A Dog for Stories

By : Jens Andersen

There is no better narrative voice than Thomas Winding's. We in Denmark know this through television, where as the narrator of his own and other writers' texts and as producer of outstanding programmes for children, he has created a number of characters and picture stories which have etched themselves on the retinas of several generations of children of all ages.
   The fact that the voice is still able to speak to us with so much power of suggestion from such a different kind of image, that of writing itself, became clear in 1987, when Thomas Winding published the children's book A Box Full of Pictures ? a wonderful experiment in which games are played with pictures, fairy ? tale patterns and typefaces. Against the background of a series of photographs Winding tells his own stories of boredom, blackberries, Superman's toothbrush and the bravest man in the world.
   It is also in this collage book that, for the first time, we make the acquaintance of the little dog, Master, who appears in a tiny story at the very bottom of the pages. Here we learn that what Master does is to remind the author of his own imagination, which is always running away with him and taking him to places where he has not been before, and that "...stories can be like very small, wild dogs. When you first meet them, you have to be careful not to frighten them. They get scared when people stamp and make too much noise. But if you follow them at a little distance and approach them cautiously, after a time, you can make friends with them..."
   Then came independent books about the dog and the storyteller. Min lille hund Mester og andre dyr (My Little Dog Master and Other Animals) published in 1968, is the story of the little white dog with the brown and black spots, who suddenly turns up one day outside the storyteller's house and says he wants to live with him from now on, so that they can spend cosy evenings at home. They do that, get on well, and become firm friends over an edifying tale or two, because Master is a dog for stories.
   And Master is living there still. He is always begging, and constantly sneaking up on the storyteller's bed. But he often has to make do with a story, which results in the following exchanges between dog and man:
   "Can a story warm you when you're freezing? Can a story feed you when you're starving?"
   "Yes; I think so. In any case, I'm not serving anything but stories at this time of night."
   "If you're right, prove it!"
   In the latest book, Mester min lille hund i natten (Master My Little Dog in the Night), the adventures (often interrupted by Master's cheeky questions or hungry sighs) deal in a comic way with the mutual respect, tolerance and soliclarity, in short, the "power", between two living beings.
   Whether they deal with the man who could not bear living with his large family, or the prince and the servant who got to know themselves and each other better by changing rôles, the stories brilliantly reflect the friendship between dog and man, which is the overriding motif of the whole book.
   Each seeks and finds the faults in himself and the other. What we find is a twofold desire for freedom, which, where Master is concerned, can be touched and felt, and implies the recognition that even in the best friendship, one friend is more or less the slave of the other. As Master exclaims philosophically: "You will never be a free dog once you've been thrashed! "
   And it is quite true that dogs (like the book's little listeners) are often stupidly and brutally treated by grown men and women.
   For the dog's master the desire for freedom sometimes grows into a barely concealed irritation at the fact that Master can simply dash about the countryside like any freebooter, and apparently do whatever he likes. And the two of them, dog and man, learn more about each other before the last page has been turned.
   Even the tone of the Master books is innovative. Winding's charming play on the friendship between .dog and man is not unreminiscent of the affectionate bickering often seen between the ventriloquist and his dummy. Then there is the book's deliberate blend of different speech strata, from the mumbling small talk of daily life to the narration of adventures on a traditional model, but in a modern, recognizable framework. And, last but not least, little pearls of instructive psychology and rhetorical ingenuities such as: "The truth will out. Even if 1 have to lie," that float along the book's ironic undercurrents, take hold of the adult and lead him obediently into his rôle of reading out loud.

Translated by Patricia Crampton