Finding Fate's Father: Some Life History Influences on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

William Todd Schultz

Biography, Volume 21, Number 4, Fall 1998, pp. 463-481 (Article)

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Finding Fate's Father:Some Life History Influences

on Roald Dahl'sCharlie and the Chocolate Factory

William Todd Schultz

For Adrienne and Henry

Necessity and chanceApproach not me, and what I will is Fate.

— Milton, Paradise Lost VII: 1.172-73

Roald Dahl thought quite a lot of chocolate. At age nine, Dahlattended school near a sweets shop whose emissions he happilysniffed. An adolescence spent in an otherwise dreary EnglishPublic School was at intervals partially redeemed by the nearbyCadbury Company. Dahl and his lucky classmates sometimesgot to taste test experimental chocolates, rating them andwriting out their reactions. Dahl liked to imagine himselfworking there, "and suddenly I would come up with somethingso absolutely unbearably delicious that I would grab it in myhand and go rushing along the corridor and right into the officeof the great Mr. Cadbury himself," who after tasting Dahl'sdiscovery would then leap from his chair crying, '"You got it!We'll sweep the world with this one!'" (Boy 148^49). Fore-shadowings of Willy Wonka's factory appear even in Dahl'sfirst major book for children, James and the Giant Peach, whenthe impossibly massive fruit runs over just such anestablishment on its way to thrilling adventures at sea.

When, however, Dahl eventually got around to writingCharlie and the Chocolate Factory, there his fascination witheverything chocolate found its fullest expression. Dahl himselftraces the novel's origin to the Cadbury experience: "I have no

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doubt at all that, thirty-five years later, when I was looking fora plot for my second book for children, I remembered thoselittle cardboard boxes and the newly-invented chocolates insidethem, and I began to write a book called Charlie and the ChocolateFactory" (Boy 149). But what else might have motivated him?What might account for the charisma—and menace—of WillyWonka, or for the unhappy, almost grisly accidents that befallso many of the children, with the exception of Charlie?

Before suggesting answers to these questions, a briefsummary of the book might be helpful, especially since the filmWilly Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, so familiar to so manyparents, departs in important respects from the highly successfultext that inspired it.1 Two such differences seem particularlysignificant: the book contains no bewilderingly lurkingSlugworth figure, but it does give Charlie a father, albeit a ratherfeckless and irrelevant one. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is ameditation on what Artaud called the "marginality of fate,"and on the almost providential intervention of chance. CharlieBucket is the only child of a desperately poor family. His fatherworks long hours screwing caps on tubes of toothpaste, untilhe loses his job and resorts to shoveling snow. The father'smiserable wages must support not only Charlie and his mother,but also both sets of invalid grandparents. As a result, theirhouse isn't large enough and there isn't enough money to buyproper food, forcing them to eat "bread and margarine forbreakfast, boiled potatoes and cabbage for lunch, and cabbagesoup for supper," with Sundays a special day because everyonegets a second helping. The family therefore goes "from morningtill night with a horrible empty feeling in their tummies," andCharlie's bones bristle beneath the skin of his face (7).

Standing within sight of Charlie's home is an enormouschocolate factory—the biggest in the world, and run by thecleverest chocolate maker in the world. For half a mile in everydirection, the factory scents the air with the "heavy rich smellof melting chocolate" (9). The family is bewitched. The factoryseems both nemesis and temptation, a symbol of everythingdreaded and desired. Grandpa Joe spends many an eveningtelling Charlie about the factory: How its founder WillyWonka—always described in superlatives—invented ice creamthat doesn't run in the sun, and gum that never loses its taste.How the building—bricks, cement, and all—was constructed

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of light and dark chocolate. How nobody ever seemed to go inand nobody ever seemed to go out, and how the workers,known only by the shadows appearing in the windows at night,are no taller than Grandpa Joe's knee.

One day, Charlie's wish to go inside this most edible offactories becomes at least remotely possible. Inexplicably Wonkadecides to admit five children for a visit. These lucky five willbe selected by Fate: Wonka has hidden golden tickets insidethe wrappings of five ordinary bars of chocolate. For Charliethere isn't much hope, since he gets just one bar a year, for hisbirthday, and so the family contents itself with following thedrama in the papers. Four slightly despicable children findtickets, the wrapping for Charlie's birthday bar reveals no gold,and the family continues to starve. But one day, Charlie discoversa dollar in the gutter, and buys two chocolate bars from a fatshopkeeper. The first bar he eats. The second, a Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, explodes in a brilliant flashof gold. In an instant, Charlie is lucky ticket holder number five,and feels a "peculiar floating sensation coming over him... hisheart thumping away loudly somewhere in his throat" (51).

