It's time for the "Winner's Book Review" column again! Written by Wang Shuainai, a researcher of children's literature, gender and contemporary literature and culture, this column combs through and reviews the Chinese edition of the Cadick Gold Medal picture book that has been published one by one, looking at what perspectives a picture book can appreciate in addition to its functionality, as well as the changes that the award has undergone over the past 80 years.
Starting with the 1939 Caddick Gold Medal Picture Book, we've launched 8 issues of Reviews. In the 9th issue, we will open the 1949 Gold Medal picture book "The Big Snow". The Forest Children's Bookstore had introduced Chinese version of the book, but the copyright had expired.
Pictured here is the cover of the 1967 English edition, which has had several different covers since it was first published in 1948.
The book was co-authored by Berta & Elmer Hader, who drew more than 70 children's books in their lifetime, half of which were written by themselves. Their cork-a-Doodle Doo and The Mighty Hunter also won the Caldecott Silver Medal in 1940 and 1944, respectively. They have a strong sense of animal protection and embody it in some of their works.
"Heavy Snow" depicts the forest before winter, and the story begins with Mrs. Cotton-tailed Rabbit watching the geese fly south, followed by other animals, preparing food or nests for the coming snow. But when the snow really came, chipmunks, deer, birds and other small animals still faced the dilemma of survival, fortunately, a couple living in a small house shoveled a path for them, and sprinkled them with seeds, nuts and bread, so that the animals survived.
This book embodies the kindness of humans to animals and also allows us to see the good side of human nature. Today's review raises a classic question from the book, which is also a topic that children's literature is very happy to explore, that is, in the life and death of all kinds of natural beings, how should human beings place themselves?
Written by | Wang Shuainai
01
A natural living environment that is not universally known
I think the Caldecott jury members, who were probably very fond of the work half a century ago, didn't consider that the previous year they had just awarded the highest honor to Snow Crystal, which was also a snowy theme (it eliminated all superfluous colors and painted a "fluttering" moment in the reader's heart). In 1949, they persistently awarded the gold medal to "Heavy Snow", which depicted mountain animals trapped in a severe winter famine.
"Heavy Snow" is actually taken.
The narrative technique of "Heavy Snow" is not difficult to understand. On the surface, the reader's perspective is close to the land animals in the lower part of the picture, and when they look up at the sky and decide whether to relocate southward, we take on the identity of various different animals again and again, understand the living habits behind them, and at the same time sigh the vastness of the world, the flourishing and active life of life, and all things have their own mentality and way of life.
The wonderful thing is that although the closer to us are land animals, the author is obviously deliberately using anthropomorphic techniques to portray their expressions, so that we can substitute emotions, but the reader actually follows the "bystander" geese flying through the vast North America, and the narrative perspective is thus blurred and ambiguous. At the same time, the array of geese is also like an arrow from left to right indicating the advance of time, and the illustrator completes the crossing of time from late autumn to mid-winter snow with a spatial crossing.
In the last issue, we had the privilege of being taught by Balzac's painter Franchoeffer, who is not crazy and does not live: "In outstanding paintings, not only the figures must stand up and walk toward us vividly, but the air, the sky and the wind that we can breathe, see and feel must exist in the painting. In Harder's pen, part of the picture depicting the flight of geese is giving people a sense of air flow, and the viewer seems to be able to hear the sound of geese flapping their wings, which is not necessarily Harde's painting skills are very skilled, but the genre of picture books because of its narrative "assists" Harder - the change in the movement of the geese in this line may be the different flying states of the members of the group at the same time, or it may be for the viewer to show the continuous movement of a goose flying forward like a piece.
The changing of time on still pictures has always been a good stage for illustrators to show their talents, and the time narrative here is difficult to explicitly say that it is through the performance of unfinished actions and then rely on perceptual closure (to understand part of the observed phenomenon as a whole phenomenon, Gestalt psychology has more research on this "perceptual wholeness" of human beings. The phenomenon of "perceptual closure" is the basic narrative principle on which picture books rely to tell stories) to guide readers to "brain supplement" the movement of geese, or to express the forward movement of time through the technique of "different times and the same picture" and single goose focus. In short, Hard also draws the sense of air flow when the spatial position of the geese changes in the sense of time flow, which enhances the vividness and sense of flesh of the image.
However, the alternating use of black and white pencils and colored water-based pigments seems to be an important reason why more readers notice and love this work. Harder paints the furry sensation of animals with colored lead, and the water-based pigments embody the light inspiration of natural life and the uninhibited vitality of wildness. Many readers also find that the color change arrangement of its illustrations is irregular, and it is not possible to see that the black and white and color page processing have any design purpose other than to adjust visual fatigue, which is a failure in common sense, but the corresponding subject matter is inappropriate - who will be harsh on the mountain forest nature and its elves, and the rules of creation that human beings know at a glance?
