Picture books marketed for children inevitably foreground the eye. Whether the artist and writer are the same person or whether they are not the same person hardly matters in terms of priority. The eyes have it. To put this another way, the pictures in these books always dominate. Obviously for the young child who may not yet read, the picture is the thing to capture her interest; but the adult too will gravitate to the visual image simply because this is more readily attractive than the printed word. The eyes have it. The first thing one sees is the book's cover, and the picture book cover is arguably far more deeply implicated in the rest of the text than are covers of other types of books. Jane Doonan notes that "Picture-book stories often begin on the cover" (52). This is true, but even when the narrative does not have its "beginning" on the cover, the cover contains narrative information. The covers of picture books are peritextual, but their very peritextuality is an aspect of their textuality in ways that are less intense in non picture books. My next point hardly depends on what I have just said, but I want to make a connection. The pictures in children's books introduce novice (even non) readers not only to visual codes, but also to visual styles. Picture books are a young child's first introduction to the fine arts (see Doonan 7), and the covers of these books set the style just as they introduce the content of what lies inside.
Picture books may be a "composite art,"1 but the attractions of colour, shape, and design draw us to the pictures. A cover illustration creates a preconception; in fact, in some instances the cover illustration gives us all we need to know in order for us to enter and understand the fictional world between the front and back cover. As an example of what I mean, I offer the cover of the OUP edition of Alfred Noyes's The Highwayman, illustrated by Charles Keeping (1981). Here the reader, young or older, prepares to enter a book that works through the expression of terror, a terror both emphasised and released through Keeping's expressionistic art. The narrative of ill-fated love takes on, through Keeping's visual imagination, a visceral quality; Carpenter and Prichard refer to the imaginative quality of this book as "morbid" (288). I'm not sure about morbidity, but certain it is that in The Highwayman as illustrated by Keeping story becomes emotion, and through this transformation of story Keeping challenges the whole notion of narrative as linear.
A glance at the cover will indicate how important the publisher thinks the pictures are. Note that the names of both author (Alfred Noyes) and illustrator (Charles Keeping) are visible, but that Keeping's name is in uppercase bold lettering, while Noyes's is in lower case. Note too that the cover picture occupies two thirds of the space and the title one third. And note also that the hoofs of the Highwayman's horse come below the line of sepia that crosses the sight line cutting off the picture from the title. In other words, the picture starts to invade the region of the cover devoted to the printing of the title. The point, I think, is that the illustrations here will overpower the poetry. I think they do.
A number of other things might also derive from this cover. The picture is in sepia--a sort of grey/brown shading with white. In other words, the picture does not use colour; it is closer to black and white than to colour.2 As Nodelman points out, "serious picture-book artists who choose to avoid colour in a medium noted for its use of colour often have similar special points to make" (67). It is worth asking what point Keeping might make here, what effect black and white, or at least the sepia tint, makes in this instance. The type of tint might remind us of old photographs, althought the style of the drawing is clearly not realistic or photographic. I'll come back to the style of the drawing in a moment, but first let's notice that black and white or variations of black and white are serious in tone; they do not, as Nodelman says, have "the frivolous intrusion of colour" (67). This is partly because we are used to seeing black and white pictures as aspects of a serious type of communication: documentaries, newspaper photographs, and the like (again see Nodelman 67-72). The great photographers--Man Ray, Ansel Adams, or Annie Leibowitz, for example--as often as not use black and white. Black and white, if nothing else, communicates age. This was not true at one time, but now in this era of constant and ubiquitous colour black and white seems to announce something that was made long ago. And also something portentous, something we should take seriously (I think of Spielberg's Schindler's List). Clearly, the content of this poem takes us into the long ago. Also we might think of the content as serious and black and white captures this. Note I say "serious" rather than "romantic." It is true that the story we will read is a romance laced with irony, a tragedy of separated lovers, but the colour of the illustrations begins to question the "romance" of this story. Romance, remember, suggests something idealized, removed from the real world we live in. These illustrations, despite their unrealistic style, remind us of the real world in all its earthiness. And here in this word "earthiness" we might find a reason for the tint of the illustrations: they are earth-toned. This is a very earthy book.
