Images With(In) Books

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really understand why Edward Gorey’s works are considered inappropriate for children. Sure they’re dark and macabre, but the world isn’t a nice place to be and there’s no reason to fool kids into believing it is.

When I first read “The Bug Book” and “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” I read them as cautionary tales that teach important lessons. “The Bug Book” teaches children not to be “that person” -the party pooper, the downer, the one who “shout[s] personal remarks”- and to at least fake being pleasant, else they be rejected from social circles and eventually disposed of, while “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” warns children to be wary of dangerous things, such as stairs and bears, that could end up killing them.

But maybe my views are a product of my childhood experiences. Gorey’s short stories remind me of the rhymes my grandfather used to sing me to sleep with. One of my favorites was 小燕子 (Little Swallow), which went something like this:

… Looking back, I guess this was a little dark for a small child’s lullaby.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey. It’s such a dark and strange collection, and every narrative we’ve read has left me with many conflicting emotions. On the one hand, I’m impressed by the apparent ease with which Gorey uses innuendo to surprise the reader and incorporate dark plot twists in his narratives. The Curious Sofa and The Bug Book, specifically caught me off guard with their extremely dark endings and meanings—as I believe they are meant to. In this sense, Gorey is a dark-humored genius in visual textuality, even if he would not have defined his humor as “dark.” On the other hand, many of his narratives struck me as simply horrible. The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a ghastly and perverse satire of alphabet books. I’d never imagined that someone could come up with a way for children to die that corresponds to each letter of the alphabet. Some of the dark satire of these narrative does seem to have a purpose; for example, The Bug Book is a commentary on xenophobia, and The Curious Sofa comments on Victorian notions of sexuality; however, I don’t necessarily see the “point” of narratives like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, except to entertain people with a very dark sense of humor. In any case, reading Ambphigorey was a reading experience unlike any other I’ve had.

I’ve really enjoyed reading Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey. I find myself most interested in the pieces where each individual image is read by itself, like The Listing Attic. The short poems have the feel of a children’s book with their rhyme scheme and attached image, but the content is very much not what a parent would give their child to read. They have a dark humor and and many satirize sociocultural concepts.

Here is an example of one such piece. While the image doesn’t actually show the moment of the death, it shows the preceding events and foreshadows the coming murder. The poem is dark but its combination with the image and the way it is written gives it humor. The page finds humor in an event that should not be seen as humorous, since a servant was killed and the woman goes to the nunnery to repent for her crime. There is also humor in the statues behind the servant mostly destroyed by Plunnery’s use of the cannon, showing that her use of the cannon has been careless in the past. These pages are fun to read and make the reader engage with them.

Gorey’s “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” is a satirical alphabet depicting children dying in various ways. while the subjects in the book are extremely dark, I do have to say that the rhyming in it makes it extremely catchy. Which is a little messed up. Today in class we discussed how Gorey is not necessarily fully portraying what happens with each letter. The majority of the images seem to occur right before the children would die. But it is the viewer who imagines what would happen next. Edward Gorey places the guilt with the viewer, and instead turns the bad thoughts on them rather than himself. It is an interesting concept because it requires the viewer’s participation. But both Gorey and the viewer contribute thoughts to the twisted images of children dying.

While the subject matter of “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” contains children, it is not meant for children at all. Most stories or images meant for children have some sort of playful or uplifting element in them. Gorey plays with this, setting expectations for the viewer. However, the dark images of death provide quite the opposite effect. This failure in meeting expectations along with the viewer’s participation in fully completing the events depicted in each image lends a hand in shattering the idea of a playful child story. This is surely the effect after seeing “The Gashlycrumb Tinies.”

One of my favorite texts that we have read this year has been Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey. Not only do I find it humorous in its critique on the British monarchy, I think that it does a good job depicting the idea of frivolity in society. From the works that we examined in class today, “The Bug Book” and “The Curious Sofa”, both stories handle murder, but murder occurs in the face of frivolity across different societies. “The Bug Book” shows a clan of bugs partying with one another and going on excursions together. When their outrageous fun is disturbed by an outsider, a large black bug, they kill him and continue on their way with partying. In “The Curious Sofa” the party is disrupted when Sir Egbert hides everyone in a sofa. In both circumstances, the halting of festivities is met with outrage, shock, and death. Could Gorey have been commenting on the times, making a commentary on how society deals with people trying to stop the fun momentum of the times?

Joseph Gillette attempted to recreate Une Semaine de Bonté with images from the Internet. He has only completed Monday so far (http://unesemaine.josephgillette.net/monday/). It’s interesting to see how his interpretation changes the meaning of the original. Some of the images and their placement simply don’t convey the same situations. For example, we wavered in class on whether it is the woman or man who has more power in the collage on page 47. Correspondingly, on slide 8 on Gillette’s website, it more looks like the woman is falling into the water than kicking the man in the head (as it might look like in the original). The man also instead seems to confront the viewer, or look up as if he has been caught in the middle of doing something wrong.

