The Dragon's Cache: Dahl’s Chickens

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Dahl’s Chickens

“What amazes me,” Sophie said, “is how you ever learned to write in the first place.”

“One night,” he [the BFG] said, “I is blowing a dream through a window and I sees this book lying on the little boy’s bedroom table.” So the Big Friendly Giant explains that, while he would never steal anything from a human, he borrowed it for a short time. “Perhaps only about eighty years,” the BFG said. “Soon I shall be putting it back.”

“And that’s how you taught yourself to write?” Sophie asked him.

“I is reading it hundreds of times,” the BFG said. “And I is still reading it and teaching new words to myself and how to write them. It is the most scrumdiddlyumptious story.”

Sophie took the book out of his hand. “’Nicholas Nickleby,’” she read aloud.

“By Dahl’s Chickens,” the BFG said.

(Quoted from The BFG, Chapter 14: Dreams, by Roald Dahl. Illustration by Quentin Blake).

Lately, I’ve been reading Generation Dead by Daniel Waters. In the novel, Adam plays football at a high school where teenagers are not just returning from the dead, but also attending classes and petitioning to join the sports teams. Yearning to grow, Adam takes karate classes, participates in a work-study program geared at enhancing the living’s understanding of the Differently Biotic (the current, politically correct term for zombies), and reads Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. We follow Adam’s interactions with his undead friends, and in times of difficulty, Adam centers himself with words of wisdom from Master Griffin his karate teacher. But we never learn what he thinks of Wuthering Heights, or how the novel impacts his life. I found this disappointing, not only because it’s one of those classics of literature I would someday like to read, but also because great stories have a way of seeping into our consciousness, and coloring our view of the world.

When I picked up The BFG in the library sale room, I merely thought it’d be interesting to compare it with one of Roald Dahl’s more popular works. At most, I thought I might mention it once in a post. When I started reading it, I quickly grew tired of the way the giant spoke, and had to slog through the novel for a while, before I learned to accept the dialogue as a valid (and not excessive) aspect of the story. Yet by the time I had finished the novel, I realized that I had really enjoyed it, and have since mentioned it several times in this blog.

At the Austin Zoo, humans shared the paths with peacocks and chickens. When I found myself posing for a photo before a particularly large example of the latter, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much Dahl’s literature has seeped into our lives. Nearly all of us, from every walk of life, either read his delightful books in our youth (while learning to read and write), read them to children, or watched adaptations in the cinema. Thus, we live in the shadow of Dahl’s literature. The paradigm through which we view the world is colored in part by the characters and situations he created. Whether we engage in his delightful humor, strut around in our finest attire, or cluck over our children, we are all Dahl’s chickens.