I'm getting closer to the style of the illustration, but first let's notice the pose of the horse and rider. The horse has two legs, one front and one back, raised in a position that reminds me of a certain type of elegant show horse. Note too the rise and fall of the tail. Here's a prancing horse in a very formal and controlled pose. Keeping's drawings are often full of movement, but not so here; this is a highly stylized representation of a horse. The rider too is stylized. He turns so that he faces us directly. We see the horse from the side, but we see the rider in full frontal position. He stares right at us from behind his mask. His outfit reminds us of a dandy, someone formal and studied, but the mask reminds us that he is an outlaw. So too does the gun. And that gun points directly at us. The picture reminds me of the famous final shot (literally) of Edwin S. Porter's film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), in which one of the outlaws who has robbed the train stands in medium close-up, facing the audience, holding his pistol at the camera. As we watch, he fires. When audiences first saw this, women fainted and strong men fled the cinema in fright. Anyhow, the point is that the gun and its position are uncomfortable reminders of the reality of robbery. The rider threatens us. The boldness of this figure staring directly at us is a challenge, and the romance of the Highwayman should not tempt us to overlook the menace he represents. This is, finally, no Stewart Granger in swashbuckling splendour.
Now the style. As I indicated, Keeping's drawings are representational, but not realistic. Take a look at the rider's right leg, for example. This leg looks more like a prosthetic leg than a real one. It is too thin and barely bends. Where is the knee? The foot appears wafer thin, and the spur protruding from the boot heel is a token spur only. Clearly, Keeping is not interested in "realism." If he were, then he would not let us see the line of the horse's left rear leg through the hoof of its right leg, or he would finish drawing the right front hoof. He is more interested in sketching in his figures than in providing the viewer with finished , hard-edged figures. Why? Well, one reason is that he wants to "express" the figure, to give expression to his figures. This means more than that he wants the reader to fill in the edges of the figures he draws. Keeping wants his figures to express more than their shapes; he wants them to express a feeling, an emotion. His line serves emotion more than visual correctness.
Rarely in this cover illustration does Keeping use a straight line (except perhaps in the line of shading that separates the white space at the bottom from the illustration itself or in some of the horse's tack); most of his lines are squiggly or curved or wavy or whatever, anything but straight and rigid. They express movement even within this very formal pose. The most obvious example of this are the lines on the horse's body. They curve and even splotch, but often they do not connect. Many lines attach to nothing. The effect here is to unnerve the viewer. We are comforted when what we see has definite form and shape, when lines connect to lines completing a design. Here lines disconnect and threaten to distort the image. Perhaps the best example of this in the book is the illustration of the Highwayman's sprawled body after the soldiers shoot him. Here lines and splotches move in all directions. His body splays out just as his blood flows without the containing body. The difference between the cover illustration and the one of the dead Highwayman occurs in composition, not style. Both illustrations have the same nervous energy, but the one on the cover has symmetry and balance, whereas the other one shatters balance. What I want to conclude is that the expressionistic style Keeping employs charges his illustrations with emotion, and this emotion is often brutal and unpleasant. This brutality and unpleasantness function to demystify the romantic poem.
Keeping is, for the most part, resolute in his desire to demystify. His soldiers are ugly both inside and out. They have bad teeth, bad skin, and bad habits. They are gross and unpleasant. They are associated with hardness--straight lines, mostly guns, are evident in the scenes in which they appear. The focus is, I think, on the helplessness and confined position of Bess, the landlord's daughter. Many of the illustrations look out from the inn onto the road and the trees and the moonlight. In other words, many of the pictures take Bess's point of view. The picture from inside the inn out along the moon-drenched road is so insistent that we see it six times before the death of the Highwayman, and in four of these pictures the turn of the road strikes me as distinctly reminiscent of a sickle. If I am right and we can see a sickle here, then the imminent arrival of death is clear. Indeed, this is the case whether we see the sickle or not.
