The art of book illustration has long accompanied the story in its imaginary expeditions—to vivify settings, to enrich character, and to extend language along sensorial planes. Yet, in contemporary publishing, there are few fictions for older readers that truly explore this complex reciprocity between image and text. In fall of 2020, the independent press Enchanted Lion addressed this lack with the announcement of Unruly: a new imprint that would be dedicated to “the picture book’s full potential for readers of all ages”. This was followed by the issuing of several titles dedicated to the dialogues between visual and literary languages, manifesting in enthralling alternatives of description, evocation, and narrative realities. In the following essay, Colin Leemarshall takes a close look on the three works out now.
In the popular imagination, the picture book is a highly circumscribed form. The apparent consensus—fomented both by market protocols and by entrenched reading habits—is that picture-heavy storybooks are for children up to the age of about eight; beyond this age, children are expected to graduate to chapter books, then to young adult novels, then finally (it is hoped) to sophisticated adult literature. (Those who remain drawn to the artistic gestalt of text and image have recourse to the graphic novel—a form that is now widely afforded the status of ‘serious’ literature.) This imagined trajectory not only obscures the fact that the world of illustrated children’s literature has always had its more provocative practitioners (from Heinrich Hoffmann to Tomi Ungerer), it also erects an unnecessary palisade against any ‘incursions’ from the adult world.
The New York-based Enchanted Lion seems to be one of the few anglophone presses invested in upending this prejudice. The publisher has long been open to putting out more challenging and unexpected works, and several of the books on its main title list might be said to be as much for adults as for children. However, it wasn’t until fairly recently, with the 2021 establishment of its Unruly imprint, that Enchanted Lion canalised these preferences into something more systematic. On its website, the publisher writes:
We’re launching Unruly because we believe that the possibilities for the illustrated book are larger and richer than the categories of board book, children’s picture book, graphic novel, and art book that currently exist [….] Picture books are rich with design and story, and yet the genre has come to be seen as one strictly for children. At Enchanted Lion, picture books are for readers of all ages, and sparking awareness of this boundlessness might finally be what is needed to allow the unique form that is the picture book—where word and image live together as nowhere else—to be seen as the expansive narrative medium it is.
In tandem with Enchanted Lion’s desire to draw attention to the range and possibilities of the picture book form, the publisher is also defiantly internationalist in its ethos, and many of its books (including each of those discussed below) are translations. The inaugural Unruly entry is The True Story of a Mouse Who Never Asked for It, a book illustrated by Violeta Lópiz and written by Ana Cristina Herreros (presented here in Chloe Garcia Roberts’s pellucid translation). A feminist retelling of a Balearic folktale, the book is billed by the publisher as “stak[ing] itself in the liminal zone between youth and adulthood, between picture book and avant-garde illustrated book”. The opening page depicts a mouse peering from behind a bundle of yarn, while across the leaf the story begins: “Once upon a time, there was a little mouse who was very neat and very hardworking”. Already, a rich semiotic field is opened up by the conjunction of these two pages. Traditionally, yarn and its associated objects are metonymically gendered (a fact crystallised perhaps most obviously in the word “distaff”, attested in Merriam-Webster as both “a staff for holding the flax, tow, or wool in spinning” and as “woman’s work or domain”). When we look more closely at the texture of Lópiz’s picture, we can see that the image has been painted directly on fabric. Thus, the mouse is temporally anchored within ‘her domain’, occupying a present that is between the woven past and the yet-to-be-woven future, between the work done and the work to do.
After the appearance of some additional ‘female’ appurtenances (makeup brushes, hairpins, etc.), the book becomes highly uncanny. We learn that “One day, while sweeping up litter on the street, [the mouse] found a coin and wondered, ‘What shall I buy with this little coin?’” But there is a noticeable misalignment between text and image: there is no coin visible amongst the accessories or scraps in the mouse’s environment, and so the reader is denied the expected visual payoff. This is one example of how Lópiz’s brilliantly subtle illustrations can waver between the representative and the arbitrary. Another example is the cabbage-cum-house that the mouse buys with her coin. The corresponding illustrations of this cabbage initially enact a kind of make-believe fidelity (via a globe that approximates the spherical dimensions of the vegetable). Thereafter, however, the cabbage is depicted by a series of morphologically improbable items: some stationery, a book, a desk drawer. Even so, in each case there remains a thread, however filamentous, to the verbal narrative, enabling the illustrative plane to stay just about tenable as a figurative tableau of the story.
