In which I commence the review of a bizarre children's book and am waylaid along the way (Part I).

On its face, finding a children's book suitable for inclusion in the daddytypes Bizarre Children's Book Contest seemed a fairly simple matter; the whole suspension-of-disbelief agenda gets taken pretty much for granted in most of the kids' books one finds littering the floor in our house, and the premise of, say, a juvenile trumpet-playing cat in need of rescue at the hands of (or perhaps, rather, the dextrous cloven hooves of) a squadron of pigs with colanders  and sauce-pans on their heads -- well, such a premise does not necessarily suggest a tale which will hold up under the harsh glare of rational scrutiny[1].  And such tales are of course by no means anomalous, our shelves being as they are overpopulated by a mob of talking, dancing, singing, or otherwise incongruously-occupied folk from up and down the phylogenetic ladder.  All of which initially seemed to suggest that a bizarre children's book would easily come to hand.

But in general, most children's books aren't meant to hold up under rational scrutiny or its harsh glare. To suggest that there is instead something more primal than reportage at work in most children's literature is nothing new; the psychoanalytic reading of fairy tales goes way back. And once you've plowed through Danny and the Dinosaur or Zack's Alligator[2] twelve or fifteen times -- well, you might notice that these stories are exemplary instances of a common theme, a theme in which some previously innocuous object of fascination to the child achieves a sort of fantastic, unexpected autonomy [3]; and that  over the course of the story, this object brings the child great pleasure but also displays certain latent and outsized tendencies toward impulsive behavior, said tendencies with some difficulty kept in check by the child; and that as the plot progresses, any adults who happen to populate the story seem strangely unwilling to mention or otherwise to notice these powerful agents of pleasure which the child has unleashed.

And then of course you will sublimate this crypto-sexual revelation into a suggestion that your kid might want to quit reading for the afternoon and go outside to play in the sprinkler! Though perhaps that says more about your own mildly repressed Midwestern upbringing than anything about the state of children's literature or the bizarreness of same.

So: Given that the basis of most children's literature -- indeed, the reason most children's literature isn't a drag and exerts a sentimental force on its readers well into adulthood (or what passes for adulthood) -- is the regular occurrence of the basically fantastic elements, or some concatenation of unbelievable detail yoked together to tell some larger truth, or simply something that's, you know, not true. So, given that the presence (say) of a talking badger in a pinafore will not suffice to propel a book, prima facie, into the realm of the bizarre, what is it exactly that sets the truly bizarre children's book apart from its pedestrian betheren?

A quick survey of such literature as I have easily at hand, and the general traits of book upon which I eventually settled as bizarre, seems to suggest several factors that might lead to the production of a bizarre book:

(1) The author and/or illustrator show a substantial degree of incompetence, whether technical or literary;

(2) the story insists upon a didacticism that is unduly aggressive given the scope of the lesson being taught, or otherwise partakes of substantial doses of anachronistic values now repugnant to a reasonable reader; and,

(3) the combination of two preceding factors (incompetence and didacticism) must be handled with such unconscious absurdity that whatever lessons the book purports to instill will be inevitably muddled or  misconstrued, often to risible effect [4].

The Perils of Artistic Incompetence.

Thus, for a book simply to have sprung from the loins of a hack does not suffice to qualify a book for entry in the halls of bizarre. Certainly, a ham-fisted approach to English prose, further crippled by either the developmental constraints of writing for early readers or the commercial constraints of wringing the last dollar out of the licensing fees flung down at the feet of the Disney Princesses, may in some instances propel a title in that direction -- though more often such a train-wreck of aesthetic disadvantages (artistic bankruptcy allied with commercial demands) leads only to dull mediocrity.