The big day arrives. While the other four children bring boththeir mothers and fathers to the factory, Charlie brings GrandpaJoe. Even more spectacular than imagined, the factory doesn'tdisappoint, and neither does Wonka, a kind of troll-like figurewith mixed motives. "Please don't wander off by yourselves,"he says, "I shouldn't like to lose any of you at this stage of theproceedings!" (64). But children do get "lost." GluttonousAugustus Gloop falls into a chocolate river. Violet Beauregardeeats gum she shouldn't and swells up like a blueberry. Identifiedas a "bad nut," spoiled Veruca Salt is taken away by squirrelsto the garbage chute. Mike Teavee, whose name reveals his vice,is reduced to a tiny video image. Only Charlie escapes doom,thus winning what has been a survival contest all along, for asWonka explains, "I decided to invite children to the factory,and the one I liked best at the end of the day would be thewinner." He stresses: "I have to have a child. I want a goodsensible loving child, one to whom I can tell all my most preciouscandy-making secrets—while I am still alive." Charlie thusbecomes heir to the chocolate factory, and Wonka invites hiswhole family to move in at once. The grandparents refuse atfirst, but Charlie and Wonka won't take no for an answer.

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"Please don't be frightened," Charlie says. "It's quite safe. Andwe're going to the most wonderful place in the world!" (161).

The book reads like a morality fable: Charlie, the good child,wins the prize just by being himself, while the bad childrenmeet with terrible ends. Their "accidents" hardly seem"accidental," however, as Fate functions like an externalizedsuperego, meting out appropriate punishments. Even when thebad kids do reemerge in the end, they carry with them enduringstigmata. Though dejuiced, Violet is still purple in the face, whileshrunken Mike Teavee is restored but overstretched, "ten feettall and thin as a wire." On closer examination, however, thetext seems far less straightforward. What has Charlie reallywon? Only the factory, or something more as well? And whatabout the accident theme? Why does Dahl permanently markthe undeserving children rather than simply humiliating themor condemning their vices in some other way? Finally, thefactory's claustral architecture deserves special attention, too.Throughout the book, visitors struggle and shove their waythrough various tubes, corridors, enclosures, and passageways—the word "push" alone is used three different times betweenpages 64 and 68. In what follows, I try to answer these questionsby examining not only Dahl's life history, but his extra-literarypreoccupations at the time he wrote the book.

What Does Charlie Win?

We know full well what Charlie wins: the chocolate factory andeverything else that goes with it, including presumably fameand fortune, and comfort for his dirt-poor, starving family. Buteven a cursory look at the life of Roald Dahl suggests thatCharlie's gain may be more than just material.

Neither in Dahl's life nor his work did expressing sincere,honest emotion come easy. Since his readers are far moreaccustomed to sarcasm or nonsense, when such emotionalexpressions appear in his fiction, they come as something of asurprise, and may even represent what Irving Alexander hascalled "indicators of saliency"—textual markers indicative ofpsychologically important material. To take an obvious incident,in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, the Chocolate Factory's farless satisfying sequel, the Bucket family finds itself ascendingin Wonka's elevator /spacecraft. Charlie's grandparents aren'tsure they like the idea, or Wonka himself for that matter. But

Schultz, Finding Fate's Father 467Charlie leans over and whispers, "Please, don't spoil everything.Mr. Wonka is a fantastic man. He's my friend. I love him" (4).The last three words are startling in context. Though Wonkahad warmed to Charlie towards the end of the first book, hisaffection was qualified by his overriding desire for an heir. Andyet, while the unexpected "I love him" may not quite fit givenwhat we know about Charlie and Wonka, the depth of devotionstill rings true: in Wonka, Dahl—as well as Charlie—finds afather.

Harald Dahl died of pneumonia when Roald was three, justtwo months after the death by appendicitis of Roald's seven-yearold sister, Astri. Harald refused to fight the illness. Apparentlywishing to join Astri in heaven, he "did not care much whetherhe lived or died." "So he died," Dahl concludes somewhat tersely,"He was fifty-seven years old" (Boy 20). It's hard not to be struckby the incompleteness of this account, which appears in thefirst volume of Dahl's autobiography. After spending just twoparagraphs on this most catastrophic of events, Dahl movesmatter-of-factly on, at greater length, to lighter fare. Since Dahl"had always found it impossible to talk to anyone about hisfeelings," and during difficult times tended to say "nothing ofwhat he was going through" (Treglown 147), it should not besurprising that Boy avoids discussing the psychological effects—short- and long-term—of Harald's and Astri's deaths. But thoseeffects may appear elsewhere, and although he is not inclinedtowards psychobiography, Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglowndoes speak of Dahl's search for "surrogate fathers," includingCharles Marsh, a self-made multimillionaire oil tycoon and artcollector (6).