After being solicited for marriage by “a drove of donkeys” (pictured as folding chairs), “a flock of ducks” (hand fans), and “an abundance of cats” (scissors), the mouse finally agrees to marry one of the “tiny cats” (socks) that approach her. Notably, she chooses “the kitten that seemed the most defenseless” (a quality suggestively hinted at in the corresponding illustration, in which the mouse is depicted as being partially inside the chosen sock). But it soon becomes apparent that the husband (who takes on a progressively amplified series of soubriquets—“cat”, “tomcat”, “Top Cat”, “Don Gato”, “Catzilla”, etc.) is not defenceless. To the contrary, he emerges as the perpetrator in an increasingly undeniable subtext of domestic abuse. The abuse does not only take the form of battery; it is also the foisting of gendered labour (physical and emotional) onto the mouse. To “stitch up the split lip of [his] little mousy” after a beating, the cat goes in search of a “seamstress”; in doing so, he doesn’t simply lean on ‘woman’s work’ to “stitch up” his crime, but worse, he seeks to stem the semiotic bleed that stands as evidence of his wife’s personhood, to deny her very lifeblood and render her coterminous with the product of her labour. Ultimately, the cat is thwarted when a weaver refuses his request for cord, reasoning that “sometimes you ask for what you’ll never get and you get what you never asked for”.
Throughout the textual descriptions of the husband’s attempts to fix his problem, the illustrations centre exclusively on a cat playing with an unravelled ball of yarn, a visual sequence that presages the unravelling of the narrative itself. The book finishes with several wordless pages, wherein entire constellations of signifiers collapse. A (human) woman cleans up the mess of an implied scene of domestic abuse. She divests the scissors of their predatory symbolic charge by turning them into a tool and cutting her hair. Her work becomes a creative one as she adorns the room with her paintings of mice, cats, and women (perhaps sketches for the very narrative that we have just read—or perhaps the images of an empowering counter-narrative). The cat, meanwhile, has been safely subsumed into the environment as a mere pet. The richness of the whole cannot be conveyed here; suffice it to say that the conjunctions and disjunctions of text and image instantiate a startling interplay between a narrative that is ingenuously simple and a narrative that is ruptured, gainsaid, and shot through with lacerating complexities.
The second Unruly book, another folk-tale retelling, is Beatrice Alemagna’s You Can’t Kill Snow White (translated by Karin Snelson and Emilie Robert Wong). In her preface, Alemagna tells us that she wanted to rewrite the Grimm Brothers’ tale from “the point of view of the queen […] To side with darkness as a way of understanding the madness.” In accordance with this revelation, the book is indeed more unfettered and unruly in its aesthetics than the author’s previous children’s books. As if evoking the evil queen’s madness, the brushwork is often frenzied and indelicate, while the colour palette veers unpredictably from tenebrous greys to drab greens to coruscating fuchsias. The creative sequencing allows the illustrations to function not only as summations of the narrative but also as portents—for example, we see the king dead in his bed before we read of his death. But simply focusing on formal inversion risks oversimplifying things; the dead king is depicted not as a body in rigor mortis, but as an actual skeleton. The sequencing thus does more than simply afford narrative primacy to the illustrations; it allows the illustrations to become cradles of fear, desire, wish-fulfilment, and prophecy—to accrue mental and symbolic layers atop the literalist renderings.
Such flickering between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic is further intensified by the written dialogue, wherein swathes of future time can be elided and traversed with a mere handful of words. For instance, in one series of sentences, the would-be queen says:
But her mother the queen will soon die.
And the king will remarry.
Me. He will remarry me.
