Willy Wonka, Dahl’s Chickens and Heavenly Visions

Abstract

With the centenary of Roald Dahl's birth just behind us, in 2017, it seems timely to return to his most popular book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), itself over half-a-century old. My motivation for this is partly external (see Acknowledgements) and partly internal, the latter arising from what seemed an outstanding paradox first articulated by Eleanor Cameron, one of Dahl's earliest and sternest detractors, who resented what she called the novel's "hypocrisy," epitomized in its moralstuck like a marshmallow in a lump of fudgethat TV is horrible and hateful and time-wasting and that children should read good books instead, when in fact the book itself is like nothing so much as one of the more specious television shows. It reminds me of Cecil B. De Mille's [sic] Biblical spectaculars, with plenty of blood and orgies and tortures to titillate the masses …. (1972, p. 440). Forty years later, Jackie Stallcup would also note this contradiction in more general terms: that "Dahl and his readers can have their Wonka bars and eat them too: we get to revel in the kind of disgusting subversive humour … while, at the same time, we learn a 'good lesson' about the rewards of 'proper' behaviour" (Stallcup, 2012, p. 46). In her Introduction to the collection in which Stallcup's essay appears, Catherine Butler also notes this incongruity, how Wonka "both tempts the children and punishes them for their infractions," having earlier, like some "vindictive […] Old Testament Nobodaddy sacked his workers, yet is still absolved at the end, "being beyond blame, a magical dispenser of rewards" (2012, p. 5). Whereas Cameron sees this duplicity as "hypocrisy," Butler suggests that the novel is more particular approach to writing. Peter Hunt has termed this "the Dahl effect" (2012, p. 186), seeing Dahl as "part of a postmodernist movement that fostered an ironic self-awareness in even the youngest readers" (p. 178), thereby making "a major contribution to changing the nature of a generation's response to fantasy," resulting in its commodification (p. 178). While I think there is some truth in this, I will argue that Dahl was himself caught up in a shift in late capitalism from production to consumerism, which resulted in this more commodified style of writing. Willy Wonka as Entrepreneur Let me begin, though, by examining that contradictory figure, Willy Wonka. On the one hand, as noted, he seems to be a ruthless capitalist in the mould of his Victorian antecedents, as fictionalised in figures like Charles Dickens's Josiah Bounderby or Paul Dombey. Wonka owns the biggest chocolate factory in the world (six times larger than any others), exports his bars "to all the four corners of the earth!" (Dahl, 1985/1964, p. 21) and uses not a local workforce but what amounts to third-world, slave labour. Wonka openly brags about it: "…I shipped them all over here, every man, woman, and child in the Oompa-Loompa tribe. It was easy. I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them…. They are wonderful workers. They all speak Eng...

On the Tolerance of Children’s Literature Criticism: Psychoanalysis, Neighborliness, and Pooh

“…14 'Surplus pleasure' is precisely it, of course, but, as I read in this present article, I am not convinced that Rudd makes an adequate case for why this is so. Rudd does offer a more sustained and subtle reading of jouissance in a later article (Rudd 2020b), but here still I would argue that a number of the problems described in this present article remain. 15 Rudd, it should be remembered, does elsewhere offer readings within what might be termed a broadly Žižekian framework (Rudd 2013(Rudd , 2020b.…”

“…It can be problematically read in relation to the 'obviously' phallic imagery of Hook's pipe (again, p. 199), for example. See Rudd (2020b) for additional examples. I should add here that, to my mind, the majority of engagements with Lacan within children's literature criticism follow what I am reading as an approach based on the notion of the literary text as an allegory for psychoanalysis.…”

Adaptable, Edible, Oedipal? The His-Story of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its Adaptations

“…The very name of this lift, the Wonkavator, explicitly links it to the chocolatier, so it is worth considering his name more carefully, for I would argue that, unlike Charlie, it is almost impossible to conceive Wonka as female. A key reason for this is the latter's explicitly phallic demeanour, as I have argued elsewhere (Rudd, 2018). This is evident just from his name, both elements of which ("Willy," and the easily transposed vowels of "Wonka") render its associations far beyond innuendo, especially when we learn that his "vitamin Wonka" is something that makes your "toes grow out, until they're as long as your fingers" (1995, p. 169).…”