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 Cadick Gold Medal Picture Book, the Beijing News Children's Book has launched 11 issues of reviews. In the 12th issue, we will open the 1953 gold medal picture book "The Biggest Bear". The Chinese edition of the book has been introduced by the children's book brand Dandelion Children's Book Library.
The picture on the left is the cover of the English version, and the picture on the right is the cover of the Chinese version.
The book was created by Lynd Ward, who tells a gripping story with exquisite and detailed woodcut illustrations. Johnny, the little boy, lives in a village that uses bearskins as a trophy, and there is a large bearskin hanging in front of each house, which Johnny's family does not have. Johnny decides to go hunting bears in the forest. But he encounters a poor bear, and Johnny can't bear to hurt it, so he takes it home. Unfortunately, when The Bear grows up and causes a serious disaster in the village, Johnny faces a task he does not want to perform, which is to kill the bear. Johnny decides to send the bear away, but each time the bear is able to retrieve it on its own...
Despite the care of the woodcut prints, "The Big Bear" is indeed a picture book with the imprint of the times, which runs through gender stereotypes and anthropocentrism, ending with a big reunion. It may be difficult to understand this theme of human-animal opposition today, but "ancestral male competition in the name of bear hunting" is indeed a traditional way of human survival, and the resulting "bear hunting culture" is also an activity that is still preserved in the United States. American writers love to write bear hunting stories so much, probably because they contain complex imaginations of nature.
Today's article from the bear hunting to the bear hunting culture, through the "famous classic essay on the same topic" to elaborate on the writer's "can't help but self-correction" (so it is not inevitable to regard this issue of the column as a sequel to the second issue), to see how the clever creators transcend the times complex, beyond the versions they have written before, leaving more valuable works of art for readers in the world.
Written by | Wang Shuainai
In the name of bear hunting,
An ancestral "male race"
The story of this man and the bear begins with a looming hierarchical lasso, "an adult male capable of successfully hunting bears—the boy (Johnny) as a hunter's reservist—the bear," which has not been broken until the final work. As children's literature, "The Big Bear" fails to lead the boy protagonist to reflect and try to exert initiative to get out of the trap of power order in bear hunting culture, but only to the self-touch and happiness brought about by human privilege.
Johnny always seems to be under the wrapping and gaze of "big" versus "small". From the picture, the boy's thin body travels between the tall houses, although this is only a country wooden house, but the painter seems to deliberately highlight the size contrast between the two, similarly, the elevation angle and close-up depiction of the corn in the field and the ham in the warehouse, plus the same tall forest trees, adults and growing bears, all of which are in stark contrast to Johnny's thinness; In terms of color, brown and black are not only the color of nostalgic memories, but also have the effect of creating a depressing and terrifying atmosphere.
Illustration of "The Big Bear".
At the beginning of the story, the text on the left states a trouble that apparently continues to plague the boy—"Johnny often goes to the little shop down the hill to buy something delicious maple candy." Whenever he walked on the road, he would see bear skins hanging from the outer walls of the barns of every household. He had never had such a bearskin in his family, and Johnny was ashamed to think of it. ”
Then, the picture book uses three pages to compare the ability and attitude of other male elders in the village and his grandfather to hunt bears, and once again emphasizes his shame and embarrassment - "Grandpa turned around and ran away." Johnny asked Grandpa, 'Why?' Grandpa said, 'I'd rather leave a bear in the orchard than be eaten by a bear!' 'Oh my God, it's so despicable!"'
So Johnny always wanted to meet a bear, a little boy who used to swing around the forest with a gun just to hit a bear so that "my family can have the biggest bear skin in the village."
While the text doesn't say it bluntly, Johnny's pressure is clearly coming from old gender discipline. In the education of boys, courage and ability in general are linked to the conquest of forest beasts by physical strength, especially by violent repression, which seems to be a "rite of passage" that local men must go through, and if not, the gaze and shame in this acquaintance society may expand exponentially to their family members, especially young men in their families.
The painter has carefully made subtle changes to the situation described in the text, with the side of each wooden house nailed (rather than "hanging" as the text says) a huge bearskin, tight, open limbs like the "X" word of the bear skin and the hard and sharp nails that can be made up by the brain, just like the eyes of every family and the gaze and reproach of the cultural ethics of the community.
