Illustration and Interpretation as Rewriting: Three Stories of Reading Sendak's Dear Mili

Abstract

Illustration and Interpretation as Rewriting:Three Stories of Reading Sendak's Dear Mili Michael Steig (bio) and Ann Campbell-Wilson (bio) Before proceeding to the two authors' readings of Maurice Sendak's illustrations to Wilhelm Grimm's Dear Mili, which together with the illustrator's own are the main topic of this paper, I shall comment briefly on three similar versions of reader response. My particular approach, as described in Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding (1989), is based on the observation that some readers have had experiences that can make their idiosyncratic responses to a text, and the associations that explain those responses, aids to literary understanding for other readers. I further assume that all literary interpretation is to a degree idiosyncratic, because there is no way for a reader or critic to move totally beyond the self which interprets. In that sense, interpretation is always both a story of reading and a rewriting. Most similar are David Bleich's intersubjective reading and Norman Holland's transactive criticism, in that both theorists insist that we cannot separate the criticism from the critic.1 The very word "idiosyncratic" parallels Holland's insistence that "we re-create literature for ourselves" and his promotion of "a literary criticism that takes as its subject matter, not a text, but the transaction between a reader and a text" (5 Readers Reading 248). For Bleich the main goal of detailing response and association is self-knowledge; and although in 5 Readers Reading Holland writes of "sharing our samenesses and differences in interpretation so as to create an evergrowing resource of responses," in that study the actual process demonstrated is, rather, one of the knowledgeable professor discovering the readers' basic personality traits ("identity themes") through interviews and the analyzing of students' ways of interpreting, with the corroboration of clinical tests. The analysis of personalities is not to my mind a project for the literature classroom, and I think of self-understanding as more a byproduct (if a frequent one) of an intersubjective process in which others' interpretations, when explained through response and association, enrich one's understanding of potential viewpoints and sometimes alter one's own reading of a text. In other words, I see the process of reader response ultimately as a transaction between persons, the readers in a classroom, readers and critics, or readers and the authors that they conceptualize. In addition, I assume that knowledge of an author's life and comments about his/her own work can be incorporated into a reader's perceptions and responses, even while I grant that it is impossible to have an objective and full knowledge of that life, and that authors' statements about their own writing are, ultimately, also "stories of reading," which may or may not fit with one's own. Although Bleich acknowledges the sense of an author's voice as a normal part of reading, it does not form a major part of his theory; Holland seems to be interested in authors mainly as subjects for analysis (as in The Brain of Robert Frost, 1988.) Some of the most enlightening stories of reading I know have been in student papers in my classes on children's literature. The one in which I first used this approach included the distribution of copies of all papers to all members of the class, and it is not surprising that the personal experiences in such papers frequently were from childhood or adolescence, given the kinds of text that were the focus of discussion. My own first reader-response article, on The Wind in the Willows, which became chapter five of my book, was an expansion of a lecture in such a course and drew on the recalled significance of Grahame's novel for me in childhood as well as other childhood experiences. Of course, such stories of reading are always reconstructions, idiosyncratic acts of rewriting, that differ from other acts of interpretation mainly in the way the subjective basis is acknowledged rather than occluded. I have found illustrations in children's books to be of special interest in considering the idiosyncrasies of interpretation because illustrating another's text is in itself an act of rewriting; telling...