Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text (review)

As an admirer of David Lewis's work on the picturebook, I have been looking forward to his new book for some time. It is certainly full of excellent insights, but I have to say that, on the whole, I am disappointed by its lack of unity. It is described in the blurb as "both an introduction to a fascinating and innovative branch of children's literature and a detailed examination of how picturebooks work." Unfortunately, these two don't marry. Lewis's book is quirky, but it certainly does not replace such standard works as those of Jane Doonan or Perry Nodelman. Lewis's work is better seen as a more advanced text, in that he operates in a regular "dialogic" relation to other works in the area (Bakhtin being one of Lewis's key reference points). He also likes to draw on the views of children, which is an admirable idea, but again, is not sufficiently developed. Finally, I found it hard to see why the informative, chapter-long appendix, applying Kress and Leeuwen's Grammar of Visual Design (1996) to the study of picturebooks, was not a chapter in itself.

The book's weaknesses also unearth its strengths; one of the main ones is Lewis's philosophical approach to the genre. It would perhaps be better, therefore, to see the book as a series of interconnected essays, in the manner of Ernst Gombrich. Lewis takes seriously Wittgenstein's maxim, "don't think, but look!"—an appropriate notion, given his subject matter!—which results in shaking up much received wisdom on the picture book (another reason I'd see it as an intermediate text). He even queries the lexeme "picture book," deciding on the compound form, to reflect the dualistic nature of the word/picture artifact, as against hyphenated, or two-word versions. He thus takes us back to basics, using the United Kingdom's Emil Award Winners (1982-1999) as his corpus, to avoid any idiosyncratic self-selection. From there he notes the diversity of the winning picturebooks, again counseling against restrictive and overhasty definitions of the area, such that, if we took the work of Quentin Blake and Anthony Browne to epitomize the genre, then other works would be seen as a falling away from these. Instead, Lewis speaks of the form being "unbounded," perennially open to new influences.

He also helpfully queries other terms used by critics: for example, such musical analogies as "counterpoint" and "antiphonal fugue" that roll so easily off the tongue, but which, he notes, actually keep word and picture apart, separately responding to each other, rather than, as he prefers, "interanimation" (borrowing from Margaret Meek), to capture the way each aspect works on the other: "The words are pulled through the pictures and the pictures are brought into focus by the words" (48). He's likewise critical of taxonomies of picturebooks, which he rightly sees as more restrictive than enlightening. For instance, critics often use the term "symmetry" to indicate that verbal text and pictures convey the same information. But, as Lewis says, this can only happen in "the loosest possible sense" for "the symmetry that many picturebooks appear to exhibit is . . . illusory, an artifact of word-picture interanimation" (39). In other words, we only think pictures say the same as a verbal text after we have read the words, which guide us. Though Lewis does not mention it, Mark Twain wittily makes the same point in Life on the Mississippi. Describing how people weep before a picture entitled "Beatrice Cenci the Day Before her Execution," Twain comments,

It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, "Young Girl with Hay Fever; Young Girl with Her Head in a Bag." (255)

Lewis suggests a more flexible approach than the taxonomy: seeing the picturebook in ecological terms. This allows a more nuanced...