Goodnight Nobody

The Hypnic Jerk(s) of "Goodnight Moon"

Almost eighty years after its initial publication, Goodnight Moon remains perhaps the greatest hypnagogic picture book. It is a text that is singularly, inimitably strange: Margaret Wise Brown’s words are strange, Clement Hurd’s images are strange, and the (in)congruities between word and image are stranger still.

Key to the book’s success is the fact that the strangeness seldom feels forced. On the surface level, at least, the book moves mellifluously along various channels of betweenness: between poetry and prose; between colour and greyscale; between past and present; between light and darkness; between wakefulness and sleep. Brown’s words may be pellucidly simple on the surface, but from the first very first page they deftly instantiate the book’s complex betweenness:

In the great green room

There was a telephone

And a red balloon

And a picture of—

The letteral drift discernible across “room”, “telephone”, and “balloon” suggests that the lineated text is drowsily reaching towards rhyme, but arriving only at assonance or half-rhyme. When the rhyme finally appears on the following verso (“The cow jumping over the moon”), it does so as part of a longer, stand-alone line that seems to exceed the ghost of metricality that haunts the above stanza.

Such drifting-in-and-out and hovering-between is characteristic of the writing as a whole, and Brown enacts it with an unobtrusive bravura throughout. However, there is one notable exception, a moment that jolts the book’s rhythmic, visual, and narratological compages. The jolt occurs during the series of narratorial goodnights—specifically, during the address “Goodnight nobody”. In one sense, the protrusion is ostentatiously flagged—the address appears on the only page that is devoid of illustration. But I would argue that the sonic protrusion is at least as prominent as the visual one. The address follows the most “regular” section of the book—a section during which the writing appears to have settled into a string of perfectly rhyming couplets (“Goodnight bears / Goodnight chairs”, etc.). After four such couplets, the symmetry is suddenly broken: “Goodnight comb / And goodnight brush” presages the greater disruption of “Goodnight nobody / Goodnight mush”. The drift out of couplets and into a quatrain might have gone relatively unnoticed, had the prosody and rhyme been more docile. But while “mush” is a perfect rhyme, and while even “comb” strains towards rhyme, semi-chiming with the first syllable of “nobody” in a forlorn effort to maintain the scheme, “nobody” conspicuously breaks rank. The scansion- and topos-disrupting properties of “nobody” are extreme, deflating the momentum of a set piece that had seemed to be drifting towards a somnolent double octave. When we arrive at the culmination of the sequence (“And goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush””), there is a sense that things have been tied up a couplet too early.

For all of its awkwardness, the “Goodnight nobody” page works brilliantly within the context of the book. It is the book’s “hypnic jerk”, so to speak, the moment when the falling asleep intimated by Brown’s liltingly soporific couplets is interrupted with a jolt. One might be tempted to frame this textual hypnic jerk as being somehow mimetic of an analogous hypnic jerk that occurs on the level of the narrative. But if such is the case, the mimesis occurs at the wrong place. The book is full of such displacements and misalignments (albeit ones that are less protrusive than the utterance in question). At the book’s opening, we seem firmly grounded within “the great green room”, wherein the action—in accordance with storytelling convention—occurs in the past. But before long, there is a sudden shift: we move from a past-tense indicative mood to a series of vocative utterances (“Goodnight room”, etc.). That this shift feels seamless is a testament to the book’s bewitching brilliance. But below the surface, the shift has created a significant tension between word and image, such that we can no longer be sure that the story being told is the story being illustrated. What we do know is that the young bunny of Hurd’s illustrations is extremely restless; for an entire hour (as indicated by the clocks in the room), the bunny shifts around in its bed, unable to get to sleep. When the hypnic jerk of “Goodnight nobody” occurs, the bunny has still not been depicted asleep, and it can therefore not be jolted awake in a way that would dovetail with the narration. If the bunny does experience a hypnic jerk, it is one that occurs beyond Hurd’s depictions.

The staging of such misalignment results in a book that both functions as a hypnotic bedtime story and that subtly frustrates its ends as same. If Goodnight Moon presents itself to us as a work of art rather than simply as a lulling nocturnal narration, it does so in large part because it is ingeniously misaligned with its apparent aims. Right at the moment that the book seems to be “winding down” and settling into a series of sleep-inducing couplets, it thwarts its own soporific utility via the address “Goodnight nobody”. This address feels momentarily extraneous—perhaps it even feels frightening, if we read “nobody” as a cipher for the disoriented subject caught between sleep and wakefulness. But there is also a cheekiness to “Goodnight nobody”, a refusal akin to that of the child who—with a fervent desire to stay awake—is unwilling to say goodnight to anybody.

In essence, then, Goodnight Moon partakes in a similar refusal to that of the bunny and the child. However faithful its analogue of sleepiness, the book does not proffer a facile trajectory of sleep—indeed, at every level of its construction it shows subtle signs of sleep resistance. Perhaps the most tantalising detail is the copy of Goodnight Moon that rests on the bunny’s bedside table. This detail raises the possibility that book that is being read to the child has already been read to the bunny—and with demonstrably poor efficacy! If such is the case, we might deduce that the bunny that began the book in a storytelling past before being transported into a vocative present is also a bunny of the future, temporally ahead of the child, still restless long after the story has been read. It is worth bearing such displacement in mind when we reach the final spread, on which the bunny (in having finally attained the wished-for sleep) has seemingly brought everything into alignment. The child to whom Goodnight Moon is being read will inevitably fall asleep, too—even if at the wrong place.