Rey - Curious George Gets A Medal

In H. A. Rey's 1957 childrens' book Curious George Gets A Medal, a little brown monkey named George lives with a tall white man with a yellow hat in a house that appears to be a short distance from both rural farms and well-funded museums of natural history.

One day George looks at a picture book, gets a letter, tries to write one himself, spills ink on the floor, floods the house while trying to clean up, goes to a neighbouring farm to fetch a water pump, frees some pigs and rides a cow, is chased by angry farmers, jumps onto a museum delivery truck to escape, wanders into a museum, climbs on and accidentally destroys a dinosaur exhibit, is yelled at and caged by angry scientists, is saved from the zoo by the Man in the Yellow Hat, agrees to fly on a space ship for the scientists to avoid incarceration, almost dies, parachutes out at the last second, is greeted by adoring crowds, and is given a medal.

This is a short book, but it leaves the reader with many troubling questions.


Ambiguous Identities and Unwelcoming Communities
Curious George appears to have ambiguous relationships with everyone around him. What is George's relationship to the Man with the Yellow Hat? Is he considered an adopted child, a pet, or a fully autonomous equal? As the story begins, they are described by the narrator as friends and roomates. But based on this one book, the Man with the Yellow Hat appears to consider George something between a child and a pet.

Unlike a small child, George is left alone at home to fend for himself. The door is unlocked and the mailman, who could easily have been a kidnapper or axe murderer, walks right in to deliver a letter. But George can't read the letter. He is illiterate, and clearly has not been enrolled in a local school. Even though he flips through books and tries to read and write, he is incapable of doing either of these things. He appears to be more pet than child to the Man with the Yellow Hat.

George meets many townspeople during his very long day, and all of them have a clear role in society. They are mailmen, farmers, drivers, security guards and scientists. Only George (and possibly the Man with the Yellow Hat) plays no clear role in society. In this way he seems like any other human child. But unlike other children, he is not part of the world of children and will never learn a trade or profession. He is not progressing toward adulthood. Again, he seems more like a pet than a child in this case.

But George is also estranged from the world of other animals. He meets no other monkeys in the book. And when he wanders into communities of goats, pigs and cows, he interacts with them as if he is human. He sees them not as individuals or equals, only as tools to help him achieve his own goals.

This time George was right, the cow did not mind being tied to the pump. She even let him climb on her back - and off they went! George was glad: now he would soon be home, pump out the room, and everything would be all right.

Curious George's interaction with the farm animals prefigures the use of George himself by the human scientists later in the book. Among other animals, George sees himself as a human. This point is driven home more painfully when George wanders the halls of the Natural History Museum. He walks into a room filled with stuffed animals and is momentarily scared - until he realizes that they are dead and cannot harm him.

He fears his own kind and is unable to see that one day the scientists at the museum might try to kill and stuff him too. He can't imagine this possibility because he sees himself as set apart from other animals. He believes that he has a special relationship with the humans, that he and the Man with the Yellow Hat really are friends.

It is not my intent to criticize poor Curious George here. But can we easily forgive him for his use of other animals? Malcolm X would likely have a lot to say about George's attitude.


Self-Worth and The Politics of Recognition
Curious George starts his day alone, flipping through a picture book in an empty house. He ends it alone, looking at himself in a mirror, bringing to mind Robert De Niro's tragic, lonely final scene in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull.

Throughout the book, George is the liberal ideal of a self-contained and self-made man. He doesn't fully belong to any community. He is an animal among humans and a human among animals.

George suffers from the dislocation and alienation common to all middle class brown monkeys. They live in nice houses and among humans. They live lives of leisure and only encounter other animals at the lowest segments of society or as victims or objects of study. He is a monkey alone - an idea brought to it's most perfect realization when he sits alone in a space ship above the earth and then floats down slowly in a parachute, barely visible to the people and animals far below him.

Although he is profoundly alone, can't we still consider George emotionally and psychologically healthy? I'm not so sure. Although he ends the story happy to be praised by the townspeople, he falls into a deep, near suicidal depression just a few hours before, when he is harassed by the museum scientists.

Professor Wiseman was terribly angry. "Lock that naughty monkey up right away," he said, "and take him back to the Zoo. He must have run away from there."

George was carried off in a cage. He felt so ashamed he almost wished he were dead.

This is cause for serious concern, but one wonders why George's sense of self-worth is so tightly tied to the praise and blame that humans throw at him. It can't be healthy. George is blind to his own inherent worth. He can't see that he is a victim of the incompetence and misplaced anger of several different townspeople.

The farmers don't securely lock their pigs in their pen but are then outraged when George releases them accidentally. At the museum, George walks by several incompetent guards, climbs onto an unguarded and insecure dinosaur exhibit and almost dies when it collapses on him. But instead of apologizing, the scientists who run the museum yell at him and put him in a cage to send him to the zoo.

What is missing from George's life that leaves him so profoundly vulnerable to the townspeople around him? His problem may be that his current sense of identity is wholly inwardly generated. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues in his essay The Politics of Recognition, that healthy identities are not fully inwardly generated.

