In the most recent queer issue, Anna Joy Springer gave us a fairy tale in the form of a rebus with “The Forest of Despots’ Daughters.” Here, Anna shows us her creative process, the decoding of her particular art:

1. This story has a subversive yet very fable-like quality to it, constructed like those children’s books designed to teach moral lessons and cleverness via rebuses and illustrated puns (a cartoonish eye representing “I,” for example). What implications about the telling of stories and inculcating “morality” might we tease out from the presentation of the material this way?

“The Forest of Despots’ Daughters,” in a recent LGBTQ Pank is a rebus adaptation of a chapter from my book, The Vicious Red Relic, Love. I took the images from a variety of children’s books printed between 1950 and 1980. I never thought of the rebus form as a didactic form, because I associate it more with puzzles on the inside of beer caps, but I see now you are right. Rebuses are often simple puzzles in children’s magazines and activity books that invite a deeper engagement with a text, because it forces a reader to decode while reading, and therefore engage with the piece actively rather than as a passive lesson-receiver. I also like to force active engagement and do sleight of hand with my readers, rather than directly advise. I suppose you could call this approach “manipulative,” “sneaky,” or “tactical.” We see faster than we read, so putting pictures in a row of text seduces a reader’s eye across the text to the image, and then (in a rebus) they have to decode the image. In my rebuses, there is no “right answer,”- all decodings are rather queer. And I suppose the desire to prompt “an unpredictable reading (or response)” is one of the most consistent moral underpinnings of my work. The moral of the entire novel, of which this piece in its written form is just one part, is that if life mimics art, it may be possible to have a more interesting (less proscribed) life if attention is drawn to art’s cultural functions and conventions, especially to the conventions of art that are so repeated and so supported by the ruling paradigm that they’re often seen as seamless, seen as natural (natural law-bound) rather than artificial. All story is allegorical in some way or another, and all figurative comparison is didactic, even when the antecedent has faded from historical memory and the figurative relationship is more or less severed. In my book I draw attention both to the artificiality of story-making and to the historical contexts from which the stories emerged to de-neutralize narrative conventions, i.e. heroes win (a tautology, and not a politically or interpersonally neutral one) – the method of presentation is, as you’ve said, didactic. But, the bright and not overtly ironic illustrations may hold the interest of even the most imaginatively dull pupil. Unless of course that pupil is a reformer. Reformers seem always to prefer minimalism of some sort, without too many scents, curves, or visible rhetorical maneuvering or “game playing.” “The Forest of Despots’ Daughters” is a playful, didactic game that’s impossible to win (or lose). It’s only possible to engage or not to engage. That’s a moral prompt, right there. Continue reading →