before Max begins to take advantage of it. He looks directly at the viewer, with a smile
which seems to invite complicity. As readers we appear to be instructed that something
slightly different is about to happen as we turn the page. Perhaps it will seem akin to
one of those moments when somebody makes momentary eye contact, in a classroom or
at a party, from which it is evident that more will follow. That is to say, at this point the
text ‘asks’ us to begin to adopt a slightly different relationship with Max through the
form of the image.
How does the image ‘ask’ something new of the reader? In a recent analysis of the
semiotic resources of visual images, Kress and van Leeuwen (1990) describe direct gaze
from the depicted figure to the viewer as the means through which demands, in
comparison with offers, are made. Following their lead we might say that prior to this
point the text has offered information, but in this image it makes a first demand on a
reader to adopt a particular orientation of expectation to the sequent events. We might
predict that what follows will therefore have some particular significance for the
narrative development, as indeed it does as Max begins to act in the transformed world
of his room.
The next moment of ‘demand’ comes soon after. It is the image in which Max sets out
in his private boat to begin his voyage to the Wild Things. Max’s gaze here is very clear,
very direct—in some contrast with the furtiveness of the earlier image. The combination
of the gaze, the disposition of the arms, the smile and the frontal angle of Max’s body all
seem to suggest a request which is something like ‘come and play this game with me’.
There is one last image in which a demand is made. The wild rumpus has begun at
Max’s command and, of course, the following three images assume the full volume of the
page. In the first of these Max dances in parallel with the wild things, but below them; in
the second, he swings in the tops of the trees, equal with them; and in the third, he is on
top of them, riding triumphantly, mace in hand. It is in the second that the new demand
is made, just prior to his ascendancy to a position of total domination.
Direct gaze from the depicted character to the reader is, of course, just one of the
many meaning resources which contribute to a sense of the plot. Going back through
the images we can see many other ways in which subtle variation cues readers to adopt
a variable role relationship with Max, or with the other participants. Consider just one
further example of the significance of variation, the vertical angle at which the
characters are depicted. As viewers we are positioned at eye level in the first image, at a
slightly higher angle in the second, and at a much higher angle again through the
images of Max in his bedroom, but then the angle drops back to eye level as he sails off
through night and day, and then to a much lower angle as he encounters the first Wild
Thing (cf. Nodelman 1988:183).
Again, what is the significance of this variation? In Western European visual semiotic
resources, angle of view is the primary means through which a relation of power
between viewer and represented image is construed. (Consider, for example, the variable
construal of a politician’s power through press photographs shot at various vertical
angles.) In this text the images instruct us to adopt variable power relations with Max as
part of the plot development—first, we are more or less his equal; then, in his moment of
abandonment we become ‘superior’ in power—or, perhaps more accurately, Max is
READING AND LITERACY 567