EXPLORATIONS IN THE SEMIOTICS O F T E X T : A METHOD FOR T H E SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF T H E PICTURE BOOK

by

PETER TRIFONAS

B.A., University of Toronto, 1983 B. Ed., University of Toronto, 1984

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF

T H E REQUIREMENTS FOR T H E D E G R E E OF

MASTER OF ARTS

in

T H E F A C U L T Y OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES

(Department of Language Education)

We accept this thesis as conforming

to Jfehe required standard

T H E UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH C O L U M B I A

August 1992

© Peter Trifonas, 1992

In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced

degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it

freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive

copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my

department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or

publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written

permission.

Department of L A M A J A * 4 T E T P L ' / A T I ' . .Y\i

The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada

DE-6 (2/88)

ii

ABSTRACT

The premise for the study is based upon the observations of Lewis (1990), Kiefer

(1988) and Landes (1987) who identify the bifurcate nature of the picture book form to be

its most unique characteristic and express the need for a structural analysis of the textual

dimensions of representative works within the genre. This study, therefore, addresses

how textual form of the picture book works, both lexically and visually, as a system of

signs and codes to create meaning.

Dependent upon two systems of signification, lexical and visual, the picture book

possesses "high semantic or semiotic capacity" (Landes, 1987, p. 30). In order to

understand how the bifurcate nature of textual form in the picture book functions to convey

meaning in the presence of a reading/viewing consciousness, the epistemological,

theoretical and methodological principles of semiotics (after Eco, 1976; 1979; Greimas,

1983; Barthes, 1964; Saint-Martin, 1987 and others) are utilized within the context of the

study to develop a method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book which is identified,

defined and applied in the study to representative works within the genre. The findings of

the study demonstrate in semiotic terms how the formal dimensions of text in the picture

book work to guide the reader/viewer through the circumstances of its lexical and visual

production, or structure, from the recognition of elements and levels below the sign (e.g.,

semes or coloremes) (Greimas, 1983; Saint-Martin, 1987) to elements and levels above the

sign (e.g., possible worlds or fabula) (Eco, 1979). Meaning-making is shown to be

dependent upon the reader/viewer's ability to actualize intensionally and extensionally

motivated responses (cognitive, affective and aesthetic) according to individualized systems

of conceptual apparati based upon real world experience(s).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

A B S T R A C T ii

T A B L E OF C O N T E N T S iii

LIST OF T A B L E S viii

LIST OF F I G U R E S ix

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S x

C H A P T E R O N E - I N T R O D U C T I O N 1

Dimensions of Text and the Picture book 1

Problem and Purpose of the Present Study 3

Summary of Purposes 4

Significance of Present Study 4

Outline of the Thesis 5

CHAPTER TWO - A N EPISTEMOLOGICAL, THEORETICAL A N D

METHODOLOGICAL F R A M E W O R K FOR SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

OF T H E P I C T U R E B O O K 6

Overview 6

The Ontology: Prelude to the Faithless word 6

Language Sign and Meaning 7

Images and Sign: Iconicity and Language 9

Writing Reading or Reading Writing 10

Semiotics and the Autonomy of the Pictorial Text 13

A Question of Articulation 15

Structuralism, Semantics and Text: A Metholological Study 17

iv

Discourse and Narrative 22

Isotopy 24

Function and Actantial structures 25

Summary 27

CHAPTER THREE - A METHOD FOR T H E SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF

T H E P I C T U R E B O O K 29

Overview 29

Definitions and Features of the Semiotic Model 29

The Reader: Textual Codes and Subcodes 31

Basic Lexical Dictionary 31

Rules of Co-reference 33

Contextual and Circumstantial Selection 33

Rhetorical and Stylistic Overcoding 34

Inferences by Common Frames 34

Inferences by Intertextual Frames 35

Ideological Overcoding 35

The Reader as Viewer: Visual Codes 36

Basic Visual Dictionary 36

Rules of Visual Co-reference 36

(Visual) Contextual and Circumstantial Selections 36

Visual Stylistic Overcoding 37

Inferences by Common Visual Frames 37

Inferences by Intervisual Frames 38

Visual Ideological Overcoding 38

Actualized Content: Lexical Overcoding 38

Discoursive Structures 38

V

(Bracketed) Extensions 39

Narrative Structures 39

Forecasts and Inferential Walks 40

Actancial Structures 40

Elementary Ideological Structures 40

Textual World Structures 41

Visual Intensions and Extensions 41

Plastic and Perceptual Variables 41

Visual Anaphoric/Deictic Extensions 42

Visual Metaphorical Structures 43

Visual Indexes 43

Visual Actantial Structures 44

Visual Ideological Structures 44

(Visual) Veridiction 45

Summary 45

CHAPTER FOUR - T H E SEMIOTICS OF L E X I C A L T E X T 46

Overview 46

Intensional Semiotics: Discoursive Structures to Semantic Disclosures.. 46

Extensional Responses: From Paradigms to Possible Worlds 53

Cognitive and Occurential States: Doing and the Subject 57

Lexical Actants and the Modality of Discourse 60

Functions, Motives and Thematic Roles 62

Actantial Structures and the Level of Fabula 65

Archetype Genre and the Hero 67

The Semiotics of a Possible World 69

Summary 75

vi

C H A P T E R F I V E - T H E SEMIOTICS OF V I S U A L T E X T 76

Overview 76

The Elements of Visual Text 76

Microstructures: Plastic and Perceptual Variables 77

Plastic Variables: Color, Value, and Texture 77

The Semiotics of Color 77

Color and Human Perception 78

Properties of Color Formation: The Color Wheel 81

Color and Value 83

Intensity and Luminosity 84

Haptic Aspects of Vision: Textural Inscapes 86

Optic Aspects of Vision: Line, Shape and Form as Outscape 88

The Word as Visual Text: Typography and the Shape of Form 90

Vectoriality (Focal Points and Directional Tensions) 92

Implantation (Positioning in the Plane and Balance) 94

Visual Anaphoric/Deictic Extensions 96

Visual Metaphorical Structures: Cross-medial Agreement 100

Visual Indexes: Within and Without Culture 105

Visual Ideological Structures in Actantial Structures 109

Aspects of Visual Veridiction 112

Summary 114

C H A P T E R SIX - S U M M A R Y A N D CONCLUSIONS 116

Summary 116

Conclusions 118

Recommendations for Further Research 121

vii

N O T E S 122

R E F E R E N C E S 123

A P P E N D I X A - Hjelmslev's (1943) Sign Model 128

APPENDIX B - Propp's (1928) Inventory of Functions 129

A P P E N D I X C - Narrative Functions in Effie 130

APPENDIX D - Temporal Sequence of the Narrative 131

viii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. A method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book 32

ix

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Types and levels of semantic analysis 18

Figure 2. The two levels of the theory of narrativity 19

Figure 3. The semiotic square 21

Figure 4. A "mythical" model of actantial structure 26

Figure 5. Bremond's narrative cycle 27

Figure 6. The deep level of /Effie/ 48

Figure 7. A semic conjunction and disjunction based upon spatialization. 49

Figure 8. Textual actors in a relation of disjunction 50

Figure 9. Temporalization of the possible world 51

Figure 10. The figurativiztion of actors according to the textual topic 52

Figure 11. The thematization of the actors in terms of the textual topic 53

Figure 12. Possible denotation of/line/ actualized by the reader 57

Figure 13. A representation of the levels of a subject's doing 59

Figure 14. Thematic roles of the subjects in terms of cognitive and

occurential doing 63

Figure 15. The narrative as determined by actantial and thematic roles 64

Figure 16. The motivation for doing in the narrative 70

Figure 17. Contrasting properties of the subject in two world structures... 72

X

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis is dedicated to Elefteria whose love, energy, intelligence and forebearance inspire me and give me the freedom to carry on my dreams.

My sincere thanks to Dr. Wendy Sutton for her generous contribution of time and her many insightful comments which were truly invaluable.

