From Word To Word

Though I have read enough to know how little I have read, I am still quite often shocked by the size of the gaps in my knowledge, even in subjects where I am interested and fairly widely experienced.  My friend Lenore Walker revealed another of these gaps for me last week when she lent me a little paperback novel called The Garden Behind the Moon by Howard Pyle.  I was at first under the impression that the book had been written quite recently, because the edition that was loaned to me was published in 2002, and it does not list an original publication date, but I had only read a few pages before it became apparent that it had actually been written at a much earlier time or that it had been written by someone who was very skillfully imitating the style and language of that earlier time.  A cursory internet confirmed that the book actually dates from 1895, and the same search revealed also that its author was, and still is to some degree, a quite famous illustrator and writer of books for children.

Now, I have taught courses on children’s literature more than once, have read vast quantities of books for children, have a habit of asking people about their favourite children’s stories, and have associated for many years with homeschoolers, who generally take their children’s reading very seriously, but I had never heard of Howard Pyle, at least not in such a way that I would remember him.  Yet he wrote stories in a wide range of genres, from poetry to pirate stories (The Book of Pirates) to retellings of the Robin Hood stories (The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood) to fairytales (Twilight Land).  One of his historical fictions (Men of Iron) was even made into a film called The Black Shield of Falworth.  How I failed to find him until know I cannot quite imagine.

What is more, as successful as he may have been as an author, Pyle was probably best known in his lifetime as an artist and illustrator, earning praise from artists as influential as Van Gogh, who wrote that Pyle’s pictures struck him “dumb with admiration”.  Whether he is depicting pirates, like  Marooned Pirate and Pirate Left for Dead, or fairytale themes, like The Mermaid and David Sat Down on the Wooden Bench, or portraits, like Catherine de Vaucelles, in Her Garden and Abraham Lincoln, or civil war scenes, like The Charge and The Nation Makers, Pyle’s pictures are filled with a gravity and an emotion that make them compelling.  I am particularly drawn to some of his black and white drawings, like The Forging of Balmung or his rendering of a child being taught by an angel to play the flute.  Though my artistic judgment weighs very much less than Van Gogh’s, these pictures fill me with admiration also.

Having found so much to enjoy in its author, I returned to The Garden at the Back of the Moon with renewed interest, and I found its style and its subject and its sensibility to be very much like George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, which is probably my favourite children’s novel.  Both books are fairytales, not in the vulgar sense of being peopled with tiny creatures who all live in flowers, but in a truer sense that I am not really able to define but that is described by George MacDonald in “The Fantastic Imagination“  and by G. K. Chesterton in “The Ethics of Elfland” and by J. R. R. Tolkien in “On Fairy Stories” and by  C. S. Lewis in “Sometimes Fairy Stories May say Best What Needs to be Said”.   The kind of fairytale that these authors describe is much rarer, at least in my experience, and The Garden Behind the Moon is just such a story.  This fairytale quality, whatever it may be, gives the novel a solemnity and a wonder and a power, even despite the bits that sound a little laboured and preachy to the contemporary ear.  It is a beautiful book and one that I will be sure to share with my children.

More importantly, I have the feeling that my relationship with the work of Howard Pyle may be only just beginning.

I found a copy of Orson Welles’ Les Bravades for less than two dollars in a bargain shop yesterday.  I had never heard of the book before, but it is a collection of pictures and writing that he made for his daughter while he was attending the festival of Les Bravades in Saint-Tropez on the Riviera, a kind of picture book and extended postcard all in one.

The book tells the story of Saint Tropez who was beheaded by Emperor Nero in Pisa, where his skull remains, covered in silver leaf.  His headless body was set adrift in a small boat, and it came to rest at a small fishing town that was, from that point forward, known as Saint-Tropez.  A grand church was built for the saint’s remains, but it was subsequently destroyed when the town was captured by Saracens, which was when the remains themselves were also lost, but the town continued to honour Saint Tropez even without his remains.  Even when certain Protestant groups were trying to abolish iconography, by force if necessary,the town organized an armed defense of the saint’s shrine.  The yearly celebration of Les Bravades, then, is to commemorate the saint himself, but also to remember the defense of the saint’s shrine by the people of Saint-Tropez and the disbandment of the Tropezian Army army by Louis XIV in 1678, hence the military nature of the festivities and the continuous firing of antique weapons that is one of its distinctive elements.