Treglown, however, sees not Harald, but Roald Dahl inWonka, citing both a similarity "between Dahl's third-personnarrative voice and Mr. Wonka's own hectic, exaggerated wayof talking," and Wonka's Dahl-like way with dismissive criticism(155). Roald Dahl certainly dreamed of being an inventor—andin fact was one, as I will discuss. He also "longed to be powerfulenough to be able to conquer illness" (Treglown 136), and inCharlie and the Great Glass Elevator actually has Wonka bringCharlie's grandparents back from the dead, a feat which Dahlhimself might have envied, given the many losses he endured.And yet, though Wonka does resemble Roald Dahl to a degree,Treglown labels such an identification "naive," and if we look

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beyond the superficial characteristics mentioned, a different,more compelling role for Wonka begins to suggest itself:fictional father.

Though Charlie's actual father appears in both books, he isvery nearly irrelevant (the film version drops the characteraltogether, at no expense to the story). In the Chocolate Factory heopens his mouth only to read verbatim newspaper descriptionsof each new lucky winner.2 When Charlie finds the money andlater wins the golden ticket, he tells his mother, not his father.And although all the other ticket winners arrive on the big dayaccompanied by both parents, Charlie's father, unemployed andunable to support the family, agrees that Grandpa Joe is more"deserving." Considering how Joe nightly regaled Charlie withstories of Wonka's factory, he doubtlessly does deserve thehonor, but the absence of parents not only makes Charlie out tobe something of an orphan, it also seems to mark him asparentless in a metaphoric sense. Wonka therefore responds toCharlie differently, not only because he is the one good kid, butbecause he lacks—figuratively—a father, and because Wonka's"real purpose is to find an heir," or son (Treglown 151). Wonkain fact really can't give the factory to any of the other children,since to do so would presumably make their very presentparents the beneficiaries. While relishing the failures and humil-iations of the other children and their escorts, then, Wonka treatsCharlie with what seems like paternal concern. As they floatalong the same chocolate river that took Augustus Gloop, forexample, Wonka dips a large mug into it and passes it to Charlie."Drink this," Wonka commands, "It'll do you good! You lookstarved to death!... Hasn't there been anything to eat in yourhouse lately?" (88). This may be Wonka's single expression ofunironic kindness and thoughtfulness in the entire book, andCharlie's deeply satisfying response marks the moment asespecially important psychologically: "as the rich warm creamychocolate ran down his throat and into his empty tummy, hiswhole body from head to toe began to tingle with pleasure,and a feeling of intense happiness spread over him" (89).

When Charlie alone survives the war of attrition, Wonka,who "had a hunch, right from the beginning" that Charliewould win, is ecstatic: "I'm absolutely delighted! It couldn't bebetter! How wonderful this is!" (149). For as Wonka goes on toexplain, the real contest was to secure his affection: "I'm an old

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man. I'm much older than you think. I can't go on forever. I'vegot no children of my own, no family at all. ... I decided toinvite five children to the factory, and the one I liked best at theend of the day would be the winner" (157). Notice how thiscancels the conceit of "chance." Wonka chose Charlie (most likelyfrom the very start), and the "accidents" weren't accidents atall, but disqualifications of those children Wonka did not like.The convenient result is that when Wonka picks an "orphan"heir to become the child he needs, Charlie finds a fabulousfather—and so too perhaps does Dahl.3

But there's more. Immediately after Charlie learns what he'swon, Wonka takes Charlie and Grandpa Joe into the great glasselevator, which rises, shudderingly, through a thin corridor, thenexplodes like a rocket through the factory's glass ceiling. "We'rethrough! We're out!" shouts Wonka. The craft hangs in midair,sunshine pours in, and the town lies spread out below like apicture postcard. Intentional or not, the implications seemunmistakable. Just after being introduced to the kind of fatherhe needs, Charlie is reborn, at least psychologically. He findshimself transported into a different realm, with a differentperspective, bathed in light. One half-expects Charlie to beslapped on the bottom.

This interpretation isn't necessarily at odds with Treglown'ssuggestion that Wonka is Dahl, since Dahl's ideal self—inventor,orchestrator of chance, master of life and death, imp extraordinaire—could coexist with this wonderfully amusing, occasionallyeven maternal, father image. Above all, Wonka's ability toresurrect the dead, which we learn about in the second book,certainly represents a wish that the loss-plagued Dahl wouldfind compelling. Conjuring up a character who, Orpheus-like,enters the underworld and zaps the unliving back to theiroriginal form seems like the best sort of wish-fulfillment. Suchspeculations, however, remain rather general. Linking Dahlhimself to the fortunes of his characters requires a closer lookat specific events, since Dahl's life course was directly impactedby a remarkable accumulation of accidents.