Thank you also Dr. John Willinsky, Dr. Joe Bélanger and Dr. Kenneth Reeder for their careful reading, thoughtful questions and many helpful suggestions.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Dimensions of Text and The Picture Book

The term "text" has evoked various meanings according to particular disciplinary

perspectives. In cognitive psychology, it has been represented as the sum total of the

author's propositions; in semiotics, as the set of lexical, or visual, signs which act as cues

to guide the reader's mental decoding operations. Structuralist theory determined the text to

be "an object endowed with precise properties, that must be analytically isolated" and by

which the "work can be entirely defined on the grounds of such properties" (Levi-Strauss

cited in Eco, 1979, p. 3). Some proponents of poststructuralist theory have examined the

"text" as the substantive equivalent of the author's productivity in the process of

communication as a social exchange of thought (Kristeva, 1969). Others (see Eco, 1976;

1979; Peirce, 1931; Derrida, 1974) have cultivated a notion of "text" where meaning

making on the part of the reader is considered to be a generative movement embodying a

semantic process of infinite regression which negates objective meaning and renders the

written word indeterminant in relation to a seemingly uncontrollable non-metaphysical

networking of interpretations (Noth, 1990). The picture book genre offers an interesting

non-transcendental case for illuminating the dimensions of textual structure and for

exploring the meaning-expressive potential of the lexical and visual forms of signification

embodied in such texts (see Kiefer, 1988).

Even though the picture book possesses the propensity to be a highly unconventional

and experimental literary form (Kiefer, 1988; Lewis, 1990) employing both lexical and

visual systems of signification, the dominant paradigm in educational research of the

picture book genre reflects three types of analyses: 1) pedagogic, where the printed word

supersedes the pictorial aspects of the text as the focus of examination in the meaning-

2

making process; 2) aesthetic, where the rationale for research is drawn from art criticism

and/or art history toward the pictorial aspects of the text at the expense of the lexical aspects

of the text; and 3) literary, where the picture book is subsumed in the vast oeuvre of

children's literature "as a marginal genre, or a larval stage of literature proper" (Lewis,

1990, p. 140). David Lewis (1990) has identified the metafictive, postmodernist, or non-

mainstream features of the picture book which belie any staid and stagnant notions that

might be possessed about the minimal inventiveness of its authors and illustrators and the

lack of boundary-breaking within the genre. The picture book is essentially an open and

fluid form (Eco, 1979) embodying lexical and visual signs and codes in an unceasing

interaction of word and image and reader (see Lewis, 1990; Kiefer, 1988). Lewis notes

that "An adequate theory of the picture book must directly address the bifurcated nature of

the form (word and pictures) and must account for the whole range of types and kinds

including the metafictive" (1990, p. 141). Because the picture book as a genre is

dependent upon the interaction of two integrated systems of signification, lexical and

visual, it is a unique combination of literary and visual forms which possesses "high

semantic or semiotic capacity" (Landes, 1987, p. 320) and facilitates the creation of

personal cognitive, affective and aesthetic meaning for the reader. It is this semiotic

capacity of the picture book genre which makes it ideal for the purpose of teaching young

children by establishing "contexts for literary and real world understandings" (Kiefer,

1988, p. 260) that merits the focus of educational research. In reconstituting the picture

book (see Lewis, 1990; Kiefer, 1988), it is necessary to step back from the well-worn

research paradigms discussed previously and take another vantage point which, in itself,

will fuse the sometimes disparate pedagogical, literary, and aesthetic aspects of the genre

by explaining the levels of semiotic interaction both within the lexical and visual

components, or "texts", of the picture book and between the picture book and the reader

(see Kiefer, 1988; Lewis, 1990; Eco, 1976; 1979). How does the textual form of the

picture book work, both lexically and visually, as a semiotic system of signs and codes to

create meaning?

3

Problem and Purpose of the Present Study

The present study supports the thesis that the textual form of the picture book, as in any

literary or visual artistic work, functions to create meaning (Kiefer, 1988; Lewis, 1990;

Landes, 1987; see also Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; Arnheim, 1974). In order to

understand how meaning is created through the unique artistic form of the picture book, it

is essential to identify the basic lexical and visual textual components in the picture book to

create a structural basis for the analysis of their interaction within the medium in the

presence of a reading/viewing consciousness which actualizes the text's meaning potential.

A n explanation of the relationship between the reader and the text is concomitant to

isolating the structural aspects of textual form that function as a vehicle to facilitate the

reader/viewer with visual cues upon which to furnish cognitive, affective and aesthetic

hypotheses thereby allowing the researcher to analyze in semiotic terms the cognitive,

affective and aesthetic as well as conscious and subconscious responses required or

initiated during the reading/viewing process as a meaning-making activity.

For the purpose(s) of the present study, a method of textual analysis incorporating

traditional semiotic techniques (see Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; Barthes, 1964) utilized for

the examination of lexical and visual texts has been developed in order to answer the

question: How does the textual form of the picture book work, both lexically and visually,

as a semiotic system of signs and codes to create meaning? The various 'boxes' in Table 1

denote the method of textual analysis described in Chapter Three and are used to identify

the levels of semiotic interaction between the picture book and the reader as well as to

isolate the unique structural aspects of lexical and visual texts within the picture book.

With specific reference to the structural semantics of semiotic techniques for analyzing

lexical and visual texts identified in the method, the emphasis of the analysis is twofold: 1)

upon the examination of the syntactic composition of the picture book as integrated lexical

and visual text(s); and 2) upon the mental operations (cognitive and affective, conscious

and subconscious) required by, or initiated in, the reader by the text as a set of lexical and

visual signs in order to facilitate the creation of meaning and aesthetic response(s).

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Summary of Purposes

1) To identify the structural aspects of lexical and visual systems of signification, as signs and codes within the picture book which work syntactically and semantically to create meaning.

2) To explain, in semiotic terms, the interaction between the reader and the picture book so as to furnish pragmatic (Peirce, 1931) and theoretical explanations of the reader's (cognitive, affective and aesthetic/conscious and subconscious) reactions for lexical and pictorial hermeneutics (or acts of interpretation).

3) To identify, explain and demonstrate the use of a method of textual analysis designed specifically for the research problem which is applicable to the picture book genre as a whole.

Significance of the Present Study

A recent study of the picture book as "event" focused upon the semiotic dimensions

of the interaction between the reader, or performer, of a text and the listener, or spectator,

of the performance during a class reading (Golden & Gerber, 1990). The researchers were

primarily concerned with studying the effects of paralinguistic cues (performance and

instructional) by the performer upon the subjects' interpretation of the text as an interactive

"social event", rather than utilizing semiotic methodology to explore the dimensions of the

picture book genre, or to identify and explain how the interaction of lexical and visual signs

and codes in the textual form of the picture book functions to create meaning for the

reader/viewer. The present study addresses the need expressed for a structural analysis of

representative works within the genre which would account for the meaning-generating

potential of an overall text comprised of lexical and visual systems of signification that

characterize the bifurcate nature of picture book form (see Lewis, 1990; Kiefer, 1988). To

this end, semiotics offers a highly developed epistemological, theoretical and

methodological framework for deconstructing the structure of lexical and visual signs

embodied in picture books as communicative sign systems, or codes, which function to

convey meaning, thereby affording the researcher the opportunity to examine the text as a

5

medium for exchanging or disseminating knowledge. This is an essential area of research

if we hope to understand the role of texts in the learning process. Semiotic analysis allows

the researcher: 1) to take into account levels above and below the sign (Greimas, 1983); 2)

to examine the means of signification as well as the content of signification (see Hjelmslev,

1943); 3) to ground the analysis in the text itself and to examine how the structures of

signification are engendered "globally" in codic terms to form systems of signification

(Eco, 1979); and 4) to examine the roles of both the sender (e.g., a text) and of the receiver

(e.g., a reader/viewer) in a pragmatic act of communication (Eco, 1976; 1979).

Outline of the Thesis

Chapter Two reviews literature reflecting areas of epistemological, theoretical and

methodological concern which are relevant to the present study and provides: 1) a

definition of semiotic theory in relation to language, image, and cognition; 2) a discussion

of the similarities and differences between lexical and visual systems of signification as

texts and the key issues of debate regarding the semiotic autonomy of each codic milieu;

and 3) a methodological study of the role of structuralist semantics (see Greimas, 1983) in

semiotic inquiry as required for the study of narrative texts. In Chapter Three, the

characteristic features of the semiotic method of textual analysis are identified and explained

according to its uses for examining reader/viewer cognitive, affective and aesthetic

responses to the picture book as a total lexical and visual textual form (see Table 1).