Thus, the blank walls of Johnny's house seem to be marked with "red letters", and in the boy's eyes, this strange "blank mark" reminds every villager, including himself, that he may have "some innate quality or ability" that is "missing", which was inherited from his grandfather and father. The boy Johnny, who was forced to become a "coward", was so distressed that he did not try other ideas, but continued the discipline of the old culture, very "naturally" hoping to borrow the absolute power of the gun to kill the bear (because of his "small" and "weak", using the gun "you live and die" thinking seems to have more understandability) to prove himself, smash the lingering gender shame, and escape from this unspoken "sin" that many people have not expressed.
However, he encounters a poor hungry bear, implying that the author unconsciously places the boy and the cub in almost the same position, and in the picture of the boy squatting down to feed the bear, it is implied that the author caresses the bear through the boy, and at the same time caresses the two lonely and helpless children in the picture who are clumped and close to each other, which are two children who are wandering in the jungle and the "law of the jungle".
Illustration of "The Big Bear".
Johnny and The Bear after this, but after the grown bear destroyed the villagers' crops several times and the boy failed to send the bear away, Johnny "reluctantly, but still struggled" to carry the shotgun on his back, take the bear into the forest, ready to shoot.
From this point on, the storyline is like driving a race car on a winding road, first the bear suddenly drags Johnny crazy into a log cabin, it turns out that it is to eat the maple candy in the house, and then the boy finds that the cabin is a trap for people to catch animals, but people catch animals to send them to the zoo in the city, big bears not only do not have to be shot, but also "live in a very comfortable place, you can eat what it likes to eat", Johnny "can also come to see big bears at any time".
Once upon a time, there was a similar writing in a domestic children's literature, and the narrator spoke for the cow: living in the protagonist's home, it is considered lucky, although it works non-stop all year round and has been whipped, but it has no complaints, and it is grateful that they do not dislike its leper-ridden body, and that they will lead it to the sun while letting it work. It is therefore the happiest cow in the world.
The text is from Cao Wenxuan's children's literature work "Bronze Sunflower".
The problem here is not the thoughts of the characters in the text, but the fact that the narrator has not been questioned by the work itself after speaking on behalf of the cattle. And more than this set of narrators' endorsements, I believe that whether it is a bear or a cow, the best food is already given in the natural world, and the most comfortable life is to listen to the wind, drink water, eat a meal in a place without a fence, bask in the sun, burp a full meal, and then hum a little song that humans can't understand.
Our species, like thousands of other creatures, is nothing more than an accident of evolution, not the center of the earth. In the face of other animals, we should not praise ourselves as a benevolent God (even if we do not blame ourselves as the cruelest predators or slave owners) and thank the "benefactor" on behalf of the aloofed deprived.
If there are characters or narrators in the work who express similar views, the author can express reflection and criticism through plot design, questioning the narrator, etc. And like "The Big Bear", not only does it pull the boy into the affirmation of the human privilege system, but also fails to refute the previous male cultural discipline of "the weak eat the strong and violently kill", all the problems are solved by the adults descending from heaven, and the boy only obeys, deviating from the basic spiritual pursuit of modern children's literature.
Even from the perspective of writing techniques, this kind of mechanical séance of rapid ending has no artistic value at all, but it allows the reader to guess that the author's pen power has been exhausted and can only be hastily concluded. The boy's "oneness" relationship with the bear is also suddenly broken (or the bear is betrayed by the friendship from the little protagonist), and the boy protagonist chooses to lock the lock of identity into the powerful side, becoming a link in the chain of captivity and gazers, and will eventually join the ranks of "adult humans".
Borrow a classic,
Spy on "Bear Hunting Culture"
Bear hunting is actually an activity that is still preserved in the United States to this day. Hunting culture is an important part of American culture, and President Roosevelt Sr. even wrote a special book called "Bear Hunting", which tells about his hunting experience in the western wilderness and the hunting culture of different ethnic groups.
William Faulkner, one of the representative figures of the American modernist novel, wrote the same work "Bear" three times, from the short story written in 1941 and published in the popular newspaper the following year, to the novella in "Go, Moses" that can be both independent and can be regarded as a long link (it became one of Faulkner's masterpieces), and then in 1955, a new work was deleted from the novella and supplemented by "Introduction", "Insertion" and "Epilogue" to form a relatively complete hunting story, as one of the "Great Forest Trilogy". Spanning 15 years.
Faulkner's short story "The Bear" is included in the collection Go, Moses.
The reason American writers like to write bear hunting stories so much is probably because they contain complex imaginations of nature, some of which are shared by most humans, and others that are roughly specific to the understanding of hunting, especially bear hunting, in the mainstream white culture of the Southern United States before World War II, which has many similarities and connections with the way the old European colonial empires perceive the lives and cultures of members of various communities in their colonies.
