Making Picture Books Real: Reflections on a Child's-Eye View

Abstract

Making Picture Books Real:Reflections on a Child's-Eye View Peggy Whalen-Levitt Like the Velveteen Rabbit in Margery Williams' fictive nursery, a children's picture book does not achieve reality by itself. "Real" is something that happens to a picture book when a child invests herself in it. We know that the Velveteen Rabbit has become real because the boy "loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded."1 But what of picture books? What happens to them on their way to becoming real in the life of a child? For the youngest child, at least, making a picture book real is not unlike making a toy real. The process is largely physical. Dorothy White writes that her child's first book "was a book fated to suffer every indignity that a child's physically expressed affection could devise—a book not only looked at, but licked, sat on, slept on, and at last torn into shreds."2 Indeed, tasting, tearing and sitting upon are among the most acceptable ways to "know" first books. And whereas in later years a child takes special pleasure in the dual status of animal crackers—something symbolic and something to eat as well—these infant viewers take their tasting literally. It is the size, the shape and the texture of a book that absorbs them. Turning pages and looking at pictures are soon to follow. The act of turning pages may seem trivial to an adult reader, but it is an activity of intense interest to a baby. That a picture book is a unique art form does not escape the notice of these young viewers. Page by page, over and over again, they will come to know it. And I would suggest that there is a time in their experience where their interest in the sheer form of a book, in its very bookness, overrides their interest in any other feature. First books achieve a new level of reality, however, when pictures are treated as symbols by their viewers. "Making real" now has to do [End Page 21] with identification and reference. Sol Worth and Larry Gross write that "before any strategy for interpretation is developed a symbolic consciousness must come into play which allows a child to recognize the relationship between a sign and some referent, person, object, or place in the real world."3 And I suspect that it is the thrill of finding visual symbols for favored real world people, places, and things that dominates the relationship between children and their picture books at this time. Making a picture book real means pointing and asking: "What's that?" and having an interested adult respond in kind. This inclination to take inventory of a page precedes, I believe, an interest in the stories pictures tell. A book becomes real through the exciting process of naming. Favorite books may depict favored real world referents. As Dorothy White wrote about two-year-old Carol, "at present any book about an umbrella would be popular with Carol for she can say the word and is obsessed with the thing itself."4 Surely aspects of style exert their influence as well. Whatever the attraction, making the book real relates to seeing it as an extraordinary catalogue of things. I have long felt that this tendency to take inventory of pictures, on the part of the youngest child, explains the popularity of the Richard Scarry books and of Margaret Wise Brown's classic Goodnight Moon. Scarry characteristically capitalizes on a child's love of naming and Brown's catalogue of a nursery scene invites the very youngest viewers to do what they are going to do anyway—take account of the things on a page: In the great green room There was a telephone And a red balloon And a picture of— The cow jumping over the moon And there were three little bears sitting on chairs And two little kittens And a pair of mittens And a little toyhouse And a young mouse And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush And...