Chapter Four is a formal semiotic analysis (based upon the method detailed in Chapter

Three) of the lexical component of the picture book relative to the visual text and the role of

the reader/viewer to make sense from the signs and codes which engender the work with

meaning (see Eco, 1979). Chapter Five completes the formal semiotic analysis by

examining the visual text in relation to the lexical text and the total elements of signification

comprising the picture book which the viewer/reader must actualize as meaning-maker.

Chapter Six summarizes and concludes the study.

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CHAPTER TWO

AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL, THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL

FRAMEWORK FOR SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF T H E PICTURE BOOK

Overview

The purpose of this chapter is to facilitate an epistemological, theoretical and

methodological framework for the construction of a method of textual analysis which is

used in the present study to isolate, define and explain the levels of semiotic interaction,

both lexical and visual, between the picture book and the reader. The first half of the

discussion will review the main epistemological and theoretical implications concerning

semiotics, language and pictorial text and will reconcile them in the second half of the

discussion with what has been recognized to be a viable semiotic methodology for textual

analysis. The second half of the discussion, which deals with semiotic methodology, refers

primarily to lexical narrative text; however, the same analytic principles and methodological

rigor can be applied to pictorial text as linear visual narrative (as is also stated in the

chapter).

The Ontology: Prelude to the Faithless Word

The Gospel according to John asserts,

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

The statement concretizes the relationship between language and faith, hence meaning,

since the embodiment of meaning lies ultimately in the oneness of divinity and language, as

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an affirmation of faith. Faith in the Word was faith in God. Implicit in this logic is the

absoluteness of truth in the word, and the unequivocal and univocal nature of meaning.

Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of logos was a philosophical consequence of a

lapsed faith in God in an age demarcing spiritual uncertainty and moral relativism,

regarding the true nature of truth. Yet, the ramifications of this declaration strike at the

very heart of human order. Derrida ( 1974) writes,

A l l the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical ontotheology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood . . . Within the logos the original and essential link to the phone has never been broken . . . As has been more or less implicitly determined, the essence of the phone would be immediately proximate to that which within "thought" as logos relates to "meaning", (p. 11)

Traditionally, theology did not and has not questioned God's ordained and absolute power.

How could the church deny faith in the voice of God, as manifest in the Word, to dispute

creation and truth? Theologically, the logicality of the world is seen as preordained and

limited only by the self-contradiction of an omnipotent God. Therefore, no knowledge is

certain because it is out of the realm of the empirical and contingent on God's will: a matter

of faith. What Nietzsche was expressing was essentially a lack of faith in the existence of

God because of a lack of absolutes, or underlying relations of signs, or order, in reality

discernible through reasoned inquiry. For the twentieth century, trusting the Word is

divorced from the reality of what is left—a semiotic limbo.

Language, Sign, and Meaning

The word, whether written or spoken, is a vehicle for the acts of creating meaning

performed in the exchange of thought. What is suspect is the competence of language to

convey meaning. To formulate theories of communication, as is a theory of semiotics or of

8

literature, one must explore the mechanics of human perception and the affect of language

as referent, accurate or inaccurate, upon the perception process.

Man is a meaning-making animal, ordering and comprehending reality through

language. Cassidy (1982) states,

It is axiomatic that mankind's greatest accomplishment is language —axiomatic in a semiotic sense. Language permits . . . communication about objects and events temporally and spatially distant. If not a prerequisite of thought, it is an exhaustive tool of thought. Language is a sign system. It re-presents and does so systematically. In written language, through the application of syntactic, semantic,and pragmatic rules, arbitrary markings assume meaning on a number of levels, for example, semantic, phonemic, expressive, (p. 78)

The object, sign production and sign perception (interpreter) constitutes the basic unit of a

semiotic communication model which clearly operationalizes the exchange and coding of

information transactionally. Inherent to the re-presentality of language is the notion of

inference, or as C.S. Peirce (1931) postulated, the concept of interprétant :

A sign stands for something to the idea which produces, or modifies . . . That for which it stands is called its object; that which it conveys, its meaning; and the idea to which it gives rise, its interprétant. (p.339)

The interprétant validates the sign, even in the absence of an interpreter, because it is a

construct arising from contact with an object in the external world.

Theorists with an interest in Semiotics (Hjelmslev, 1943; Peirce, 1931; Dewey, 1922;

Greimas, 1983; Eco, 1976; Barthes, 1964; Derrida, 1974; Lotman, 1990) have asserted the

belief that perception in itself is the interpretation of disconnected sensory data and the

creation of cognitive hypotheses based upon individual experience. Yet, above simple

cognition as the physical mechanisms underlying thought and symbol manipulation, or

mechanics of thought (Hunt, 1978; 1979), lies the representational level of

theorizing —content of thought (Hunt and Agnoli, 1991). Piaget (1970) has given a

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semiotic rendering of the mental image as the "interiorized imitation" (p. 14) and

transformation of reality and stresses that "without semiotic means it would be impossible

to think at all" (Piaget & Inhelder, 1966, p. 381). The ability to represent mentally an

object in the external world as an inner image, or interprétant, becomes a semiotic

instrument necessary in order to evoke and to think what has been perceived. The sign

presupposes a mental differentiation between its signifier and the signified. Signs are not

things or objects, but correlations between expression and content, so that we are

essentially concerned with sign-functions instead of signs (Hjelmslev, 1943; Eco, 1976;

Greimas, 1983). A sign-function occurs when a certain expression is correlated to a

particular context and these correlations are culturally created, thus, implying artificiality or

convention. The issue of similitude between sign and object is misleading because

univocality is an unrealistic expectation in semiosis, which is unlimited and multivariate

(Eco, 1984; Peirce, 1931). There are no universal truths because meaning is transitory and

often provisionally bound in culturally determined semantic fields. For example, a sign-

function operates in every lie to signify something not of or true to the external world. The

given code enables the interpreter to understand sign-functions that are false. Ultimately,

the content of an expression is not an object but a cultural unit. If we know the proper code

of correlations between expression and content, we can understand signs. Language, then,

is a semiotic system embodying artificial and conventional sign-meaning correlations

(Hjelmslev, 1943; Barthes, 1970; Greimas, 1983; Eco, 1976; Lotman, 1990).

Images and Signs: Iconicity and Language

A semiotic typology of images includes five distinct classes: 1) graphic (pictures,

statues and designs); 2) optical (mirrors and projections); 3) perceptual (sense data) 4)

mental (dreams, memories and ideas); and S)verbal (metaphor and descriptions) (Mitchell,

1986). The traditional semiotic definition of an image is rooted in distinguishing its

features based on resemblance:

10

The sign brings separate instances (subject-object on one hand, subject-interlocutor on the other) back to a unified whole (a unity which presents itself as a sentence-message), replacing praxis with a single meaning and difference with resemblance . .. the relationship instituted by the sign wil l therefore be a reconciliation of discrepancies, and identification of differences. (Kristeva, 1969, p.26)

The concept of image, defined semiotically as resemblance, however, refers to "visual"

phenomenon and their mental representations (as defined above) and does not cover a

broader spectrum of sign production including transmission through non-visual channels

(e.g., spoken language) (Nôth, 1990). In order to account for resemblance beyond visual

representation, iconicity, or the extent to which a sign vehicle is similar to its denotatum, or

referent, is a criteria for examination. According to Morris (1946),

A sign is iconic to the extent to which it itself has the properties of its denotata . . . Iconicity is thus a matter of degree . . . A portrait of a person is to a considerable extent iconic, but it is not completely so since the painted canvas does not have the texture of the skin, or the capacities for speech and motion, which the person portrayed has. The motion picture is more iconic, but again not completely so. A completely iconic sign would always denote, since it would itself be a denotatum (pp. 98-99).

Can language represented graphically be iconic according to Morris' (1946) definition?