As we said earlier, the American picture book "The Big Bear" deliberately highlights the smallness of man and the size of nature in both words and pictures, which is a kind of "poetics of space" according to the phenomenological researcher Gaston Bashra.
The reason why we can appreciate literature is because although human beings have such a diverse language and culture, they still share many codes that span time and space, national imagination and metaphor: red is blood and crisis, the moon makes people gentle and sad, and the mountains and wilderness waves make people feel "sublime".
In our cultural imagination and literary writing, the image of nature often exists as the antithesis of industrial civilization, it is the darling of memory production and nostalgic literature - it is lonely, irrational, and vital, unlike the bureaucratic system and assembly line advocated by urban and industrial production, which is precise in calculation and alienates and separates people to lose vitality; It appears deep and serene most of the time, so it is the mother's general healing and inclusive ability; At the same time, it has great uncertainty and danger. Because of this, in bear hunting literature, the image of the bear as large, thick, fur-warm, silent and dangerous always exists as a symbol of nature, and sometimes even guards a forest like a mountain forest goddess, which is not difficult to understand.
Judging from the connotation of the bear's first two "literary images", the sense of loneliness and sublimity brought to people by such a "huge" natural landscape or image may also be an outward manifestation of people's internal mood and pursuit. The prophetic image of the bear in the hunting story is a little bit of nature's spiritual platform, and although they are rivals, why not be ourselves bound in difficulties? In some moments, the deep forest bear is like the lonely lamp in the wilderness depicted by Bashira, which symbolizes the "lonely man who was thrown into the world" who belonged to the world and defied the world; But it transcends us, and it possesses the wildness of freedom that we aspire to, the instinctive violence and the power of resistance bound by civilization.
But on the other hand, we can't get rid of other elements contained in an image. In terms of the images of nature and bears, they also have the meaning of ignorance, primitiveness, obscurity and backwardness, and bears are considered to be the perpetrators of cruel physical violence, the upper members of the jungle food chain, and when they are combined with the writing of the european empire on the colonies, they are associated with the images of the colony's natives.
Faulkner's mental father, Isaac, is such an "ideal native", he is a hybrid of Indian chiefs and black slaves, and he is almost the embodiment of the natural spirit of the Trinity with the giant bear old class and the hound "lion" in the work.
I Love To Read The Classics: Jungle Tales, by Joseph Rudyard Kipling, Minalima, Elephant Press, October 2020.
In Kipling's Jungle Tales and several other works, it is not difficult to find that this kind of "primitiveness" of the colonial natives is extremely interested, deliberately highlighted, and regarded as a complement and correction to the "excessive civilization" of whites. This colonial mentality is markedly different from the previous period's mentality of simply viewing nature and aborigines as ignorant images (as in Robinson Crusoe), and it grew with the deepening of the colonists' or European immigrants' engagement with indigenous life and the latter's insurrectional struggles.
But this does not mean that there is a true equality between the two, and the spokesmen of "modern civilization" always have a hard time breaking free from a binary framework when writing about the relationship between white people and indigenous/natural, in the process indigenous and natural images are often mystified and it is difficult to develop new cognitive and understanding paths for their images.
For example, why do so many animal novels and hunting literature tend to choose large and fierce beasts such as bears and wolves as opposing protagonists and as the embodiment of the spirit of nature? Why could the writers of fiction of that era not choose insects as representatives of natural poetics as Fabre when weaving their imaginary nature, and why did not choose the wild power of nature with a weak surface but fertile, as well as agile, and also ecological disasters? Hares are also winners of evolutionary competition, aren't they?
Can we reflect on the long-standing human perception of natural competition and the pattern of literary writing?
Therefore, when I always read this old-fashioned binary model of opposition in animal novels, hunting and wilderness survival literature, and colonial novels (even excellent works), it is inevitable to feel bored from the perspective of artistic innovation alone; There is also a problem worth pondering, due to the ambiguity of the image, this kind of writing mode will logically be difficult to avoid the glorification of the law of the jungle.
The picture book We're Going on a Bear Hunt is based on an old British ballad.
We have to know what bear hunters admire. We must remember to remind ourselves that their so-called laws of nature have been cultured and aestheticized, and that the authors are talking about the grandeur of nature at a philosophical and aesthetic level. However, the laws of nature also contain the law of the jungle, and the praise of hunting skills also includes the praise of opponents with the most powerful and violent threats, and the difference between bears and hares is that the former's power is concentrated on the individual, rather than an evolutionary wisdom that pays more attention to "group strategy". This cult of physical strength fits much with the myth of male heroism, whether as a self or an opponent, and the illusions of receiving the blessing of natural forces and defeating the god of nature are cohesively condensed in this idealistic hard and violent body.