The book’s illustrations are mostly line drawings, many of which have a certain amount of colour added to them, but usually only gestures of colour, here and there, highlighting rather than actually colouring the drawings.  The pictures range greatly in size, from individual figures only a couple of inches tall to full page scenes.  They are clearly sketches, drawn hurriedly, and meant as a personal gift rather than for public consumption, but there is something unique and beautiful about them, perhaps just for this reason.  They are, in many respects, just the kind of personal and amateur art that I have elsewhere argued should be encouraged as a way of making of art the gift that it should be, and I enjoyed this aspect of them very much.

I am not sure how widely available the book is, but it is well worth picking up if you should happen to come across it.

I am interested, not in devotional art, but in art as devotion, not in the artistic object made to be a site of devotion for its creator or for its receiver, but in the artistic practise that, with the proper spirit, becomes a discipline of the mind and of the body and of the spirit that allows devotion, perhaps, to occur in us.  In an artistic practise of this kind, the object of art, far from becoming an idol, never even becomes an icon, because the iconic function is played by the artistic practise itself.  It is a practise of art in which the artistic object and even the artistic act become radically secondary to an artistic discipline that seeks to be, before all else a devotion, though it knows that true devotion must always lie beyond it.  I would have my reading and my writing become this kind of discipline, this kind of devotion.

I generally try to make Christmas presents for my kids.  Last year I made them  a set of blocks designed to build castles, and this year I made them wooden shields, with wolves for my eldest, whose middle name means “young wolf”, and hawks for my youngest, whose first name is also the name for a species of small hawk.  They are about two feet by two feet in size and quite heavy, and they came with wooden swords made by the young entrepreneur that I mentioned some time ago, so they would actually be dangerous if I were to let the boys use them as toys, but they are intended instead to hang on the wall as their own personal coats of arms, something that symbolically ties them to our family.

The colours of their shields and the pattern of three animals come from my mother’s Gordon coat of arms, from my father’s Hill coat of arms, and from my wife’s James coat of arms, and the chevron comes from the latter two, so the boys’ personal symbols are integrated into the symbolism of their parents’ families.  Of course, anyone who takes heraldry seriously would be horrified at this kind of unsanctioned alteration of official heraldic devices, but I am less interested in having the shields be authentic than I am in having them be personal and familial.  I want them to be a symbol to my children that, though they are unique and irreplaceable, they are also always a part of a family and a tradition that can give them a place to belong.

This is the gift that I hope they are receiving this Christmas.

Finding books that entertain both a four year old boy and his parents can sometimes be difficult, particularly when most of the books that are now being produced for this age group are based on super hero movies or television shows that are dumbed down to the lowest possible level.  These books are so focused on being educational that they have lost any sense of plot, characterization, or imagination.  They impress anxious parents because they are labeled with a reading level and because they use various techniques that claim to help children learn to read, but they certainly do not help children to move beyond reading as a technique toward reading as a passion.

This is why I was so pleased to find The Fog Mound series by Susan Schade and Jon Butler.  It is comprised of three books, Travels of Thelonious, Faradawn, and Simon’s Dream, its chapters alternating between graphic novel and illustrated narrative, and it was recommended to me by John Jantunen, whose four year old son it entertained before mine.  It is a post-apocalyptic narrative, set in a world where humans are extinct but where some of the animals have developed the ability to speak and to handle human tools.  It is vastly imaginative and vastly entertaining, with a decaying human city, and a secret animal community atop a fog shrouded plateau, and a mysterious island threatened by mutant crabs, and a tiny scientist who just may be the last surviving human being on earth.