The Fiction of Accident

Roald Dahl's life was so accident-beset that the back cover ofthe paperback edition of the Treglown biography refers to asurfeit of "shocking personal tragedy." As if to underscore the

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importance of the theme, Dahl's own account of his life beginswith an accident that occurred even before he was born. At theage of fourteen, his father Harald fell off a roof, broke his leftarm, and then lost that arm, thanks to medical incompetence.When Dahl himself was nine, his older sister took the familyon a car ride which proved to be much more eventful thananyone had anticipated: she crashed the car into a hedge, causingDahl's nose to be "cut almost clean off my face ... hanging ononly by a single thread of skin" (Boy 103). As a young RAFfighter pilot, in the fall of 1939 Dahl made a forced landing inthe North African desert. When the plane struck a boulder,Dahl's skull was fractured, and his nose, having already beensingled out for punishment, was driven back into his face.Crawling from the cockpit, he rolled out of danger, and was"picked up, bleeding profusely, by British soldiers patrollingnearby" (Treglown 43). And in perhaps the most significantdisaster of all, his four-month-old son Theo—"to whom Dahlwas unambiguously devoted"—was hit by a cab as his nannypushed his carriage across a street. The child's skull was brokenin several places. Doctors did not expect him to live, and thoughhe did, it was with lasting neurological impairments (Treglown137-38). This accident occurred while Dahl was working onthe first Charlie book; in fact, Dahl dedicates it to Theo.

Not surprisingly, then, accidents recur in Dahl's fiction. Onthe very first page of James and the Giant Peach (1961), Dahl'sfirst major work, James's parents get eaten, rather randomly,by a rhino. The first sentence of Danny the Champion of the World(1975) informs us that Danny's mother died when he was onlyfour months old, and in The Witches (1983), the little hero'sparents die in an icy, Christmas-time car crash. Although anentire essay might be devoted to the accident as leitmotif inDahl's work, I would like to focus here on what has to be hismost accident-perfused book of all, Charlie and the ChocolateFactory. Why do accidents figure so prominently in this story,and what psychological function might they serve?

First, there's the matter of the children's mock gruesome"disappearances." That particular plot detail caused immediatecontroversy. Dahl's editor at Knopf, Virginia Fowler, had herdoubts, calling Veruca Salt's disposal down a garbage shaftespecially "crude" and "revolting"—too much on the "adultlevel" (Treglown 154). But the children's departures are not

Schultz, Finding Fate's Father 471merely gratuitous or unnecessary in context, because Dahlseems, among other things, to be writing a cautionary tale. Thesechildren are done in by their own vileness. Their respective fatesare not only metaphorically apt, but also display Dahl's moraltendency to increase discomfort as a means for disarming andprovoking his young readers. Augustus Gloop "drowns" inchocolate, Mike Teavee becomes a TV image, and so on. Butsomething more oblique, and undeniably more menacing, isalso at work. For apart from whatever social comment Dahlmay have intended, the book's tone at times betrays a kind ofpervading menace. As Gene Wilder's performance as Wonkain the film version makes clear, something like vengeance lurksbehind Wonka's pleasure over each demise. Repeatedly Wilder/Wonka stands by indifferently while each child exits in a waythat would have been easily preventable. Although most readersI think would agree that these episodes are among the mostentertaining and distinctive in Dahl's book, why are the children,rather than their parents punished? Why does Wonka/Dahlseem so determined to make the children pay, and so excessively,for their moral failings? What did he get out of it?

One answer lies in Dahl's history of loss. He had been forcedto watch good children meet with undeserved catastrophe—his sister, dead at age seven; his infant son, suffering braindamage.4 If as Treglown suggests, Dahl did in fact identify withWonka, then the candy maker's orchestration of "death" inCharlie and the Chocolate Factory, and his utter mastery over it inCharlie and the Great Glass Elevator allow Dahl vicariously toturn the tables on loss—to dictate its caprice, rather than bedictated to by it. Dahl's heroes admittedly do lose their parents,thus returning him to the site of his own grief surrounding theloss of his father Harald. But when Roald Dahl actively discardscharacters, as in the Chocolate Factory, he becomes judge andexecutioner within a created alternate reality in which only badkids meet with disaster and good kids, who have done nothingwrong, triumph.

But in such a world, Dahl clearly identifies not only withWonka but with Charlie as well, that boy who "desperatelywanted something more filling and satisfying" out of life, wholonged "more than anything else" for chocolate—chocolatesignifying Wonka/Father. Functioning as both Wonka andCharlie grants Dahl an even headier power, the power to create

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a just world conforming to his will, and naturally he definesthe world he prefers, a world in which he, not dumb reality,decides which children triumph, and which meet with bad ends.

