Chapter 6
William Steig: Marionettes and Monsters
Two wooden figures, one painted pink, the other yellow, lie on newspapers in the sun, perhaps to dry. They look like marionettes. The pink one is short and fat, whereas the yellow one is straight and thin.
Each starts to wonder what he is doing there on the newspaper in the sun. When Yellow notices Pink beside him he asks, “Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so,” Pink replies cautiously.
“Do you happen to know what we’re doing here?” Yellow asks. Pink doesn’t know.
“Who are we?” asks Yellow. Pink doesn’t know that either. “Someone must have made us,” Pink surmises.
Yellow produces all sorts of difficulties with Pink’s hypothesis and himself concludes, “We’re an accident, somehow or other we just happened.”
Pink starts laughing. “You mean these arms I can move this way and that,” he asks derisively, “this head I can turn in any direction, this breathing nose, these walking feet, all of this just happened, by some kind of fluke? That’s preposterous!”
Yellow is unmoved. He admonishes his companion to stop and reflect. “With enough time,” he says, “a thousand, a million, maybe two and a half million years, lots of unusual things could happen. Why not us?”
Patiently Pink takes up one feature of their construction after another. In each case he challenges Yellow to suggest how that feature could have been the result of an accident. For each feature Pink mentions, Yellow tries to say how that feature could indeed have been the result of an accident.
Finally a mustachioed man shambles up, examines Pink and Yellow, and announces, with obvious satisfaction, “Nice and dry.” As the man saunters off with Pink and Yellow tucked under his arm Yellow whispers in Pink’s ear, “Why is this guy?.”
Pink doesn’t know.
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In the Fifth Century BCE, Empedocles speculated that animals and human beings could have been the accidental concatenations of bits of matter, concatenations that just happened to function well as units. Empedocles even developed a story according to which a cosmic force of attraction, Love, gradually collected these bits together like clumps of iron filings influenced by a magnet. First there were arms, legs, heads, and torsos, and then these units came together into configurations, some of which functioned well as new, larger units, and others of which were simply disfunctional monstrosities – including, as Aristotle reports, a man-faced ox.
The accidentally combined units that functioned well, according to Empedocles, survived. The others died. The story strikes us today as very Darwinian, except that Empedocles had no genetic theory to explain how a chance concatenation of bits and parts that happened to function well as a whole could reproduce itself, so that the type would survive.
Plato, with his picture of the Master Craftsman creating the world and all its inhabitants according to eternal blueprints, was Pink to Empedocles’s Yellow. Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, was at least Pinkish, and also a clear opponent of Yellow.
The debate continues, right down to the present day. David Hume and Charles Darwin refined the terms of the discussion, and recent genetic theory, including the discovery of DNA and not the Human Genome project have made it more sophisticated still. But none of these advances has entirely settled the issue between Yellow and Pink.
In William Steig’s story, Yellow and Pink (New York: Farrar, Straus and Girous, 1984), the mustachioed man at the end seems to vindicate Pink, even though, not recognizing his maker, Pink doesn’t realize he has been vindicated. But is Steig’s story also the story of our world? Or does our story have a different ending? And how can we find out? Can we find out?
Yellow and Pink is a gem. Now a question, comment, or descriptive detail in it is wasted. And the illustrations in it, also by Steig, do much more than illustrate the story; they embody it. No one who has seen the book will forget the poignant figures, or their profoundly simply tale.
Clearly the story is philosophical. It also invites a discussion of science, even though it is not exactly a scientific story. Who is meant to be the audience?
No doubt that question is as tricky and intriguing as the story’s own question, “Who are we?” Perhaps William Steig would say he wrote the story for himself. And perhaps he did. For myself, I would say that his story is as much for the child philosopher in every reflective adult as it is for the aspiring scientist and incipient philosopher and theoloogian in every curious child.
William Steig has, of course, written many wonderful children’s stories. But, having started this chapter with his Yellow and Pink I am going to go on and discuss two more stories that might be placed under the heading, ‘philosophical theology.’ In selecting these stories from Steig’s vast output, I do not mean to suggest that philosophical theology his main interest, or even that, among the children’s stories of his that are philosophical, the ones that are broadly theological are the best. I don’t know that that is true. I do mean to suggest, however, that among children’s stories that are in some broad sense theological as well as philosophical, these Steig stories can hardly be bettered.
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Let’s turn now to Shrek! (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990).
