Private Places on Public View: David Wiesner's Picture Books

Abstract

While the illustrations in David Wiesner's picture books evoke similar-looking worlds, the books tell stories that belong to different genres--or so literary theory suggests. After exploring how the similarities of these pictures challenge that theory and expose some of its assumptions, the author proposes that the books and the theories in question both celebrate and undermine the liberating potential of fantasy. The finest fantasy art is a liberation from that never loses sight of its point of departure. Terry Reece Hackford, Fantastic Visions. In David Wiesner's Caldecott-winning book Tuesday, frogs fly in formation through a typical American town. In his book June 29, 1999, giant vegetables fly in formation through ordinary American landscapes. While the landscapes in his Free Fall, a book depicting a boy's dream world, are somewhat less ordinary, groups of birds, papers, walls of buildings, maps, fish, and leaves fly in formation through them. Even in Wiesner's Hurricane, a realistic book about a storm, leaves driven by strong winds fly in formations much like those of other objects in the other books. In the final picture of Hurricane, a bird appears to be imagining fish flying in formation in the heavy rain views through a window--a motif picked up in Weisner's latest book, Sector 7, in which groups of children, cats, and even actual fish in a river see skies full of fish-shaped clouds flying in formation. There are other similarities also. The main effect of both Tuesday and June 29, 1999 is the incongruity of the flying objects in otherwise ordinary landscapes. Sector 7 creates a similarly incongruous relationship between its fish-like clouds and the realistic landscapes of Manhattan they fly over. Free Fall depicts croissants and chess pieces as incongruously gigantic in relation to humans as June 29, 1999's vegetables, and also shows a child in contemporary pyjamas incongruously entering a mediaeval castle surrounded by a crowd of knights. In its central pages, similarly, Hurricane shows us two boys in ordinary contemporary dress as they imagine themselves in play, sailing the seas with pirates and exploring outer space, just as the central pages of Sector 7 show a real boy in ordinary winter clothing surrounded by humanized clouds on a visit to a cloud-distribution centre in the sky that looks suspiciously like New York's Grand Central Station. Wiesner's illustrations for Dennis Haseley's non-fantasy book entitled Kite Flier intriguingly replicate the effect of his own fantasy texts and confirm the peculiar consistency of the world that his pictures represent in quite different verbal contexts. Without consulting the text to determine that they represent actual kites in a perfectly possible way, the objects in the pictures look like surrealistically gigantic insects, fish, and roses. The illustrations in these books all evoke a world that looks very much like the same strange place. But despite that, they tell stories that belong to different genres, or so literary theory would suggest. This perplexing resemblance of illustrations for theoretically dissimilar stories deserves exploration. To begin with: What characteristics in these stories show that they represent different genres? The answer is simple: They offer differing forms of explanation for the strange events that they depict. Quoting Robert Philmus, Darko Suvin says, Naturalistic fiction does not require explanation, fantasy does not allow it, and SF [science fiction] both requires and allows it (65). It turns out that the vegetables in June 29, 1999 have been jettisoned by a passing alien spaceship. The presence of this scientific explanation--or, in the absence of any hard evidence on the actual existence of aliens, this theoretically pseudo-explanation--for fantastic events makes the story science fiction. In connecting fantastic possibilities with our own and our rational systems of accounting for it, such explanations make science fiction what Suvin identifies as a literature of cognitive estrangement--one that use[s] imagination as a means of understanding the tendencies latent in reality (8). …