This is the sort of imagination that captures the attention of a child, and of a parent also.  It is the sort of story that finds its purpose in being a story rather than in trying to be merely educational.  My oldest son, who generally prefers me to read him non-fiction books about space stations or knights or crocodiles, is entranced.  He would finish a book a night if his parents had the time and the stamina to read it to him.  He literally begs me to keep reading  at the end of each chapter.  He has even offered to trade snacks and television privileges in exchange for additional chapters.  He may not be learning to read any faster, but he is learning to love reading, and this brings his father much happiness.

Now, all that being said, I would not put The Fog Mound on the same level as some of my own childhood favourites.  Its story moves too quickly at times, and the plot is often unfocused, including too many tenuously related elements.  The art is good but not exceptional, at its best in the larger panels of strange new locations, and at its worst in the sections of dialogue where it becomes repetitive and visually redundant.  The characters are far fuller than most children’s fare, but they do not exactly attain to complex personalities either.  The writing style is generally strong, refusing to make its vocabulary or its sentence structure too simplistic, but it is dialogue heavy, so it often falls short of creating a real narrative atmosphere.

These criticisms, however, should not obscure what the series does very well: it revels in story and in imagination, and this is what a children’s book should do, before everything else, because the function of children’s literature is to inspire a love for reading not to facilitate a mere technical literacy.   The books that birthed this love in me were those that cast me into story and into imagination, even and especially when they were beyond my reading level.  I remember the Narnian books, and The Hobbit, and The Wind in the Willows, and the stories of the Green Forest, and many others.  These are not stories that aim to teach children to read.  They are stories that aim to tell children stories, and this is enough, more than enough, because children will learn to read if they have something worth reading, and they will also learn what it means to imagine and to tell stories themselves, and this is more important still.

I never had a chance to read George MacDonald’s fairytales when I was a child.  It was not until I was a teenager that I discovered his two most widely read novels, The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, not until I began teaching a course in Fantasy Literature that I read Lilith and Phantases, not until the following year in a Children’s Literature class that I read At the Back of the North Wind.  It was also only then that I first read MacDonald’s fairytales.

They are an eclectic mix of stories.  Some are clearly intended for children, including moral tales like the The Golden Key and whimsical stories like The Light Princess.  Others are perhaps written for a more adult audience, including The Gray Wolf, an eerie little story about a werewolf, and The Day Boy and the Night Girl, a tale that explores some relational themes of a more mature nature than most fairytales do.  In every case, though, MacDonald’s characteristic imagination makes them beautiful.  They have the quality of dreams, narratively ethereal but imagistically vivid all at once.  They are exactly what I want fairytales to be.

If I did not come to read MacDonald’s writing until much later than most, I still know very little about Maurice Sendak’s art at all.  I cannot now recall when I first discovered Where the Wild Things Are, a perennial children’s favourite, but it remains the only book of Sendak’s that I have ever read.  I have glanced at his illustrations for the Little Bear books, which were adapted into a tolerable children’s television show that my son now enjoys, but until recently I knew nothing else about Sendak and had no reason to suspect that he would ever be related to the MacDonald fairytales that I loved so much.

Last year, however, I found a used copy of MacDonald’s The Golden Key.  It was a small blue hardcover edition illustrated with the most beautiful line drawings.  They reflected  MacDonald’s dreamlike sensibility well, interpreting the story without forcing themsleves onto it, and they were drawn by Maurice Sendak.  I bought the book, of course, fully intending to discover whether similar editions had been made of MacDonald’s other fairytales, but it was an intention that I promptly forgot, and the book went on the shelf,  and I did not think much more about it.

There the story might have remained had I not gone into a used bookstore this past fall and discovered The Light Princess in the same edition and with the same illustrator.  I bought it even without really looking at it, and I can remember vividly heading straight home so that I could check the publisher’s website and find which other fairytales they might have published in the same edition.  Somewhere between the store and the front door, however, something intervened, and I forget once more, and so, it was only today that I saw the books again on my shelf and finally completed the task that I had first set myself over a year ago.

In retrospect, I think that my forgotten intentions may have been an unconsious attempt at self-protection.  As long as I did not actually find anything definitive to the contrary, I could always hope that Sendak had produced illustrations for a whole number of MacDonald’s books, and I could keep watch for them as I browsed my way through thrift stores and used book stalls.  As soon as I knew for certain, as I now do, that there are no other such books to find, I can only regret that there are so few to be had.  I must confess, I preferred it when I was ignorant.