And so the departures of Augustus Gloop and his ilk—sogruesome, so bizarre, so easily preventable—thereby providean outlet for Dahl's anger, resentment, and sense of injustice inresponse to the various losses he had endured. Aman who didnot talk directly about his feelings thus could express themthrough the harsh and unusual punishments he metes out tohis characters. Because Augustus Gloop is a "repulsive boy,"and his mother a "revolting woman," he is doomed. VerucaSalt is "even worse than the fat boy," and in need of "a realgood spanking." The "despicable" and "beastly" Violet getswhat she deserves, and if Mike Teavee can't be stretched backto his original size, Dahl simply notes, "It serves him right."Such nasty children merit no mercy, and in Wonka's world, theyget their just desserts, of the poetic sort he decrees. When lossarrives in reality, survivors are left no option but to wonderwhy. Why that person, why not someone else, someone moredeserving of death? As an artist, Dahl creates a world in whichsuch questions do not arise.

The battle for Roald Dahl then is not over the eliminationof horrible accidents or unforeseen disasters, but rather overwho gets to control them. The most detailed account of thisstruggle appears in The Witches, in which five children—including a "Harald"—also disappear or get transformed, butin this case at the hands of nefarious local witches. Thesepowerful creatures despise children, and particularly enjoyturning kids into creatures all grownups hate and thereforedestroy—a slug gets smashed, a flea gets powdered, a pheasantgets shot from the sky, plucked and roasted, and eaten forsupper. In fact, the witches take special delight in makinggrownups eat their own offspring—by turning them into hotdogs. The ultimate plan is to change all the children of Englandinto mice by tricking them into eating chocolate laced with aspecial formula, the "Delayed-Action Mouse-Maker." Thewitches' strategy for transforming the children actuallyresembles Willy Wonka's scheme. After opening sweets shopsfrom which to dispense the doctored candies, on a certain daythe witches will announce in their shop windows a "Great GalaOpening with free sweets and chocs to every child" (78).

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The orphaned hero and his cigar-smoking, witch-sawygrandmother get wind of the plan, and work to uridermine it.The grandmother is an especially interesting hybrid of WillyWonka and Harald Dahl. Like Wonka, Grandmother thumpsaround the house with a "gold-topped cane" (46).5 Her eyes, as"bright as two stars" (123), resemble Wonka's "marvelouslybright" eyes "sparkling and twinkling at you all the time"(Chocolate Factory 61). But Grandmother also goes through lifewith a missing thumb, much as Harald Dahl did without hisleft arm, and while Grandmother only comes down withpneumonia, Harald Dahl died from it. Harald, Wonka, andGrandmother thus seem to spring from shared and deep roots,and their distribution over many years suggests that Dahlcontinually reworked the same material, consciously or not, inan attempt to make metaphorical sense of it.

Equally present in The Witches is Dahl's preoccupation withhorrific accidents and the trauma they induce in survivors. Inthe book's most poignant passage (which Dahl sets off withitalics), the hero, transformed into a mouse, meditates on hisown lack of despair over the change. "What's so wonderfulabout being a little boy anyway?" he asks, "I know that miceget hunted and they sometimes get poisoned or caught in traps.But little boys sometimes get killed, too. Little boys can be runover by motorcars or they can die of some awful illness" (112).As already noted, even a short list of unfortunate ends containsthe injury and/or death of Dahl's son, daughter, sister, andfather. In another paper, I have discussed what I called the"Orpheus Complex," a personality dynamic in which writersstricken by loss also eventually respond to that loss with thecreation of literature. In at least one detail Dahl conforms tothat prototype, for he too "rewrote" trauma in attempting todischarge lingering grief and to repair fate's damage. Charlie'scontrolled "accidents" no doubt made for a much morehabitable world, however imaginary it may have been. In areview of The Witches, Erica Jong insightfully describes the bookas "a parable about the fear of death as separation and a child'smourning for the loss of his parents," and goes on to note thebook's psychologically beneficial effect: "It's a curious sort oftale but an honest one, which deals with matters of crucialimportance to children: smallness, the existence of evil in theworld...."

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As we have seen, these "matters" were also cruciallyimportant to Dahl himself. To borrow the language of scripttheorist Silvan Tomkins, the unforeseen trauma motif found inDahl's writing may be one of his "nuclear" scripts, expressinghis "unwillingness to renounce or mourn," an "inability torecover what has become lost," and a disinclination to purifyor integrate what had grown intolerably conflicted (197).According to Tomkins's system, we are all self-dramatizersengaged from the earliest weeks of life in a constant drama-turgical process of constructing personal worlds. Certain salient"happenings" get repeatedly edited into one or more corescripts. Apparently few in number and especially complex,these nuclear scripts emerge in the following way: somethinggood turns bad, and negative affects predominate. When theindividual tries to reverse, rehearse, avoid, undo, or repair thedamage, a process of psychological magnification ensues, inwhich affect-laden scenes become interconnected as the personhalf-consciously perceives similarities between seeminglydifferent experiences. The constellating power of the script makesit "nuclear"; it persists as a potent, vexingly recurrent problem,one not only repeatedly expressed, but also growing in scopeand form, proliferating much like a cancer metastasizes.6

According to Rae Carlson—who has championed scripttheory perhaps more than any other practicing personologist—to be afflicted with a nuclear script is to be driven by a"demanding psychic agenda." In thrall to problems that can'tbe solved or let alone, in pursuit of the "ideal" scene, suchpeople resort to "celebrating experiences in memory andimagination, fantasizing punishment of the oppressor, escapingtheir own sense of punishment, and imagining perfect endings"("Personology" 5).

