symbol of self-activity, the descending[?] of Christ [32 illegible words]. The world from which Christ has departed will no longer be the world in which he had never existed; it is, in its very principle, a different world. (Bakhtin 1993, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 16) In Bakhtin s view, Christ s existence can be considered as one of the best instances of existence as an event. The world that Christ left was certainly not the same world he came into. As observed by Holquist, being an event does not mean that human beings are passive receptacles into which events fall. Bakhtin believes that existence is addressed to us as a flood of potential messages and this addressivity means that we are constantly responding to utterances from different worlds. According to Bakhtin, addressivity implies not only that consciousness is always consciousness of something but also existence is the existence of something (Holquist 2002, 47). For the Russian thinker, truth is formed collectively within dialogues and interactions among people. One dominant voice can never exist in an isolated island. The voices are incessantly engaged in dialogues to shape the truth.

4 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHILDREN S SPIRITUALITY 3 Bakhtinian subjectivity is defined through intersubjectivity. From his viewpoint, a person is exposed to different ideologies and discourses from which he/she constantly selects and assimilates. Interrelationship and correlation between language, society and consciousness can be tracked in Bakhtin s theories of subjectivity. The voices are in a constant struggle to achieve hegemony and dominance. It is precisely in these circumstances that subjectivity is shaped and molded. Bakhtin characterised two different forms of discourses in his Dialogic Imagination that is, authoritative and internally persuasive: Both the authority of discourse and its internal persuasiveness may be united in a single word-one that is simultaneously authoritative and internally persuasive-despite the profound differences between these two categories of alien discourse. But such unity is rarely a given-it happens more frequently that an individual s becoming, an ideological process, is characterized precisely by a sharp gap between these two categories: in one, the authoritative word (religious, political, moral; the word of a father, of adults and of teachers, etc.) that does not know internal persuasiveness, in the other internally persuasive word that is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal code. The struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness. (Bakhtin 1981, Dialogic Imagination, 342) As stated by McCallum, Bakhtin develops his theories in the context of language and the discourse of narrative fiction. The sociolinguistic factors for him are the basic elements of heteroglottic structure of society. Like Lacan, Bakhtin believes in the formation of subjectivity inside the language. The characters for him are caught in a crossfire. Ideologies and discursive structures are in the ongoing process of invading the minds of miscellaneous characters and these processes give shape to the subjectivity of the characters in an intersubjective and dialogic mode (McCallum 1999, 103, 104). Mikhail Bakhtin was determined to search for the other in the text. For this carnivalistic thinker marginal voices were of critical importance. As Renfrew states, the core of alternative linguistics or translinguistics is the concept of utterance which demonstrates that a concrete utterance is a speech performance or act, which is determined not only by the intention of speaker, but by the concrete situation in which the utterance takes place. In this context, it is the speech interaction that determines the form of the utterance not the speaker in isolation (Renfrew 2015, 102,103). As a matter of fact, the subject s active participation is defined in answerability: An act of our activity, of our actual experiencing, is like a two-faced Janus It is only the once-occurrent event of Being in the process of actualization that can constitute this unique unity; all that which is theoretical or aesthetic must be determined as a constituent moment in the once-occurrent event of Being, although no longer, of course, in theoretical or aesthetic terms. An act must acquire a single unitary plane to be able to reflect itself in both directions-in its sense or meaning and in its being; it must acquire the unity of two-sided answerability-both for its content (special answerability) and for its Being (moral answer-ability). (Bakhtin 1993, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 2, 3)