We can also see that Faulkner actually used some "cleverness" to praise the bear. He deliberately skipped the content of the daily life of bears hunting weak animals, focusing on the more evenly matched battles between bears and hunters, but even so, it remained a natural myth based on the majestic and violent flesh at the top of the food chain, a foundation from which literature of the genre could not escape. Therefore, the praise of nature's ruthlessness and strong will that flows from time to time in the work is also difficult to get rid of the shadow of nostalgia for the law of the jungle and the multi-hierarchical order.
Of course, this nostalgia is always linked to gender discipline, so in "The Big Bear" we can see that the boy Johnny is actually struggling with an endless "ancestral male race", and the images of mothers and girls rarely appear in the text and pictures - because the old-fashioned "hunter story" has nothing to do with women; In Faulkner's short story "The Bear," we can also see the narrator repeatedly emphasizing that hunting and drinking in the hunter's hut are gatherings of adult men: "This wine is not for women, nor for boys and children, but for hunters." "In the real world, the boy and girl scouts founded by robert Baden-Powell were asked to learn from the natives about their barbarism, and the girl scouts were specifically asked to learn the characteristics of indigenous men, and in the literary world, Kipling's white boy Jim, who was raised by Indian parents, became the most important symbol of the girl scouts.
And what best embodies the hierarchical order implicit in this type of bear-hunting literature is this description of Isaac's spiritual mentor Sam to the old bear class: "In fact, he does not care about dogs and people, nor does he care about bears at all." He came to see who was coming, who was new to the camp this year, whether this man's ability to shoot a gun was good or not, and he couldn't stay here. Let's see if we've found a dog that can pestering him with a fierce bark and summoning a man with a gun. Because he is the leader of the bear. He's human. ”
This elderly man of wilderness descent, with prophetic powers, is the image of the wisest man in the work, which means that he has great power to interpret the laws of the world. The old class he explained was very similar to his own, calm, with a mountain god-like way of thinking, expecting a respectable opponent, but we should ask one more question: To what extent is the real bear as he says? Is there any assumption, self-substitution and beautification?
After all, the bears in these works, naturally, from beginning to end, their images and connotations are represented by people. And the most paradoxical thing is that Sam finally gave the other party a hierarchical position of "man" as a compliment to the bear--the text goes around in a circle to praise the old class, the spiritual representative of nature, as a supreme honor, by the name of the short-sighted and less intelligent "man" who is mostly considered to have lost the spirit of nature and brought great harm to nature, which also shows the logical contradictions of this kind of literature.
So, is it possible for the writers of bear-hunting literature to break through as much as possible in the old model of "natural-civilization/industrial civilization-indigenous culture/male-female" three-dimensional network-like binary opposition?
Illustration of "The Big Bear".
Writer "can't help but self-correct"
Faulkner gave a demonstration of "article revision" for later generations, especially the authors of bear-hunting literature. From his changes, we can see how a writer who is loyal to art has performed the technique of "turning stones into gold" on his past works. I think it is most appropriate to elaborate on today's topic with the most prestigious work in the world's "bear hunting literature".
If the short story "Bear" of 1941 is a work confined to the old model, it has the dualistic opposition ideas in most of the wilderness hunting literature analyzed above, mystifying and poeticizing the images of nature and indigenous people, and does not cross the path of understanding of various "border areas and border people" in mainstream European and American literature from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, then the 1955 novella "Bear" contains the conscious self-reflexive voices of many writers.
The most obvious reflexes appear in the added "epilogue". According to local rules, after the death of the Indian chieftain, his slaves should be buried, and the epilogue tells the story of a black slave running desperately in the jungle, exhausted and finally arrested after being bitten by a pit viper, and the black slave is about to die of poison at the end of the story.
The 1955 edition of the story ends with the black slave as the main perspective and perceiver, writing about his confusion, fear and despair after running around the jungle and being bitten by a pit viper. Here we can see the complete opposite of the large praise of the spirit of nature in the "main text", which leads to the final death of the black slave, which is nothing more than two direct forces, one of which is the ruthless and cold nature beast, which has no sympathy for the vulnerable in distress, and the viper in the water is cold and slippery, as if the messenger of fate suddenly extends his poisonous hand from the side of the ambush road, accurately and completely snuffing out his will and hope to resist arrest.
The second is the Indian (black slave burial) culture influenced by white slavery. Whether it is the natural jungle or the Indian Chikasso tribal culture, it is a "positive" force that is praised by many defenders in the text, and the dead chieftain is more closely related to Sam Laws, the "mountain god".
