Why is it that children’s books are illustrated, and adult
novels are not? If children were less imaginative than adults, comparatively
unable to create worlds in their heads and see people who are not really there,
the explanation would be simple. But anyone who has been a child knows that in
coming to better understand the world that does exists, he loses something of
the ability to know one that does not. Rather, children interact with images—mental
or physical—in a special, intensified way that is more tangible and less
abstract than an adult’s experience of similar material. In adult literature, key
moments often take place in the drabbest of settings. Dostoevsky writes at a turning point of Crime and Punishment: “Raskolnikov turned and looked at her anxiously:
yes, that was it! She was already trembling in a real, true fever. He had
expected that. She was approaching the word about the greatest, the unheard-of
miracle, and a feeling of great triumph took hold of her” (Dostoevsky, 327).
The intellectual and spiritual power of resurrection is showcased in a dark, stale
room with dirty yellow wallpaper and scant furniture. The final scene of King Lear is not on the battlefield, but in a cold, grey little
hollow tucked away from the tumult and pageantry. In Walker Percy’s redemptive
novel The Moviegoer, the final scene
of love and hope has this for scenery: “They’ve been sitting in the car since
eight o’clock” (Percy, 239).
By placing the action in bare environments, these authors focus
their audience’s attention on plot and psychological developments without the
distraction of noise and color. The reader grasps Sonya’s emotion, Lear’s
heartbreak, and Binx’s newfound purpose through words that primarily convey a
message rather than paint a picture. By contrast, great children’s writers are
at their most physically descriptive at the key moments of their stories. Over
the next few pages, I want to examine three scenes—one of faith, one of love,
and one of hope—as examples of using tactile sensual imagery to convey meaning.
Finally, I want to use one of the concluding scenes of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to
meditate on why this technique would be so widespread among authors employing
the imagination to impart a moral teaching.
Faith
Hans Christian Andersen’s long fairy story The Snow Queen is a tale of the power of
childlike faith and devotion over the Enlightenment’s cold god, Reason. In the
story, the devil creates a mirror that robs the beauty from anything seen in its
reflection, and corrupts any virtue to seem disgusting. For the first time, he
declares, men can see each other and the world as it really is, free of
romanticism. When the demons try to view heaven through the mirror, it shatters
and the pieces scatter over the earth, piercing the hearts and eyes of many.
Some people even make spectacles of the glass that distort everything they see.
Andersen develops his opening warning against faulty vision—he says that there
are still shards in the air today—when little Kay is pierced by the glass and
surrenders himself completely to the evil Snow Queen:
Empty,
vast, and cold were the halls of the Snow Queen. The flickering flame of the
northern lights could be plainly seen, whether they rose high or low in the
heavens, from every part of the castle. In the midst of its empty, endless hall
of snow was a frozen lake, broken on its surface into a thousand forms; each
piece resembled another, from being in itself perfect as a work of art, and in
the centre of this lake sat the Snow Queen, when she was at home. She called
the lake “The Mirror of Reason,” and said that it was the best, and indeed the
only one in the world. Little Kay was quite blue with cold, indeed almost black,
but he did not feel it; for the Snow Queen had kissed away the icy shiverings,
and his heart was already a lump of ice. (Andersen, 18)
Andersen paints a verbal
picture of the throne room of Reason. It is vast, even endless, because it is
impersonal, with no loving being to fill it. Andersen uses the northern lights
as a metaphor for pure rationalism, casting a flickering light on distant
things but shedding no warmth or clarity on real people. The Mirror of Reason
appears perfect. The queen thinks it is the only means of understanding in the
world, but is too cracked to form a cohesive picture of reality. When Kay’s
loving friend Gerda enters, the boy is arranging the pieces of ice into words—Andersen
calls it “the cold game of reason”—but he cannot form the word “Eternity.” The
Snow Queen promises that he shall own the whole world when he can achieve
eternity through reason, but it is the only task he always fails. When Gerda sees him, she begins to cry, and her tears melt
the ice in his heart: “Then he looked at her, and she sang—‘Roses bloom and cease to be, /
But we shall the Christ-child see.’ Then Kay burst into tears, and he wept so that the splinter
of glass swam out of his eye.” At that moment, the ice forms itself into the
word Kay could not manage. Call it heavy-handed, but Andersen’s point is clear:
the child’s faithful tears, her reminder of the beauty and fragility of a life
of flowers instead of ice, and her faith in the Christ-child conquer Reason’s
grip on little Kay. The result is “Eternity.”