For Dahl, the losses of his sister and father could be origina-ting events. Something good—an intact family—had suddenlyturned bad, and as an adult writer of fiction, Dahl recurrentlyscripted and organized the damage via imaginative retellings.Just as he did, his heroes grapple with loss, managing in variouslyidealized ways to triumph, either by finding substitute parentsmore potent than the original ones, or by becoming thearchitects of their own fate. In the process, Dahl exacts revengeupon imagined oppressors, and in so doing concocts relativelyperfect endings. But in addition to tending toward over-

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generalization, nuclear scripts also afflict their author, envelophim, and demand his constant attention. Much like Freud's warveteran, dreaming ceaselessly of the same bloody battle, Dahlrepeatedly turns to the same theme of loss and its repercussions,underscoring the "nuclear" nature of each of these efforts.

Claustra

Of course, the form of return most liable to end the repetitiononce and for all would be a return to a time before birth, beforeemergence into narrative, and Dahl's universe is certainly filledwith spaces which personologist Henry Murray has called"claustral"—enclosed, womb-resembling. To take only one ofthe more extreme examples, in the early James and the GiantPeach, the orphaned hero crawls into a hole in the side of thefruit, which upon further explanation proves to be a "dampand murky" tunnel: "and all around him there was the curiousbittersweet smell of fresh peach... . The walls were wet andsticky, and the peach juice was dripping from the ceiling" (25).In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, references to tunnels, corridors,valves, tubes, pipes, and the like, through which the characterscontinuously get pushed and pulled, are so plentiful that itseems more economical to represent them through a summaryrather than a catalog. Though crowds at the gate push to get in,Wonka ushers only the children through, promising that "it'snice and warm inside" (64). The first of many corridors is "sowide that a car could easily have been driven along it." Its wallsare "pale pink," the lighting "soft and pleasant" (65). "Howlovely and warm," whispers Charlie. All the passages slopedownward, deep beneath the surface, leading to rooms largerthan football fields. As Wonka explains, "underneath theground, I've got all the space I want. There's no limit—so longas I hollow it out" (67).

The group hustles and bustles along towards the "nervecenter," accompanied by a great deal of pushing and shoving."Enormous pipes" dangle down from the center's ceiling,draining into the chocolate river. Here Augustus gets stuck in apipe, and while his father wonders "how that pipe is big enoughfor him to go through it," the people "could see the chocolateswishing around the boy, and they could see it building upbehind him in a solid mass, pushing against the blockage." Theterrific pressure meant that "something had to give," and in

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this case "that something was Augustus" (80). Or as Wonkadrolly explains: "Augustus has gone on a little journey, that'sall. A most interesting little journey" (80).

The group boards a boat made of glistening pink glass, andsails to "some kind of dark tunnel," which turns out to be a"gigantic pipe." After "rocketing along at a furious pace," thegroup disembarks at the "Inventing Room," where Wonka'sideas are born. Pipes run all over the ceiling and walls. Wonkaproudly introduces the gum machine, which rumbles andsteams and shakes most frighteningly, then emits "a monstrousmighty groan, and at the same moment a tiny drawer poppedout of the side of the machine, and in the drawer there lay some-thing so small and thin and gray that everyone thought it mustbe a mistake" (98-99). Exit Violet Beauregarde. Shortly thereafter,Veruca Salt disappears down a garbage chute. "Endless pinkcorridors" follow (HO), the claustral imagery building up untilthe great glass elevator—with its button reading UP AND OUT—signals Charlie's psychological rebirth.

