Innocence lost : picturebook narratives of depravity

Abstract

Unlike children’s books by Beatrix Potter and Janosch, which implicitly undermine the semantic harmony between the illustrations and the text, and thus ironically challenge widespread assumptions about the transparency of the narration, the picturebooks by Jon Klassen and by Roberto Innocenti and Aaron Frisch exemplify a striking symbiosis between the verbal and visual narrative modes. Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back and Innocenti and Frisch’s The Girl in Red convey a genuinely terrifying vision of human relationships and offer an extremely bitter, not to say latently apocalyptic diagnosis of contemporary western culture. While each book relies on different aesthetic modes and makes use of different tension-building narrative strategies, they both immerse their readers in the experience of horror, offering spectacles of inescapable violence, disguised and unpunished. The artists effectively expose what they see as human indifference to evil and injustice. Alarmingly, however, they also uncompromisingly mock humanistic ideals and unscrupulously impose their cynicism on the reader. Residing in the text and the illustrations, or in gaps between them, the narrative mockery effectively constructs the nihilistic message of the stories and creates an overwhelming vision of the triumph and impunity of the powerful.