Love
Oscar Wilde, always unabashedly
aesthetic, created an image of sacrificial love that would remain in the
reader’s memory even if the context were forgotten. In his story The Nightingale and the Rose, a bird
hears a lover lament that he has no rose to give his sweetheart, and cannot
find one because it is winter. The nightingale begs every rose-tree she knows
to give the boy a flower, but only the red-rose tree knows any way to grow a
rose out of season: the bird must create the flower with her song and dye it
with her own heart’s blood. Her life, she decides, is unimportant compared to
that of the great lover she has seen:
So the Nightingale pressed
closer against the thorn, and the thorn touched her heart, and a fierce pang of
pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew
her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that
dies not in the tomb. And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of
the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was
the heart. … 'Look, look!' cried the Tree, 'the rose is finished now;' but the
Nightingale made no answer, for she was lying dead in the long grass, with the
thorn in her heart. (Wilde, 4)
To Wilde, platonic love does not mean calm love—it is fervent and
passionate. The reader experiences the nightingale’s charity in color and sensation.
Love is crimson. Love is the crackle of fierce pain that rips through her heart.
Love is the wildness and red heat of her blood pumping through the thorn and
into the tree. Love is the trembling of the rose and the stillness of the moon
as the nightingale’s eyes begin to film and her voice begins to fade. Love is
the coldness of the morning as she is brushed by the long grass, and it is the
stiffness of the thorn in her stiff body. Never in the story does the bird say
“I love you” to the student, and if she did, the words would soon pass out of
the reader’s mind. Wilde’s gorgeous, sensual imagery remains.
Hope
In
Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows,
Rat and Mole meet the god of their world, and the encounter is startlingly
corporeal. While searching for their friend Otter’s lost son, they hear the
call of the deity. That call is physical, an actual melody with literal sound waves.
When they reach Pan’s grove, Mole looks up:
…[H]e looked in the very eyes of
the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in
the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that
were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a
half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across
the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just
fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs
disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his
very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little,
round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment
breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he
lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered. (Grahame, 125)
The experience is almost gritty. Note the descriptors: “curved,”
“gleaming,” “hooked,” “bearded,” “rippling,” “supple,” “shaggy,” “podgy.”
Mole’s vision of Pan is so present, so relatable, so within the natural order
of things. Pan has always been associated with wild revelry and carnal pleasure,
but here, his kind and humorous eyes and half-smile tie him more to the
comforts of heath and hearth than to the bacchanal. Compare Mole’s experience
to the great Western poetic vision of heaven. When Dante at last lifts his eyes
to the center of the Rose, words fail him. He sees color, for a moment believes
he perceives an image, and then his understanding and speech desert him. The contrasting
sensuality of Mole’s vision, however, should not detract from its significance.
In looking, Mole wonders and lives more exquisitely than ever before, and Pan
must send he and Rat the “soft touch” of forgetfulness lest the pair never
again enjoy their lives. I would argue that this episode, seemingly unrelated
to the rest of the book, actually holds each chapter together. Grahame’s story
is a celebration of woods, rivers, earth, home, friendship, and food. These are
all good things without a doubt, but Grahame’s leisurely exposition could easily
be kitschy and sentimental—the author using little animals to talk about things
that he likes. Pan gives a spiritual unification to the story. He is the
representation of the essential goodness of these things.
Mole and Rat’s later vague memory of something
“surprising and splendid and beautiful” is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ words on
hope in The Weight of Glory, in which
he speaks of the sweet but painful secret longing that certain aesthetic
experiences provoke in every man:
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was
located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through
them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good
images of what we really desire; but … they are not the thing itself; they are
only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not
heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. (Lewis, 4-5)
For Lewis,
beauty, memory, and longing all reach toward a heavenly unvisited country. Grahame’s
eyes are more on this world than the next, but he uses the idea in a similar
way. For Lewis, heaven’s nearness to earth, and our ever-present memory of
something we can almost touch but have not yet seen, is the essence of what we
call beauty in art. In The Wind in the
Willows, Pan unites that longing with the essence of the physical world
itself. Rat’s wonder at his discovery of the god’s very physical deep footprint
is a perfect example. Mole and Rat hear the
Tune, smell the Flower, and then
return to their joyful lives in the Country
of Pan. But Pan does not remove the memory of himself from one character: the
baby otter. Portly grieves when Pan disappears, because he alone can still see
and feel the god in his mind. Rat and Mole, by contrast, will come closest to
fully remembering the vision when they hear hymn sung by the river and the
reeds: words for the adult, an image for the child.