WRITING READING or READING WRITING

Literary competence (meaning linguistic competence as Iser, 1978, defines it) is a

natural prerequisite for deciphering written text; however, the superficiality of this type of

competence is that it lacks a reasoned explication of meaning-making. It is an ends-means,

means-ends dichotomy. The demise of logocentricity, the deflation of the spoken word

and the inflation of the written, places undue emphasis upon written text.1 Derrida (1974)

comments,

11

I believe . . . that a certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of techniques. That is why the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing (p. 8).

The understanding of technique, as graphic linguistic expression, cannot therefore ensure

the understanding of writing. For, if literary competence were the sole proprietor of

meaning, language would be self-referential and the sole-appropriator. Is the reading

process mere mental mimesis of the language itself expressed as literary competence, or the

decoding of signs of signs, semiotically unlimited through free and variated association?

Eco(1984) explains the generative function of the linguistic sign within a text,

A text is not simply a communicational apparatus. It is a device which questions the previous signifying systems, often renews them, and sometimes destroys them . . . The ability of the textual manifestations to empty, destroy, or reconstruct preexisting sign-functions depends on the presence within the sign-functions (that is the network of content figures) of a set of instructions oriented toward the (potential) production of different texts (p.25).

A dialectical relationship between reader and text is suggested, since, the words, divorced

from the writer as marks on paper devoid of meaning, demand a reader to actualize their

meaning potential. It is not however a rewriting of the text. The act of reading is the re­

creation, or synthesis, of constructs referential to certain artificial and conventional signs,

which in themselves, have no meaning or function, until assimilated through a reading

consciousness. In essence, a reading act is a re-reading act striving to reformulate, in

personal terms, an already reformulated reality. The problem of meaning and essence of a

written text arises. The intangibility of objective meaning renders the literary work an

imaginary object. Ineffable and non-static, it does not occupy the same spatio-temporal

domain of ordinary experience and is to some extent metaphysical in that it exists as a

mental state, event or construct in the mind of a reader. Consequently, the accessibility of

the work determines aesthetic analysis and is the basis for critical perspectives. This is a

12

given in critical enquiry. We experience related ideas, emotions, and psychic states

through the act of reading, but are distanced from authorial purpose, or intervention, as

incorporated in the work. Iser (1978) attempted to reconcile the notion of iconism and the

graphic representation of language in literature:

The iconic signs of literature constitute an organization of signifiers which do not designate a signified object, but instead designate instructions for the production of the signified . . . The iconic signs fulfill their function to the degree in which their relatedness to identifiable objects begins to fade or is even blotted out. For now something has to be imagined which the sign has not denoted—though it will be preconditioned by that which they do denote. Thus, the reader is compelled to transform a denotation into a connotation (p.65-66).

The connotative terms Iser (1978) alludes to are recreative concepts aiding the grasp of

similarities among particulars perceived in reality, not objects. Knowing the terms of

signification of a written expression is not infallible because truth, or knowledge, is based

in a perception of reality and not reality itself (see Dewey, 1922; Eco, 1976). Yet, the

denotative function is an unfortunate choice of terminology by Iser because denotation

commands as a codifying equivalent the "rigidification and death of all sense" (Eco, 1984,

p. 25). To universalize meaning denotatively, as referred to in resemblance, supreme

responsibility for meaning signification rests in the text, and not in the reader; since, the

sign-function, or correlation between the content-form and the expression-form of a sign,

must determine the response (Hjelmslev, 1943) and denote one meaning. Ultimately, this

is a limitation upon intertextuality, or experiences of different texts, and extratextuality, or

external experience, which nourish the generation of new contexts from which meaning is

created (Eco, 1984). In Iser's (1978) argument, it is implied that words are the equivalent

of iconic signs. If the iconic sign is evaluated in the context of a true sign, there can be no

analogous, motivational or natural relationship between the object and the signifier

(Eco, 1976: 1984). If indeed words are icons, as Iser (1978) suggests, what are they icons

of—other words? The notion of iconism is tautological in this case; since, the sign can

13

never truly and completely possess the same properties as the object which it signifies, and

of which we have no true knowledge, only perception. The relatedness and non-

relatedness of the iconic sign is contradicted in the argument Iser (1978) puts forward and

the implication is that words are stimuli for conditioned responses to specific "signifieds",

as expressed by the definite article in "the signified". Furthermore, it is assumed we all

perceive the same objective reality.

Semiotics and the Autonomy of Pictorial Text

Given that pictorial texts are no less polysemous, or able to generate more than a single

meaning (Barthes, 1964; Prieto, 1966; Eco, 1968), than lexical texts, semiotics has

functioned to limit the interpretive openness of pictorial texts (Nôth, 1990). The central

question regarding semiotics and pictures (in its broadest sense) has been focused on the

extent of autonomy of pictorial text in relation to linguistic text: "Is an autonomous

semiotics of pictorial perception possible, or does the semiotic analysis of pictures always

require recourse to the model of language?" (Nôth, 1990, p. 450).

The suggestion for a pictorial grammar (Metz, 1968; Eco, 1976; Saint-Martin, 1987)

has been derived from the fact that pictures have no unique visual metalanguage and,

therefore, require language as an instrument for pictorial analysis. Arguing from a

logocentric viewpoint, Barthes (1964) has focused the question on the relationship between

lexical and visual elements incorporated into the same text:

Images . . . can signify . . . but never autonomously; every semiotical system has its linguistic admixture. Where there is a visual substance, for example, the meaning is confirmed by being duplicated in a linguistic message . . . so that at least a part of the iconic message is . . . either redundant or taken up by the linguistic system . . . Does the image duplicate certain of the informations given in the text by a phenomenon of redundancy or does the text add a fresh information to the image? (p. 10; 38)

14

The lexical-visual relationship in a text is more complex than is suggested in the question;

however, Barthes' (1964) concepts of anchorage and relay are useful in considering how

this "combined code" type of text may generate and guide meaning semiotically. In

anchorage "the text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to

avoid some and receive others . . . It remote-controls him toward meaning chosen in

advance", whereas, in relay "the text and image stand in a complementary relationship; the

words in the same way as the images, are fragments of a more general syntagm and the

unity of the message is realized at a higher level" (Barthes, 1964, p. 40-41). In order to

facilitate meaning, the message as a whole involves both the lexical-visual dependency of

anchorage and the complimentarity of both textual constituents found in relay. With

reference to an advertisement for pasta, Barthes (1964) demonstrated the interdependence

of lexical and visual signs within the same text. The objects depicted in the advertisement

(spaghetti, tomato sauce, grated Parmesan cheese, onions, peppers, and a string bag) can

be grouped under the one lexical term used as a label /Panzani/. Not that these products are

exclusive to a particular ethnicity, but in culinary terms, the ingredients for the "complete

spaghetti dish" are represented in the photograph as uniquely Italian. Since the

advertisement was designed for the French consumer, and not the Italian consumer, the

ethnic connotation of the name is particularly effective in establishing a thematically

meaningful context for the intended audience. The "Italianicity" of the products depends

chiefly on a contiguous, or adjoined, relation between the word /Panzani/ and the products

depicted in order to achieve the transference of connotation from the lexical to the visual

text, thereby, resulting in anchorage and relay. "Is there any semiotically relevant preverbal

level of visual perception and analysis?" (Noth, 1990, p. 450).

Proponents for the semiotic autonomy of pictures (see Sonesson, 1989) have objected

that the commentaries of multimedia contexts (such as Barthes' analysis of the Panzani

advertisement) have not asserted the semiotic priority of the lexical over the visual message.

The theory of visual perception, or Gestalt Theory, has been cited to justify the belief in

language-independent entities interpreted as semiotic elements of visual cognition

(Sonesson, 1989; Krampen, 1973; Mateescu, 1974; Arnheim, 1974). According to the

15

Gestalt theory of perception, the perceiving organism obtains visual data from the

environment by scanning the visual field. Gestalten, or organized forms, are generated as

holistic perceptual structures of invariant shapes, or figures, which tend to contrast against

the larger background of a visual field. Interpreting gestalten as signs and extending the

argument from the expressive plane, concerning form, to the content plane, concerning

meaning, Arnheim (1974) stated that "no visual pattern is only itself. It always represents

something beyond its own individual existence—which is like saying that all shape is the

form of some content" (p. 65). The implication being that pictorial signs are autotelic in

creating meaning independently without recourse to language, and unlike lexical signs,

through the form of their expression. Can a semiotics of visual language be developed in

accordance with the levels of grammar of language and reveal essential structural

components of pictures?