5 4 M. M. KIMIAGARI Nielsen also asserts that Bakhtin s theory of two-sided answerability provides a unique position within the philosophy of the subject: The subject is ultimately the author of its actions and the subject is interpellated by the power and authority of its circumstances (Nielsen 2002, 69). The concept of answerability is tightly linked to Bakhtin s core concept of unfinalisability or unfinalisedness. The type of openness and in-the-process movement that we find in the concept of unfinalisability can be traced in the evolving fictional characters in the realm of literature. In Dr. Seuss s Horton stories, the characters repeatedly find themselves exposed to the others ideas and they are confronted with events that may not lead to change and reformation, but through zigs and zags the change succeeds. In his Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics, Bakhtin brings up the concept of unfinalisability. He repeatedly brings into focus Fyodor Dostoevsky s works: Every true reader of Dostoevsky, who perceives his novels not in the monologic mode and who is capable of rising to Dostoevsky s new authorial position, can sense this peculiar active broadening of his consciousness, not solely in the sense of an assimilation of new objects (human types, character, natural and social phenomena), but primarily in the sense of a special dialogic mode of communication with the autonomous consciousnesses of others, something never before experienced, an active dialogic penetration into the unfinalizable depths of man. (Bakhtin 1984, Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics, 68) To translate the mentioned theories into a concrete and well-grounded methodology the dialogic and conceptual framework of Bakhtin s theories will be employed. The focus of this essay is on Horton, the protagonist of two popular books by Dr. Seuss. The analyses of the texts will revolve around the formation of truth and subjectivity in the context of the unfolding events of the books. Dialogism, unfinalisability, two-sided answerability, authoritative and internally persuasive discourse function as the cornerstones of the analyses of the texts throughout the sections devoted separately to the books. It should be noted that the analyses follow the narrative line of the stories. On the whole, the conceptual framework of Bakhtin helps this essay shed new shades of light on the development of the protagonist of the stories of Horton to reveal the dialogic formation of truth and subjectivity in Horton Hatches the Egg and Horton Hears a Who! Analysis of the text (Horton Hatches the Egg) The story begins with a sight of Mayzie the bird sitting on her egg. She starts chatting with herself and moans about the tiring and demanding process of hatching an egg. The bird decides to find someone else so that she can go on a vacation and be free of her unpleasant responsibilities. She asks Horton the elephant to help her out and sit on the egg in her stead. At first Horton refuses the offer: I haven t feathers and I haven t wings. Me on your egg? Why, that doesn t make sense Your egg is so small, ma am, and I m so immense! (Seuss 1968, Horton Hatches the Egg, 3). What we notice here is the start of a conflict and friction between authoritative and

6 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHILDREN S SPIRITUALITY 5 internally persuasive discourses. When Horton realises that it is a foolish thing, we can trace the authoritative discourse that certainly won t accept an elephant on a tree. At last he gives in and accepts the offer. This change of heart substantiates the unfinalisedness of this protagonist and goes to show that Horton s consciousness is a consciousness of someone else in a Bakhtinian style. Horton goes up the trunk and sits on the egg. The first adversity that he faces is a strong and terrible storm, but the elephant tolerates. In exactly the next illustration of the book Dr Seuss creates a sharp contrast between Horton and Mayzie. We catch sight of the bird having fun on Palm Beach while Horton is all wet in the storm trying to protect the egg from environmental harms. The springtime comes around and so does the authoritative discourse of Horton s community. His friends and the members of the jungle of Nool come and subject Horton to ignominy and humiliation: Look! Horton the Elephant s up on a tree how absurd. Old Horton the Elephant thinks he s a bird (Seuss 1968, Horton Hatches the Egg, 19). Horton considers himself the author of his own actions and resists the dominant discursive structure of his community. Two-sided answerability plays a key role in view of the fact that the protagonist finds himself in a constant conflict between his own independent opinions and the major discourse around him. He begins to shape his own consciousness and a gap is created between internally persuasive discourse and the authoritarian one. Threats from anthropocentric minds of hunters begin to take shape and Horton finds himself in a hazardous situation created by human beings. Hunters with rifles come, but the elephant refuses to budge. Horton sees that instead of shooting the hunters drop their guns and begin to laugh much to his surprise. Another authoritarian discursive structure emerges here, but this one belongs to human beings. The hunters consumerist minds begin to commodify the image of an elephant sitting on top of a tree. They decide to take Horton and sell him to a circus in New York. They build a wagon, which has symbolic significance, to imprison Horton and take him to NY. The wagon demonstrates how the authoritative discourse tries to limit and restrict the internally persuasive one in their dialogic relationship. Now the truth becomes another one. An elephant that tried to save an egg out of kindness becomes a ridiculous and crazy elephant that should be laughed at because the human beings put a different spin on the image of an elephant sitting on an egg. This image transforms into a commodity and a spectacle. One sentence that recurs throughout the story is the utterance of faithfulness by Horton: I meant what I said and I said what I meant An elephant s faithful one hundred percent! (Seuss 1968, Horton Hatches the Egg, 38). As Renfrew maintained, this utterance is not solely determined by the intention of the speaker, but it also arises from the concrete situation it belongs to (Renfrew 2015, 161, 162). Thus, we can consider this utterance as a speech performance and act which forms the underpinnings of Horton s actions. It is of note at this point that Horton s opinions are translated into a type of materiality with a different modality.