Sometimes, Gillette’s choice of images takes the creepiness or mystery away from the original — maybe because the images are more recognizable to us? For example, the collage on page 60 has a dark quality to it, with the fearful-looking woman staring at an unconscious man. On slide 28, the woman looks a little fearful, but the man kind of just looks like he fell asleep in his spaghetti. That the reinterpretations have much brighter shades and are in color may also take away from the sense of darkness I get when I see the original. I wonder what people in Ernst’s time thought of his collages (e.g., what kind of commentary or critique they made), because maybe for them Victorian novels were more recognizable and familiar and thus allowed them to see a different meaning than I can.

Additionally, I am not sure if Gillette tried to bridge the images together as if they were part of an narrative, like Ernst did. I think Gillette’s process explains why it is harder for me to see the connections between images. He would do a keyword search on Google Images, such as for “woman sleeping” or “waterfall.” Thus, unlike Ernst with Victorian novels, Gillette chose to venture outside of a certain type of material or genre.

I’m not saying that Gillette’s interpretation is bad. I’m not sure if he intended to do Ernst’s work justice in terms of recreating the exact meanings of the original. His recreations instead serve as an interesting contrast to the original — actually, I think it is more helpful for me to more interpret them as a commentary on today’s digital image-informed society rather than something that serves to better illuminate Ernst’s work. Through the wonders of the Internet, Gillette is able to use images from a variety of time periods, allowing us to think of them in an almost unlimited number of contexts. Some images have watermarks on them, which to me is a reference to questions of ownership in the digital age. The lack of depth (at least in comparison to Ernst’s work) makes me think of how there is all this information out there on the Internet, and how it’s hard to weed through them to find quality.

While reading/looking at Ernst’s collages in Un Semain De Bonte, I had a hard time believing that the images were actually collage, and not just one drawing. I am really curious about Ernst’s creative process. How did he find images that went together so well? How did he make them fit together so seamlessly? Un Semain De Bonte is so unlike any other collages I’ve seen in that it does not appear to be collage at all. If Ernst’s goal was to make his collages not look like collages, why didn’t he just draw them in the first place?

Another thing that interested me was the socio-political commentary Ernst inserted into his collages. In combining different parts of images to make something entirely new, Ernst distorted common scenes of life and gave them weird and unsettling meaning. This idea of collage as way of making commentary is still present today. For example, the artist/rapper Yung Jake who creates intricate celebrity portraits entirely out of emojis.

Another example is the popular tv show South Park, which in its first few seasons was animated through a type of collage called stop motion cutout animation. South Park, like Un Semain De Bonte, is chalk-full of all type of commentary on today’s society. I am curious about what the deeper connection between collage and socio-political commentary is.

It has been a really interesting week to study Max Ernst for me because in my Nazi Germany class we happened to be talking about surrealism and Dadaism as well. During the Third Reich, Surrealism and Dadaism were considered degenerate art forms because they did not portray the world as it really is. Hitler believed that artists who depicted the sky as yellow or bodies with abnormal limbs were not true artists because they were not giving a real representation of the world. To depict objects and people in such uncommon ways meant that the artist had to be physically ill and not see the world properly, or the artist was purposely trying to trick people the world was that way with their art. The restriction of expression (which was not just limited to art) lead to a very restrained culture. Attendance to movies, theater, and art galleries actually decreased because the work became so bland without any variation.

I personally enjoy the freedom of being able to explore other perspectives through art because I think that is what makes it enjoyable. In the case of Max Ernst, he had a history of having hallucinations so he probably did see the world differently than others, but that should not mean his art should be condemned. Surrealism can be an escape from the real world because it explores the unconscious mind, but as we have seen with Max Ernst’s work, it also helps you see the real world more critically. The lions, water, and wings may seem fantastical at first but the more we look at how they elevate his work, the audience can see how Ernst is commenting on social issues of his time. Sometimes you have to see your world differently to understand its flaws. This probably why Hitler did not want Surrealist artists or their work in his society out of fear they would critique the actions of Third Reich. I know Ernst did not want his work on display because he thought people were not interpreting it properly, but I wonder if there were people who just did not want to show it at the time it was published because they did not agree with his perspective of society or if it wan not until later on. I also wondering if Ernst was specifically on Hitler’s list of banned artists.

Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar was one of my favorite picture books from my childhood, and seeing it in class made me think about how we perceive the art in children’s books. Children’s books are so incredibly wonderful for so many reasons, and so many have stuck with me, so I decided to write my final paper comparing Goya to a favorite book of mine (and of the world in general), Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. I think writing this essay will open my eyes in a new way to picture books, because it will force me to compare one to the very dark and mature artwork of Goya. Who knows what I will find…. Maybe there are more similarities than meet the eye?

When looking through Une Semaine de Bonte, it struck me just how well the erie, fantastical narratives worked with Max Ernst’s style of art.  His work has great depth and the light and darkness is well balanced to give off just enough darkness to make the images uncomfortable.  These scenes are enhanced by his choice of line- the emphasis using thicker, darker lines is well-placed, and the thinner crosshatching is artfully used to emphasize certain aspects of the lighter beings often being drawn into the darkness.  His artistic style is also reflected in his subject matter, as his stark contrasts and gradual fades between light and dark complement the twisted, mixed imagery of the grim and the average very well.  Overall, I greatly enjoyed looking at Ernst’s work as a great reflection and tie between the subject matter he wishes to convey, and the style in which he does it.  The composition and the execution of the medium work together extremely well.