The Long Road Home is the second in a series of graphic novels that tell the story of Roland Deschain, The Gunslinger, the hero of Steven King’s Dark Tower novels.  Unfortunately, my response to it requires a little history, so bear with me.

I had never read a Steven King book that I liked until about three years ago.  The horror genre in general is entirely uninteresting to me, and I found King’s prose, which seems to value length over sound editing practise, horrific for all the wrong reasons.  I enjoyed the first part of The Stand, but it lost me in the interminable journey that comprises the middle section.  I also enjoyed King’s children’s novel, The Eyes of the Dragon, a readable and entertaining if mostly unremarkable fantasy.  I found everything else almost unreadable.

A few years ago, however, a new friend of mine recommended King’s The Dark Tower series, persistently.  He insisted that it was not a typical horror novel, not horror at all, in fact, more post-apocalyptic-western-fantasy, if I knew what he meant, which I was not sure that I did.  It is a principle of mine, however, to take serious recommendations seriously, so I sat down with the first book in the series, The Gunslinger.

The Gunslinger is a marvellous book.  The story is very simple, and this simplicity is emphasized by a prose that, by King’s standards at least, is sparse and direct.  The writing is imagistic rather than realistic, schematic rather than detailed.  It has clearly been pared and polished, worried and sifted.  It is King’s best writing by far, and its stylistic simplicity permits other forms of complexity to emerge.  The story is highly allusive to various stories and myths, particularly to Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and to the biblical account of Abraham and his son Isaac.  There is also a thematic complexity that draws from various contemporary American mythologies in ways that make the characters almost archetypal. The story and the characters seem less to tell a story than to create a myth of which they are mere instances.  They form a unique and haunting novel, and I do not think it is coincidental that, though it is one of King’s shorter novels, it took him the better part of thirteen years to complete it.

Unfortunately, the Dark Tower series does not maintain this creative level.  It is, as I always admit when I am recommending it, quite unevenly written.  While the first book has serious literary value, the second, third, and seventh are only good.  The fourth, fifth and sixth, even parts of the seventh, are not even very good, though they are still entertaining in their way.  As the series progresses, the novels get steadily longer and less precise, steadily more like the writing of the generic horror novels that King produces at such an alarming rate.  Though they are still good stories, and though they are still quite imaginative, they lack what thirteen odd years of polish and revision brought to the first text.

The fourth, Wizard and Glass, is probably the low point of the series.  Not only is it too long and too ungainly, but it is comprised of a single long flashback episode to Rowland’s youth, an episode that certainly provides some context for Rowland’s character as an older man, but that nevertheless feels entirely out of place in the larger sequence of novels.  The whole book is a frustrating disruption to the larger narrative, to the point where I skipped it entirely when I went to reread the series this past year.  I have even suggested this approach to others when I have recommended the series to them, explaining that only the beginning and ending of this book are really necessary to the story, and that it is perhaps better read later as a separate novel.

This is why I was disappointed when the first graphic novel, The Gunslinger Born, began the story with the events of the fourth novel.  Assuming that the writers intended to produce graphic novel versions of the whole Dark Tower series, I felt that they had done the series a disservice by not beginning with the book that made it worth reading in the first place.  I understood the logic that would put the books in chronological order, but I thought this logic grossly insufficient to warrant beginning the narrative with anything other than the figure of Rowland walking across the desert in pursuit of the dark man.

All of this is to explain why I was pleasantly surprised by the second graphic novel in the series.  It does not, as I assumed it would, return to the first of King’s novels, but relates the previously untold story that spans the time between the events of the fourth novel and those of the first.  Not only does this project explain much more satisfactorily why the first graphic novel began where it did, but it means that the rest of the original novels will probably not be rendered in graphic novel form, an undertaking that I always thought a bit suspicious.  Rather than attempting to produce what could only be inferior versions of the original novels, the graphic novel series instead expands on the very minimal information that King includes about the young Rowland to produce entirely new episodes. I am much more satisfied with this approach, and it makes the new graphic novel much more worth reading.