And yet, the overall effect of Charlie and the Chocolate Factoryappeals less to the themes of birth or rebirth than to an effort toseek enclosure, to return to the womb. Characters are constantlypushing and shoving into smaller and smaller spaces, seekingthat warmly pink, pleasant containment. As it turns out, theclaustral imagery of Dahl's fictional world had a counterpartin life—the garden shed which served as his writing hut. "Formuch of his life," as Treglown notes, Dahl spent several hourseach day "snugly wrapped in a sleeping bag, sitting in an oldarm chair, his feet on a trunk which was filled with blocks ofwood and tied to the leg of the chair, to prevent it from slipping.Here he transported himself back to his earliest infancy. Evenbeyond" (111). Dahl agreed with this interpretation of his shed:"It's small and tight and dark and the curtains are always drawnand it's a kind of womb—you go up here and you disappearand get lost" (qtd. in Treglown 111). In fact, Dahl elevates theimagery of the shed into the necessary condition for a writer offiction, for that "secret side" of the artist, "which comes out inhim only after he has closed the door of his workroom and iscompletely alone. It is then that he slips into another worldaltogether, a world where his imagination takes over and hefinds himself actually living in the places he is writing about atthat moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of

Schultz, Finding Fate's Father 477trance, and everyone around me disappears" ("Lucky" 196).When confronted with tragedy, Dahl turned to the shed as aplace of refuge. Following Theo's accident in America, Dahlinsisted that the family return to England, "where he couldescape into the security of his shed" (Treglown 141). In thatshed, that womb, "after nine months of hard work," Dahl wrotemuch of the Charlie story (Charlie's Secret 3). The book's claustralimagery, then, can be seen as a kind of recapitulation of Dahl'sworking environment. He writes of the womb from a womb.

Murray described various claustral complexes. The simpleclaustral complex, for instance, is "constellated about the wishto reinstate the conditions similar to those prevailing beforebirth," and is "organized by an unconscious desire to re-experience the state of being that existed before birth" (363).Typically small, warm, dark, secluded, safe, private, orconcealing, claustral spaces, according to Murray, are often huts,soundproof dens, or even tunnels—one of his subjects declares"I loved to build tunnels" (366). As a child Dahl used to hide ina tree to write his diary, and when he went to Repton, his EnglishPublic School, he found isolation in a photography darkroom(Treglown 111). Murray's description of desirable locationsseems to echo Dahl's description of his shed: "a subject withthis complex is attracted to, seeks, or if not found, builds suchobjects, and is inclined to enter them and remain in them forsome time, secluded from others" (366). Once fixated on such"habitation or sanctuary," the subject "hates to leave it or to moveto another house" (364). Dahl had adapted his "marvelous,isolated, quiet" shed to write in; he was rarely disturbed there,and returned to it in times of particular stress.

Murray notes that claustral complexes also expressthemselves through the cathection—the strong attraction—ofboth death and the past, prominent topics in much of Dahl'swriting. Dahl certainly used his shed in order to "commemorate,and fantasize about, his past" (Treglown 111), assembling on aside table his father's paper knife, souvenirs from North Africa,a heavy ball made out of wrappings of chocolate bars, and evenshards of himself—his own femur and fragments of his spine,saved from operations. Dahl valued the hut because it affordedhim the chance to "disappear" and "get lost," to sup into anotherworld, leading to the trancelike state of the writer's "secret side"and beyond, for those who seek claustra often desire to lose

478 Biography 21.4 (FaU 1998)individual identity by separating from others and merging withthe infinite—what Murray terms the "cathection of Nirvana."

I believe, therefore, that a good case can be made for rootingthe Charlie books' profusion of womb metaphors in features ofDahl's personality: his tendency, perhaps born of trauma, toseek succor, to avoid harm, and effectively to lose himself inclaustral spaces like the writing hut. Just as in the act of creation,the metaphor of the womb encircled his imagination, so toodid the hut enclose him physically, entrancing him. But another,still more immediate variable may also have focused hisattention upon tubes, valves, tunnels, and the like. Dating thecomposition of Chocolate and the Chocolate Factory is a difficulttask, but according to Treglown's estimates, Dahl had finishedthe first draft of a story called "Charlie's Chocolate Boy" towardthe end of August 1960. Available biographical materials shedvery little light on this work, although judging from the titlealone, it must have differed significantly from the eventual book.We do know that Dahl sent a revised draft of Charlie and theChocolate Factory off to Knopf more than two years after Theo'saccident, which occurred in the Fall of 1960. Therefore, althoughwe don't know how much of the specific content of the Charliebook took form after the accident to Dahl's son, we are safe inasserting that Dahl worked on a significant portion of the bookafter the traumatic incident occurred. And so the question arises:How might Theo's misfortune have influenced Dahl's use ofclaustral imagery?

One result of Theo's injuries was that he developed hydro-cephalus. To drain the buildup of cerebrospinal fluid, surgeonsran a thin tube with a one-way valve from his head into a vein,from which the fluid got dispersed into the bloodstream(Treglown 138). But this tube constantly clogged, each time atgreat threat to Theo's life, and each time requiring anotheroperation to change the tube and valve. According to Treglown,Dahl "studied the problem incessantly," and eventually, incooperation with Kenneth Till, a neurosurgical consultant,designed a prototype device. An engineering firm with whicha friend of Dahl's had connections carried out free experiments,and in June 1962—several months before Dahl delivered hisrevised draft of Charlie—a Dahl-Till Valve was inserted into a

child's head. As Treglown notes, "Some people still have it intheir heads today" (144).