7 6 M. M. KIMIAGARI In the end, Mayzie finds Horton by coincidence and wants her own egg back. In an exchange of dialogue, we see a dialogic and ethical conflict burgeons with regard to the ownership of the egg. Mayzie claims the ownership of the egg because she is the one who has created it and Horton claims it because he is the one who protected it. This can be considered as a dialogue which occurs in the case of ethics and ownership. In the middle of their quarrel the egg hatches and a strange creature jumps out. It is not a bird nor an elephant, but a mélange of them or something that we may call an Elebird. This hybrid creature comes out of a red egg, but no one can ignore the small white specks on it. The people around them cheer and send them back home. This substantiates the fact that Horton s internally persuasive discourse prevails and merges with the authoritarian discourse in a dialogic fashion. This process is precisely the same process that develops Horton s subjectivity in an intersubjective way. In actual fact, the Elebird epitomises the unfinalisability of Dr. Seuss s unfinalisable protagonist of Horton stories. Horton cares about the marginal voices and the Elebird is the product of that caring. Analysis of the text (Horton Hears a Who!) Horton enters another dialogic adventure in Dr. Seuss s next book which has a universal, ethical and multinational message and that is: a person s a person, no matter how small. These recurring words reveal how Horton, even in his language, plays the role of a challenger who sends ripples of disruption into the status quo. While splashing and playing in the pool, the big elephant hears strange noises and realises that an unrecognisable voice has started a dialogue with him out of the blue. As opposed to the first story, Horton s consciousness and his way of dealings with his environment have changed and developed. He instantly answers the call of help but he can t recognise where it comes from: I ll help you, said Horton. But who are you? Where? He looked and he looked. He could see nothing there but a small speck of dust blowing past through the air (Seuss 1954, Horton Hears a Who!, 3). Once more, from the very beginning the authoritarian discourse comes into a bitter conflict with the internally persuasive discourse of the protagonist. The Kangaroo and all the members of the Jungle of Nool start humiliating Horton and call him a crazy and insane elephant because he talks to a speck of dust. Bakhtinian addressivity comes out into the open and Horton s consciousness becomes the consciousness of something that he is responding to which is the speck of dust in this case. Little by little, the big elephant starts to realise that the speck of dust is home to an entire society with diverse members. They call their city Who-ville and the mayor as a representative of their community starts a dialogue with Horton: My town is called Who-ville, for I am a Who and we Whos are all thankful and grateful to you. Horton calls back to the Mayor of the town, You re safe now. Don t worry. I won t let you down (Seuss 1954, Horton Hears a Who!, 21). In this story, Horton resorts to a recurring utterance and motto like the previous one and that is: a

