Reflections on the Aesthetics of Antonio Skarmeta's Picturebook, The Composition

Antonio Skarmeta's picturebook, The Composition, masterfully illustrated by Alfonso Ruano, delineates the development of political consciousness in the mind of its young protagonist, Pedro, and does so by combining the arts of literary narration and artistic illustration. A critique of military dictatorship, the book imaginatively depicts the effects of dictatorship and right-wing military repression on the lives of children and their parents. The illustrations are realistic and depict mundane scenes of daily life to bring into focus the uncertainty, fear, and arbitrariness of life in authoritarian political situations.

The pictorial immediacy of Alfonso Ruano's illustrations heightens our awareness of the social and political relationships between children and adults and the political context of their education in and outside school. They point out that political conflict affects children, forcing them into developing critical thought, independent of their parents, where the urban public experience is inevitably disputatious. In Skarmeta's story, Pedro struggles to make sense of the effects of the military dictatorship, the presence of soldiers on the streets, and his parents' interest in political news on their noisy radio. Pedro's incipient competence as a soccer player is impressive. The kidnapping of Don Daniel, the father of his friend, shocks Pedro into thought concerning the meaning and consequences of dictatorship. Daniel's parents give him the freedom to be a child and develop his political stance independently. Pedro's school is visited by a military captain who wants the children to write a composition entitled "What My Family Does at Night." In the story, a number of events show the difficulty and decay of life under the dictatorship, including the kidnapping of a teacher, the absence of the garbage truck, and the felling of a tree. The disruption of normal life is conveyed by the rarity of people on the streets and the priest not wanting to say Sunday mass.

The classroom has become an area of surveillance, where children are used to discover family secrets and political positions. The military captain attempts to ingratiate himself and his regime with the children. The use of a picture of the dictator to be put on the classroom wall signifies the ubiquity of authoritarian power and its dangers.

Pedro's growing political consciousness is proved by the essay he writes, in which he gives away nothing incriminating or of evidentiary value, thus protecting his family from reprisal and keeping his family's political dissidence a secret from the regime.

Of particular aesthetic interest is the illustration of Pedro and his school friend Juan sitting beside each other, with a picture of their military dictator directly behind them, and with a clothes rack attached to the wall to their right. Long lines and indentations on the wall lend a harsh realism to the painting, adding a sense of the foreboding, gravitas, and depth.

Skarmeta is widely considered a leading writer of the post-Boom of the Spanish American novel (Leslie Williams). The Composition exemplifies his commitment to writing about common folk and working people. The interaction of politics and the arts, and the volatility of Latin America's political institutions, have been given expression in a number of artistic styles, including muralist art, magic realism, and expressionism (Lucie-Smith). While conceptual and site-specific art has significantly conveyed the desolation and trauma of military dictatorship and its crimes, Ruano returns to a realistic depiction and engagement with the issues surrounding military dictatorship, state terrorism, and the intrusion of the military into the lives of the young. The representation of the body in Ruano's pictures points to both the emotions of the subject and its materiality. Ruano's illustrations are critically self-conscious in that they select key moments in Skarmeta's text and give them an emotionally deep yet unsentimental interpretation. Ruano's interpretation or viewpoint is not explicit, but it is not detached, either. Given that the reader-ship of the book is young children, and that many of the events described are disturbing, Ruano settles on an approach that offers moments of both...