Ray Bradbury and Roald Dahl should have been best friends. Okay, maybe they wouldn't have too much in common - I don't really know and don't feel like researching it - but they'd have gotten along quite well at a party being the two guys who sat in the corner talking about how television was going to destroy us all. I've already briefly brought up Bradbury a few posts back when I mentioned Fahrenheit 451. Not only is it tragic that in this world, all books are contraband, but he also stresses the role that television would fill in a world that lacked critical thought. Television screens often times circled an entire room; favorite television characters were referred to as "The Relatives," as viewers often times knew these characters better than they knew any living person. What Dahl does is bring this concern to a younger audience with his children's book Matilda.
Dahl starts this book off by criticizing Matilda's parents for not being able to recognize her intelligence. They are described as being the type of people who eat TV dinners every night in front of the television set and have no books in the house other than a cookbook. Matilda reads this when she's 4 years old, and when she asks her father for another book, he says "What's wrong with the telly, for heaven's sake? We've got a lovely telly with a twelve-inch screen [note: this book was written in 1988, and since I would have been only two at that time, let's just assume that that was a big screen back then] and now you come asking for a book! You're getting spoiled, my girl!" (Dahl, 12). Her education left in her own hands, Matilda precedes to sneak off to the library every day and enlighten herself, with the help of Dickens, Bronte, Austen, Hardy, and so on, all when she is four years old.
Recently I commented on books moving away from fantasy towards self-efficient prodigies. This book actually crosses both sides of this line. With Matilda's great mental capacity, she soon finds that her mind is more powerful than most in a supernatural sort of way. Her newly discovered abilities will come to help her deal with her impossible parents and her even more impossible headmistress. In this way, this book could have double appeal and keep the attention of a broader audience. The only thing I don't see being attractive to modern youth is how villainous it makes television appear. I am not going to take a definite stance either pro- or anti- television because, I, like today's children, have grown up with television being a major part of my life. It becomes difficult to judge a matter when it is so ingrained in one's culture. I happen to think that it has the potential to increase the means of education as well as potentially being the degradation of society. Ironically enough, it was television that taught me that maybe I should spend a little less time watching television. For example: I love the series "Gilmore Girls." I love the life that they have and I envy it. However, if I spend all of my time watching it, I'm not really leaving myself much opportunity to experience it.
Well, that's all on that for now, but for the curious: The title of this blog is the title of a song by OK Go, which seemed relevant to the theme.
Enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fbg_04oYa8&feature=related
I remember reading this book when I was younger, but I took the TV angle a different direction. I love the way you look at it, but I always saw it more as an issue of no relationship with her parents. They cared about their TV more than they did her daughter which I suppose supports your whole argument. I just never looked at it deeper since I did read it when I was younger. So I don't think you need to worry about a younger audience being deterred by the book because I think they'd look at it on the surface and not be offended by the author's underlying message. :)
ReplyDeleteOh, good point, Pam. I just automatically went there because I had previously read Dahl's poem called, wait for it... "Television," which maybe I could have mentioned in this post. It's just one of those cases where I let my mind fill in blanks that I wasn't actually expressing. Here's a link.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.poemhunter.com/poem/television/
But I do agree with you. It doesn't HAVE to be about the television in this particular book. Because, let's be honest, any parent who treated their child like this, regardless of what they were using to occupy their time, would not be winning any awards.