[The] crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression. [Taylor is referring here to things like culture, art, and other modes of expression and meaning.]

But we learn these modes of expression through exchanges with others. People do not acquire the languages needed for self-definition on their own. Rather, we are introduced to them through interaction with others who matter to us - what George Herbert Mead called "significant others". The genesis of the human mind is in this sense not monological, not something each person accomplishes on his or her own, but dialogical.

Curious George is damaged and vulnerable because he is searching for his identity alone, with no culture or community of his own and no genuine significant others in his life. In fact even in the most basic sense, George has no family or friends beyond his questionable relationship with the Man with the Yellow Hat.

One wonders whether George feels shame so quickly and deeply because he has no genuine foundation of pride and meaning in his life. This sort of foundation would traditionally have come from an upbringing among other little brown monkeys who love him, steeped in stories of other famous brown monkeys like Hanuman, Dr Zaius and King Kong. But all he has is one "friend" who is absent for most of the book. A Man with a Yellow Hat who keeps George illiterate and ignorant and happily hands him over to emotionally abusive scientists for dangerous space experiments.


The Absurd World of Work
It is precisely this fractured self, this absence of genuine community and self-worth, that leaves George open to abuse at the hands of the economic system of 1950s America. By the end of the book, in exchange for his freedom, George agrees to temporarily give up his leisurely life of the mind and become a worker - a "productive" member of society. His job is to sit in a space rocket and pull a lever at a designated time.

Strangely, Curious (!) George never bothers to ask why the human scientists want him to pull a lever or what the space rocket technology will eventually be used for. The scientists don't value George for his defining characteristic and, sensing this, George has submerged it to make them happy. The scientists broke him down by first humiliating and threatening him because of his curiosity and ingenuity. They stuffed him in a cage and made him wish for death. Then they celebrated him for accomplishing the meaningless task that they set for him.

By the end of the book, George's sense of self-worth has become explicitly linked to his ability to impress the dullard townspeople with the undignified and unfulfilling tasks that they ask of him. George the worker is also now totally alienated from the purpose and the fruits of his labour.

As Marx wrote in 1844:

It is true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.

In fact, even in more practical terms, George's time as a proto-astronaut illustrates how little people value him as an individual. George isn't compensated for his work. The scientists appear to follow no labour regulations and take no safety precautions. George meets with no union representative, lawyer or government aeronautic-aviation inspector. He is explicitly coerced by Dr Wiseman, who tells him "Of course everything will be forgiven, if you are willing to go" [into space]. He agrees to go under duress.

George is given no adequate training before being shot into space. He could not possibly have given his informed consent to participate in the project. He is given no paperwork to sign and would not be able to read it even if he was. The risks of the job are never clearly explained to him.

Only after he is in outer space does the narrator say "They watched the screen: George did not move. Why didn't he pull the lever? In a few seconds it would be too late. The ship would be lost in outer space with George in it!" What?! You bastards! (Amazingly, the narrator implies here that George's death if he didn't pull the lever would be his own fault, not the museum's or the scientists'!).

Finally, by going on the mission as a space worker, George is not developing the skills and experience required for long-term employment in the space industry. As a non-unionized "contract" worker with no benefits or job security, George is not truly entering a profession. He is not, and will never be, considered a professional astronaut. He can be replaced by machines or dogs at any moment, with no recourse, and has no idea if he will be employed as an astronaut ever again.

While reading about George's journey into outer space, one might rightly ask why he isn't in school. Are the townspeople afraid of teaching him to read? They are outraged when he uses his own initiative and ingenuity to explore the museum or track down a water pump or free farm animals. But when he pulls a lever at the allotted time as instructed, the townspeople that used to hate him and hound him suddenly adore him and give him a medal. What does this society value? What are the sources of Curious George's self-esteem? Near the end of the book, we learn that this was the best day of George's life. But all he really won was the praise of small-minded people embedded in a ludicrous system that remains completely opaque to George himself.

At the end of the book George stands proudly in front of the mirror wearing his shiny new medal. His earlier dreams of learning to read and write have been long forgotten. The Man in the Yellow Hat and all the townspeople have successfully diverted George from his initial instincts toward self-actualization and personal growth. His creative impulses and his overwhelming curiosity have been washed away by the dehumanizing (demonkeyfying?) forces of production, technological progress, and alienating labour.


Final Thoughts
As our study has revealed, Curious George and the 1950s society he lives in are clearly heading for trouble. When H.A. Rey wrote Curious George Gets A Medal, did Rey know that he was describing a sick little brown monkey in a sick society? Perhaps he was unable to publish a more direct critique of 1950s America without fear of serious retribution.

In Persecution and the Art of Writing, the political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote that historically, writers with dangerous things to say learned to say them esoterically, speaking to two audiences simultaneously.

Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.

Read correctly, Curious George Gets A Medal provides an insightful, gripping portrait of one monkey in society. It is a blistering critique carefully nestled inside a short, innocent childrens' book.