Ellen Handler Spitz has a review at The Book featuring The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm (trans Maria Tatar). I haven’t seen the Tatar book yet, although it is on order, but something in Spitz’s review caught my attention. The normal discussion about the needs of children and violence, sex, incest and other normal fairy tale content is there but there is another point to the review.

The Grimm Reader also stimulates interpretation and improvisation by eschewing illustrations. In so doing, it provokes serious reflection on the function of pictures in children’s books. The dearth in this text makes us weigh their role as enhancers or detractors. Arguments against them of course claim that they tend to fix a particular visualization and tamp down what should be left loose and free. After being exposed, say, to Gustave Doré’s haunting engravings of Little Red Riding Hood, it would be hard to imagine those scenes any other way. Here, by contrast, words are given license to perform their sorcery unaided. Pages are decorated only occasionally with delicate borders, medallions, or illuminated letters. This pleases me immensely: in a culture determined to flood itself with garish, sensational imagery to the detriment of the unaided word, this book reminds us that, as Tatar herself has written, the words of children’s stories are magic wands in and of themselves.

The first thing that provoked thought was a memory from my own time as a child-owner of a copy of Grimm’s. Along with Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia, Grimm was my favourite. Given a copy by my grandmother when I was starting to read past the Seuss stage, I had to struggle at first with the words. The book had a black leather cover, which I loved to glide my fingers over, gilt edging and colour plates. I loved it. Some stories were read obsessively and some totally ignored, but I remember the pictures. I looked at all of those over and over and I remember wishing that instead of the people – the princess with the magic talking horse for example, I wanted to see pictures of the squirrels that lived in the forest. I wanted to see the birds, the little lakes where the ducks went, the song birds I just knew were hiding behind the garden walls. I wanted pictures of the badgers and crows. (It never occurred to me that some of them might not live there although it did occur to me that there might be animals there I didn’t know and it made me crazy that I couldn’t see them in the black bound book.)

I know that as adults readers tend to focus on people. Many people (in text and lecture) have made the point that readers read to get to know other people (whether made up or not), but that was not my experience of being a child. I wanted to know animals, and to some extent, plants.  I didn’t have much interest in people. Perhaps that was fear, or just childlike inability to yet handle the complexity and apparent cruelty of big people, but whatever the reason, what I wanted was world-life not human-life.

Can you imagine? Children’s stories that come with the world embedded: what a delight that would be. You read a story about a Romanian witch and there are the Romanian flowers, Romanian mammals, Romanian trees, and, of course, Romanian witches’ houses. It would teach children something many of us already suspected, that the specifics of the material world matter to the story, to the reasons why someone would do the things they do.

This observation leads me to the last three sentences quoted above. The idea that words are magic and that they are somehow at odds with images – or at least threatened by the overwhelming power of image. I’m not sure I would speak to the relationship between text and image in that way. It seems more that they work together to create a space in which identity can frolic. When images are of people, especially well drafted images, our natural empathy is accessed. Our ability to read emotion in human faces (whether line drawing or sight-perceived) and feel the emotion being broadcast is not one we can turn off. We connect less with animals and plants except when their forms appear to mimic human attributes (Bambi’s big eyes, for example) so they are less emotional, less powerfully coercive of our behaviours and desires.

Text, as Mitchell points out, is illustrative; this “word” is an image as well as being a bit of text. Like pictures of world-life,  text does not so easily connect with our emotions as do pictures of human faces and bodies. This allows us to have the illusion that text can be transparent to meaning. In one of his chapters Mitchell talks about the Romantics and their idea – best encapsulated by the symbols of mirror and lamp (thanks Abrams) – that imagination is something that reaches past the materially visual, which is a poor, not to mention primitive, substitute for the transcendent active imagination. While I love Keats and Wordsworth, I have to say that their assumptions about the world have always irritated me. Anyway, more of this later probably. I just find it interesting that this old battle between image and text shows up continually, like old WWII propaganda remade for a different kind of war. The thing is that it wasn’t true then, and, of course, still isn’t, but it still keeps going. Is that the power of image or text do you think?

Just a final point about Spitz’s delight in the minimal drawings: it may be that less evocative images allow a better balance between text and image – a better power relationship.  When I see – say – a poem that speaks to a sunflower’s existence and it is illuminated by drawings of chickadees eating the seeds, even if that is not the substance of the poem, it supports the world the text creates. The image and the text are co-inspiriters. If, instead, it were a picture of Adonis with a sunflower as a breechcloth (or for that matter Venus in similar attire), the text is likely to suffer in comparison. I would be provided an experience in either case, but it would be (in the case of a human figure illustrated) one where inequity would be paramount.