In the very next set of sentences, she says:
It’s my time to shine. Me, at last.
Me, the beloved, the beautiful,
the powerful.Me, me, me.
But now the king has died, too.
The speed at which these events are relayed (coupled with the newly dead king’s depiction as a skeleton) complicates the perennial present of the queen’s utterances, suggesting that the events currently occurring or yet to occur have also already occurred.
The depictions of the jealous queen’s murderous stratagems further ratchet up the uncertainty. After claiming that Snow White “is tearing out my heart”, the queen has her would-be revenge as she gorges on what she believes are the torn-out lungs and liver of her nemesis (though they are in fact those of a young boar”). As the queen devours these organs across a strip of eight pictures, the colours and textures constantly change, variously rendered by pencilwork, aquarelle, and even photo-collage. In each square, sections of the pictures appear to be in different stages of completion: in one square the queen’s throne is merely a crude pencil outline, in another it is a seat of ornately wrought gold, and in yet another it is an object of oppressive, obsidian black. These shifts in form, colour, and medium allow Alemagna to suffuse a single scene with longing, power, and regret—with the emotional vectors of variegating temporalities and vantage points.
Snow White herself is also highly mutable. In her preface, Alemagna invokes Rilke’s maxim that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror”, and the author seems to allow this logic to play out in her depictions of Snow White, some of which are grotesquely distended or ghoulish, visually belying the dwarves’, the prince’s, and the magic mirror’s declarations of the young woman’s beauty. Snow White’s skin tone shifts between various colours—grey, pink, ochre, and, in a deathly concretisation of the metaphor, actual white. She is also vulnerable to the same beguiling beauty of which she is a paragon, at one point imperilling her life for the sake of “Beautiful goods […] Ribbons and lace in every colour!” But beyond mere vanity or vapidity, she is also a blithe observer of cruel murder, part of the “merciless crowd” that watch as the queen is forced to dance in a pair of heated iron shoes, which ultimately extinguish her.
It would be facile to try to derive any kind of ethical dispensation from Alemagna’s retelling, as neither the queen nor Snow White emerges as a moral exemplar. However, the focalisation does allow us to develop a sympathy of sorts for the queen. Not only is Snow White described as “the child [the queen] will never have”, but she is also a love-object whose mere existence reminds the queen that she has “been dreaming of love since she was a child”, of “the love [she] never knew”. This implied aetiology of the queen’s jealousy and madness combines with the wild, shifting, geometrically impossible images to give us a glimpse of the terrible beauty underpinning the tale.
The latest book in the Unruly series is The Book of Denial, written by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda (translated by Lawrence Schimel) and illustrated by Alejandro Magallanes. Examined purely from a textual standpoint, this book is perhaps the most traditionally ‘literary’ entry in the series so far; the narrative is rich and suggestive, and its length comfortably satisfies the conditions for a traditional short story. The story is essentially a darkly involuted family drama, told from the point of view of a son who is troubled by what he finds in one of his writer father’s manuscripts (the working title of which shares its name with Chávez Castañeda’s book):
The hand of an adult is the size of a child’s face, so the executioners of children need no weapons. The children are made to face away from them, and the executioners approach from behind. All they have to do is place their hands over the children’s faces, as if covering them with a scarf, gently protecting their little mouths and faces from the cold. Then, the executioners need only press down with their hands, until the children are suffocated.
These words create a breach in the blissful ignorance of the son’s world, one that is further widened when he learns about the slaughter of the Holy Innocents at school. Eventually, he discovers, from his father’s manuscript, a veritable litany of adults killing children throughout history. Such killing forms the subject of the father’s manuscript-in-progress, a subject about which he insists that “children need to know”, and a subject about which he believes he must write, “for only then can our worst history be changed”. However, it is unclear how noble the father actually is. In a particularly telling line, the son wonders how his father “could use his hands to write something like that”. This unusual pleonasm (“use his hands to write”) purposively riffs on the motif that was established in the executioner section of the father’s manuscript. By framing things with this flourish, the son not only imbues the act of writing with a homicidal charge, but also foreshadows the father’s potential capacity for actual murder.