For instance, I had initially thought to review Zack's Alligator as my examplar of bizarre. Indeed, this is a work which has caused me untold irritation [5] since my daughter first demanded to hear it some two years ago; the book possesses the peculiar merit of wedding an untenable text to poorly-rendered illustrations, each in turn erected upon a base of sloppy observation. (For instance, has the breakdown of social cohesion in suburban America really meant that no neighborhood adult would report to Zack's parents that he had spent the afternoon in the company of a well-known carnivore? All the psycho-sexual babble of the paragraphs above aside, I have developed an alternative conspiracy theory in which the alligator, while visiting her depredations upon the unsuspecting neighborhood, has managed to consume Jane Jacobs on the sly.) 

But in the end, I decided that the faults of Zack and his mischievous keychain-cum-companion did not rise to the standards required of a bizarre book. Sure, the illustrator seems strangely unwilling to maintain a consistent approach to rendering seasons (spring's tulips co-exist in the same bed as summer's daisies), odd errors in continuity abound, and never have I seen children skateboarding in such a manner as the Watts portrays here.

Such instances of sloppiness or laziness obviously tick me off; every time a reader notices that an author (or illustrator) has taken some half-assed shortcut in a story, the author (or illustrator) loses another chunk of whatever goodwill or trust the reader has brought to the book. For a jaded adult like myself, well-schooled in the ways of the cruel world, I can simply muffle my disillusionment with dissipation and ardent spirits. For a kid without my carapace of experience, though, this sort of artistic dishonesty can have some lasting side-effects.

Richard Hugo wrote at length in a posthumously-published essay about one of the first books he read as a child, a collection of Peter Rabbit stories; in this collection, every so often a chapter began with "a poem, a rhymed quatrain, as I recall, ABCB."  Writing some 50 years since he had seen the book, Hugo recalls that in one episode Peter takes shelter from a blizzard in a stranger's empty home and the chapter ends with the rabbit asleep on the floor, "safe at last from the elements." Then,

The next chapter started with a poem. The owner of the cave house, who turns out to be the big brown bear, is speaking. It went something like this:

What are you doing inside of my house?
You knocked all the snow off your feet with your jump.
Why don't you knock before you come in?
I've a notion to cut off your head with a saw.

The first time I read it I felt let down. "Jump" does not rhyme with "saw," as anyone can plainly hear. After all, the poems had always rhymed before. What right did the author have to throw up his or her hands this way. . . . Though it became funny, the first few re-readings of the book I still felt betrayed by the author and his or her failure to rhyme. After all he or she could have tried:

I've a notion to cave in your skull with a thump.
I've a notion to beat out your brains on a stump.
I've a notion to kick your rabbity rump.

Whoever wrote that book is probably dead. But to his or her spirit I say, Come on, one more try. At the time it seemed extremely important that the poet had failed his or her obligation to that poem (Hugo 153) [6].

Though perhaps like Hugo suggests, the passage of time can blur the distinctions between a lazy author who has abdicated his or her responsibility and an author who is simply doing the best he or she can with the cards he or she has been dealt.  When you hold up some of the woodcut illustrations from early American schoolbooks next to contemporary illustrations of splay-footed skateboarders, you are haunted by the suspicion that even across the gulf of a century or two, each illustrator was in some measure distracted from the task at hand when presented with the job of producing his work; essayist and bookseller Jack Matthews wrote of a 19th century reader he had purchased that the illustration of the elephant in which,

At any rate, the head is recognizable; but the back is long and sloping like that of a quarter horse, and the hindquarters are a stunning anomaly--thick and bellows-shaped, like the massively sagging pants of a pensive clown. A curious beast to be released into the jungles of an untutored mind [7].

I can offer here by way of illustration my own instance of a didactic artist with a similarly imaginative approach to zoology, a woodcut for a fable collected in the Deutsches Buchstabir-und Lesebuch zum Gebrauch deutscher Schulen (Germantaun, Penna., 1820). Given that the illustrator had to rely on what scant verbal resources he likely had at his disposal to create this illustration, it seems little wonder that in the final product it appears instead as though a mastiff has been angered by an unfortunate encounter with a tureen of linguine. But unlike the resentment which wells up inside my breast each time I crack open the tale of Zack and his alligator, I am here instead moved to good humor. Perhaps the difference lies less in whatever differences there might be in each illustrator's artistic talent, and the woodcut instead evinces a sort of hard-working sincerity which the later illustration lacks.