A Question of Articulation

Articulation means structuring and it has often been considered to be the main

distinguishing feature of language. In language, there is a two-fold structuring, or double

articulation (Hjelmslev, 1943; Martinet, 1949; Prieto, 1966), by two unit types:

morphemes, or minimal units of meaning within a message (e.g., syllables or words) and

phonemes, or differentiating phonetic signifiers (the corresponding units of written

language are graphemes ). For example, a word such as in-act-ive is composed of

distinguishable units of meaning at the level of first articulation. The second level of

articulation structures the phonetic (or graphic) signifiers of the morphemes into

nonsignifying but differentiated units. Hjelmslev (1943) went further in separating the

two planes of articulation into expression and content where the expression plane

combines both phonemes and morphemes while the content plane is comprised of

conceptual units of sense (Noth, 1990), or semes. Extralinguistic variables, or purports,

such as the phonetic potential of the human voice (on the expression plane) and the

amorphous mass of human thought (on the content plane) are considered by Hjelmslev

16

(1943) as substantive influences on the form of expression and content in language (see

also Greimas, 1966; Eco, 1976; 1984). Thus, the form and content of language are

inextricably bound to those human variables which determine its substance and the

circumstances of its production and perception.

The case for second articulation in pictorial text has been a point of contention among

semioticians. Gestalten have been interpreted as supersigns (Krampen, 1973), or holistic

elements which are products of information processing, consisting of integrated subsigns

within a pictorial whole (Saint-Martin, 1987). Hierarchical levels of perception in

supersigns are postulated to extend "from a differential optical element, a geometrical

morpheme, a partial image of a signifying object to an iconic phrase and discourse" (Noth,

1990, p.451). On a more esoteric level, the possibility of pictorial second articulation has

also been argued and identified in terms of figurae (Barthes, 1964; Prieto, 1966; Eco,

1968; Metz, 1968), or distinctive but not meaningful units of visual perception

corresponding to phonemes (or graphemes) on the expression plane. These stimulus

invariants to visual perception are defined by natural laws in relation to the environmental

sources of their production and the resulting effect upon the psychology of the viewer

(e.g., figure-ground relations, light contrast, geometrical elements, etc.). Figurae in turn

aggregate to constitute signs (comparable to the morpheme) and form semata (or visual

"propositions") as total iconic statements. The presence of double articulation in pictures

at the second level has been questioned by citing the argument that the figurae level merges

with the sign level and the sign level with the semata level to create pictorial meaning (see

Sonesson, 1989). Further research on pictorial texts (see Eco, 1976) has proposed that

specific rules of pictorial segmentation can only be determined within individual pictorial

contexts and that "iconic text is an act of code-making " (Eco, 1976, p. 213). This

approach emphasizes the differences and the similarities between pictorial and verbal

representation (Goodman, 1968). Saint-Martin (1987) presents a convincing case in

support of a visual syntax of pictorial language by incorporating features of the arguments

posed to the contrary within a semiotic theory of visual text. For example, the coloreme is

postulated as the basic visual element (corresponding to the phonemic level in language)

17

which functions to differentiate meaningful visual elements, even though, meaning

signifying potential is absent. The aggregate of coloremes, on a more surface than "deep"

level, constituting the dot, the line and combinations of the two elements, are considered to

lack intrinsic meaning, however, as particular constituents of a pictorial text these elements

(as aggregates of color agglomerations) form distinctive features of an object, or objects,

within the pictorial plane (Prieto, 1966; Saint-Martin, 1987; Sonesson, 1989) and gain

meaning as formal gestalten. Ultimately, the syntactic analysis which Saint-Martin (1987)

provides attempts to furnish hypotheses for a scientific analytical approach to large

aggregates of coloremes as non-linear but correlational schemata based upon constant

interaction of plastic and perceptual variables found in a pictorial text and the viewer. The

result is effective because Gestalt Theory, colorematic analysis and semiotic principles are

combined to examine the visual language of pictorial text, at once, as structural entity and a

supersyntagm, or a total unit of sense.

Structuralism, Semantics and Text: A Methodological Study

Structuralism in linguistics (see Saussure, 1916) has influenced A . J. Greimas'

semiotic methodology of text analysis as detailed in Structural semantics (1983). The

method itself has become the core technique of semiotic text analysis of the influential

"School of Paris" (see Barthes, 1970; Greimas, 1983; Derrida, 1974). The theory is

founded upon the premise of the existence of a semantic universe or "the totality of

significations, postulated as prior to articulation" (Greimas & Courtes, 1982, p. 361). The

semantic universe embodied in a natural language is too vast to conceive in its totality; thus,

any discourse presupposes a semantic universe, on a micro-scale, that is actualized in part

as discourse and that "can be defined as the set of the system of values" (also p. 361).

Meaning is achieved through articulation of such a micro-scale semantics and can be

described "by means of elementary axiological structures according to the categories of

life/death (individual universe), or nature/culture (collective universe)" (Greimas, 1970, p.

18

xvi). These arbitrary universals are the starting point for analysis of the semantic universe

yet can never be isolated in pure form, but only when articulated. Greimas (1970)

explains,

. . . the production of meaning is meaningful only if it is the transformation of a meaning already given; the production of meaning is, consequently, in itself, a signifying endowing with form, indifferent to the contents to be transformed. Meaning, in the sense of the form of meaning, can thus be defined as the possibility of transforming meaning (p. 15).

Defining the text as a discoursive micro-universe, places the text in the position of

autonomy excluded from extralinguisitic phenomena in text analysis. The organization of

discoursive structures as narrative creates a distinction between two levels of representation

and analysis: a manifest, or surface level and an immanent, or "deep" level.

IMMANENCE SEMANTIC

MANIFESTATION SIGNIFICATION

seme lexeme sememe

minimal content unit (deep level)

lexical manifestation (surface)

meaning signifier (polysemous)

Figure 1. Types and levels of semantic analysis.

This principle can be applied to other systems not necessarily dependent upon natural

language (e.g., cinema, painting, architecture, sculpture, etc.) in order to isolate and

explain the structural aspects of the medium as text. For example, in attempting to bring to

light the interrelations between the structural elements constituting a pictorial text (e.g.,

color, texture, form, composition, etc.) and, thereby, isolate and explain the means of

signification as well as the content, it is possible to avoid speculation and ground the

19

analysis within the structural aspects of the text itself. The analysis can then be extended to

examining the role of the viewer in relation to the production of the text (Eco, 1976; 1984).

Greimas' linguistic framework is based on Saussure's (1916) concept of difference

(see Derrida, 1974), or the notion of binary oppositions and distinctiveness of functional

phonology as presence and absence, and the glossematic sign model (see Appendix A) of

Hjelmslev (1943). Structural lexicology forms the basis for the semantic analysis of

textual structures (Noth, 1990). Semiotics, according to Greimas and Courtes (1979), is

operational as a theory of signification "when it situates its analyses on levels both higher

and lower than the sign" (p. 147).

Generative Trajectory

Syntactic Component

Semantic Component

Semiotic and narrative structures

Discoursive structures

Deep level

FUNDAMENTAL SYNTAX FUNDAMENTAL SEMANTICS

Semiotic and narrative structures

Discoursive structures

Surface levels

SURFACE NARRATIVE SYNTAX NARRATIVE SEMANTICS

Semiotic and narrative structures

Discoursive structures

DISCOURSIVE SYNTAX

Discoursivization Actorialization Temporalization Spatialization

DISCOURSIVE SEMANTICS

Thematization

Figurativization

Figure 2. The two levels of the theory of narrativity.

