Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon 4 (of 4)

The lone poet in nature is traditional and Harold’s isolation does not feel unnatural until, searching for his bedroom window, he draws a city full of windows. Harold, concerned twice about getting lost (its why he drew the path he strayed from, and why his forest had a single tree), cannot find his way home. The city is the only thing in the book that overwhelms the frame of the page, and a city without people cannot help but recall, at least for older readers, a post-apocalyptic landscape. The dragon was unnatural and fantastic (and its seamless incorporation further emphasizes that in the mind there is no distinction between the internalization of reality and the imagination); the moose and porcupine were at most somewhat peculiar but cute animals made by a child’s scrawl. Harold’s policeman, however, is disturbing (something I have felt since I was a child), partly because it is the figure Harold is most unable to render even in a cute cartoon form: he is a mockery of a human form, a scarecrow with spikes for fingers. The disturbing aspect of the policeman is emphasized because while we may have assumed that Harold’s animals moved to eat the picnic leftovers (though the moose has not moved from Harold’s initial lines on the earlier page, the still image keeps this ambiguous) – though we may have assumed that were this a cartoon we would see Harold’s figures come to life – it is sadly clear that his policeman is completely stationary and dumb: he is the only of Harold’s “creatures” we see fully drawn on more than one page, identical with his arm pointing on both. Harold’s journey – which has taken him from his thought and the blank page, to field, forest, ocean, beach, and mountain has led us past an empty house to an empty city and the mute and paralyzed figure of the Law that would impress any psychoanalyst. This moment is very much the culmination of the journey, though not of the book, as the bleak moment causes Harold to wish more firmly for home, and to remember the way there.

The final pages give us a triumph of solipsism (though the silence of the Law is already pretty good): Harold remembers his window is the one that frames the moon, draws it and the room around it, and goes to sleep. He anchors his room around a completely arbitrary point, one he established on the second page and which has been on every page since. His mental anchor is the changing, shifting source of reflected secondary light – the moon of the generous night of Whitman, Stevens and Ashbery. And it is also, at the end of an extremely internal story, that we find an additional level of internalization as for the first time Harold draws himself inside an enclosure: his discovery -- his creation -- of the right window is not simply finding the one with the moon in it, but finding himself of the other side of that window (the city landscape was especially imposing in part because the cold regular faces of the buildings had no openings).

Harold and the Purple Crayon is a child's version of Romantic poetry, raising all the issues that haunt every poet after Wordsworth: Wallace Stevens for Beginners.

(Postscript: I think I may have made a mistake breaking this discussion into four parts; if you felt at all lost, and are interested, go back and read parts one through four in order.)

Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon 3

Harold also does not know what it is he will create – though the landscape and everything in it is his own mental space he has the capacity to be surprised by his work. His tree “turns out to be” an apple tree, and he is frightened by his own dragon; he draws an ocean without realizing it and falls in. His imagination is both his, and something external (as "genius," in the ancient world, was a kind of daemon who followed us around).

This internal landscape is also one in which time does not exist: Harold decides what time it is when he creates the moon (I find it necessary to remind myself that the entire story takes place at night: even with the moon it is easy to forget that this is a nocturnal journey, as the blank page invokes a bright landscape). This is especially noticeable when Harold creates the apple tree: he creates the dragon to guard the tree to protect the apples from being destroyed before they ripen and become red, but the only reference to color (other than purple) in the story, along with the fact that all the images besides Harold are purple, only serves to emphasize that the apples will never get red. With its single tree this timeless Eden (Harold’s parents are never referenced in the narrative) breaks the second of Stevens’s commandments in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (following “It must be abstract” and “It must give pleasure”) that, “It must change.” Change is impossible here.

On an additional Genesis note, Harold goes looking for a hill to see where he is, but realizing that the higher he is the farther he can see decides to “make the hill into a mountain.” “Making a [mole]hill out of a mountain” is an expression that means to make a big deal out of something small (as I am doing here), but is most often associated by the parallel hyperbole “making something out of nothing” which is exactly what happens in Harold’s narrative.

Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon 2

Harold and the Purple Crayon has only four elements: the blank page (which finds contemporary analogues in some images from Grant Morrson’s JLA and Animal Man, and the white room in The Matrix), Harold (drawn in black and white – clearly on a separate ontological level from his drawings), his purple crayon and the things he draws with it, and the text of the story. Harold and the text are colored with the same faded black, suggesting they are linked, so Harold and his Crayon are really the only elements of the story – no parents, no other people or animals, not even a landscape; the fact that Harold draws everything he interacts with makes him a curiously isolated: Harold’s world is as populated as the average Wallace Stevens’s lyric, in which the self, rather than the outside world, is the only subject.