Schultz, Finding Fate's Father 479

Theo's clogged valve therefore became a source of extremeanxiety for Dahl, and it pushed him into finding a solution forthe problem—a solution which required constant thought aboutvalves, tubes, tunnels, and passageways. For much of his life,Dahl had dreamed of being an inventor, and of gloriousinventions and inventing rooms. At the most propitious timeimaginable, then, Dahl both became an inventor and invented one,in the figure of Willy Wonka. Given Theo's condition, all theclaustral imagery, all the tight spaces and clogged passageways,take on a new meaning. Even Augustus Gloop's predicamentseems weirdly poignant in context. "He's blocked the wholepipe," Grandpa Joe exclaims; "Smash the pipe," implores Mrs.Gloop. Claustral themes, therefore, seem perfectly appropriatefor two very different reasons—one deeply unconscious andpersonological, and the other immediate, situational, and to agreater degree conscious. The womb offered relief, as a constel-lating nuclear script, a palliative for presently felt fear, and asource of study for making things better.

*****

From a psychobiographical perspective, then, Charlie and theChocolate Factory is a kind of allegorical summary of many ofthe topics Dahl returned to throughout his writing life—thesearch for a father replacement, the effort to master fate, andthe need to find succor and avoid harm through the pursuit ofclaustral spaces (perhaps nuclear scripts all). Whether he knewit or not, Dahl must have felt compelled to revisit the sameterritory over and over again, at times for the sake of simplerepetition—that is, neurotically, to no benefit—at other timesas part of an unconsciously rooted effort to master turbulentemotions or repair psychological damage. The fact that Dahlwrote a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—somethinghe did not do for any other book, despite various financialincentives—suggests that he may have had unfinished businessto attend to.

Freud apparently told H.D. that dreams sometimes revealeda "corner," a point of convergence between vectors (Lohser andNewton 43), and of course, for Freud, writing was a kind ofday-dreaming and the written work a dream, condensed anddisplaced. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Dahl dreamed ofa father who made a world that was fair and wonderful.

480 Biography 21.4 (FaU 1998)

Wonka's fervid inventiveness rendered loss unimaginable, orat least easily overcome. For once, reality made sense; chanceonly masqueraded as chance, and accidents were all wellrehearsed. "Shocking" as they are, the disappearances pointnot towards a world unrestrained, but towards a just universewatchfully maintained. Predictability, not inscrutability, thusultimately reigns supreme. Because Dahl creates in Wonka anauthorial double who scripts events that Dahl invents, chancedoesn't stand a chance, pulverized by both a fictional authorand by an author of a fictional author. If Dahl ever lost control,then Wonka would not, and vice versa.

It's hard to imagine a less capricious universe.

NOTES

Author's Note: Thanks to the Winter 1997 Psychobiography Seminarat Pacific University, before which many of these ideas found theirinitial form; to Selene Crompton, for the long conversation; andto Rae Carlson, for supplying me with additional material onnuclear scripts. And as always, I am grateful for Alan Elms'predictably judicious reading of an early draft.

1. The departures are aU the more significant because Dahl himselfwrote the screenplay, apparently along with much rewriting byuncredited others (Treglown 188-90).

2. Dahl seems aware of Mr. Bucket's meager role. In the Glass Elevator,after Mr. Bucket asks a question of no one in particular, Dahl-as-author intrudes to note that Mr. Bucket is speaking for the firsttime.

3. Another father connection might have sneaked into the screenplayof Willy WonL· and the Chocolate Factory. In a peripheral subplot, aminor character whose wealthy husband has been kidnapped,urges investigators, "AU I want is to have Harald back!" It'simpossible to imagine Dahl writing such a line without thinkingof his father.

4. Later, only days after Dahl had sent off a revised draft of Charlieand the Chocolate Factory, his daughter OUvia died of measles,leaving him almost mad with grief. She was seven, the same agehis sister Astri had been when she died.

5. That he puts canes in the hands of such deeply loved charactersis worth noting, for both in Boy and "Lucky Break," his story ofhow he came to be a writer, Dahl goes on at great length abouthis and his friends' canings at the hands of assorted Headmasters."The fear of the dreaded cane hung over us like the fear of death

Schultz, Finding Fate's Father 481all the time," he explains, "That cruel cane ruled our lives."Absorbing the cane into the characters of Wonka and Grandmotherwould appear to strip it of some of its fearsomeness.For detaüed discussion of these and additional criteria of nuclearscripts, see Carlson " Exemplary" and "Studies."

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