Before there
were any alphabets, abjads, or abugidas there were pictures. Crude
depictions of animals scrawled on the walls of caves exist dating
back as far as the stone age. The base reptilian brain of humanity
instinctively understands images before anything else, even beasts
that lack a functional language may have eyes sharper than those of
humans. If one looks at a book meant for young children there might
be a lavish illustration spread out over two pages, but only two or
three simple sentences worth of text. Books compiling fairy tales
for mass consumption, including those from the famous Grimm
brothers, more often than not feature relevant illustrations
ranging from rough or even grotesque sketches in early collections
to intricately
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In Figure 1 the
boy appears to be very calm while he examines the cats paws, and
does not seem to sense any danger despite said cats exceptional
sizes. Maria Nikolaveja, a faculty member at the University of
Cambridge, claims in Devils, Demons, Familiars, Friends: Toward a
Semiotics of Literary Cats that starting in the early nineteenth
century that cats were thought of as intelligent, and that people
thought that The versed animal can talk and recall his adventures
[
] (250). If the boy is mentally ill, then perhaps he thinks that
the cats are indeed talking to him and are rational creatures that
mean him no harm. Delving further, the sharp, simple imagery could
signify that the boy thinks of himself as clear-headed and having
no need to doubt what he sees; the relative lack of shading could
perhaps represent a mode of black-and-white thinking. Figure 2 and
its use of rough line work could be thought of as representing the
boy having a hazy and unclear
mind. While there
are many things in the image only the boy himself and the robed
figure are highlighted while everything else is muddled by
darkness. The boy can only see clearly what is presumably a specter
or other threat to his well-being. He appears to be holding what is
either a stake or knife in what is most likely some attempt to
protect himself; he can only see danger and evil. The meaning of a
work of art is in the eye of the beholder, and though the lens of
psychoanalysis it could be said that the boys in the images are
seeing the world through a distorted
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