Crossover Picturebooks

A Genre for All Ages

Sandra L. Beckett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136577017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This book situates the picturebook genre within the widespread international phenomenon of crossover literature, examining an international corpus of picturebooks — including artists' books, wordless picturebooks, and celebrity picturebooks — that appeal to readers of all ages. Focusing on contemporary picturebooks, Sandra Beckett shows that the picturebook has traditionally been seen as a children's genre, but in the eyes of many authors, illustrators, and publishers, it is a narrative form that can address any and all age groups. Innovative graphics and formats as well as the creative, often complex dialogue between text and image provide multiple levels of meaning and invite readers of all ages to consider texts that are primarily marketed as children's books. The interplay of text and image that distinguishes the picturebook from other forms of fiction and makes it a unique art form also makes it the ultimate crossover genre. Crossover picturebooks are often very complex texts that are challenging for adults as well as children. Many are characterized by difficult "adult" themes, genre blending, metafictive discourse, intertextuality, sophisticated graphics, and complex text-image interplay. Exciting experiments with new formats and techniques, as well as novel interactions with new media and technologies have made the picturebook one of the most vibrant and innovative contemporary literary genres, one that seems to know no boundaries. Crossover Picturebooks is a valuable addition to the study of a genre that is gaining increasing recognition and appreciation, and contributes significantly to the field of children's literature as a whole.

Chapter One

Picturebooks as a Crossover Genre

There is no art for children, there is Art. There are no graphics for children, there are graphics…. There is no literature for children, there is literature.

—François Ruy-Vidal

Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages is a follow-up to Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives, which was published by Routledge in 2009. The earlier book deals generally with the phenomenon of crossover literature, and more specifically with novels and short fiction that cross from child to adult or adult to child audiences, while the present study focuses on picturebooks for all ages. The original intention was to include picturebooks in the first volume, but crossover literature is such an important and largely unexplored cultural phenomenon that a single book was insufficient to address all the genres that transcend age boundaries. Although crossover fiction is now widely recognized as a distinct literary form and marketing category by critics, publishers, booksellers, writers, and readers, the term “crossover” is still often used only to refer to children's and young adult novels read by adults. Picturebooks have not generally been seen as part of the crossover phenomenon, even though the trend of picturebooks for all ages pre-dated the landmark Harry Potter series. In September 1997, prior to the crossover hype, Judith Rosen published “Breaking the Age Barrier,” one of the rare articles in English-speaking countries to deal not only with young adult fiction but also with picturebooks. The almost complete lack of attention paid to picturebooks within the discussion of crossover literature in most countries is particularly surprising since, more than any other genre, they can genuinely be books for all ages. This study seeks to address the neglect of a genre that deserves special attention within the widespread and ever expanding global trend of crossover literature.

Picturebooks are quite distinct from other narrative forms due to the complex interplay of text and image (or, perhaps more accurately, verbal and visual texts). In her insightful study Radical Children's Literature, Kimberley Reynolds attributes much of children's literature's ability to stimulate and nurture innovation to the fact that “many children's texts operate two semiotic systems simultaneously: the visual and the textual.” Referring to picturebooks in particular in a 1990 article, David Lewis attributes their capacity for innovation to what he calls their “inescapably plural” nature.¹ This unique feature of picturebooks is what makes them one of the most exciting and innovative contemporary literary genres. It is often the experimental or “radical” nature of these picturebooks that gives them appeal with adults as well as children, as I discussed in a paper titled “Breaking Boundaries with Radical Picture Books” in 2002.² This is not an entirely new phenomenon, as Chapter 2 clearly demonstrates, but today's picturebooks repeatedly challenge the conventions, codes, and norms that traditionally governed the genre. Profound, often controversial content, some of which will be discussed in Chapter 5, and complex narrative strategies—hybrid genres, polyfocalization, metafictive discourse, intertextuality, parody, irony, and so forth—in both text and image provide narratives that are attracting an ever-increasing older audience of adolescents and adults to the genre. Several studies examine the so-called sophisticated techniques of contemporary picturebooks that are often referred to as “postmodernist,” but without considering them in the context of the crossover phenomenon.³ The innovative graphics and creative, often complex dialogue between text and image provide multiple levels of meaning and invite readings on different levels by all ages.

Picturebooks offer a unique opportunity for a collaborative or shared reading experience between children and adults, since they empower the two audiences more equally than other narrative forms. Carole Scott seems to place crossover picturebooks among the masterpieces of children's literature for this reason when she writes: “I believe that enduring works of children's literature are those with dual address that speak to both children and adults, and that picturebooks offer the greatest equality in the reading experience, since pre-literate children can engage in reading the pictures as the adult reads them the verbal text.” As she and many other critics now point out, modern children often have better visual literacy skills than adults.⁴ In addition to being more skilled at reading graphic details, they are often more receptive to untraditional visual and verbal narratives than adults. When the German edition of David Wiesner's The Three Pigs (2001) appeared in 2002, it provoked a controversial discussion about whether it was a book for children, for adults, or for all ages. Despite the age recommendation of four years and up, many critics found it difficult to believe that children could understand the 2002 Caldecott Medal-winning picturebook, which presents rather difficult philosophical ideas about reality and fiction.⁵ However, Lawrence Sipe's 2008 case study convincingly demonstrates that young children can appreciate and even offer surprisingly sophisticated interpretations of this complex text.⁶ Child-to-adult crossover literature is often equated with “dumbing down,” but in actual fact, many crossover picturebooks offer challenging reading experiences for adults as well as children.