On the Goodreads book review website, readers' dissatisfaction with the work is that it spends too much space nagging about the wintering methods of various animals, and many of them are similar, repetitive, and exhausting, and this criticism is indeed justified. But the most interesting thing is that one of the readers added that at the beginning, it was written that so many animals felt that they had a way to survive the winter, and looked very smart, and in the end it was humans who went to rescue animals trapped in famine after the blizzard, which "did not feel appropriate."
The "inappropriateness" of such a plot design is probably due to the constant reflection and caution of the human race, and whether it is too anthropocentric to write in this way. What's more, we know that it is not uncommon for some clumsy literary writers to make up stories that do not conform to common sense in order to make up ideas first.
Fortunately, this was not the case this time.
In fact, many of the wild animals that have protective measures for themselves (such as animals that can hibernate) and have the ability to forage in cold places will not survive when the cold comes. It's just that some of them are strong by virtue of their fertility, some of them have a high survival rate of their offspring, and they will not become extinct as a group, but if, as written in this picture book, a winter is particularly cold, the snow covered up the food, and it is particularly long (the text ends with a folk little palm, the people of parts of North America use groundhogs to predict when spring will come, if the marmots of that year see their shadow, it means that winter can end immediately, and vice versa, it means that winter will continue for another six weeks), Then it is not impossible for a certain animal to become extinct as a result.
Ten years ago, the Karamaili Mountain Nature Reserve in Xinjiang froze to death due to continuous heavy snowfall, causing dozens of goose-throated antelopes to freeze to death. Local management station workers say that once the snow exceeds 25 centimeters, it will cover the grass and many animals will die of starvation. Workers at the management station were feeding the wildlife for more than ten days, and they were adding more pasture from other places. The effort may last more than a month, but the grain is still a drop in the bucket for the goose-throated antelope. Fortunately, the local Przewalski's wild horses were not greatly affected by the snow disaster due to the timely rescue of humans.
Thus, Beta Hard and Elmer Harder's Snow hides a very common but not universally known truth about natural habitats and animal protection—many animals survive the extreme cold and the hunger they bring, and even die quietly in hibernation; at the same time, there have been people who have been silently helping all kinds of hungry animals to meet the next spring in their lives. Therefore, "Heavy Snow" actually involves a classic question, and it is also a topic that children's literature is very happy to explore, that is, in the birth and death of all kinds of natural beings, how should human beings put themselves?
02
What Snow Teaches Us
More than a hundred years ago, the First World War broke out. Hugh Lofting, an American engineer during his military service, because of his extreme depression and longing for his children, wrote "The Story of Dr. Doolittle" in a letter to his children on the battlefield of World War I, telling the adventures of a village geek doctor Who knew all kinds of bird talk, was not afraid of power and money, and took in various animals at home. After the "First World War", this series has produced more than 12 films, and it is loved by the majority of children's readers to this day.
Dr. Doolittle and the Mysterious Lake, by Hugh Loftin, translated by Zhang Naiwen, Acadia Children's Library | Anhui Education Press, July 2019 edition.
In it, Hugh Loftin discusses this issue in the capacity of an entire work— in the apocalyptic setting of Dr. Doolittle and the Mysterious Lake, the longest-lived giant turtle couple on Earth chooses to save a human couple, for which they abandon some other animals (and in the past it was the tyrannical willfulness of the human king and the enslavement of all beings that led to the cataclysm). They never regretted Dr. Doolittle's recall of that cruel decision, believing that only by rescuing humanity would it be possible to save more animals in the near future and to preserve the Earth's "animal spirits" in a distant future through the wisdom and mind of all creatures—only "humans", the Turtles believed, would rescue the "non-species" out of pure "intolerance" and possess the greatest ability to achieve the widest range of rescues out of the pure "intolerance" of reason (of course, these reasons are important," But the turtle couple's rescue of these last two "people" is not due to the utilitarian reasons mentioned above, but out of friendship and simple sense of justice for specific humans—they cannot stand the powerful carnivores because of hunger and resentment to encourage all animals to hurt two human friends who have lost their ability to protect themselves. They repeatedly emphasize that it was the tyrannical king who hurt the animals, not the two men who had tried their best to help the animals in front of them—what a sensible and noble mind they possessed.)
