Abstracts

Phil Nel
The College of Charleston

Just a Dream?: Chris Van Allsburg and Surrealism at the End of the Twentieth Century

Joseph Stanton’s “The Dreaming Picture Books of Chris Van Allsburg” (Children’s Literature, 1996) has catalogued Magritte’s influence on Chris Van Allsburg, but it does not ask: Why Surrealism? Why now? This paper will propose some answers,
addressing both the role the avant-garde plays in Van Allsburg’s work and what it means to be using the historical avant-garde at the end of the Twentieth Century.

One possible answer is that the apparent non-sequiturs of Van Allsburg’s picture books feel comforting to child readers: just as the internet functions as a text with no fixed point of reference, is itself a narrative always subject to change without notice, so the twists and turns of Van Allsburg’s picture books may seem quite natural to contemporary children. From this perspective, Van Allsburg’s surrealistic imagery does not jar the child into a new awareness of the material world (as was the sometimes-realized goal of the historical avant-garde) but instead acts as a kind of affirmative culture.

Ben’s Dream (1982), for example, delivers the startling contrasts of a suburban American house drifting past St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, but the purpose of this and other juxtapositions remain unclear and, in any case, by story’s end Ben finds himself safely in his neighborhood once again. Another possible answer is that, for kids who have become habituated to the everyday distortions of mass media (television, the internet, movies, video games), Van Allsburg’s historical avant-garde can help to wrest children from any complacent acceptance of a slippery, always already metatextual universe.

Perhaps, as Andreas Huyssen’s reading (1986, 1995) of Peter Bürger (1974) suggests, the emergence of residual elements of the historical avant-garde in postmodern culture can offer a way into the critical potential of the postmodern. For instance, Just a Dream (1990), Van Allsburg’s most overtly politically engaged work, places a child’s bed amidst mountains of trash, atop a smokestack, and stuck in dense traffic -- each juxtaposition intended to press the book’s argument for environmental conservation. And even The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984), Van Allsburg’s most elliptical book, expresses “the hope that [...] children will be inspired by” its illustrations, indicating a desire for the book to have an effect beyond the confines of its covers.

Since, as a critic, I strive to believe in the possibility of materialist criticism, I find myself seeking a middle path between these extremes. Perhaps Van Allsburg’s books remain so compelling to children and adults because their odd juxtapositions seem at once familiar and foreign to the child reader. As the architect Michael Rotondi observed a couple of years ago, “Children today don’t see wholeness and coherence in simple circles and rectangles and squares. Coherence for us means visual and conceptual order, but these kids surfing the net understand moving centers rather than fixed points of reference -- they see a more complex world.” Though he never mentions the despairing criticisms of Fredric Jameson or Jean Baudrillard, Rotondi’s comments suggests that this more complex world need not be dismissed as a depthless postmodern or a procession of simulacra. And perhaps Van Allsburg’s dream-like, surrealist imagery can engender a critical cognition of the material world. If Van Allsburg presents such phenomenon in a way that makes the reader uneasy or poses unanswered questions, then his stories may invite us to keep thinking about the mysteries they introduce long after we have closed the book.