DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS Death On The Cover: A Dialogic Search For The Depictions Of Death On The Covers Of 41 Picture Books About Death And Dying Csaba Osvath University of South Florida 1 DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS Death On The Cover: A Dialogic Search For The Depictions Of Death On The Covers Of 41 Picture Books About Death And Dying Introduction “Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere.” (Baruch Spinoza) Investigating the artistic representations of death on the covers of selected children’s picture books might be viewed as a futile or anemic academic exercise; a sort of misguided and forced project, engendered by a hurried decision and a desperate desire to meet certain curricular requirements. My added resentment toward, or perhaps my periodic abandonment of this project was due to a life circumstance that brought the reality of decay into a tangible, unavoidable closeness. The building that houses the life of my family’s embodied existence started to collapse, due to structural decay. This material death, expanding under the painted covers of our exterior walls of our home, no unlike a sudden emergency call, had pushed me away from a deskbound analysis of picture books to fight the real and really dreadful prognoses of a possible calamity. However, I soon discovered that facing death or decay through a privileged place of aliveness, armed with viable tools is never futile. Thus, I am encouraged by Spinoza’s advice, as I am staring down the signs of death on our construction site, as well as the artistic depictions of death on the printed pages, stating that this endeavor calls for, “not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.” 2 DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS Purpose As such, the primary purpose of this study is to examine and analyze the cover art of 41 picture books in order to understand how death is portrayed/represented through visual or linguistic expressions. The content analysis of cover art is guided by Bakhtin’s dialogism, and Rosenblatt’s transactional theory and aesthetic reading. Both Bakhtin’s dialogism and Rosenblatts’ transactional theory are viable tools to convey meaning as I interact/engage with the selected book covers. Questions 1. In what ways do artists (authors/illustrators) use text and pictures to express or convey death? 2. Through a dialogic engagement with the book covers only, what meaning can arise related to death as a phenomena and social construct? Where Is Death? This aforementioned question was once proposed to my great grandmother, as we visited the graveside of my great grandfather, who I never had a chance to know. I can still recall the vibrant yellow patch of dandelions on the hillside cemetery, the cacophony of nature’s symphony devoid of industrial sounds, and the dancing light on the water that seemed playful in the tiny creek we crossed on a crackling, moss covered wooden bridge. But most clearly, I remember the answer from my great grandmother, who quietly, but with great certainty said to me, “Csabikám, death is everywhere.” Her answer shocked me, because everything around us was a joyful proclamaiton and empirical truth about life. 3 DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS Only the headstones seemed to reveal something about death, but back then, as a young boy, I did not comprehend the cold symbols and signifiyers carved into the marble to indicate the reality of death or the hopes expressed through religious symbolism. Later in life, I realized that I was like Carlos Castaneda, who needed a shaman like Don Juan to understand the truth, spoken by my great grandmother. Kornfield (2000) recalls how Don Juan reorients Castaneda’s relationship toward death and tells him to approach death as a great advisor. He writes, Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, at an arm's length. It has always been watching you. It always will until the day it taps you. The thing to do when you're impatient is... to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just catch the feeling that your companion is there watching you. (Kornfield, 2000, p. 40) Similarly, Ernest (2007) also calls for a conscious cultivation of our awareness of death as a necessary tool to endure or even to thrive in the presence of terror and continuous decay. As members of the human race, our existence contains the binaries of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, as well as the reality of life and death. Consequently, we are challenged to explore, to investigate, and to honor both aspects of the limitations of life. It is also important to state that death is not only a universal human condition, but also social construct, when it is investigated or approached as a concept (Ernest, 2007; Clement, 2013). Children’s literature provides a complex set of tools as well as an interactive space to investigate death as a phenomenon and to engage with it as a social construct. 4 DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS Death, Children, And Children’s Literature Although death is often a suppressed or even tabooed conversation topic in the context of early childhood education, it is undeniable that children are not exempt from the experience or encounters with death and dying. Children too may lose family members, friends, pets, or through illness undergo the process of dying. The reality of death “has a tremendous impact on children,” and children’s grief reactions “dependent on the child’s sociocultural context and individual development” (Wiesman, 2012, p. 2). According to Clement (2013) the perception of death follows certain maturational patterns linked to aging. Studies show that before the age of five, most children perceive death as a kind of sleep, that is temporary or reversible, or an illness from which the patient can recover (Barrett and Bhene, 2005; Clement, 2013; Corr, Clyde, Nabe & Corr, 1997). Children under the age of five usually struggle to grasp universal phenomena, such as death, and when they encounter death (e.g., a loss of a pet, or a loss of a family member, etc.) their emotional/physical response is closer to sympathy than active empathy, and their immediate response to grief is often somatic, like a stomachache or headache. However, children between the ages of five and eight “develop more conscious forms of empathy” as a result of a psychological differentiation from their identity/ego and the lives of others (Clement, 2013, p. 4). In later years, Clement (2013) suggests that before the age of ten, “most children have also made the transition to seeing death as permanent, irreversible, inevitable, and universal, a state from which no one is immune” (p. 4). During this period “children often channel their fear of death through a personification of death as a shadowy figure, a skeleton, or a clown” (Clement, 2013, p. 4). Through aging, education, and life experiences, children’s understanding of death will deepen and become more accurate, 5 DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS however, misconceptions, unrealistic beliefs, and fears will often surface as part of their coping mechanism (Poling & Hupp, 2008; Lazar & Torney-Purta, 1991; Speece & Brent, 1984; Bostico & Thompson, 2005). According to Wiesman (2012), picture books are important tools to introduce or to teach children about death, because picture books “can provide a way to address and support children as they experience trauma and begin to understand the emotions surrounding their grief” (p. 11-12). It is also necessary here to define and differentiate picture books from other forms of literature, because in picture books “meaning is conveyed in both pictures and words” (Wiesman, 2012, p. 4). Thus in a picture book, text and illustrations are equally important in the presentation and understanding of the story (Jalongo, 2004). The topic of death in children’s literature has its own, complex history. According to Clement (2013) in the earliest stories, specifically written for children, death was often emphasized or presented as something to fear, “the ultimate punishment for rebellious bad behavior or the well-earned reward for servile good behavior” (p. 2). Clement also adds that early illustrations are “littered with the small corpses of young people who have suffered gruesome ends” (p. 2). Hollindale and Sutherland (1995) notice an important shift in the portrayal of death in children’s literature during the late nineteenth century. Their analysis show that death often served as a kind of mechanism “to dispose of inconvenient parents,” thus, the child could gain independence and a certain kind of freedom to achieve his or hear own adulthood (p. 259). Before the 70s and 80s, especially in Western cultures, the topic of death was never a prominent topic or theme in children’s literature. But during the 70s and 6 DEATH, COVER ART, AND PICTURE BOOKS 80s “publishers began to take chances with children’s books that focused on the traditionally taboo subject of death as a physical reality and philosophical concept” (Clement, 2013, p. 2). Still if anyone surveys the contemporary market of picture books, the relatively small number of death related literature is a clear indication how we deal with this topic as a culture. Gutiérrez, Miller, Rosengren, and Schein (2014) in their recent article reveal that even when death is addressed to a younger audience in a form of a picture book, “most [stories] involved human or animal characters with whom children could easily identify and most represented death as an emotional experience…evoking sadness and other experiences” (p.