Moral
Imagination
So
why does Wilde choose a bird as his vehicle of love? Why does Andersen construct
a strange story of a demon, a broken mirror, a frozen lady, and a barefoot
child to attack the Enlightenment? Why does Grahame attempt sublimity through
shaggy legs and let a baby touch and remember what the adults within the story
can, in the end, only guess at? If this technique is ubiquitous in good stories
for children, the answer must be related to the goal of those stories. C.S.
Lewis explains the purpose of Narnia at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The children have come to the end
of their journey, and Lucy and Edmund Pevensie ask the Christ-figure Aslan
whether they will return to Narnia soon. Never, he tells them, and they despair:
‘You are too old, children,’ said
Aslan, ‘and you must begin to come close to your own world now.’
‘It isn’t Narnia, you know,’
sobbed Lucy. ‘It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never
meeting you?’
‘But you shall meet me, dear one,’ said Aslan.
‘Are — are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.
‘I am,’ said Aslan. ‘But there
I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very
reason you brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may
know me better there.’ (Lewis,
541)
Narnia is a land where the Christ Himself is a lion with heavy paws,
sweet breath, rough, thick fur, and a rich voice. Aslan is the ultimate image for a higher truth; the children
touch him, chase him, ride him, cuddle into his fur, and kiss his face. Lewis
says Narnia itself exists so that children may learn enough that, once
childhood is over, they may know Aslan-Christ better in their own world. Lewis
is a Platonist, so he believes that all of these tangible things reflect a
higher reality, just as a lion can reflect God and a greedy boy can reflect the
sin that put Jesus up on the cross. But for the Pevensies and their friends,
and for the children who follow their adventures, “faith” can be held when it
is a beautiful apple from the tree of life, “hope” is embodied in the stalwart
beavers always on the lookout for news that “Aslan is on the move,” and “love”
is clear in the picture of a king with his arm around a unicorn (Lewis, 146). These
images are so effective because they grab onto a child’s imagination, and they
are so good because they subtly work to make that imagination a moral one.
In
short, Andersen, Grahame, Wilde, and Lewis are seeking to teach children through
pictures that grab hold of their minds. University of Virginia professor Vigen
Guroian argues that it is foolish to attempt to teach ethics to a child,
because ethics are syllogistic or even mathematic (Tending the Heart of Virtue). Even if a child pays enough attention
to be able to recite the lesson back, he will certainly not care enough for it
to let his study affect his behavior. A fairy tale, on the other hand, teaches
a boy that knights will die for king, country, and the service of women. Children
learn the importance of faith from George McDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, selflessness from Collodi’s Pinocchio, and courage from Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The
heavy use of tactile imagery in teaching these lessons is an extension of the
same goal. Because Aslan is a lion, we know he is brave and strong. Because
Lucy’s senses are overwhelmed by his smell and his fur and his hugeness, we can
see him, almost feel him, and we know he is very close. Kay’s blue little face
says better than any treatise “Have faith and rejoice.” The trembling body of
the nightingale reminds us that art and beauty find their true purpose in the
service of love.
An adult would probably find that an illustrated
Bible did little, perhaps even detracted, from his experience of the book’s
teachings, because the writers rely more on words and thoughts given directly
than on images. There is a time for everyone to move past Narnia and grow close
to this world; Raskolnikov is a deeper, fuller representation of repentance and
salvation than is Edmund Pevensie. But for the child, the vivid images define
the experience. It is why N.C. Wyeth is famous. It is why children dress up as
their favorite characters and act them out rather than write papers about them.
When the images are not just aesthetic but also virtuous, the children who
experience them may grow up to be adults still acting like Ratty, Jim Hawkins,
and Lucy Pevensie.
