The Illustrated Postmodern Literature of the twentieth century, especi ally since World War II, is typified by experimentation and a questioning of the traditional ways we attempt t o learn from the ordering of experience in stories and books, Postmodern literature, often playfully comic, subverts our expectations and contradicts our faith in the verisimilitude of what we read. Obviously, in one sense children's books need to establish those expectations before they can be attacked . And the most sophisticated experimentation must take place for an audience already well experienced in norms and models. It is likewise our view of children as naive readers that prevents too large a departure from traditional story-telling and illustration. Each book repre sents an image of its reader, an image of the child, and our image as consumers in how we perceive the child we buy th e book for. The developments of postmodernism have pervaded our lives and literature, and likewise shaped the contempo rary picture book . In a xn a chapter from his book The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988), Jack Zipes takes three contemporary and familiar illustrated texts to task : The illustrations by Hyman, Mayer, and Sanderson, despite their artistic qualities, reveal nothing new about Sleeping Beauty and nothing new about the myth that surrounds her sleep. The compositions are not critical commentaries on the text but extensions bound by prescriptions that tie the artists' hands to draw not what they see and know but what the text and society mean to uphold. We pride ourselves in the days of postmodernism, poststructuralism, postindustrialism, and post women's liberation that we have left the sexist connotations of children's books and illustrations behind us. Perhaps, my discussion of Sleeping Beauty, the fairy tale as myth, will reveal that it is not so much Sleeping Beauty who needs to be wakened from a trance, but we as readers and creators of fairy tales, that is, if we want our imaginations really to be challenged and our eyes to behold new horizons qualitatively different from the scenes of our present illustrated fairy-tale books. (163-64) Zipes is echoing the modern call: make it new, show us something we have not seen before. He is speaking here of a sexist depiction of the fairy tale, but he also raises the question of just what a postmodern portrayal might be. Could there be a postmodern picture book for children, and could there be such a thing as a postmodern rhetoric of picture-making? Clearly, present texts show an advance in the sophistication of pictures from the days when text and words were segregated, the text on the left page and the picture separate on the right. Likewise, the imperfect relationship between word and picture has prompted texts which ironically comment from one medium to the other. As Perry Nodelman writes in Words about Pictures, the pictures and text of picture books come together best and most interestingly not when writers and illustrators attempt to have them mirror and duplicate each other but when writers and illustrators use the different qualities of their different arts to communicate different information. When they do that, the texts and illustrations of a book have an ironic relationship to each other: the words tell us what the pictures do not show, and the pictures show us what the words do not tell. (222) Rather than merely attempt to exploit the different media, however, Nodelman says that the words and pictures cannot help but be ironic: "Irony occurs in literature when we know something more and something different from what we are being told. . . . The pictures destroy our confidence in the apparent meaning of the words, and the words destroy our confidence in the apparent implication of the picture" (223). For instance, in 1973, the same y The Juniper Tree, Maurice Sendak also Grisly-Beard, a comic and ironic versi tale. The Juniper Tree is a contempor translation of Grimm by Lore Segal and serious black and white line drawings own page with only white on the follow Sendak is here presenting as definitiv tales as he had in 1973. In contrast, a comic-strip like...
Read full abstract
Dec 1, 2001