20

On the lower level, semes, or the minimal unit of semantic componential analysis,

function to differentiate significations and form semic systems subdivided into semic

categories. On the higher levels, are textual units which produce semantic entities greater

then signs. Perron (cited from Greimas, 1988) explains the model of generative discourse

analysis as defined by generative trajectory,

. . . generative trajectory designates the way in which the components and sub-components fit together and are linked together. Three autonomous general areas: semio-narrative structures, discoursive structures and textual structures have been identified within the general economy of the theory first to construct the ab quo instance of the generation of signification where semantic substance is first articulated and constituted into a signifying form, and then to set up the intermediate mediating stages which transform the semantic substance into the last instances ad quern where signification is manifested (p. xviii).

Discourse production through developing stages, each containing a syntactic and a semantic

subcomponent (see Figure 2), is postulated as beginning at a "deep" level with elementary

structures and extending over more complex structures at higher levels "which govern

organization of the discourse prior to its manifestation in a given natural language"

(Greimas & Courtes, 1979, p. 85; see also Hjelmslev, 1943). Manifest textual structures

of expression (linear or spatial, phonetic, written or visual) are external to generative

trajectory.

At the level of discoursive structures, the seme forms the "deepest" and most

elementary structure of signification, however, it is a theoretical postulate and must be

considered as such. Greimas (1983) explains,

This minimal unit, however, which we have called seme, has no existence on its own and can be imagined and described only in relation to something that is not, inasmuch as it is only part of a structure of signification.

By situating the seme within perception, in a place where significations are constituted, we noticed that it received there a kind of existence because of its participation in two signifying ensembles at the same time: the seme, indeed is affirmed by disjunction within the semic categories, and it is confirmed by junction with other semes within semic groupings which we have called semic figures and bases (p. 118).

21

It is a minimalist definition of structure where primacy is given to relations between

elements based on difference (Noth, 1990). For example, the difference between son

and daughter at the lexical level is due to the disjunction characterized metalinguistically

by the features male and female as part of a semic hierarchy of the content-substance sense

(see Appendix A). The common semic category of the two features, sex, presupposes any

semantic resemblance or conjunction between the two features and sets the ground from

which the articulation of signification emerges (Greimas, 1983). A linear semantic axis

with the differential terms male and female would represent the semes involved as

elementary structures of signification. A semantic axis may have different articulations, or

lexical fields, in different languages, thus, transforming the content-form at the word level.

The "deep" level is organized in the visual representation of the semiotic square "where the

substance of content is articulated and constituted as form of content" (Perron cited from

Greimas, 1988, p. xviii):

(Assertion) (Negation) (e.g. male) (e.g. female)

contrariety

(Non-assertion) (e.g. non-female)

(Non-negation) (e.g. non-male)

Figure 3. The semiotic square.

22

The oppositions constituting semantic axes may be represented in the semiotic square as

two types of logical relations: contradiction, or the relation existing between two terms of

the binary category assertion/negation, and contrariety, or the implied contrariness of one

term with the other. For example, the seme s t , "male", is described as the opposition ( in

terms of presence or absence) of non-Sj ( Sj ), "non-male", in which the seme "male" is

absent. The contrary of s l 5 "male", is s2, "female", which expands the square to a four

term constellation to include the contrary of s 2 which is non-s2 ( s 2 ) , "non-female".

Complimentarity or implication now appears between the terms Sj and s2 or s2 and Sj:

"male" implies "non-female" and "female" implies "non-male" (see Greimas, 1970). The

"deep" structural nature of the semiotic square can be seen in the fact that there may be no

lexical equivalent at the surface levels of manifestation to express "non-male" or "non-

female" as concepts (Nôth, 1990). Therefore, the fundamental semantics at the "deep"

level contains the necessary semantic categories that form the elementary structures of

signification and the fundamental syntax consisting of the relations and transformations

which derive and constitute those structures (see Figure 2).

Discourse and Narrative

Enunciation mediates between the semiotic narrative structures, organized as a series of

strata along the entire generative trajectory, and their actualization in discourse produced by

an enunciator. The discoursive structures manifest the surface semiotic structures and set

them into discourse by making them pass through the domain of enunciation (Greimas,

1988). As Perron (cited from Greimas, 1988) notes, "It is the place where, by becoming

actualized as operations, the semio-narrative structures make up the competence of the

subject of enunciation" (p. xix). "Charged with the discoursivization of the narrative

structures and comprising of three sub-components of actorialization, temporalization and

23

spatialization" (Greimas & Courtes, 1979, p. 134), the syntactic component is joined with

a semantic component and "its sub-components of thematization and figurativization"

(ibid., p. 134). At the surface level, narrative semantics subsumes the semantic values

selected from the deep level of structure (see Figure 2) that are actualized in the form of

lexical actants which, in turn, operate at the level of narrative syntax (e.g., as subject,

object, predicate, etc.) (Greimas & Courtes, 1979) as part of a narrative syntagm (or a

larger discoursive unit, e.g., a sentence or discourse).

In essence, the lexicology of the text is built both horizontally on a syntagmatic axis

consisting of formal structural elements within a text (be it a word, sentence, or narrative

tract) and vertically on a paradigmatic axis where possible substitutions between linguistic

elements occupying the same structural position within the same expressive context may

occur (e.g., the phoneme /s/ being substituted for /g/ in the lexeme /go/ to make /so/). The

juxtaposition of structural elements in a text, at the interpretive level, occurs in relation to

syntagmatic indexes (e.g., contradiction, graphic codes, discontinuity, repetition,

inconsistency, superfluity, non-verisimilitude, etc.) (Todorov, 1977). Paradigmatic

indexes, at the interpretive level, may consist of: 1) intertextual paradigms refering to

cultural conventions of human behavior and psychology established external to the text

(e.g., characterization, event and discourse); or 2) internalized paradigms constructed

from within the text by connecting two or more syntagmatically linked indexes of

interpretation refering exclusively to the "textual world" (Todorov, 1977; Greimas, 1970;

Kristeva, 1969; Eco, 1979). Thus, a text is said "to mean": 1) lexically at the syntagmatic

and paradigmatic levels due to organization and substitution, respectively; and 2)

thematically, by the syntagmatic and paradigmatic conjunctions and disjunctions created at

the levels of organization and substitution, within and without the text, resulting in

interpretive indexes. The second set are extensional operations that go beyond the

conscious decoding of lexical meaning as a communicative act intended to realize the virtual

possibilities of language, or intensional operations, and into the realm of activating possible

worlds by determining the coherence and plausibility of the vision. For example, the

representation of a character or event may be incorporated into the syntagmatic structure of

24

the plot and fabula constituting the text, yet, at the paradigmatic level have no intertextual,

or cultural validity, and be relevant only to the textual world as an intratextual paradigm.

Mythological or fairy tale genres refer to creatures such as dragons, ghosts and goblins that

are unrealistic in a cultural sense because they do not exist in the external world; however,

within the world of fairy tales and mythology, as determined by the story and fabula within

specific genres, dragons, ghosts and goblins are perfectly plausible and realistic characters.

It is at this point that actors (like these characters) are formed as the result of genre function

and influences upon the form and perception of narrative utterance.

Isotopy

Isotopy describes the coherence and homogeneity of text which allows for the semantic

concatenation, or chain-linking, of utterances (Greimas & Courtes, 1979). In order to

semantically disambiguate terms within a text and assure textual coherence and

homogeneity, there must be iterativity, or recurrence, of a classeme (either semic category

or repeated contextual seme) which connects the semantic elements of discourse

(sememes). Eco (1984) explains,

The term isotopy designated d'abord, a phenomenon of semic iterativity throughout a syntagmatic chain; thus any syntagm (be it a phrase, a sentence, a sequence of sentences composing a narrative text) comprehending at least two content figurae (in Hjelmslev's sense) is to be considered as the minimal context for a possible isotopy. (p. 190)

On a semantic level, Greimas (1983) uses two expressions le chien aboye (the dog barks)

and le commissaire aboye (the commissioner barks) (p. 81) to illustrate that aboye (barks)

has two classemes, human and canine. It is the presence of the subjects, the dog or the

commissioner, that reiterates one of the two classemes and establishes the contextual

selection for a literal or figurative reading of the text. A syntagmatic extension of an

isotopy is constituted by the textual segments that are connected by one classeme.

