ABSTRACT
The antipastoral constructs a landscape of fear, but unlike the dark pastoral, it is a rejection of the possibility of pastoral. It is an imaginative disconnection, a landscape of isolation. The Zabajaba Jungle introduces such a landscape. Distinction and differentiation, a primary development task or rather process of childhood, is complex and somewhat chaotic in this non-sense jungle, where the characters are drawn from the world of humans, the plant world, and the animal world. Here William Steig grapples with the role of the unconscious to reflect the child/hero's psychological conflicts along the evolutionary road toward human consciousness. Leonard journeys into the jungle, the uncivilized, instinctual world of the unconscious, its potential danger offset by its nonsensical name. Leonard's fledgling consciousness is reflected in the voice of Flora, an ungainly bird, tentative, shy, awkward.