My favorite director, Werner Herzog, has a famous documentary, Grizzly Man, which is also a model of echoing this theme and thinking from afar. The American man Timothy Treadwell was able to achieve nothing for the first 30 years of his life, and he was infected with various vices, but the grizzly bear he met by chance on a trip gave him an incredible sense of closeness. He became a dedicated grizzly bear watcher, and for the next 13 years he spent the next 13 years living with them every summer in Katmai National Park and Nature Reserve, a land of large numbers of grizzly bears. He watched and filmed them hunting, resting and fighting up close, and uploaded them to video sites with his own commentary, which received a lot of attention. His video work always reveals disappointment and anger toward humans, introducing the gentleness, kindness, "spirituality" possessed by creatures such as grizzly bears and the harmonious possibility of living with (some) human beings with wisdom and goodwill without harm.
However, in the summer of the 13th year, he and his girlfriend Amy were killed in the mouth of the Grizzlies. The recording of the last 6 minutes of their lives (Tridwell didn't even have time to open the lid of the camera lens) preserved a scene of extremely tragic human-bear fighting. During this last time, we hear him constantly asking his girlfriend to "leave me alone, let it go, let's go", and Amy apparently did not choose to leave, and her body was found not far from him. Herzog's calm restraint reveals the fact that at the end of his life, The Grizzly Bear, whom Tridwell had placed on infinite romantic fantasies, devoured him, while his girlfriend, a member of the human race he deeply distrusted, refused to give up on rescuing him to the death despite several persuasions. In Tridwell, we see the quest for the meaning of life over bears, and in Amy we witness the love and courage of humans over bears for their kind that transcends utilitarian purposes—which is why Hugh Loftin's old turtle mud face and wife Belinda leave Noah's Ark in the Flood without hesitation, looking for and insisting on saving young and kind human couples.
Stills from the documentary Grizzly Bear (2005).
Since March, the news of the war and the spread of the epidemic have ignited too much resentment and anger, which has devastated many hearts. In the past week or so, the epidemic has become more and more severe in many places, and I, like many readers, live in anxiety and anxiety, and I can't help but look for relevant information every day. At present, this column has been updated in chronological order for 8 issues, and I once wanted to break this order and choose a book from more than half a century of gold medal works that is most suitable for soothing the soul and helping people to meditate, and express the meaning of literary criticism that cares about society and benevolence. But another idea can never be erased, perhaps "immovable as a mountain" to follow the chronological order of writing one by one, not because of any external force to pull the exception but can give the reader a sense of constancy and peace of mind: even if the world is shaky, it is not easy to finally be inched.
Moreover, good works have the power to soothe people's hearts. Fortunately, this book written "step by step" is a "book of answers" that can respond to many of the "dilemmas and confusions of life" recently - as mentioned above, Amy's inseparability can certainly be a proof of "civilization", but even the narcissistic, delusional, and performative personality of Tridwell, combined with his bad life, he is so obsessed with finding the possibility of warmth in the Grizzlies, as some commentators have said, its core is serious and worthy of facing——" The human spirit that struggles in an inherently violent and indifferent universe".
The human spirit is unwilling to submit to the disorderly, indifferent laws of nature. The glimmer and the most frightening thing about the so-called "civilization" lies in the fact that it can break through the shackles of primitive instincts and the shackles of "mediocrity" from time to time to "see" and even to "others" in the wind and snow situation.
Otherwise, where does the "Primate of All Things" come from?
Plague [French] by Albert Camus, translated by Shen Zhiming, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, April 2021.
At the end of "Plague", after experiencing countless deaths, hunger, isolation and grief, people won another "victory", and the long-closed city gates were finally opened, and everyone was drowned in the sea of celebration. But dr. Michael, the owner, knew that the Y. pestis was just sleeping and lurking, waiting for a day to make a comeback. Camus wrote:
Faced with this view, Dr. Rieux decided to write this story so far. He did this because he did not want to remain silent in the face of the facts, in order to be a witness sympathetic to these plague sufferers.
Thus Rieux's book (which is where the reader knows that the Plague is the book written in the name of Dr. Camus Torree, an interesting narrator' identity trick) is not a record of victory, he only wants to record what people had to do at that time, and he knows that when the plague is about to come again, there will always be some people who will do something. Dr. Rieux wants to tell people what he has learned in such a long period of hardship and suffering, and to tell people that there is always more to be appreciated than should be despised.
I think that's exactly what Snow is trying to teach us.
Finally, we must mention that we should scientifically rescue animals and maintain the ecology, and do not frequently feed animals in various environments because of this work, providing them with help that they do not need. Over the years, because people have fed birds in parks and other places, wild birds such as red-billed gulls and wild ducks have lost their vigilance against humans, relied on feeding and abandoned the south to freeze and died in ice lakes, and the wetland itself has also been polluted. Only with the blessing of wisdom can benevolence truly do good deeds and help others.
![Travel after snow, safety is paramount[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)