The picturebook has traditionally been seen as a children's genre. The critic Barbara Bader expressed this widespread view in 1976 when she wrote that a picturebook is “foremost an experience for a child” and Perry Nodelman echoes it in 1988 when he describes picturebooks as “books intended for young children.”⁷ A preliminary comment in a 1993 edition of Papers sums up the situation in the following words: “The picture book has, since its creation, been considered the prerogative of the young child. It will take much persuasion to destroy this image, despite the complexities which are quite clearly seen in today's picture books.”⁸ In the eyes of many contemporary authors and illustrators, the picturebook is a narrative form that can address any or all age groups. Authors and illustrators often deny and defy publishers’ very age-specific categories of readers. Publishers themselves are questioning these borders and even creating series for all ages. The picturebook is, after all, merely a format. In 1997, Regina Hayes, president and publisher of Viking Children's Books, who has brought out a number of crossover picturebooks, used the fact that the picturebook is “just a format” to argue that there is no reason why its audience should be limited to children. Averse to the term “sophisticated picture books,” she prefers to think of the works of the authors and illustrators she publishes, including J. otto Seibold, Jon Scieszka, Maira Kalman, and Istvan Banyai, as “‘bridge books,’ since they form a bridge between traditional picture books and longer works.” The same year, the vice-president and associate publisher at DisneyHyperion, Ken Geist, admitted he deliberately tries to place some crossover titles in a picturebook format.⁹ Why should stories that fit into the thirty-two-page picturebook format automatically be released as children's books? The perception that picturebooks are essentially a genre for children is shifting more rapidly in some countries than others. In Norway, where the term allalderslitteratur (all-ages-literature) was coined in the 1980s, picturebooks are now widely considered under this rubrique as well. The crossover appeal of Garmanns Sommer (2006; English trans., Garmann's Summer), which was the first book from the Nordic countries to win the Bologna Ragazzi Award in 2007, is, according to the author-illustrator Stian Hole, “a characteristic trait in modern Scandinavian picture books, which are often labeled ‘All-age books.’”¹⁰

Maurice Sendak, probably the world's best-known picturebook artist, has been claiming for years that “we have created an arbitrary division between adult and children's books that does not exist.” Although he refers here to children's literature in general, using the example of Lewis Carroll, who “didn't set out to write for children,” but rather to “writ[e] books,” his own concern is picturebooks in particular: “What I write takes as much intense effort, as much creativity and dramatic sense as the so-called grown-up books.”¹¹ When Outside Over There was released by Harper and Row in 1981 as a book for both children and adults, Sendak told Selma Lanes that he had “waited a long time to be taken out of kiddy-book land and allowed to join the artists of America.”¹² Geraldine DeLuca suggests, however, that “Sendak, in his quest for both audiences, may actually be leaving the child behind.”¹³ A number of critics expressed the view that Sendak's We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, published in 1993, is no longer a picturebook for children. Jane Doonan writes that it might seem that “only adults with a religious background, and with knowledge of the Holocaust, would be able to make anything of Dumps and that Sendak has produced a picture book for them rather than for children.” This is not, however, the opinion of the critic, who continues: “It would be truer to say that he has created something that does not conform to generic expectations about picture books as children's literature only. Dumps shares with certain other modern picture books a quality that was formerly the preserve of folk and fairy tales: an open address.”¹⁴

Sendak's views were shared by innovative publishers of the time and some children's publishing houses were founded with the express goal of producing picturebooks that abolish boundaries between children's literature and adult literature. One of the unsung pioneers was Robert Delpire, who was the first French publisher of Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, published as Max et les Maximonstres in 1967. Delpire was at the origin of a graphic and thematic renewal of the picturebook that preceded the daring innovations of Harlin Quist and François Ruy-Vidal. The intended audience of the sophisticated children's books published by the controversial American publisher Harlin Quist has always been a subject of debate. His remarkable works were avant-garde when he began publishing in the 1960s and they remain so today. They featured some of Europe's most innovative young artists, including Nicole Claveloux, Étienne Delessert, and Henri Galeron, many of whom launched their careers with Harlin Quist. The unique and quirky look he brought to children's book publishing during the late 1960s left an indelible mark that is expressed in a New York Times statement printed on the back cover of one of the most famous Quist books, The Geranium on the Windowsill Just Died but Teacher You Went Right On (1971): “There are few publishers whose books are so distinctive that the mention of their names conjures up an immediate picture of a recognizable style. One such publisher is Harlin Quist.” Despite the immediate attention and wide acclaim his books attracted everywhere sales in the United States did not match the enthusiasm. With the exception of a few bestselling titles like The Geranium on the Windowsill Just Died, which sold over half a million copies, they were bought primarily by a loyal following of adults. In North America today, they are remembered chiefly by a relatively small number of collectors who appreciate their innovation and striking artwork and design.