25

Ultimately, a "text" which fosters a single interpretation in its semantic structure is a simple

isotopy, whereas, bi-isotopy is the result of textual ambiguities or metaphorical elements

that promote polysemous readings. Pluri- or poly-isotopy is the superimposition of

multiple semantic levels in a text ( Eco, 1984; Nôth, 1990).

The first stage of the theory considered: 1) syntactical (grammarial) isotopies; 2)

semantic isotopies; 3) actorial isotopies; 4) partial isotopies (or smaller textual units that are

"condensed" into a text as the result of summarizing macropositions); and 5) global

isotopies (as the result of partial isotopies) (Eco, 1984). The second stage incorporates

recurrent thematic and figurative categories where the typology of isotopies is extended to

semiological isotopies covering iterativities in terms of exteroceptive)' (refering to

properties of the external world) (see Greimas, 1983).

Function and Actantial Structures

Traditional motif research in narrative has considered actors (on two levels as

characters, in anthropomorphic or zoomorphic forms, and lexical subjects, or actants, of

discourse within a sentence engaged in a thematic role), items (or objects) and incidents as

minimal units of narrative analysis (Greimas & Courtes, 1979). Propp (1928), however,

identified the minimal unit of narrative analysis as the Junction in terms of an action which

"cannot be defined apart from its place in the context of narration" (p. 21). Nôth (1990)

explains,

Functions as units of action are narrative invariants, while the agents performing those actions are textual variables. Within his corpus of one hundred fairy tales, Propp discovered a relatively small number of thirty-one such invariant functions, as opposed to a large number of persons, objects or events (corresponding to the traditional motif) (p. 371).

For example, after the "initial situation" is established in a narrative text, a series of

functions may be cited to explain the narrative syntax and progression of the fabula (story)

26

(see Appendix C). The thirty-one functions are distributed across seven spheres of action

as performed by various characters such as 1) the villain 2) the donor 3) the helper 4) the

sought-for person 5) the dispatcher 6) the hero 7) the false hero (cf. Greimas, 1983, p.

201). From Propp (1928), Souriau (1950; see Greimas, 1983) and Tesnier (1959; see

Greimas, 1983), Greimas (1966) formulated a "mythical" model of narrative actants

containing three binary oppositions: 1) subject vs. object 2) sender vs. receiver 3) helper

vs. opponent.

sender object —• receiver [knowledge]

Î [ t desire] helper —» subject «- opponent [power]

Figure 4. A "mythical" model of actantial structure.

Essentially, the fabula (or story elements of the narrative) and every other narrative

structure is reduced to purely formal positions as actants (defined lexically as that which

accomplishes or undergoes an act e.g., subject-object, sender and receiver, and narratively

as classifications of an actor according to genre) which produce actantial roles (Greimas,

1966; Greimas, 1979; Eco, 1979). The syntactic order of the actantial categories

correspond to "a subject wants an object, encounters an opponent, finds a helper, obtains

the object from a sender, and gives it to a receiver" (Noth, 1990', p.372) sequence or

variations thereof. The narrative utterance (NU) is, therefore, defined as a process

composed of a function (F), in the Proppian sense, and an actant (A), or NU=F(A)

(Greimas, 1983; 1979). The logic of relationships is based upon "knowledge", "desire"

and "power" where the transmission of a message can be analyzed syntactically as the

transferal of "knowledge" and the drama of the acquisition of "power" ("desire" being the

motivating force behind the action).

27

The helper-opponent dichotomy was later abandoned (see Greimas, 1970) as a major

actantial category and the value transfer occurring among the major actants explained as

relationships of conjunction and disjunction according to the semiotic square. Following

from the latter model, a narrative sequence can then be said to begin with a relation of

conjunction between two actants (subject or object), followed by a disjunction (as a

problem or transition phase) which is reconciled in the redistribution of semantic values as

a new conjunction (Greimas, 1970): 1) initial state —> transition —» final state; or 2)

problem —> final stage (see Todorov, 1977). Time and causality are the basic dimensions

of the narrative process (Ricoeur, 1983) that suggest a linear macrostructure, or overall

sequence. Although, the semantic connection between the initial event and the final event

may also suggest a cyclical model such as the following containing four phases beginning

with either a state of deficiency or a satisfactory state (Bremond, 1970, p. 251):

Satisfactory state

Procedure of improvement

Procedure of degradation

State of deficiency

Figure 5. Bremond's narrative cycle.

Summary

The focus of this chapter has been to review an epistemological, theoretical and

methodological framework which is utilized to facilitate the construction of a method for the

semiotic analysis of the picture book in order to isolate and explain the semiotic interaction

28

between the text and the reader/viewer as motivated by both the lexical and visual aspects of

textual form. To this end, the scope of this review has been pragmatic in the selection of

sources relevant to the discussion and not exhaustive in the sense of closing the door to

further discussion. In summary, the following issues have been addressed in chapter two:

1) a coherent definition of semiosis has been presented; 2) the cognitive, affective and

aesthetic implications of semiosis with respect to language and meaning have been

addressed (e.g., iconicity and mental representation); 3) a definition of "image" and its

implication with respect to lexical and pictorial text has been posited; 4) the structural

aspects of lexical and pictorial texts have been outlined, compared and contrasted with

respect to semiotics; and 5) workable, tested, and recognized semiotic methodologies (Eco,

1976; 1979; Greimas, 1983; Barthes, 1964; Saint-Martin, 1987) for examining the

structural as well as the interpretive aspects of both lexical and pictorial texts have been

discussed.

29

CHAPTER THREE

A METHOD FOR T H E SEMIOTIC

ANALYSIS OF T H E PICTURE BOOK

Overview

The purpose of Chapter Three is to outline the semiotic method of textual analysis

which is applied to representative works of the picture book genre in Chapter Four and

Chapter Five for the purpose(s) of the study (as stated in Chapter One). With specific

reference as to how the lexical and visual elements comprising the unique textual form of

the picture book work syntactically and semantically to create a complex system of codes,

the method is used to identify and to explain in semiotic terms the interaction between

lexical and visual texts in the picture book and between the picture book and the reader.

Definitions and Features of a Method: Some Assumptions

The epistemological, theoretical and methodological principles of structural semantics

(see Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983) incorporated within the method in Chapter Three provide

the basic tools and metalanguage for the semiotic analysis of "text" (as discussed in Chapter

Two) and are useful only to the extent that they allow for the phenomena being studied to

be accounted for in terms comprehensible to the human intellect (Eco, 1979). It is in this

sense that a methodological structuralism as operational procedure for analyzing lexical and

visual texts is necessary because without the metalanguage required, there would be no

way to achieve the purpose(s) of semiotic inquiry relevant to the study of the picture book

form as outlined in Chapter One (see also Eco, 1976; Noth, 1990). A semiotic method of

textual analysis is therefore considered to encompass metatextual means or devices (e.g., a

30

metalanguage, a "model", figures or other visual schemata, etc.) which conceptualize in

hypothetical, rather than empirical, terms the intensions and extensions made by the

reader/viewer in the act of meaning-making relative to the lexical and visual structures of

signification manifest in the picture book form. Intensional responses are defined as the

consciously motivated acts of meaning-making required of, or initiated in, the

reader/viewer to realize the signifying potential of the total text. Extensional, or not

consciously motivated, acts are defined as those performed in relation to the signifying

structures which constitute the text but are determined extratextually by contextual factors

which influence lexical and visual sign perception in the pragmatic act of communication

(e.g., culture, education, competence, etc.). A model reader/viewer (Eco, 1979) who can

apprehend fully the intensional and extensional structure of the picture book form is

postulated as an integral feature of the semiotic method detailed in Chapter Three for the

purpose(s) of the analyses conducted in this study.