8 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHILDREN S SPIRITUALITY 7 person s a person, no matter how small. This utterance gains its performance in the social conditions of the jungle of Nool and it is not wholly determined by the speaker himself. Until the very ending of the story Horton the elephant remains the only one who can hear the marginal voices of the people on the speck of dust and he does his best to safeguard their community. The monkeys snatch the flower with the speck of dust and give it to an eagle named Vlad Vlad-i-koff so that the mighty bird can take it away and wreck it. Horton starts following the representative of the authoritarian discourse till morning and claims that speck of dust again after hours of strenuous searching for the marginal voices in the speck of dust. Again, the members of the jungle get angry at Horton and believe he is disturbing the peace of their community. This reveals that any disturbance caused by a marginal voice will bring about the attempt of the dominant discourse to contain that so-called disorder. The animals gather and cage Horton and they also intend to boil the speck of dust on the clover in hot water. Horton turns to the unfinalisable aspects of his fellow animals and takes it upon himself to bring in evidence to prove that the microscopic people really exist on that speck of dust. Everybody from all walks of life in Who-ville gather to shout and prove their existence. Eventually, they prove their existence. The members of Horton s community join him and vow to protect that speck of dust as well. As specified by Jeffcoat, we observe how the marginal voice at last gains significance and the dialogic formation of subjectivity succeeds: Once the Whos unite their voices, they exhibit the power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed. They are powerful because they know what is at stake, which enables them to put all their energy into their fight for justice. In doing so, they fight not just for their ideals but their very survival. It s this power that is sufficiently strong to free both the Whos and Horton, as well as releasing the people of Nool from their own arrogant assumptions. (Jeffcoat 2011, 98) The other characters also yield to Horton s perspective and change their minds. This fact is the indicator of the unfinalisable nature of Dr. Seuss s characters and, of course, the collective formation of truth. As Bakhtin claims: Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction (Bakhtin 1984, Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics, 110). Conclusion As mentioned earlier, subjectivity and truth are formed dialogically in Dr. Seuss s Horton stories. Horton is a type of character that does big things for the small and marginal voice of the other, and it is this protagonist that persistently and tirelessly reinforces the dialogic atmosphere of the stories. In the course of the stories the readers observe how truth is mediated and modified by different discursive structures. In the end we realise that Horton meant what he said and said

9 8 M. M. KIMIAGARI what he meant an elephant s faithful one hundred percent. In point of fact, one can say that Horton attempted to establish a dialogic relationship with his own environment and made changes through that way. An isolated island of a dominant voice cannot remain lonely for a long time. The voices form a Bakhtinian constellation like the shape of an Elebird and dialogues shape the truth collectively. The subjectivity of Horton s unfinalisable character is molded through the clash between the authoritative and internally persuasive discourses in his community. Horton never goes for the controlling voice, but he chooses to play the role of a challenger who seeks the other. For Horton, isolation and sealing never pays off. The inclusion of internally persuasive discourse leads to the creation of an Elebird whose existence manifests how dialogic inclusion, not exclusion, functions at the core of Seussian narratives. Acknowledgements The author wishes to express his deepest gratitude and dedicate this article to Dr. Amir Ali Nojoumian whose Literary Theory courses at Shahid Beheshti University inspired him to write this article. The dialogic atmosphere of his classes was the driving force behind this research. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Mohammad Mehdi Kimiagari is an MA student of English Literature at Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Isfahan where he earned his BA in English Language and Literature. He is currently working on his MA thesis which is on Yael Farber s production of Arthur Miller s The Crucible from an Agambenian viewpoint. His primary research interests are in visual and adaptation studies. ORCID Mohammad Mehdi Kimiagari References Bakhtin, M. M The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. M Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Holquist, Michael Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge.

10 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHILDREN S SPIRITUALITY 9 Jeffcoat, Tanya From There to Here, from Here to There, Diversity is Everyewhere. In Dr. Seuss and Philosophy: Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! edited by Jacob M. Held. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. McCallum, Robyn Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction: The Dialogic Construction of Subjectivity. New York: Garland Publishing. Nielsen, Greg M Norms of Answerability: The Social Theory Between Bakhtin and Habermas. Albany: SUNY Press. Renfrew, Alastair Mikhail Bakhtin. London: Routledge. Seuss, Theodor Geisel Horton Hears a Who! New York: Random House Books for Young Readers. Seuss, Theodor Geisel Horton Hatches the Egg. New York: Random House Childrens Books.