Babar and the Photographers
BABAR AND THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
In a recent New Yorker Arts & Letters piece, writer Adam Gopnik—one of our most astute and insightful cross-Atlantic writers—offers up a penetrating analysis of, surprisingly enough, Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar stories. What began as an improvised tale told by de Brunhoff to his children during the summer of 1930, has lasted throughout the decades, spawning an industry and devotion that is both admirable and impressive. When Jean died at the untimely age of 37, his son Laurent was twelve; he later went on to pick up the paintbrush and to continue in his father’s footsteps—and artistic style—publishing new Babar titles, almost to this day.
The occasion for Gopnik’s brief essay is an exhibition that is presently up at the Morgan Library & Museum, and which features early drafts, sketches and watercolors for the first draft of the book. It’s a rare chance to see work that has had a wide-ranging cultural impact for several generations; I plan to see the show at the end of the month on a visit to the city.
Early in the essay, Gopnik writes, “…the Babar books are more than the sum of their lines. By now, of course, a controversial literature is possible about anything, and yet to discover that there is a controversial literature about Babar is a little shocking.” “The controversial literature,” Gopnik observes, “isn’t trivial: it touches on questions that are real and enduring,” including imperialism, it’s attendant overlay of racial superiority, and the role of imagery in perpetuating colonization, namely French colonization. The argument is quite easy to follow: the naked elephants of the Babar stories are a symbol of the African natives, who upon arrival in the city—Paris, or any French colonial town—are dressed up, taught to walk upright and act civilly, then sent back home to become the administrative (and moral) superiors of their fellow-kind.
Gopnik lays out these arguments readily enough, without holding back their ugly connotations, only to deftly clear the table of them away a couple of paragraphs later. “Those who would burn ‘Babar’ miss the true subject of the books. The de Brunhoff’s saga is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination.” It is presented as comedy, for one—an elephant riding an elevator, or dressed in a green suit is ridiculous in the true sense of the word—and it is self-conscious—aware of itself—for another. In other words, there is no hidden agenda lurking somewhere in the fanciful illustrations.
I think that Gopnik is justified in his dismissal of the positions and complaints of the “literature of controversy” surrounding Babar. But more importantly, for me, by dismissing the arguments quickly, he avoids getting bogged down in a spat and opens up the discussion to a far more interesting notion: how the worldview of Babar—for indeed there is one, just not the one that the controversialists think—differs from other children’s stories, namely English stories featuring London, and those which take New York for their home.
“So, ‘a certain idea of France,’ in de Gaulle’s phrase, is at the heart of the appeal of the Babar books,” Gopnik asserts. “What is that idea, and how does it differ from our idea of England or America?” Gopnik goes on to vigorously state the fundamental structure of children’s literature:
“All children’s books take as their subject disorder and order and their proper relation, beginning in order and ending there, but with disorder given its due. In London, in children’s books, life is too orderly and one longs for the vitality of the wold; in Paris, order is an achievement, hard won against the natural chaos and cruelty of adult life; in New York, we begin most stories in an indifferent city and the child has to create a kind of order within it. Each scheme reflects a history: the English vision being a natural consequence of a peaceful nation with a reformist history and in search of adventure; the French of a troubled nation with a violent history in search of peace; and the American of an individualistic and sporadically violent country with a strong ethos of family isolation and improvised rules.”
At this point, I’ll take Gopnik’s word for it; I’m not interested in rebuking or adding to his reading of history and the applications he sees in not-only the Babar series, but also the Madeline series, the Mary Poppins stories, and others like “Peter Pan,” “The Wind in the Willows,” “The Hobbit,” “The House on East 88th Street,” “Stuart Little,” and “Harriett the Spy.”
IDENTIFYING UNDERLYING STRUCTURES
What I am interested in, obviously, is how all of this applies to photography and photobooks. I want to consider the point Gopnik raises regarding the implicit embedding of a worldview, something that all creators of artistic works engage in, regardless of whether it is a self-conscious act or not.
But what is meant by “worldview” in this statement? A good place to start may be that the “world” implied is synonymous with “the human reality” and/or man’s natural condition; one’s view—one’s deeply seated beliefs—of this “world” is what’s up for discussion. “What is man?” is the quickest summary.
To define a natural human state involves answering a flurry of questions that are traditionally cosmological (and/or religious) in scope. For instance, is reality limited to the physical realm? Are there dimensions that transcend the physical? Is the soul an indivisible entity, and therefore everlasting, or is it an archaic notion that science has satisfactorily dispensed with? Is there a God—a First Cause, a Primal Will, a Divine Reality—or is life here on earth purely guided by complex systems of chance, or some combination of the two? What is the purpose of life and what actions comprise a life well-lived? What is the ideal social structure for the organization of humanity?
The answers to any of these questions is what constitutes one’s worldview and will immediately affect one’s actions in regards to fellow humans as well as to the natural world (and the search for order that Gopnik places at the core of children’s books).
It goes without saying that it will also heavily influence how we view current events around our increasingly shrinking globe. It almost goes without saying that embedded within our actions and choices lie our views on the world, whether we are conscious of them or not.
Essayists, novelists, and children’s book writers are perhaps more aware of their positions and how that influences and affects their work than many photographers are, most probably because of the philosophical baggage that photographers carry around with them. The notion that a photograph depicts ‘reality’ or anything more than a partial ‘truth,’ despite having been proven to the contrary by artists and scientists alike for much of the last 30 years, refuses to loosen its grip on many photographers and artists.
Photographs are undoubtedly potent, and when they depict events unfolding before one’s eyes, it is impossible to not assign a level of “truth” to them. But images, just like individuals, inevitably serve larger concepts, whether the patron is the photographer him/herself, or a paying client who insists that a certain viewpoint be upheld and conveyed. The photograph cannot help but carry the fingerprint of its maker, a maker who has views about the state of the world, and why people do things the way they do, or treat each other the way they do. Attempting to determine causes and effects has a way of creeping into the most objective of observers. Determinations of causes, however, enters into the realm of the interpretation of observable effects, and this is the precise point at which one’s worldview guides the interpretation.
How overt or restrained those views are, and whether they come across in one’s work is another question entirely, which is what makes Gopnik’s reading of French, English and American children’s stories all that more insightful. He has uncovered subtleties which slip past the majority of us.
to be continued…