Picture Books, Mimesis and the Competing Aesthetics of Kinesis and Stasis

Abstract

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It has been a long-standing presupposition in Western art that a subject's inner self is made visible by physical movement. As an index of both self-expression and self-control, represented movement is understood as not only expressing what a character feels, but also revealing that character's ethical or moral state. This presupposition has dominated picture book art since its inception, so that conventional significances attributed to bodily postures and gestures, in the context of the particular narrative roles assigned to characters, readily convey an illusion of mimetic realism and— perhaps more importantly— orient audiences attitudinally and ideologically towards the represented material. To take a simple example, an upright stance expresses a range of positive meanings ranging from physical to moral well-being, whereas a character inclined to stoop or slouch expresses negative attributes, ranging from dejection to anti-social attitudes. "The latter is very apparent in, for example, the posture of Dave in Shirley Hughes's Dogger (1977), where, after the loss of his favourite toy, he is a dejected figure walking through the School Summer Fair (see Figure 1). The bowed head, stooped shoulders and hands in pockets signify his dejection, and the darkness of mood is perhaps underlined by the shadow at his feet. But as Thomas Pavel points out with reference to fiction, 'while it is right to see mimesis as essential for understanding what fiction is, it is nevertheless wrong to see mimesis as adequate for understanding what fiction does" (2000, p.521). The posture here might rather connote pensiveness, except that the accompanying verbal text details Dave's dislike of the pleasure his sister is finding in the day and his consequent decision to go off on his own, and if is this that prompts an audience to interpret the posture and the shadow as I have done. Text and picture interaction thus overdetermine meaning here.