We see this same landscape two other times, both without the framing device of the window, once at the beginning when the Highwayman first arrives and once at the end when he returns after death for his beloved Bess. In both pictures, the sickle-like aspect of the road is less clear. And of course the last scene reverses the light quality of the first as if we've gone to the negative of the picture. The negative effect is a move into the other life. These lovers can find fulfillment only in death. This talk of fulfillment might take us back to the cover, and it is worth reminding ourselves that picture books communicate everywhere from front cover to back cover. Anyway, on the back cover we see the two lovers in embrace, she inside the inn (as usual), and he outside. But the lines of the windowsill and clothing intersect to indicate that no barrier exists between the two lovers. They merge into one another. They did this earlier in the book--on the eighth page--when Bess's hair becomes one with the Highwayman's hair and face. But here the sense of inside and outside are strong. By the time we reach the back cover, this sense of separation is gone.
I have concentrated on Keeping as opposed to Noyes here, but I think this version of the story invites us to do so because Keeping's illustrations are so strong. Students with whom I have discussed this book often remark that the illustrations are too gory, too sensual, too gross, too scary. His figures are abnormal, some say. In short, few students have expressed any interest in the book, although some think the poem is good. Those who do find the book interesting, claim to find this book very powerful. What strikes me is the reaction from both those who like and those who dislike the book: it is invariably strong--even visceral. It seems impossible to be neutral or non-committal about this book.
What Keeping has done, it seems to me, is to take an essentially light-weight poem and transform it into an emotional revel. Take for example the picture which accompanies the words: "Not till the dawn he heard it, and his face grew grey to hear/How Bess, the landlord's daughter,/The landlord's black-eyed daughter,/Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there." We see the Highwayman's face in full close-up, framed by two rugged and hard faces. The illustration focuses on eyes and mouth; we must contemplate eyes and mouth because of the use of black here. The eyes are demented. The mouth is a gaping agony. Drops of sweat on the nose express intensity of feeling. This is a moment of shattering horror, of the realization of what has happened. The madness of the Highwayman comes across forcefully. Aristotle's notion of art's cathartic effect strikes me as applicable here. Keeping's drawings express brutality and ugliness, but they do so in an aesthetic manner. These pictures ask us to respond both emotionally and intellectually. They turn powerful moments of drama into abstract shapes. The moments of death recorded here are moments when the body bereft of life becomes a shape, an object, an object that discomfits us by forcing us to gaze upon it. In some strange way, we become complicit in the deaths of these two people. Their deaths compel us to think of brute facts. The gaze, which we are told so often is a sign of power, here becomes, ironically, a sign of helplesness.
The spirit of this book is transgressive. We can see this right from the front cover where the tradition of court portraiture from at least the time of Van Dyck's portrait, Charles I on Horseback (c. 1637-8) stands on its head. What is regal, realistic, studied, and finished in Van Dyck, becomes in Keeping confrontational, artificial, parodic, and incomplete. We gaze at an illustrated man who returns our gaze so intently that we cower. What we understand from this book is that art can organize life, but it cannot protect us from it. Looking at Keeping's work estranges us by attracting our attention to primary things: love and death, black and white, negative and positive, ugliness and beauty, desire and fear. Some might find Keeping's interests in violence and brutishness "morbid," but I prefer to think his interests are more aesthetic than sucked sugar stick.
Notes
1. "Composite art" is a term coined, I think, by Jean Hagstrum in a book on William Blake. Hagstrum speaks of the "living unity" of Blake's words and pictures, in which one aspect of the form picks up what the other lacks. See Hagstrum 10-20.
2. In fact, at least one description of the book speaks of Keeping's "powerful black-and-white illustrations." See Watkins and Sutherland 318.
Works Cited
Carpenter, Humphrey and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. Oxford and New York: OUP, 1984.
Doonan, Jane. Looking at Pictures in Picture Books. Stroud, Glos.: Thimble Press, 1993.
Hagstrum, Jean. William Blake Poet and Painter: An Introduction to the Illuminated Verse. Chicago & London: University of Chicago P, 1978 (1964).
Nodelman, Perry. Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children's Picture Books. Athens & London: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
Noyes, Alfred. The Highwayman. Illus. Charles Keeping. Oxford: OUP, 1981.
Watkins, Tony and Zena Sutherland. "Contemporary Children's Literature," in Children's Literature: An Illustrated History, ed. by Peter Hunt. Oxford and New York: OUP, 1995. 289-319.
