Starting from the Caldecott Gold Award picture book in 1939, the Beijing News Children's Book has launched 15 issues of reviews. In issue 16, we will open the 1957 gold medal picture book A Tree Is Nice. The Chinese edition of the book has been introduced by the children's book brand Pu Lan.
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 Janice May Udry and illustrated by Marc Simont. Woodley poetically describes the beauty of trees in his eyes: "If you have a tree, you can climb the trunk, roll in the leaves, or hang a swing on the trunk... Birds can also nest on branches, it's nice to have trees..."
Marc Simmont is a Paris-born American artist, cartoonist, and children's book illustrator. He won three Caldecott Awards and two Caldecott Honorable Awards, including "The Happy Day" in 1950 and "The Stray Dog" (imported by the children's book brand Dandelion) in 2002. He has also illustrated several children's books, including James Thurber's The Princess's Moon (Caldecott Gold Medal in 1944), for which Mark Simmont drew new illustrations in 1990. Extended reading: I want to pick the moon - how to use fatherly love to solve the most difficult "exam question" in history? and The 13 Clocks (introduced by the children's book brand Whimsy).
In this review, Wang Shuai noticed that children's picture books seem to have a different kind of closeness to trees, the figure of the tree will always appear in a variety of picture books, the tree's sense of strength, growth and individuality bring people the awe of the sublime and eternity, so how should children's literature treat the solemn and solemn themes such as "sublime" and "eternal"?
What can children see through the tree?
In traditional literary theorists and aesthetes, the "sublime" and "beautiful" (or "beautiful") are often deliberately distinguished, and their efforts to advance abstract cognitive faculties are highly respectable. But some of these early theorists of beauty—poets like Wordsworth—would also acknowledge that something contained both tenderness, grace of harmony and order, and disturbing, frightening elements of the "sublime." Obviously, today's protagonist "The Tree is So Good" focuses on such a "double beauty" thing.
Illustration of "The Tree Is So Nice". (Source: Pu Pulan)
Author Janice May Woodley repeatedly laments in the picture book that "trees are so good" and lists many reasons. Among these reasons, of course, we can see at a glance those parts about "beauty". But beyond the gentle and beautiful scenery, the joy of life brought by the greenery, and the daily peace of mind of family and friends, what else? Why do children's picture books seem to have a different affinity for trees in the midst of natural landscapes, and are particularly willing to create childhood stories or nature arias based on them? Why in some nostalgic picture books, we may not find mountains and seas or wild grass and flowers, but we can always see the big trees in the background?
I think back to the trees in these picture books, they tend to be tall and tall, and humans are small around them. I suddenly realized that the perception of the sublime, mixed with fear and the meaning of "self-deprivation and devotion in pouring," may be impressions and themes of "beauty" that are less perceptible in picture books about "trees" than in the "quiet beauty" section.
In "The Tree Is So Good", the first sentence of the opening chapter reads: "The tree is so good." Tall trees obscure the sky. Woodley then writes that trees grow along rivers, valleys, and especially "high on the top of a mountain," and that if many trees are together, then "they are called great forests"; It's good to have only one tree, "because there are so many leaves on the tree", which means that "all summer, you can hear the wind blowing the leaves and rustling". A series of words are used here to give people the feeling of a huge giant, high, large, many, whole, and the rustling elephant sound is linked to the previous words to also imitate the feeling that something is "filled" with space.
Illustration of "The Tree Is So Nice".
In Longinus's On the Sublime, the vastness of size is the source of the sublime, and the "sense of infinity" as the "greatness" at the abstract level also gives people a sense of "grandeur" and constitutes a part of the sublime. If we pay attention, we will find that the design of the appearance size of tree-related picture books is often deliberately elongated or significantly larger, and the hard texture of hardcover also contributes to the formation of a sense of serious reading and "sublime"; Inner drawings often use the "bleeding" method, that is, "the picture extends to the edge of the paper cut", and the picture of "bleeding on all sides" is also common. This depiction of the "towering" and "full" sense of natural landscape can be clearly felt in Mitsuya Anno's "Forest", Anthony Brown's "Hide and Seek" and popular science poetry picture book series "Tree", "Mountain" and "Sea".
In picture books that depict a single large tree, there are always small figures who are opposed to it, with thick or tall upright trunks and lush foliage, providing shade for human beings; In forest-themed picture books, the picture is crowded and often dazzling, as Edmund Burke said in Philosophical Inquiry on the Roots of Our Conception of the Sublime and Beautiful, "Our minds have completely lost themselves because of the interweaving of many grandiose, unclear images; These imagery works because they are ambiguous and indistinguishable. ”
There are two sources of sublime here, both of which are accomplished by the "vastness" (Gaston Bashira) that is automatically made up in the reader's mind. Like grasslands and great lakes, the "vastness" of these landscapes is no longer something concrete and intuitive, but a kind of "expansion of existence", which can easily be transformed into a symbol of the inner soul state of the self by those who view natural scenes.