After being bitten by a viper, the black slave also showed the natural demeanor of the "border people" - "ruthless", he did not shout vicious curses, he even like Sam whenever he encountered accidents, only sighed a sentence "Oh, old ancestor". It is just that his "demeanor" is quickly shaken by the narrator, and he does not seem to have a deep understanding of the sentence he whispered, "You know that I don't want to die", but an instinctive reaction in a state of ignorance and confusion - "as if it is only after the words are spoken that even he does not know its meaning, or does not understand the depth and scope of his intentions." The "natural sense" of collective identity and culture, the "transcendent awareness" of the borderlanders represented by Sam and Isaac, is deconstructed in this black individual.
In addition, the revised "Bear" has an unreliable narrator, such as the narrator who will say that Isaac, the boy who follows the bear hunting, is not afraid of bears when he encounters bears, and then say that he "recognizes what fear is like"; For example, a statement of apparent hierarchical order reads, "Later when he grew up, he understood." That makes a lot of sense. This is how things should have been. Sam is the chief, the king; Boone was a commoner, his hunter. Managing dogs is naturally Boone's business" contradicts the anti-hierarchical kernel of the black slave narrative at the end; For example, Sam's way of conquering the hound "lion" – "Let's not let him tame either." We want him to remain wild. We just want him to finally understand that the only way he wants to get out of the small wooden barn is to obediently listen to Sam or someone else. He was the dog who could intercept and drag old Ben in the future. We have named him 'Lion'. ”
Although the work strongly emphasizes the difference between this and "taming", it seems that this is still a kind of falcon-style taming, still cultivating a "slave dog" who listens to people's words, all of which make people wonder whether the "spirit of nature and borderlands" promoted by the narrator matches the sacred aura it is granted, and then doubt the reliability of the narrator, and the internal voice of the work becomes rich.
Finally, there is the adjustment of the order of the paragraphs and the deletion of parts of the old gender narrative. A passage in which the hunters gather to drink and the father tells Isaac about the "truth" is placed at the end of the short story, as if it does represent the truth, and the image of the hunter and the bear is mixed; However, in the middle of this paragraph, the image of the hunters seems to be contrary to the position of the author implied at the end, and the hunters are representatives of the worship of the law of the jungle.
This suggests that Faulkner may have been aware of the problems in the short story in which the hunter and his father praised, so he simply clarified it—the image of the hunter is more complex, the hunting nature of the wilderness may not always maintain the dignity of the wilderness as the mouth says, and they occasionally expose the "despicableness of mankind", while the bear is still the object of the author's unconcealed praise, the representative of the wilderness spirit, which somewhat distinguishes the fatherly violence of the hunter from the natural life force attempt represented by the bear. In this way, the different images and the intentions they represent are much clearer than before. In addition, many figurative statements that compare nature to women have been deleted, and the text in this part of the short story is written from the father's preaching, which shows that the author also reflects on the masculine violence of the short story linked to gender.
However, this text is not perfect. Faulkner's praise contradiction we have analyzed earlier, the choice of the bear as a representative of nature, singing its great power, then this set of praises is bound to contain part of the recognition of the law of the jungle, and Fook's reflection on human hunting at the same point, sensitive readers still can not help but wonder whether he is because of "loss of courtesy and seek the wilderness", so there is still a little nostalgia for this violent, bullying law, entangled with this; The most obvious self-reversal appears in the "epilogue", which is somewhat insufficient, lacks enough before and after clues, and cannot form a truly integrated and coordinated effect with the whole article.
It can only be said that this incongruity allows the reader to see more clearly the implicit emotional and logical contradictions of the author himself, and becomes conspicuous evidence of his conscious "self-correction". Of particular importance is the text's point out that Isaac is the "one-star microfire" that humans are stronger than bears, and can only be explained in the long passages of The Great Forest or Go, Moses, which, as a stand-alone novella, clearly does not give a satisfactory enough answer.
Through the above detailed analysis, we can see that the writer's "uncontrollable self-correction" is really a very difficult self-struggle, even for the writers who have a fairly high evaluation in the history of literature. But because of this, those writers who choose to challenge themselves and fight are even more valuable, their vision through the fog of the "present", trying to resist the limitations of instinct, choosing to be loyal to art and the future. In Bear, Faulkner does not detect the "one-star fire that human beings are stronger than bears", but we do see the answer in the writer's struggle and self-correction, and we see the beating fire of the heart.
Text/Wang Shuai Nai
Editor/Shen Chan
Proofreading/Xue Jingning