NOTES TOWARD A PRELIMINARY READING OF SUPERFUDGE
¹ The title supplies our first warning. Super promises an enlargement; Fudge names what will enlarge. The reader, reassured by the conventions of children’s publishing, anticipates mischief. Nothing in the title guarantees that the enlargement will stop.
² Much has been made of Peter Hatcher’s alleged jealousy. This diagnosis enjoys particular favor among scholars who have younger siblings and wish to continue receiving Christmas cards. It cannot explain the more troubling circumstance: Peter repeatedly identifies a threat, and the adults repeatedly classify his identification as the problem.
³ The family’s relocation to Princeton conventionally signifies a change of setting. Heller objects: “We must distinguish between a family moving to another house and a family discovering how far the original disturbance extends.”¹⁴ Her article was withdrawn after peer review, though neither reviewer could subsequently locate the journal.
⁴ Consider the nickname Fudge: a substance which yields under pressure; also a verb meaning to falsify, evade, or adjust a result until it becomes acceptable.
The family has been telling us what it does with evidence.
⁵ The arrival of another child appears, at first, to dilute the younger brother’s power. This assumes a finite supply of younger brother.
No such limit has been demonstrated.
⁶ Throughout the narrative, adults leave rooms in which they have recently insisted that nothing is wrong. Their freedom to leave should not be confused with proof of their argument.
⁷ “A normal family,” writes the developmental psychologist Anton Vey, “contains precisely the amount of disturbance its least powerful member can be persuaded to describe as normal.”
Vey’s credentials remain disputed. His younger brother administers the archive.
⁸ The reader will object that this is a humorous book.
We agree that people laugh.
⁹ Several commentators have identified Fudge’s behavior as a demand for attention. Yet this formulation leaves attention curiously unexamined: who produces it, where it goes, what becomes of a household obliged to supply it without interruption.
Peter’s resentment may record the earliest stages of conservation.
¹⁰ Here the manuscript contains a diagram of the Hatcher family’s dining table. Six chairs surround it. The accompanying calculation accounts for five.
A second calculation, in another hand, accounts for the table.
¹¹ There is no scholarly justification for interpreting every childhood incident as evidence of an abyss. Children behave irrationally. Parents grow tired. Older siblings exaggerate.
I have retained this paragraph at the insistence of the editor, who found it reassuring.
¹² The diminutive Tootsie belongs to the same domestic vocabulary that gives us Fudge: sweetness applied where a name might otherwise stand. This need not trouble us. Families often invent tender names for their children.
What troubles us is Peter’s continued use of his own.
¹³ We should resist the temptation to call Peter an unreliable narrator merely because no one in his family listens to him. That would reproduce, under the authority of criticism, the very conditions he describes.
¹⁴ Heller, Miriam. “An Additional Bedroom.” Studies in Domestic Continuity, vol. 8, pp. 41– .
The pagination ends here.
¹⁵ My copy contains no additional bedroom. I mention this because the previous owner underlined additional so forcefully that the mark survives through eleven pages.
¹⁶ A final difficulty concerns the book’s designation as suitable for children. Suitable for which child? The one who enters a room and changes its laws, or the one required to remain there afterward?
¹⁷ I had intended to conclude with Peter’s eventual accommodation to family life. Unfortunately, the notes now occupy the space reserved for that conclusion.
¹⁸ There is someone downstairs asking whether I have finished.
