Show and Tell: The Visual Evocation of Orality in Peter Sís' A Small Tall Tale From The Far Far North

Orality¹ is inevitably an important aspect of the literature meant to educate and entertain young children. Nursery rhymes, storytelling, reading aloud from books—these offer important entry points into literary worlds, especially to pre-literate children. The relationship between the spoken and the written word, however, is typically hierarchical in that the oral is generally seen in modern culture as a stepping stone towards the "higher good" of reading for oneself. The phase of oral narratives and poems in many educational programs is kept as brief as possible and is more or less abruptly terminated as soon as the child begins to comprehend the printed word. The diminishing value of the oral and the increasing respect for the written has been noted by such early classics as Charlotte's Web, which emphasizes the regenerative potential of the wise spider's songs and stories even as it represents the superior power of the written word to affect individual destinies. The displacement of oral modes of literary transmission by print culture is, of course, irreversible. However, in spite of the fact that creators of children's literature are constrained to the choice of print as a medium for their art, some writers, such as Peter Sís, have sought to evoke the fading echo of the oral into the silent realm of the textual by their innovations.

To date, critical interest has focused on the verbal evocation of orality, but picture books invite us to consider the visual evocation of orality. Linguistic experiments that use the printed word to suggest the richness of the spoken one have been encouraged by the growing concern with ethnic roots in the past few decades. Alfred Burns, for instance, has commented upon the adaptations of ancient Mexican myths and stories for children that seek to recreate the oral roots of the narratives by the use of rhythm and typography to convey the different voices and tones of the speakers. Michelle Pagni Stewart also notes the significance of orality in ethnic cultures. She uses the notion of the "speakerly" text to explore the dynamic between oral and written in picture books dealing with cultures that particularly value oral narrative traditions. Stewart argues that as picture books are typically meant to be read aloud, speakerly works that oscillate between written and oral voices not only encourage the give-and-take between storyteller and audience but also awaken the young child to a knowledge of oral traditions in other cultures. Another mode of engagement with orality is manifested in George Shannon's conception of picture books as not merely "silent movies" that juxtapose word and image but as constructs in which the "aural cycles" of the text collaborate with the "rhythms" of the images (138-40). Shannon's analysis of various picture books in this context concludes with his own experience as the writer of Bean Boy, which is illustrated by Peter Sís. He finds that Sís, "a good illustrator with an attentive ear," adds to and strengthens the tone and rhythm of his text through the images (146). Indeed, Sís seems particularly sensitive to the negotiation between the textual, the oral, and the visual. The picture books that he has written as well as illustrated attest to his interest in these different narrative media.

In The Three Golden Keys Sís presents the significance of written texts as the stimulants of memories about a lost past. The "keys" to which the title refers are three scrolls on which tales from the narrator's past are inscribed. Only the immutability of the written words can make the silent streets of the narrator's hometown, Prague, come alive. The scrolls are necessary for the resurrection of the voices of the past as the narrator enters his old home at the end of the book with the help of the scroll-keys and hears the familiar words of his family. His masterpiece, Tibet: Through the Red Box, presents the complex negotiation between his father's oral narratives, the written journal...