Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [139]
To have such an experience requires us to have an intense experience where the different features or components of an object are unified into a coherent pattern.5 We can have such intense experiences by looking at Seuss’s artwork, especially his oil paintings.
Take Seuss’s painting, Cat Carnival in West Venice,6 for example. This painting figures a humanoid Seussian cat wearing an absurd and elongated hat on its head. The cat, male I presume, also wears a handsome suit as he leads a lady down a red, blue, and grayish-blue flight of stairs. The stairs descend into darkness. The lady is shaped like a petite, porcelain figurine. She wears what appears to be an elegant dress perfect for a carnival in West Venice; it resembles a nineteenth-century dress with a flowing ruffled train. She also wears what appears to be an elaborate, almost-translucent headpiece on her grayish-blue hair. Thick, vibrant lines take up the entire right side of the painting. Once these elements are seen together, an alluring scene emerges before our eyes. As we look at Seuss’s painting, we are transported from our everyday reality to a magical scene. We witness a handsome cat walking a pretty lady down a flight of stairs, perhaps on their way to a carnival in West Venice.
We can now see how Beardsley’s aesthetic theory would explain why Seuss’s Every Girl Should Have a Unicorn would be art. Just like Cat Carnival in West Venice, this painting transports us from our everyday reality into a surreal scene. We are transfixed by the intersecting, curving lines dancing across a dark background. We are surprised by the nondescript, naked girl riding a unicorn in the lower right-hand corner. Almost hiding there, she playfully rides the unicorn as it walks down a green-blue hill.
We can also use Beardsley’s aesthetic theory to see how Seuss’s children’s books are artworks. Take Seuss’s first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. In this book Seuss’s illustrations convey the story line at least as much as the actual text and lets children who can’t read follow along. His illustrations let the readers’ imaginations roam free as they lose themselves in Dr. Seuss’s world. The surreal scenery, the absurd characters, the almost doodlelike, unfinished quality of its characters—all these features lead the reader to imaginatively fill in the gaps; to let their eyes wander around the page and tie everything together in a flowing narrative. This style remained a prominent feature of Seuss’s children’s picture books from the late thirties well into the sixties.
What also makes Seuss’s children’s books artworks is his efficient and economical use of language, language that is understandable to young children. For example, The Cat in the Hat uses only 237 different words to create “a fast-paced, intriguing tale with vivid characterization, eliciting a high degree of reader participation. . . .”7 This efficient and economical use of language is coupled with rhyming couplets, nonsensical words, and a playful arrangement of words. These stylistic features are further coupled with his tendency to ink his strong lines boldly to offset the often unfinished quality of his illustrations. Taken together, these stylistic features were what enabled Seuss to create books that made it easy for children and adults alike to have aesthetic experiences while reading them. Beardsley’s aesthetic definition of art gives us a means of accounting for how Seuss’s style can invoke aesthetic experiences in his readers.
Beardsley’s aesthetic definition of art seems fine since it allows us to explain why Seuss’s paintings and children’s books are artworks. However, his definition of art entails at least two things that many philosophers of art and art critics are not willing to accept. First, some art critics and philosophers of art are not willing to accept that very young children can