I should preface this post by saying that I am mostly ambivalent about the graphic novel as a genre. I am certainly not one of those who regard it as entirely devoid of artistic value, but I also fall significantly short of the opposite position that wants to characterize it as rejuvenating a too often stagnant and elitist literary culture. My admittedly limited experience with the graphic novel has not persuaded me that it is any different from other art forms as they are practised in our culture: capable of making significant artistic statements, certainly, but most often productive of mere amusement. Art Spiegelman’s Maus books are an example of graphic novels of the first sort. I also find most of Neil Gaimon’s books interesting, with a particular fondness for The Dream Hunters, a retelling of a Japanese myth that is illustrated by Yoshikata Amano. Beyond these, however, I have not usually been impressed by the narratives that form graphic novels, even if they are visually interesting at times.

Yesterday afternoon, however, I stumbled upon a graphic novel that is beautiful both visually and narratively, despite having no text at all. I was at the library with my two sons, and I happened to see Shaun Tan’s The Arrival out on a table as I was following my youngest on his energetically random path. I read as I followed, and I was soon utterly immersed in the story, in its blending of the fantastic and the familiar, in its almost tactile sense of intimacy.

The narrative is very simple. It follows a man who flees his country, leaving behind his wife and daughter, to begin a new life for them in a foreign land. Its simplicity is made compelling, however, by the beautiful way that the art attends to the smallest gestures of face and hand. A page often holds many small and discrete images that differ from each other only in subtle ways, and yet their progression forms a clear, intimate, and therefore powerful narration. In one very early sequence, for example, the daughter is shown in three stages of waking, then eating, then turning her head toward the next frame, which holds only the suitcase that her father has packed for his trip. There is then a frame of her father donning his hat and looking away from his daughter, followed by one of her mother tying her shawl and looking away from her husband. The next three frames are of the mother’s hands buttoning her daughters coat, the daughter’s hands pulling on her own boots, and the daughter lifting the suitcase to a father who is absent from the shot. The final frame is of the father from the perspective of his daughter, looking down at her, his hand extended to take the suitcase.

This sequence is a masterfully constructed narrative. The everyday activities of the girl’s morning interrupted by the glance at the suitcase. The characters isolated in their individual frames, never joining each other, almost always looking away from each other. The girl handing the suitcase to the already absent father. The father receiving it from the already absent daughter. The whole sequence emphasizes the aloneness of the characters in the face of the coming departure, a departure that has separated them before it has even occurred. This sort of pictorial narrative is made effective by a relentless attention to the intimate details of faces and hands. Each expression and gesture is made to speak a visual language that is almost evocative of a choreography. The characters seem less to move from frame to frame than to shift from pose to pose, telling a story in a kind of lived dance. The effect is beautiful and compelling.

Tan also changes the depth of field in ways that are very effective and that function as a kind of narration in their own right. The sequence in which we discover that the man is aboard a ship to the new land, for example, opens with a close frame of the family photo that the man has packed. The next frame broadens to include the hand of the man as he eats his soup. The next broadens further to show the whole of the man and the gaze that he has fixed on the photo as it sits atop his suitcase. The fourth recedes through the porthole window, through which the man is looking. The frames then continue to recede: the porthole becoming smaller as the ship becomes larger, until the man’s one window is lost among the many windows in the massiveness of the steamer’s side. The sequence is effective enough on its own, but Tan follows this series of smaller images with a huge picture that includes both of the following pages, representing the ship, which had grown massive in comparison to the porthole, as small in itself against the hugeness of the sea and of the sky and of a cloud that fills most of the picture. The effect is powerful. I almost exclaimed aloud in the library as I was reading, so completely does the shift from the smaller images to the much larger one accomplish the diminishment of the one solitary man into the hugeness of the vessel and, in turn, into the hugeness of nature itself. This effect is then further heightened by the following two pages, which are filled entirely with sixty small, tile-like pictures of clouds, where the ship and everything else disappears altogether, and then is reversed by the next two images, which recede to a single page of the ship at sea and a single page of passengers on the ship’s deck. The focus continues to narrow on the next pages, through several smaller frames of individual passenger groups, then to the man himself, and finally to his hands as they write to his absent family.

