On imagery

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.