In The Art of Maurice Sendak: From 1980 to the Present, playwright Tony Kushner ponders the naysayers of illustrated children’s books, those elitist fools who consider the medium a disreputable lower art form– a bastardization of literature– soiled by its alleged impurity and sacrilege. Is impurity such a crime?
And you can see their point, you can comprehend their distaste, those purist picture-haters, those iconoclasts! For who has not been seduced and then abandoned by the impure? What is a picture book for children? It’s a trick! Its purpose is to lure kids into the gingerbread cottage, the prison-house, the labyrinth of language.
Why are there picture books? Centuries ago, recognizing how strenuous a chore reading is going to get for anyone lucky enough to grow older and graduate to really difficult books, some useful person invented the illustrated book to start kids reading. The picture book performs an allurement; it offers to kids an already familiar language, the visual, as a seductive entry into a not yet familiar, forbidding, and more treacherous world—the world of written language, of serious abstraction, of sayables and unsayables. Children’s literature makes us fall in love with books and we never recover—we’re doomed. Having spent one night In The Night Kitchen, we’re on our way to Proust and Hegel and the Holy Scriptures.
Subscribe to RSS