This idea of sincerity trumping lousy execution may perhaps result from an anachronistic application of indie-rock-type standards; though anachronistic incongruity can be just what a book needs to pull it out of the Slough of Mediocrity and onto the Highroad to Bizarre.

But I begin to weary and shall take up the topic again tomorrow, I hope, and maybe even get around to the review of my bizarre book.
_______
[1] Such indeed is the premise of a well-known episode in Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day, originally published in 1968. Another book from Scarry relies of course on the conceit that a family of pigs would drive a Volkswagon to the beach. Which makes no sense, given the very real likelihood on such a trip of encountering sociopathic dingos on the fast track to suspended driver's licenses. Perhaps it would be better to stay home, my porcine friends! But then of course there's the old saying that there are only two types of stories -- a family of swine leaves home or a strange swine comes to town -- and while the small-scale domestic travails of the Pig family may have suited a fancy-pants domestic novelist, such swine would have granted Mr. Scarry but little scope for his considerable talents.

[2] Zack's Alligator, by Shirley Mozelle and with pictures by James Watts, belongs to that genre of book best described as "the ones which the parents will hide in that remote cupboard up over the refrigerator because it really chaps my ass after repeated readings." Our daughter loves the story -- a classic in the whole key-chain-grows-into-real-talking-alligator field -- but for reasons which I will address elsewhere, the book soon begins to pall.

[3] One rather sinister instance of the ambiguous benefits of wish fulfillment, which only recently came to my attention since the launch of the daddytypes contest, is Margaret Wise Brown's posthumous Steamroller, the moral of which runs along the lines of "Be careful what you wish for or you will likely crush a cute animal or benevolent adult!"

[4] Edmund Pearson makes an relevant observation in his entertaining survey Queer Books (New York 1928), when he notes,

To become famous for queer poetry it is necessary to have a combination of unusual qualities. There must be an absolute inability to know what is ridiculous; absence of the sense of humour must be congenital. Great seriousness of purpose must exist, together with a persistent itch for literary fame. But all these will avail nothing, unless the poet has, in addition, a diabolical aptitude for the wrong word in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where many of use would stumble upon a passable phrase or thought, he goes unerringly to the incongruous and the absurd (Pearson 72).

Of course, in 1928 Pearson was using a different working definition of "queer," but his meaning should be easily understood to apply to our field of bizarre books all the same.

[5] Though clearly the irritation is not completely untold, as I have managed to bring it up repeatedly and at length to my wife and several friends; indeed, in footnote [2] above, I even go so far as to lapse into vulgarity while discussing Zack and his sprightly crocodilian companion. Those familiar with my habitual mildness of both speech and demeanor will take this as some measure of the damage the work has wrought upon my psyche.

[6] Richard Hugo, The Real West Marginal Way (New York 1986).

[7] Jack Matthews, Booking in the Heartland (Baltimore 1986).

Comments

[greg from daddytypes]

I am in awe.

[dutch from sweet juniper]

this fucking rules.

[Chris]

I hope you got a review off in time, because you certainly deserve to win something based on this preamble alone.

[Mrs. Kennedy]

Are you planning on publishing this? Because I think your daughter will totally give you tenure.

[abby]

Sounds like someone has spent too much time speaking in small sentences and needed to use his adult voice.

Seriously though, love this blog.

[G.]

Abby, I talk to my kid like this all the time. She tolerates it, grudgingly. Mrs. K, I think I'm still on a month-to-month contract with her. Or day to day, to judge by the tears and drama, etc.