Picture Book Anatomy

Come here, please, Mr. Caldecott, and listen to this:

. . . picture-book art is a rich blend of the techniques of a variety of forms of visual information—not just the directed tensions of visual art and the stage pictures of theatrical blocking but also the camera angles of film, the conventionalized action lines of cartoons, and the stock types of stereotypical diagrams . . .

(157).

Did Mr. Evans tell you such things when you set about drafting John Gilpin for him down in the rural peace of Witley, or did he just say: "Here's a jolly ballad that everyone knows, why don't we put together some drawings for it?"

The contrast of attitudes may be exaggerated, but it serves to express the unease which I feel about trying to make a fair assessment of the 330 pages of Professor Nodelman's words about pictures. For although I do not think that Mr. Caldecott would have had the time or the inclination to work his way through the layered arguments of that book, those arguments do claim that his art, and that of his peers, be examined with rather more attention than has occurred hitherto.

Perry Nodelman announces his intentions in his Preface. Sensibly rejecting the facile commentators who see picture books as a means for teaching art-appreciation, or as instruments of pedagogy, he aligns himself with those altogether more virile troopers who are now moving in upon children's literature: the semioticians and the reader-response brigade. "This is serious art" (x) he says of his subject, and as such it must lay itself open to an analysis which goes beyond the conventional descriptions of graphic media and pictorial fashion. Codes and communication are the thing. What conditions us to accept that such-and-such an arrangement of graphic effects represents an identifiable scene or character? What validates a certain progression of pictures as a "meaningful" interpretation of a certain progression of words?

Recognizing that "children's picture books" are a vast and varied body of material, Nodelman is at pains to impose a tight control on the development of his analysis. After an introductory chapter which seeks to establish a match between illustration and children's visual understanding (predictably entitled "Pictures and the Implied Viewer") he goes on to a group of chapters which deal with the narrative force of pictorial expression, He rightly admits the likely priority of verbal texts—"words that evoked [the creation of pictures] in the first place" (40)—but at this point he is more concerned to establish the way readers may derive information directly from pictures.

He begins this section of the book by discussing the surface characteristics of illustrations, which he sums up, in typical fashion, as "the meaningful implications of overall qualities of books and pictures" (40). These cover such things as the way we may be affected by the format of the (open) book, by the texture of its paper, by the physical disposition of illustrations in relation to accompanying letterpress and by the symbolic qualities of color as distinct from the expressive potential of monochrome.

From here he proceeds to four chapters which tackle more nebulous topics than the physical:

1. a. Style as Meaning, in which he confronts the problem of wresting meaning itself from that all-purpose term. "Style" he sees as being a superimposition of the artist's personality on a set of given factors (graphic media, subject illustrated, conventions of locale and period, etc.).

2. b. Code, Symbol, Gesture, which deals with "narrative information" that is supplied through "specific objects depicted" (101). At a simple level this may have to do with the weight given by an illustrator to what makes up the content of his picture. At a deeper level the chapter concerns itself with symbolic content, whether injected by the artist (e.g., Oliver Hardy in In the Night-Kitchen, or the reflected cross in Through the Window) or determined by cultural or psychological assumptions.

3. c. Visual Weight and Directed Tension, subtitled "the...