Shrek is an ugly, human-like creature. He is revoltingly ugly. Although his mother and his father are also very ugly, Shrek is even uglier than the two of them put together. In addition to being quintessentially ugly, Shrek is repulsive in other ways, too. For example, he can spit a flame a full ninety-nine yards in front of him; he can also vent smoke from each of his two ears.
“Hissing things over” one day, Shrek’s parents decide that Shrek should be kicked out of his home and sent out into the world to fend for himself. So they do just that. As Shrek goes out into the world it delights him to see the flowers bend aside and the trees lean away to let him go by. There is something powerful about being super-repulsive.
In the woods Shrek encounters a very ugly witch who is busy boiling bats in turpentine and turtle juice. She sings as she stirs her big pot of smelly stew. “What a lovely stench!” remarks Shrek gleefully. The very sight of Shrek in all his ugliness makes the witch woozy. When she recovers from her wooziness, she agrees to tell Shrek’s fortune in exchange for a few of his “rare lice.” In doggerel verse the witch tells Shrek that a donkey will take him to a knight whom he will subdue; then he will meet and marry a princess even uglier than he is.
Fired up with the thought of meeting his “fairy princess,” Shrek happily sets out on a mission to find her. Along the way he encounters a poor peasant, whose lunch he takes; he warms the lunch in the laser-like glare of his eyes and then eats it for his dinner. Some time later Lightening and Thunder catch sight of Shrek and try to frighten him. But he just gobbles up Lightning’s fiercest bolt and belches out smoke in the way other people might burp after a heavy meal. On the edge of the next woods Shek comes upon a warning sign, which threatens harm to anyone who ventures into the woods. Shrek swaggers right past the sign. A little way into the woods he does, in fact, encounter a dragon, which he promptly subdues.
Next, Shrek encounters the promised donkey, to whom he recites the magic words the witch had told him to use. The donkey carries him to the castle, where he meets the knight he has been told about, and subdues him. In triumph he crosses the drawbridge and enters the castle.
Once inside the castle Shrek finds himself in a hall of mirrors. His frightful face is multiplied so many times that even he is frightened. But when he starts to run, so do all his reflections. On recognizing that it is just himself he sees in the many mirrors, Shrek goes on into the throne room, where he meets the most stunningly ugly princess on the surface of the planet. Shrek and the ugly princess fall completely in love with each other and decide to get married as soon as possible.
Here the story ends. Shrek and his unbelievably ugly princess get married and live horribly ever after, “scaring the socks off all who fall afoul of them.”
* * *
We can hardly expect that Shrek will be every child’s favorite story. Some children., we can be sure, will be “grossed out” by Shrek’s revolting face, head, and claw-like hands. But some children will delight in Shrek’s incredible ugliness and will applaud his vulgar behavior. Why?
No doubt Shrek offers at least a temporary respite from the oppressive demands adults in our society lay upon children, demands to look clean and beautiful and to act in ways that adults find attractive. In laughing at what makes their parents and teachers squeamish and uncomfortable, children can strike a blow for their own liberation.
Yet there seems to be more to this story than child liberation. Shrek (Schreck means ‘fright’ in German and Yiddish) raises an important question about whether there can be anything genuinely attractive, even beautiful, that is also extremely ugly.
In a way the answer to that question seems obviously to be ‘No.’ The beautiful and the ugly are opposites. Nothing, it seems, could be both beautiful and ugly, or even ugly and attractive – at least not in the same respect.
Yet consider the Flemish painter, Hieronymous Bosch. His painting, The Temptation of St. Anthony, is full of loathsome creatures. But the painting is an artistic masterpiece. It is nightmarishly beautiful and repulsively attractive.
The idea that art aims simply at the beautiful is, despite its seemingly tautological certainty, false. I once saw an art show in Vienna called “The Magic of Medusa” made up entirely of grotesquerie. It included Western art of all periods – from ancient depictions of the writhing snakes of Medusa through revolting Renaissance drawings of human anatomy in gruesome detail, to modern “masterpieces” of surrealism. It was a show devoted to the beauty of ugliness.
At Halloween many children are allowed to indulge their own fascination with the grotesque and the ugly. Their revolting masks and disgusting costumes are indulged, no doubt, partly because their parents realize that Halloween comes but once a year. But why not actually discuss with children the way some of them (and some of us!) become fascinated with ugliness? One can hardly imagine a better vehicle for that discussion than William Steig’s Shrek, which, incidentally, is attractively illustrated in revolting detail by the artist/author.