In 1968, a year after the creation of Harlin Quist Books, Quist established a partnership with François Ruy-Vidal that enabled him to publish and distribute his books in Europe as well as in the United States. During the six years he worked with Quist, Ruy-Vidal convinced great names of French literature, such as Eugène Ionesco and Marguerite Duras, to publish for children. His philosophy was to never work with children's authors and illustrators. Quist and Ruy-Vidal published the first of Ionesco's classic children's stories, Conte numéro 1 (English trans., Story Number 1), in 1968, the same year that the four Contes pour enfants de moins de trois ans (Stories for children under the age of three) appeared in the author's memoir, Present passe, passe present (1968; English trans., Present Past, Past Present). In a New York Times article devoted to “Picture Books” in 1970, Barbara Novak, an influential theorist of American art, suggests that Ionesco's “radical innovation” pushed the children's book market further into “simple-mindedness and banality,” producing books that are “an insult to any self-respecting age group.” With regard to Story Number 2 in particular, she writes: “It is the most natural thing in the world for Ionesco to write for children. The reversal of usual relationships, the fantasy, the credibility he donates to the incredible, along with the sheer delight in nonsense, all are more readily assimilable by children than by their elders.” Novak sees Ionesco's tale, in which “reality becomes a matter of many alternative choices,” proof of a counter trend of increasingly sophisticated picturebooks.¹⁵ In Radical Children's Literature, Kimberley Reynolds uses the example of Ionesco's tales to show how “during the time when it was regarded as a mode suited only for the nursery, nonsense… anticipated and was called into the service of modernist movements in literature.”¹⁶ Children's literature provided the Theatre of the Absurd playwright with a genre in which he could pursue his aesthetic experiments with language and the absurd, and he introduces young readers to some rather complex notions in his deceptively simple stories. All the Harlin Quist books had a very European look and to this day they remain unique in American children's publishing.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, François Ruy-Vidal worked with several publishing houses, radically transforming the world of children's books by publishing authors and illustrators who were not specialized in children's literature. Critics often reproached him for creating books for adults rather than children, but Ruy-Vidal categorically refused to accept the specificity of children's literature. The theories he formulated more than forty years ago could constitute the credo of many crossover authors, illustrators, and publishers today:

There is no art for children, there is Art. There are no graphics for children, there are graphics. There are no colours for children, there are colours. There is no literature for children, there is literature. Based on these four principles, we can say that a children's book is a good book when it is a good book for everyone.¹⁷

Ruy-Vidal was not merely echoing the vague, oft-expressed view of C. S. Lewis and many other authors: that a good children's book also appeals to adults. He was determined to avoid publishing books that were “formatted, targeted, utilitarian,” so that he would be open to the more “authentic” projects proposed to him by authors and illustrators. Rejecting what he called the “false books” that abounded in children's publishing, his formula was to produce true books, that is, unique, creative works that take risks, have an emotional charge, and provoke reaction and reflection on the part of the reader. In addition to this precise notion of literature, Ruy-Vidal's goal was to “restore to children's book illustration… its lettres de noblesse by ridding it of the stereotypes that traditionalist publishing was abusing,”¹⁸ a goal he set out to achieve by engaging some of the most controversial young illustrators of the day, not only in the books he published with Harlin Quist but also in the many books he brought out later. Ruy-Vidal's groundbreaking children's books caused quite a stir in France in the 1960s and they continued to surprise and provoke in subsequent years.

Like his precursors Harlin Quist and François Ruy-Vidal, the French author and publisher Christian Bruel is known for his pioneering, visually sophisticated, and often provocative picturebooks whose ambivalent audience has been the subject of similar controversy. Between 1976 and 1996, Bruel directed the experimental publishing house Le Sourire qui mord (The biting smile), which had its origins in a collective of scholars, journalists, and artists created following the events of May 1968 with the aim of rethinking and renewing children's picturebooks. Their philosophy is hidden in the anagram of the publishing house's unusual name, “Le risqué ou dormir” (Risk or sleep). It was founded with the express intention of breaking down the barrier between child and adult readers and eliminating the stereotypes and taboos in children's literature. Bruel objects to the idea of “livres pour enfants” (books for children), promoting instead stories that are accessible to children yet touch adults. “To make books for children is an error,” he claimed in 1970, proposing instead that it is more appropriate “to make books that can be put into children's hands also.” The publisher's views never changed. Two years before the disappearance of Le Sourire qui mord, the first page of the 1994 catalogue insists that a book is ultimately about “life,” life that can som...