Again, the narrative here is accomplished beautifully. It establishes an effective frame, beginning and ending with the man’s only connections to his absent family: the photo and the letter. Between these markers it stretches his loneliness through the vastness of the ship, of the sea, of the clouds, and of the huddled and anonymous mass of his fellow passengers. His smallness and isolation are made almost palpable, as are the tenuous threads that hold him to himself. There is nothing, the sequence makes clear, that keeps him from disappearing entirely into the massiveness of the unknown world except the family who exists for him now only through the fragility of pictures and letters. These kinds of sequences drive the book narratively despite or even because there is no textual narrative at all.

However effective the art is narratively, however, it would be unfair of me if I were not to comment also on its visual beauty as well. The images are all distinct and framed, like old pictures in an album, an effect heightened by the black and white and sepia tones, by the kinds of creases and blurring that can be found in many old photos, and, in some places, by borders that are meant to portray the frames explicitly as photos. This photographic quality is further reinforced by a beautifully realistic style and by the costumes and culture of the man’s homeland, which look very much like those of England in the early 1900’s. These elements all contribute to the sense that the reader is following the history of some family member as told through an old picture album. The effect is disarmingly intimate.

However, all of this familiarity is contrasted by many elements that are entirely fantastical. The man is driven from his home by long, spiky tentacles, for example. He meets those who have fled colossal giants that suck people into barrels of flame through huge vacuums. The new country to which he flees is itself an eerily beautiful fantasy, entirely original and different from his own. On a certain level, these fantasy elements function to represent the strangeness that any immigrant feels when arriving in a new culture, but they have a larger effect also. They make the story surreal enough to surprise its readers in a culture that is so saturated by knowledge that it is often incapable of surprise any longer. No foreign culture would be foreign enough to surprise us, but Tan’s fantastical foreignness forces us to see and experience apart from our expectations. We find ourselves surprised in the midst of what had seemed to be a familiarity.

There is, of course, no way that my writing can hope to do justice to what Tan has done visually. The Arrival, like any literature worth reading, needs to be read on its own terms. Even so, I hope that I have at least succeeded in making Tan’s book intriguing enough that others will go and read it themselves. It is well worth a place in any library.

In the process of preparing for my Survey of Literature I course in the fall, I have been looking for adaptations of the major texts we will be studying, especially contemporary examples that would serve as points of comparison for my students.  Both Beowulf and William Shakespeare’s King Lear have a wealth of adaptations both old and new.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and John Milton’s Paradise Lost have many fewer adaptations, but enough to serve my purpose.  Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene, however, has been almost entirely ignored by adaptors, at least as far as I can tell.  The title shows up in various places, like Henry Purcell’s semi-opera, but not often attached to adaptations of Spencer’s text.  The narrative of St. George and the dragon has been retold in different ways, but this is only a very small part of the work.

I am at a loss, so consider this a general call to adapt The Faerie Queene.  An opera would be lovely, something really heroic in the style of the German romantics.  I would also like a theatrical version in an impressionist mode, a little abstract, a little surreal.  A film would even be acceptable, so long as it avoided casting anyone remotely recognizable as a Hollywood star.  I also want a graphic novel, but with full page illustrations, not the comic style boxes, something vaguely artistic.  In place of this I would also take a cycle of illustrations, preferably by someone interesting, like Dave McKean or Yoshitaka Amano.

So there it is.  Go do it.  You have until September.

Gordon Lester, a friend from my time in the MA English program at the University of Guelph, has recently been contacted by someone arranging publicity for Gayatri Spivak, the famous theorist who wrote, among other things, the introduction without which I would not understand Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology even to the very small degree that I do. Apparently, Spivak would like to use Gordon’s painting, Gayatri Spivak with Bear, in the promotional material for her CRASSH lecture in Cambridge, England on October 9th. Gordon has produced a whole series of pictures depicting famous theorists with bears, of which I have the Naomi Klein original. If you are interested to see the whole series, there is a link to Gordon’s site in my blogroll.