One is that the "tree" of the artistic imagination is understood as the only lonely object on the vast plane of the lonely earth with strong roots, a strong body, and a persistent longitudinal will to grow, an image that, according to Bashira, is like every "lonely person thrown into the world."
The second is that the whole vast nature represented behind a drop of lake water, a leaf, these things are the twinkling, bright, tear-filled eyes of nature—"trees enlarge everything around them", as Claire Gore wrote that "more majestic than these trees is the sublime and tragic space around them, as if this space increases as the trees grow". Unlike mountains and seas, trees have a stronger sense of growth and individuality. Its sublime majesty is not only in the sense of space, but a remarkable "space-time combination". In many picture books, trees are always growing up with people, which is reflected in "The Tree is So Good", and it is more obvious in "What the Tree Sees - Time and Our Story", which is more similar to ourselves than the inorganic whole that is not easy to shake such as mountains and seas.
Illustration of "The Tree Is So Nice".
In this sense, returning to the former sublime connotation, we can better appreciate the sense of empathy and closeness when we see the lonely and upright green tree in a large blank space on the screen, it is a young and living life, and it marks the ruthless evidence of each year's time with its own body records - the annual rings, and its annual rings do not need to be exposed to us, only we just need to have this "knowledge", then they grow in our wordless perception and recall of the tree in a circle.
For this reason, many children's literature works like to associate trees with nostalgic themes of nostalgia, and in those prose works that recall childhood, the large trees in the sheltered courtyard play the role of Kant's starry sky and earthly lone lamp.
The narrator is the adult "me" who may be struggling with the vulgar life and the utilitarian world, the present "me", while the childhood tree gazes soberly and firmly at that eternal time and space, as if they store in them all the innocence and tenacity, hardness and security that the courtyard of the family can give. The sublime and grace of the trees may well form a tense expectation of "eternity". We forget ourselves in admiration for the sublime, merge into larger and more solid objects, and re-establish ourselves through the subjective spiritualization of natural things.
Illustration of What the Tree Saw – Time and Our Story. (Source: Unread)
Thus, in adult literature, we will see Calvino using this tree that embodies the unconscious and primordial energy of human beings to create a baron on the tree who never lands in order to be free, while children's literature always believes more optimistically that people can more easily share the spirit of the tree to cope with the difficulties of growth, and even claims that people can "create their own tree" and change the world by this: "The Tree is Good" ends with "Everyone wants to have a tree." They return home and plant a tree each", and the boy protagonist in "The Midnight Gardener" inherits magical craftsmanship from the old man, dedicated to cutting out the most imaginative green tree art for the townspeople, and their efforts awaken the entire town that has fallen into mediocrity and nothingness, bringing it back to life.
"Sublime" and "eternal" in children's literature
I was about to take this opportunity to talk about children's literature's positive writing on solemn themes such as the "sublime" and "eternal".
It is not difficult to understand that children's literature has a unique advantage in expressing some themes such as the spirit of play, imagination and anti-utilitarianism, but what if the writer intends to bypass light, cheerful, and witty styles and challenge the "sublime" and "eternal" topics that at first sound classical? In addition to choosing natural landscapes with majestic factors such as mountains, seas, and trees, and silent inorganic objects that are usually non-subject postures as carrying objects, does it mean that the children in such thematic works or the protagonists symbolizing children can only take this route: use the posture of moths to put out fire to offer themselves moving and worship to "sublime" things, so as to be integrated with them and become part of the "sublime"?
I think that the sublime and the eternal in children's literature may be different from the way they are embodied in literature in general, and that the irreplaceability of the former must also lie in its differences from those aspects of general literature in dealing with various themes rather than the expression of identity.
Greek director Theo Angelopoulos' "Eternity and One Day" was also in the screening list at this year's North Film Festival, which, although not usually considered a "children's film", seems to me to have the qualities that all children's art should have - the celebration of innocence, the celebration of fantasy and language and poetry, the prominence of the theme of growth and the search for the meaning of life, the reflection on "self" and dialogue/"relationship", and the internal logic that literary and artistic works should abide by in the method of living between reality and fiction is still firmly adhered to. Wait a minute. Of course, at this moment I just want to talk about the film's performance of the "eternity" theme.