There are other important thoughts worth exploring that are suggested by Shrek! One of them is that ugliness breeds ugliness and ugliness is attracted by ugliness. It is made to seem fitting that a disturbingly ugly man will be attracted to, and will actually marry, a disturbingly ugly woman. Are we meant to get the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
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William Steig, Rotten Island, Jaffrey, NH: Godine, 1992.
Once upon a time, there was a very unbeautiful, very rocky, and thoroughly repulsive island. The island’s volcanoes, like those of other islands, belched up fire and smoke and spewed out hot lava. In addition, these volcanoes also spat out poison arrows and two-headed toads. To be sure, there were actually plants on the island; but they were twisted and thorny plants and they never produced any flowers at all. At night the whole island froze over and turned to ice. Each morning it had to thaw out all over again.
Set in a boiling sea of menacing and disgusting sea-creatures, this rotten island made itself home to a great array of ugly monsters of every deformity and every threatening appendage imaginable. Every creature on the island was quintessentially ugly in its own special way. All these creatures adored their own ugliness and they envied the ugliness of any creature that seemed uglier than they. Nothing amused them so much as to see a fellow creature in great pain. Indeed, this rotten island was the very epitome of ugly creatures who behave in ways that match their ugly appearance.
One day, quite unexpectedly, a beautiful flower appeared on this rotten island. This flower frightened and repulsed the island’s hideous and evil inhabitants. They found it scary and upsetting. It drove them to a destructive anger and to warfare among themselves. In this way a great civil way developed in which the rotten island’s hideous creatures destroyed each other in one gigantic conflagration. That conflagration was followed by a deluge of rain and then, finally, by gentle showers. At dawn, after the rain had ended, the Rotten Island was no longer rotten. Instead, it was now ravishingly beautiful — a paradise of gorgeous flowers and plants, crowned by an overarching rainbow. Soon birds came to this new island paradise. And there the story ends.
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Like William Steig’s Shrek! (also recently discussed in this column) Rotten Island explores the opposition between Beauty and Ugliness, but in a different way. Shrek! calls into question conventional assumptions about the opposition between beauty and ugliness and forces us to reconsider what we consider beautiful, and why. It reminds us, to our conceptual discomfort, that some of the world’s great art depicts grotesquerie. (Think of the revolting scenes portrayed by Hieronymous Bosch.). Shrek! should help us think about what makes Halloween costumes and horror movies attractive to us, and perhaps especially to our children..
By contrast, Rotten Island assumes that our distinction between the beautiful and the ugly is at least reasonably well in place. It invites us to ask whether Plato and the great tradition that followed him is right in supposing that the beautiful is the enemy of evil and the cause of the good (see, for example, Plato’s dialogue, Hippias Major, at 296a) – whether perhaps the beautiful is even the very same thing as the good (see, for example the Plato’s dialogue, Symposium, at 201c).
Steig’s story is a fable. But it is also a little like the myths Plato puts in his dialogues to help make his philosophical points. Steig’s story seems to be meant to help us see some cosmic truth. It encourages us to reflect on the great battle in the world between Good and Evil and perhaps to recognize the role beauty can and does play in this battle.
Many people today are certainly much more skeptical about identifying beauty in the world than Plato was. They are likely to be even more skeptical about the idea that beauty could be, like the flower in Steig’s story, a transforming force for good. And yet the idea is not totally ridiculous.
It can be instructive to ask the children around you, whether in your family or the classroom, if they can think of something that might be a little like a flower transforming a hideous and strife-plagued island into a beautiful and peaceful one. One thing that might come to their minds is the urban jungle in which so many people live today, even people in the most prosperous nations. Is it possible that planting a flower garden in a run-down housing project might affect, not only the appearance of the area, but even the way people who live there treat each other? Might beauty in a classroom, or an office, or a bus station, have any effect on the people who study or work there, and on the way they think of themselves and treat those around them?
Steig’s story might thus prod us to take some practical action to introduce beauty into an environment that is now utterly ugly. But it may also prod us to reflect a little on the metaphysical and cosmological status of beauty. Is beauty merely a subjective and ephemeral response, something culturally induced in human beings and fixed in birds and bees only by the natural selection of biological evolution? Or is there something really out there, something, the apprehension of which may indeed be conditioned by our human culture and by the natural selection of birds and bees, but something that ideally moves us all toward the good and against evil? That is a question well worth asking, whatever our best effort at answering it turns out to be.