The father’s possible murder of the son—and his ventriloquizing of him for the sake of the story—is one of several things that are perhaps being denied in the narrative. Another possibility is that the father has committed suicide, and that the son cannot come to terms with this fact. Or perhaps the father, son, and mother are all dead, and the story is being narrated posthumously from an uncertain locus. There is also an extra-familial possibility—that the father is not a man of letters but the son’s teacher, and that he is using the classroom to explore his obsessions as a failed writer. All of these potential “denials” and their various permutations (plus a myriad of other possible denials that cannot be enumerated here) are subtly encoded in the text, impinging on the provenance of the book. The diegetic Book of Denial is repeatedly thrown away by the son—or maybe not, given that no matter how often he discards the book, it seems to keep returning; scraps of writing (whether they be the author’s or non-authorial interpolations) keep popping up throughout the narrative; the son tries to mimic the undulations of his father’s handwriting while adding negations to some of the book’s more unsettling propositions. The upshot of these scenes and actions is that the authorship of The Book of Denial (also called The Worst Book in the World) becomes progressively more obfuscated. The ambiguities even allow for the possibility that the mother (who is never given a direct voice in the story) is the book’s surreptitious author.
Though much of the book’s moving conclusion provides a sense of closure, it doesn’t go so far as to solve any of the above mysteries. And here, we can turn to the illustrations to see whether they add any crucial semantic weight. First, it is worth saying that the book’s grayscale designs are beautifully realised, helping to facilitate an undeniably pleasurable reading experience. Still, the question of whether The Book of Denial is a truly composite work, rather than just a short story with ancillary illustrations, is a slightly vexatious one. Magallanes’s illustrations often play on our compulsion towards the grapheme (“How can you see letters without wanting to read them?”). The effect of such “reading” is unnerving: in one instance, we see letters of the alphabet ominously submerged in water; in others, our heightened pareidolia causes ghostly faces to emerge from the uncanny arrangements of colons, brackets, and question marks. Hands are another recurring feature of the book (one of the most affecting spreads features a large photographic representation of a pair of hands—one each on the recto and the verso). The rest of the book employs techniques ranging from faux-naif drawings, to blocky typography, to elaborate woodcut details.
On first reading, however, the above-mentioned illustrations do not seem strictly constitutive of the narrative—that is, they do not clearly partake in the kind of text-image synergy that is so important to the first two Unruly books. Indeed, Chávez Castañeda’s text could almost be entirely abstracted from the picture-book setting without any essential loss (and, as it turns out, a section of Schimel’s limpid translation has already been reproduced sans images in Words Without Borders). However, everything is complicated by one major exception—three handwritten lines on the penultimate page of the book: “I did NOT need to do it. I did NOT kill our son. I will NOT die now, my beloved” (note that in the book, each “NOT” is inserted into the relevant sentence in the manner of a correction). This handwriting instantly contracts the distance between text and image, retroactively causing the visual bricolage to move beyond the merely incidental, transforming it instead into a formal analogue of broken childhood innocence—a breach that the story keeps trying, almost right up to the end, to deny.
Each of these Unruly publications presents a semiotically hybrid and richly aporetic narrative. It is worth mentioning, too, that each work is a lavishly produced and haptically satisfying object. But most important is that these publications are testament to Enchanted Lion’s ardent desire to show readers that the picture book form can be far more expansive than what is generally imagined. There are, of course, already many children’s picture books that deserve to be considered great literature on their own terms; but the form can also push into unfamiliar hinterlands that (even if they straddle the domain of childhood) are characterised by the kinds of complex terrain that are more native to adult literature. One hopes not only that Unruly builds on these auspicious beginnings, but also that other publishers start showing an interest in picture books that fall outside of the currently accepted rubrics.
Colin Leemarshall lives in South Korea. He runs the print-on-demand press Erotoplasty Editions, which sells innovative and idiosyncratic books of poetry at cost price. His translation of Lee Sumyeong’s Just Like is forthcoming with Black Ocean
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