Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [142]
So, until the community of children’s literature writers, critics, and librarians recognized his style of writing and illustrating children’s books as permissible, Seuss was not recognized as a publishable children’s book writer. It probably did not hurt that Seuss’s illustrations resembled impressionist and surrealist paintings that had become legitimate artistic styles in the United States during the decade or so prior to the publication of his first children’s book. It also didn’t hurt that his style integrated elements associated with the cartoons and parodies popular during the twenties and thirties. After all, he began his artistic career as a satirist and cartoonist, beginning with his work for his Dartmouth College humor magazine, the Jack-o-lantern, and later for several magazines including Judge, Life, and Liberty Magazine. It would’ve been natural for him to retain those features of parodies that kept readers’ attention—for example, mocking people by imitating their mannerisms in a humorous fashion. And this style was most prominent in his political cartoons and parodies, especially ones intended to convince people of the foolishness of the U.S. isolationist policies prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor and later to promote the U.S. war effort during World War II, published in PM from January 1941 until June 1942.
Yet his artistic style forecloses the possibility that any of his artworks could ever fit the classic model of artworks. That is to say, none of his artworks were truly beautiful.14 Take the hundreds of fictional characters Seuss drew: the Zooks, the Zax, Yertle the Turtle, the Grinch, the Sneetches, Gertrude McFuzz, and so forth. Some of them might have been cute, but none of them were beautiful if what we mean by beauty is either (1) the aesthetic pleasure we experience by appreciating an elegant design or (2) the aesthetic property possessed by an object that evokes disinterested pleasure in us. And even when Seuss sought to draw alluring, beautiful human bodies, for example, the seven naked protagonists in his early book for an adult audience, The Seven Lady Godivas, he was unsuccessful. Apart from the curvatures meant to represent a woman’s breasts and hips, their bodies were as neutered and sexless as any of his nonhuman fictional characters.
Danto’s philosophy of art reminds us that sometimes when someone creates an object determines whether that object can be a work of art. In Seuss’s case, if he had attempted to write his children’s books prior to the thirties, his books probably wouldn’t have been considered art. They would have not lived up to the expectations, say, of middle-class European American parents living in the United States during the 1820s. These parents would have expected children’s stories to teach their children moral lessons. These parents would have expected children’s book authors to be moral tutors to their children, not playful compatriots. In other words, reading children’s stories would have primarily been exercises in moral education.
This approach to writing children’s stories was never Seuss’s approach to writing children’s books, however. When he began writing children’s books, he responded to editors who rejected And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street for lack of a clear moral message by saying to his wife: “What’s wrong with kids having fun reading without being preached at?”15 And even when Seuss wrote polemical books, he privileged exercising children’s imaginations over giving them clear-cut moral lessons.16 And we all should be thankful that in the late thirties