Harold Bloom writes: “’what the solipsist means is right,’ a gnomic Wittgenstein truth, is in traditional American terms the Emersonian admonition ‘Build therefore your own world,’ which in turn is founded on the central Emersonian motto ‘what we are, that only can we see.’” This is the world of Harold and his crayon. The first image of the story is a page spread with crayon scribbles on the first page that connect to Harold and his crayon on the second; the caption that tells us that “after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight”: the crayon scrawls represent Harold thinking it over, establishing the crayon’s creations as mental objects, letting us know the journey home we are reading takes place in a fully internal landscape, populated only with creations of thought.

The poetic analogue to Einstein’s law of relativity is trope (from the Greek, to turn): movement is only meaningful when understood as being relative to something; poetic freedom is only meaningful when, as Bloom says, it is “achieved against a prior plentitude of meaning, which is tradition, and so also language.” Harold’s walk on the long straight path is meaningless – “he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere” – because the laws of perspective mean Harold cannot detect his own movement unless he moves against something: it is only by drawing the long straight path that he can leave it and notice his own movement, against the figures of his own thought, his internalized landscape (the poet tropes, not against tradition, but against his internalization of tradition, as Bloom points out). Harold's journey for the rest of the book is now from left to right, the way one reads, rather than the meaningless movement toward the horizon and away from the reader: he moves by rejecting perspective and “realism” in art and accepting the left to right movement of the words at the bottom of the page, continuing the horizon line and drawing objects to move against.

And the words at the bottom of the page are words that, at several points, connect to the images not only as captions but also as puns: When Harold lands the ship he “makes land” and at the end of the story he “makes his bed” and “draws up the covers.” The words don't simply describe what Harold does, they participate in the kind of mental space the story is about.

Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon 1 (of 4)

My favorite childhood book was Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon. I thought I would do a series of four blogs about why I still think the book is interesting today. I want to start with an epigraph from Wallace Stevens's The Sail of Ulysses, before a short introduction and a summary of the book:

Under the shape of his sail, Ulysses,
Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night
The giant sea, read his own mind…

“There is a human loneliness,
A part of space and solitude,
In which knowledge cannot be denied,
In which nothing of knowledge fails…

This is the true creator, the waver
Waving purpling wands …”

In the introduction to the revised edition of Enjoy Your Symptom Slavoj Zizek quotes the “wise Jesuit motto” “give me a child till he is seven, and afterward you can do with him whatever you want” as an opening to his reading of Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O: there will always be hope for Lacan in America, says Zizek, as long as American children are exposed to these parables of the Lacanian opposition of desire and drive. It is in this vein that I want to go through Harold and the Purple Crayon as illustrative of a certain kind of solipsism that is central to the increasing internalization of post-Enlightenment poetry in English.

Harold and the Purple Crayon is the story of Harold, a toddler, and his crayon. On a blank white landscape, “after thinking it over for a while,” Harold decides to go for a walk in the moonlight, so he draws a moon and a long straight path (so as not to get lost). Because he appears to be getting nowhere he walks perpendicular to the path to “where he thought a forest ought to be,” and he draws a forest with a single tree (again, so as not to get lost). It “turned out to be” an apple tree and Harold, thinking the apples would be nice when they got red, draws a dragon underneath the tree to guard the apples. The dragon, however, frightens him, and, backing away with his hand shaking behind him he accidentally draws an ocean and falls in. He draws a sailboat, lands on a beach, and makes a picnic of pies; he draws a moose and a porcupine to finish the leftovers. Getting tired, he draws a mountain to see if he can see his house from the top (he knows the higher he goes the farther he can see) and go home. He falls off the top, through thin air because he only drew one side of the two-dimensional mountain. He draws a balloon to fly in; still not able to see the window to his room he lands and draws a house, but none of the windows are his. He draws more and more, finally drawing a city full of windows, none his. Deciding to ask a policemen for directions he draws one, but the policeman only dumbly points the way Harold was going anyway. Harold wishes he were home, and then remembers that his window is always right around the moon (which has been on every page since he first drew it): he draws a window around the moon, “[makes] his bed,” “[draws] up the covers” drops his crayon and drops off to sleep. The end.

That's the end of my setup. I will start the main discussion Thursday. Try to find the book in the meantime if you can. It's fantastic.