Abstract
While touch is the first sense to develop in the fetus, it has often been overlooked as the effective base of aesthetics and poetics in baby books. Likewise, while haptic prosody is a concept deployed in discussions of advanced poetic form, it generally only signifies touch rather than literally inviting it. The rhythm and theme of many baby books, in contrast, actively encourage (and even demand) touch—and this touch is not incidental to the books’ prosody but a haptic means of realizing the biological realities on which poetic rhythm is arguably founded: the tension and release of the heartbeat and the breath. Both of these phenomena are uniquely tangible to the unborn child and are organized and elaborated in the haptic prosody of the baby book. If, as Derek Attridge has written, it is not possible “to discuss [poetic] rhythm without relating it to the movements of the human body,” baby book prosody is of particular interest, given its themes and rubrics that dictate and imply human movement and touch. This article offers an early-stage analysis of surprisingly concretized touch-based prosody in a wide range of popular board books, soft books, and touch-and-feel books. While not unique to baby books, this tactile focus is distinct from the more virtuosic prosody of later-childhood picture books where rhythm functions in the abstract. Metered baby books assume a prior rhythmic competence in the baby, something already present which they intend to arrange and refine—per Stephen Blackwood’s balancing “patterns in sense experience . . . [as] deep, innate structures” with the essentiality of aesthetic intervention and development. They also offer a vision of prosody, not as an arbitrary set of rules but as an organization of something endogenous to human biology. Far from exercises in affirming uniqueness or autonomy/defiance, these books instead induct the child into the rules-based environment of formal poetic prosody as well as the rule-breaking inherent in this prosody. In so doing, they provide innovative methods to not only better understand baby lit through poetic theory, but also to showcase the tremendous potential of baby lit to better understand the haptic origins of poetic rhythm at all levels.
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Notes
It is worth considering the relationship that these three types of touch have to the similar tripartite structure posited by iconotext theory, first proposed by Kristin Hallberg and widely employed within picturebook scholarship since. Iconotext theory suggests that the image can work in relation to the verbal text in terms of correspondence, complementarity, or contradiction. Haptic prosody texts add the complication of touch to the visual/verbal binary of iconotext theory, and consequently have the potential to both complement and unsettle a number of longstanding applications of iconotext picturebook scholarship. For further reading on iconotext theory, see Kristin Hallberg, (1982) Litteraturvetenskapen och Bilderboksforskningen, Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap, 3, 163–168; and Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, How Picturebooks Work (2001), New York: Garland.
In this article, when quoting baby books, we follow Derek Attridge in using the language of dolnik and “beat prosody” to explain the experience of pulsing beats in verse only partially or unsatisfactorily accounted for in accentual-syllabic scansion. “B” signifies a beat and “[B]” signifies an implied beat. When citing poems for which an accentual-syllabic reading is conventional or that display an obvious accentual-syllabic stress, we deploy traditional foot-based notation: “/” signifying a stress, “x” signifying an unstress. For more on the specific application of dolnik to children’s verse, see Attridge (2018), Rhythm: Children’s Poetry and the Dolnik. In Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and Louise Joy (Eds.), The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: The Study of Children’s Verse in English (pp. 33-46). London: Routledge.
The line breaks and stanza structures for verse in baby books are themselves an interesting object of study, as they are many times design-driven decisions with the book in mind more than the prosody. While sometimes these unconventional divisions are quite intentional (as in the case of the single line next to the touch-and-feel patch in Good Morning, Good Night!), other times their logic appears to range from functional to aleatory. Although the verse in Never Touch a Dragon! offers a conventional four-beat dolnik structure, it develops across six lines rather than the expected two or four. In highlighting the language first (and the poetry second), a prominent font size is employed allowing the words to cover the majority of the page, irrespective of conventional line breaks (to say nothing of conventional capitalization).
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Carl F. Miller, is Associate Professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University, where teaches courses in children’s literature, comparative literature, Anglophone literature, and critical theory. He has recently published work on Latin translation in children’s literature, translation pedagogy for youth literature, and the history of the snowman in children’s culture.
R. Eric Tippin, is Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Hesston College. He has published on the essay, the aphorism, prose style, and other subjects in the long nineteenth century.
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Miller, C.F., Tippin, R.E. Haptic Prosody and the Aesthetics of Baby Books. Child Lit Educ 54, 294–311 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-023-09560-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-023-09560-w