Poster for the movie "Eternity and One Day" (1998).
The film tells the memories and wanderings of a terminally ill old poet in his last day before being admitted to the hospital, and the chance encounter with an Albanian refugee boy and the mutual snuggling give his lost and desperate soul a new lease of life. During this day's travels, the memory of his late wife kept popping up in his mind, on the beach he asked his wife how far away tomorrow would be, to which she replied "Μία αιωνιότητα και μία μέρα (eternity or day)". Interestingly, the translation of this answer in the film resources I watched split into two versions, one for "eternity or a day" and the other for "one day more than eternity". The old man did not seem to hear his wife's answer clearly in the loud sound of the waves, and you and I, who did not understand Greek, were left in this riddle.
When language creates an innate barrier to appreciating a work of art, we are not helpless. As the most important theme running through the film, there are many passages in the film that attempt to explore it, and the creator's tendency is to reveal the question of "who represents the closest to eternity".
For example, an elderly man once broke into a wedding in order to entrust his dog to a nanny, and the wedding scene surrounded by railings can be seen as a ceremonial scene dancing around the center of eternity. Generally speaking, the men and women at the wedding are "physical states" that are very close to the word eternity, and at least at that moment they expect eternal love; The wedding scene is not closed, but all the children on the street can only look in with the pointed railing but cannot enter, and the old protagonist can enter the field but eventually exit, which is probably also a confirmation of this - people at different stages of life are difficult to communicate with, and the same person may also be hindered in accepting and integrating the "self" at different stages - children are "not yet there", the elderly are "already passed", and they are difficult to connect with people who are "in progress", eager and may have a brief glimpse of eternity. The children at the railings are similar to the postures of refugees on the barbed wire fence on the border in the film, and the time gap is obviously metaphorically metaphorically limited in space, and people in every time and space are so separated and lonely.
However, if we look closely at the dance styles of both men and women in the wedding venue, especially the dance of the groom, we will find that they are very perfunctory and mechanical, and do not seem to be very engaged and enjoy it. It can be seen that this pair of newcomers who are theoretically closest to happiness and eternity are also young people with the strongest physical strength and are not the spokespersons of "eternity" in the film.
Footage from the movie "Eternity and One Day" (1998).
As we know, the protagonists of the movie are old men and boys. This means that it chooses the old man and the boy – one full of despair and on the brink of death, the other an exiled refugee whose life has just begun – two super-marginalized and vulnerable people who interpret eternity, and the more crucial redeemer of which is the boy.
Opening the heart of the old man and taking the old man out of the discursive dilemma by the boy who let go of his initial vigilance is a unique salvation from the naïve spirit—this savior is almost certainly the child, because the child is more courageous or more likely to trust strangers; Boys are also justified as the only ones who can see the poet of the old man's fantasy, because children have a more uninhibited imagination and, if I stress once again, trust, less bound by "reason and experience", and can freely enter and exit the virtual world and redeem themselves and the old man by it. It can be said that the development of the story and the solution of the problem are based on the child's unique cognitive state from a certain perspective.
The old poet in the film originally only had distant places and books, but did not have a close daily and good intimate relationship, and we can think that he is in an unsound state of "spiritual and flesh separation". And the boy brought poetry and new words to the old man, and the poem was written by the poet who the old man had studied all his life, so that the old man's lost vocabulary and ability to love specific people in his life were finally found when facing the boy. He finally expressed his need for boys' company directly, acknowledging his vulnerability and loneliness. When he breaks the silence, he truly intersects with life, where the old man's own past paper experience intersects with the innocence of others in reality. It also once again highlights the value of the child's heart, which is connected with the poet's heart, it is a bridge to help adults approach poetic life, and it is a convenient door for existence to open for adults who pursue poetic life.
That is to say, in this story of sublime and eternal themes expressed in a positive, almost tragic form, the spokesperson of such qualities is associated with something that seems very small and useless: children redeem the elderly, the vocabulary of refugees fills the gaps in the lives of cultural researchers for many years, and the seemingly illusory literary imagination seems to be more powerful than the real doctor - the attending doctor of the old man in the film laments that he cannot heal the protagonist's body when he meets the wandering protagonist by the sea, At the same time, he also reveals that the protagonist's poetry nourishes him and his descendants as a doctor. We often find that in those works of art that can be called "great", the lack of "reality" is acceptable, but the lack of fantasy is impossible, and with the ability to fantasize, the imperfections and trauma of real life can also be compensated for and healed.
Poster for the movie "Eternity and One Day" (1998).
In addition to the main plot, how does the film show children?
