The Plausible Impossible

Recently I received the criticism that my picturebook story, Winston Watson and the Noise Machine, didn’t work because the noise machine wasn’t feasible. Apart from arguing the physics of the noise machine concept (E=mc2, in which sound waves move baffles and thus generate energy), how do I determine if the (in)feasibility of the noise machine is a fatal flaw in the story? Or to look at the issue more broadly, how do picturebooks take their travel-companion readers along when they journey through an imaginary land?

Many picturebooks stay in the land of reality. They have no talking animals and all the things that happen could and might actually happen in our world as we know it. They are slices of real life. Alicia Has a Bad Day by Lisa Jahn-Clough is an example of this kind of book. Nothing mystical happens. The dog licks Alicia’s nose and starts her on her way to having a better day. These books are constrained by the same reality we are. But according to child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, “For a story truly to hold a child’s attention, it must entertain him and arouse his curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination;” (5)

Unlike adults, kids aren’t mired in the world of reality. They readily traipse between fantasy and reality without even stopping to shut the door. Most of the time they know the difference, but they lack the experience to know whether something is plausible or impossible. Keiran Egan, a Simon Fraser University Professor states, “Stories which stay close to the child's everyday real world… are more likely to confuse the child as to what is real and what is not, because children lack the experience to sort what may be real but unusual from what is false but plausible…The value of fantasy is that children recognize very early that it is different from their everyday world.”

But is there any real value in fantasy? In an article on the Children’s Book Council website, fantasy writer Lloyd Alexander said, “Fairy tales and fantasies nourish the imagination.” Though books that nourish the imagination are not necessarily fairy tales or fantasies. Picturebooks that deal with imaginary realities fall into three categories:

Fictional
These stories take place in a universe that operates under a different set of rules, which the reader is typically told right off. Clues include when animals or inanimate objects talk, or the story begins, “Once upon a time.” In Imogene’s Antlers the reader knows right away that the story is not about an ordinary girl on an ordinary day. “On Thursday, when Imogene woke up, she found she had grown antlers.”

Imaginative
These are picturebooks that veer off Reality Road and go trekking through the land of the imagination. These books are more fanciful than magical. Rattletrap Car, by Phyllis Root is a good example of this. The first four spreads seem to be rooted (ha-ha) in reality. Pa and the kids are hot and decide to go to the lake. Then the car gets a flat tire, and Junie uses her beach ball, secured with fudge, to replace the tire.

Obviously, a beach ball can’t be a wheel for a car, yet that doesn’t keep Rattle-Trap Car from being a fun story. Why doesn’t the reader just say, “This can’t happen, so I’m not going to finish the book?” Because by that point, we don’t care. We’re along for the ride—out to have fun. Just before the car gets its flat tire, the text reads, “Clinkety clankety bing bang pop! It’s the picturebook equivalent of Rod Serling announcing, “you are entering the Twilight Zone.” Would this story be better if the solution were more realistic? I don’t think so. It is the far-out, imaginative solution that makes the story satisfying.

Mystical
Chris Van Allsburg is the master of this category. This type of book leave the reader wondering. Wondering things like, was that Jack Frost, or just some stranger? Maybe Abdul Gasazi really did turn the dog Fritz into a duck… Where did that lion on top of the piano in Jumanji come from?

The common denominator in all three approaches is that once “reality” has been established in the book’s fantasy world, the rules don’t change. Imogene wakes sporting a peacock tail. In the world established earlier in the book, that could happen. She didn’t wake up as a peacock; that wasn’t the reality established. The rattletrap car was fixed with real objects that could, by stretching the imagination, substitute for the broken parts. The new parts weren’t magically transformed nor did they appear from nowhere; they were available and they just did what they did. The ball rolled, the surfboard was a flat, sturdy surface, and the steam wheel revolved. And in Chris Van Allsburg’s books, everything seems as normal in the end as it did in the beginning—just like when the television was “returned to your control” at the end of a Twilight Zone episode.

What set up is necessary to make imaginative picturebook work? Do there need to be hints of the fantastic throughout the story? In the Fictional picturebook, the reader knows pretty much from the beginning that the story takes place somewhere other the reality. In the Mystical picturebook, the reader is never quite sure what’s real. That leaves the Imaginative. What is the first clue in The Rattletrap Car that it’s an Imaginative picturebook? It’s not the illustrations—they’re reasonably realistic. It’s the language. It includes lots of made-up words, such as the thermos full of “razzleberry dazzleberry snazzleberry fizz.” Even the title, Rattletrap Car, has an imaginative feel to it. And perhaps it is the very fact that a beach ball can’t substitute for a tire, and even a child knows it, that

Works Cited

Alexander, Lloyd. “On Fantasy.” New York: The Children's Book Council website. From: http://www.cbcbooks.org/html/lloydalexander.html

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Knopf, 1985.

Jahn-Clough, Lisa. Alicia Has a Bad Day. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1994.

Root, Phyllis; illus. by Jill Barton. Rattletrap Car. Cambridge: Candlewick, 2001.

Small, David. Imogene’s Antlers. New York: Crown, 1985.

Van Allsburg, Chris. The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1979.