For anyone who thinks Ted Geisel dashed off a book in the course of a weekend and passed the rest of his time lounging in Lake Tahoe, let me draw your attention to a two-page spread I chose at random from The Cat in the Hat. Seuss spent nine months writing the book, and it sparked a revolution in children’s literature, selling over eleven million copies to date. I’ll be suggesting here that the long-overdue dignity and verve Seuss brought to child lit are the results of careful, considerate, and often ingenious craftsmanship. The unique needs of a beginning reader place a multitude of demands on a book at each moment of her experience with it. To inspire her to read more and better, the book must request, hold, and reward her sustained, attentive effort. The author must both discern these demands and meet them consistently. The formal parameters of children’s lit are so rigorous that the other first-grade reading primers of Geisel's day were either stale or frustrating to read. In a 1954 article, educator John Hersey described the sorry state of American reading instruction and called on Dr. Seuss by name, asking him to try to write a better instructional text. The Cat in the Hat, Seuss's answer to the challenge, isn't just sufficient; it's spellbinding. Here's how.
First of all, some general features of the book worth noting:
—It contains only 236 distinct words (223 of which were drawn from a list Geisel was given containing 348 words every six-year-old should know) yet is 1629 words in length (72 pages).
—Of those words, 221 are monosyllabic and 14 have two syllables. The only trisyllabic word is “another.”
—Only two colored inks are used (red and blue), although in varying shades; combined skillfully with the black ink and the white of the page, Geisel gives the impression of employing far more colors than the lithography process then available could manage.
—The major concern of the book is to provide American children with a primer that is all the more effective for being interesting (versus the status quo, viz. Dick and Jane seeing Spot run). Seuss is also well aware of the most significant realizations beginning readers need to reach: 1) a book is not merely a colorful toy (i.e., not intended to be put in one’s mouth, thrown, etc.), and 2) the words on the page are not merely part of the picture.
—The book is mostly written in anapestic dimeter, with either abcb quatrains or rhyming couplets. The unusual plodding quality of the rhythmic triplets draws attention to the pattern in such a way that the child can 1) clearly hear which syllables in the sentence are accented (so as to parse it properly and learn how to pronounce words) and 2) anticipate upcoming parsings and pronunciations as she reads. When Seuss first employs a given word in the course of the story, he often does so by rhyming it with a word he’s already introduced; that way the reader can correctly guess the pronunciation of the new word.
—Seuss set out with the goal of making each page end in a “cliff-hanger” (suspense) of some kind, so as to motivate the child to keep reading to the end of the book. Both the rhyme and the meter pull the child along as well.
Now, regarding the two-page spread reproduced above:
—The introduction of the word “NOW” as a culminating addition in the third repetition of the phrase “Look at me” helps to clarify the function of “NOW” as an adverb modifying the command “Look.” If the page had merely started, “Look at me now!” the six-year-old reader would have far more difficulty parsing the sentence and might well be discouraged from continuing to read the rest of the page. The fact that the word “NOW” is intensified in aural effect by the repetition helps to convey the sense that its linguistic effect is to intensify the command “Look at me.”
—”It is fun to have fun” uses the same word as both a noun and a verb. To its original 1957 audience, the latter use suggests silliness whereas the former suggests enjoyment, so the word is also being shown to have multiple senses. A child who reads this sentence is inaugurated into the enjoyment of playing with language; she might invent all kinds of uses for a word if she puts her mind to it—”you have to know how.”
—Note that this page is part of a cumulative plot element in which the Cat is balancing gradually more and more objects, each of which the child has the opportunity to identify visually when it’s first introduced textually and then keep track of it as it reappears on each page.
—The precariousness of the situation is heightened by the fact that most of the objects the Cat is balancing are breakable, and the humor is heightened by the fact that they are functional. The reader is prompted to recognize for herself that the fish bowl could break and that the rake, the milk, etc., are not usually used as mere toys. When a child gets the joke thanks to her own prior observations about milk and rakes, her own sustained attention not only to the book but to all of life is rewarded and encouraged.
—I mentioned earlier that Seuss wants to make sure kids learn that books are not mere toys; thus, Seuss is careful to have the Cat balance many other functional objects as well as the books to ensure that the Cat’s book-balancing here doesn’t suggest to young readers that such behavior is what books are intended for.
—The Cat’s action is both subversive (he’s not supposed to do that!) and perceptive (even though we don’t usually do that, we COULD!). The Cat’s central message in the book is that the children (who were bored until he arrived) can be endlessly entertained if only they employ their own boundless potential to observe and interact with what’s around them. It's crucial that the children are left with a
choice as to whether tell their parents about the Cat at the end of the book; this way, it's clear that the world they find in their imaginations is uniquely their own.
—The text is clearly separated from the drawing and (as in most cases in the book) sits on the left page to suggest that one reads text from left to right. The children appear in the lower left corner both to suggest their passive, spectatorial role in the scene and their identification with the reader. Their and the fish’s awed expressions confirm the attitude the reader takes toward the Cat, to whom all their eyes are pointing. They both help the reader to be more confident in her emotional response by mirroring it and show her where to look on the page. Imagine how confusing this scene might be for a small child if her eye weren’t drawn in so many ways to the Cat as its central element. See also how pleasing it can be for a small child to approach this visual cacophony with the ability (thanks to the text of the book) to identify and name all the objects that appear in it.
—Notice the variety of sentence structures that appear on just this one page: commands (“Look at me!”); a compound conditional (“It is fun…but you have to know”); fragments (“And the fish on a rake!”—which helps the reader to parse the command “And look!” when it appears a few lines later); a sentence with an introductory prepositional phrase (“With my tail I can hold…”); and an interjection (“Oh, no.”). The sentence lengths vary widely, too; the reader is kept interested with complex variety, but in a way that remains always within her grasp. She is shown her own capacity to understand ever more.
—”I can fan with the fan!” uses the same word in two ways in the same sentence, just like “It is fun to have fun”—and the reader is alerted to this by how similar the two sentences sound.
—I leave it to an art critic to draw out the subtleties of the illustration, but I’ll at least note that the way the Cat “holds up” the objects here is clearly not “balancing” them: he is doomed (realistically, at least) to collapse at any moment (the books, for instance, are touching neither each other nor the gloved thumb upon which they presumably rested a moment ago). The anticipation of the astute reader is rewarded when on the next page he does indeed fall. The cliff-hanger in the text (“That is not all… .”) urges the reader to turn the page to find out how the situation resolves; the reader thinks, “How could that
possibly not be all?! If the Cat tries to balance anything else, he’ll fall over!” On the next page, the reader can say to herself, “Look, I was right!” I say “to herself” because this is a book which, with a little initial parental prompting, a child can use to teach
herself to read. It doesn’t get much more empowering and affirming for a child than to be able to spend some time on her own working with the book and then to report back to her parents, showing them what she’s become able to do all on her own.
—Okay, one other art-crit observation: imagine a line through each depicted object and limb suggesting the direction it’s pointing. The scene is boundlessly dynamic. It’s full of the energy the Cat aims to bring to the children, who had been static at the beginning of the book but are now angled forward in breathless anticipation—as, thanks to Seuss, is the reader.
Some ideas presented above come from Ruth K. MacDonald, Dr. Seuss (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 116-123.