We saw that on the bus, the boy was not attracted by the revolutionaries/demonstrators who got on the bus first and held red flags, but first saw the female student with flowers, and he smiled; After the couple of students got out of the car, the boy smiled again at the man who picked up the bouquet; After the man got out of the car, the boy went to look closely at the revolutionary—note that the revolutionary was asleep at this time, and a "man" who revealed the ordinary moment of man and returned to a soft state of flesh and blood could get the boy's gaze and smile, and the body of steel and the generally considered sublime aura were not attractive to the boy. Although the boy and the old man do not have a single line in this clip, and there is no positive interaction with the passengers, the creator's intention is more evident in this silent lens language, the boy is the judge of the value of the whole story, and his pure eye is the yardstick by which to measure whether an event (even a feat in the usual sense) is meaningful.
It is not children who chase the sublime, but children who define the sublime, and if possible, creators seize the opportunity for children to show rejection of what is generally considered sublime, either dismissive or determined to turn their backs.
For example, in "Daughter of the Sea", the little mermaid first turned her back on the "meaningful way of being" defined by her grandmother, and then because she loved the prince deeply, she was unwilling to realize marriage by means of ingenuity or conspiracy design, which is equivalent to giving up the "immortal soul" and "prince's love", so far, all the paths to the sublime explained by authority in the story have been denied and abandoned by her, but it is this girl who insists on her heart and gives up all opportunities to obtain a noble position, A fallen angel who chooses to plunge straight into the dark sea at dawn is finally declared by the story to have the sublime, ethereal "sky" (note that it must be ethereal and unable to prove its existence to people) identifies with the child's double betrayal - I think it would be surprising if the grandmother and the sea witch, who represent the authoritative intellectuals in the story, knew about the ending of the Little Mermaid finally rising into the air as an elf.
This act is of the same nature as Huckleberry's willingness to go to hell (which he was convinced and feared by the schooling of the time) to save his fellow blacks, and is a complete "betrayal" of the "noble meaning" set by the outside world, but it is precisely because they are not shackled by any seemingly eloquent and authoritative explanation, but only act according to their hearts, that this complete abandonment makes the true embodiment of the sublime.
In fact, the reaction of children on the bus in "Eternity and One Day" is not the performance of most boys in reality. Needless to say, as we said earlier when discussing Pippi's naïve spirit, children in children's art always embody the image of children who have expectations for their future ideal personality. (Read more: Madeleine "Group Pet" and Pippi the Lonely Brave: Who is the soul of children's literature?) The boy is the most divine character in the film, and when he smiles at the sleeping revolutionary, he is like the Virgin Mary embracing Jesus, showing a motherly gaze and comfort to the world.
Footage from the movie "Eternity and One Day" (1998).
"How far away tomorrow is one day more than eternity"—in fact, two months later I wrote this article with this conjecture and judgment in mind to consult a colleague who taught Greek, and he clearly replied that the "και" in this phrase is not a choice relation, but "and, one plus one"—what literature is, literature is a little more transcendent, a little more hopeful than reality; What hope is, hope is the unwilling idea of "I think I can rescue again" in nonsensical works; And what children's literature is to fully respect and constantly explore the unique power and value of human childhood, so that children, at least in children's literature, can play the role of savior and disobedient, even if he has nothing to do for the time being, at least let him retain the ability to unwilling to converge with the anger of "huge things".
What makes the hungriest monster in the universe stop devouring everything in "Doctor Who" is not the thousands of years old Time Lord's head that hates to contain the profound theories and rich "insight" of the universe, but the yellow leaf held up by the doctor's companion that makes her parents know and love each other - the doctor admits that this is right and reasonable, because "there are 'many' in the vicissitudes of experience, but new life means infinite possibilities." New life is always more precious than vicissitudes, closer to the sublime and eternal than the latter, which should be the belief and value that children's literature upholds. If adult literature always either affirms or denies the concept of eternity, children's literature pursues "one more day than eternity."
Our original children's literature, on the other hand, always seems to lack the confidence to make children the righteousness and spokesperson of noble values, and in the world of stories they describe in the positive pursuit of "sublime" and "eternal" qualities, children are always followers of the "sublime" laws told and instructed by authoritative voices rather than rebels and doubters.
Seriously, when our children's writers are aware of this, they can deliver truly transcendent works. The recognition of this issue is an important measurement dimension of whether children's standards have really become the ideological resources of this society, and the breakthrough in its writing will provide great energy for original children's literature to break free from the "fate" of "works only for children" and educational books.
Illustration of The Last Tree. (Source: Inspiring Culture)
Author/Wang Shuainai
Editor/Shen Chan Luo Dong
Proofreader/Janin