The model and method of textual analysis of lexical narrative text and the role of the

reader proposed by Eco (1979) (adapted from Petofi, 1973, and incorporating the structural

semantics of Greimas, 1983) forms the basic epistemological, theoretical and

methodological foundation from which the framework for the lexical component of the

method outlined in Chapter Three is drawn. Eco's (1979) method, however, is expanded

and adapted (see Table 1) to include semiotic aspects of visual text manifest linearly in the

picture book as a narrative progression. A feature and function of visual text relevant to the

specific research purpose(s) of this study (as outlined in Chapter One). Like Eco's (1979)

model, the position of the individual 'boxes' which comprise the visual representation of

the method in Table 1 of Chapter Three does not preclude to any suggestions of an

hierarchy of levels encompassing the method of analysis itself or to a sequential ordering of

the reader/viewer's intensional and extensional responses to the textual form, but addresses

metalinguistically the levels of possible abstraction at which meaning-making occurs. Eco

(1979) explains this misleading aspect of semiotic method in textual analysis,

The notion of textual level is a very embarrassing one. Such as it appears,

31

in its linear manifestation, a text has no levels at all . . . 'level' and 'generation' are two metaphors: the author is not 'speaking', he has 'spoken'. What we are faced with is a textual surface, or the expression plane of the text. It is not proved that the way we adopt to actualize this expression as content mirrors (upside down) that adopted by the author to produce the final result. Therefore, the notion of textual level is merely theoretical; it belongs to semiotic metalanguage, (p. 13)

Table 1 is intended not as a guide to hierarchical levels of lexical and visual text or to a 'step

series' of acts or responses which the reader/viewer may actualize in relation to the

signifying structures of the picture book form, but to reveal and to reinforce the

interdependence among the metatextual 'boxes' in detailing a semiotic method for textual

analysis (see Eco, 1979). The only way in which the method depicted in Table 1 provides

a concrete case for textual interpretation is the fact that all intensional and extensional

performed by the reader/viewer are actualized in relation to the linear lexical/visual

manifestation of the picture book such as it appears linguistically and visually in lexematic

and colorematic surface form (Eco, 1976; 1979; Saint-Martin, 1987). In Table 1, a

horizontal line separates the actualized content from the given set of codes or subcodes the

reader/viewer applies to these expressions of textual form as Discoursive Structures or

Plastic and Perceptual Variables in order to transform them into meaningful content.

The Reader: Lexical Codes and Subcodes

Basic Lexical Dictionary. The reader utilizes the graphic and lexical signs provided by

the text to construct the most basic semantic sense from semes, or minimal content units,

embodied in the expression(s). This is a primary tentative attempt toward an

amalgamation (in a general sense) from which meaning is created (Greimas, 1983; Eco,

1983). For example, the sentence /Effie is a gregarious ant/ contains composite syntactic

and semantic indicators within the terms of the expression which function to elicit cognitive

and affective responses in the reader. The noun /Effie/ is a deictic referent to a human

name, that of a girl, or perhaps, a woman, which in itself promotes mental associations

INTENSIONS Lexical Visual

32 EXTENSIONS

Lexical Visual

Elementary Ideological Structures

Actantial Structures

Narrative Structures:

Themes, motives functions (fabula)

Visual Ideological Structures

Visual Actantial Structures

Visual Metaphorical

Structures: Themes, motives, visual

functions (cross-medial)

Textual World

Structures:

Assignment: truth values

Judgement 'of

accessability of

textual worlds

Forecasts and

Inferential Walks

(Visual) Veridiction

Visual corroboration:

visual truth matrixes, congruity judgements, (non) contiguity

(cross-medial)

Visual Indexes:

Visual Image Indicators

Discoursive Structures:

Semantic Disclosures

Plastic and

Perceptual Variables

(Bracketed) Extensions:

First references to a possible world

Visual Anaphoric/Deictic

Extensions:

First references to a possible visual world

Linear Lexical Manifestation Linear Visual Manifestation

lexical Codes and

Subcodes

Basic Lexical Dictionary Rules of Co-reference Selections: Contextual and

Circumstantial Overcoding: Rhetorical and

Stylistic Common Frames Intertextual Frames Ideological Overcoding

R E A D E R VIEWER

Visual Codes and

Subcodes

Basic Visual Dictionary Rules of Visual Co-reference Selections: Contextual and

Circumstantial Visual Stylistic Overcoding Common Visual Frames Intervisual Frames Ideological Overcoding

Table l. A method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book.

33

representative of the properties of the word manifest in its human state (e.g., a woman as

experienced, in reality, having human proportions and characteristics). The development

of meaning-making is dependent upon the existence of a basic lexical dictionary in the

conscious mind of the reader that can be drawn upon to reference associations stimulated

by visual clues in the form of word arrangements. The syntactical properties (e.g.,

singular, feminine, noun, etc.) of the lexemes, or words, do not completely actualize the

meaning potential of a total expression until connections between other terms in the

expression are established through co-referencing. Thus, the isolation and actualization of

the virtual semantic properties latent within lexemes is contingent upon the syntactic

structuring of expression which facilitates the reader's semantic disclosures.

Rules of Co-reference. The various shifters in the text work to orientate the reader on

the basis of the first semantic analysis of the words (Greimas, 1988). /Effie/ as a sememic

unit is undercut with reference to non-human associations since the noun qualifier /ant/ is

semantically anaphoric in reexpressing and reestablishing a previously made semantic

relationship. Initial reader expectations are also displaced with the realization that /Effie/

refers specifically to a non-human entity and the sememic level of meaning becomes

redefined textually through the syntactic relations between lexemes (e.g., /Effie/^«human»;

/Effie/=«ant»). Co-references are textually based and disambiguate meaning from surface

to deep levels within the structure of the sentence (see Greimas, 1979). If this is not

possible, the reader relies upon further textual clues for clarification.

Contextual and Circumstantial Selection. Beyond the co-textual manifestations of

meaning in the linear text (e.g., word forms), contextualized selections of meaning provide

possibilities for correctly determining the reference of a term in comparison with other

terms originating from the same semiotic system, such as in a language (Eco, 1979). In

this case, reference is based upon an encyclopaedic knowledge framework where one

lexeme can denotatively and connotatively generate a series of associations with which the

reader may or may not be familiar as determined through experience. For example, a

lexeme like /hen/ can refer to «bird» or «poultry» in different cultural contexts and point to

radically diverse associations for each reader depending upon experience(s) of the lexical

34

sign as real world object. The distinction is actualized by the reader as possible

interpretations of a word within an expression are selected and rejected according to

textually suggested correlations of lexical signs with external referents which are used to

build interprétants, or mental representations of signs.

Circumstantial selection is based upon "bookish", or intertextual competence, and the

ability to reconcile the presence of elements external or foreign to the semiotic code to

which a particular text adheres. This might include aspects of vocabulary, specialized

expressions or jargon. In narrative texts, circumstantial selections become contextualized,

or are linguistically defined in order to avoid confusion (Eco, 1976; 1979; Iser, 1978).

Rhetorical and Stylistic Overcoding. Rhetorical and/or stylistic cues alert the reader

whether language is being used literally or according to aesthetic convention. For example,

the phrase /Once upon a time/ is an overcoded expression in that the reader is in possession

of and inserts the part of the code required to complete the purpose of communication (Eco,

1979). The reader is aware of and alerted to the fact that a story beginning with this

overcoded expression is fictional and written according to a certain style commensurate

within the genre expected. The interpretation of the textual indicator is not naive but

purposeful in setting up and meeting structural or thematic expectations. To this end,

rhetorical and stylistic overcoding can be used as a literary device in aesthetic texts.

Inferences by Common Frames. Frames are data-structures which are used in lexical

texts to represent stereotypical situations experienced in reality (Winston, 1977). There are

specific elements within frames (courses of events, people, objects, actions, relations, and

facts) outlining basic courses of cognitive action (perception and language

comprehension) that are necessary to understand the situation as an experience (Eco,

1976; 1979). Beyond the visual aspects of a text, which will be discussed later, a

narrative contains references to visual objects, the features of which are isolated and

identified in order to create an overall common frame. For example, the lexical description

of a farm might contain references to objects with visual dimensions (e.g., hen, pond,

haystack, mill , etc.) in order to establish a particular context for the scene depicted

recognizable to the reader as a common frame. The listing of these objects is in itself an

35

overcoding of the information required to understand the specific situation and the

subsequent building of further data structures to complement the common frame.

Inferences by Intertextual Frames. No text is read independently of the reader's

experience of other texts (Kristeva, 1969). This is another example of overcoding where

the extratextual experiences of the reader act as an encyclopaedic source for information

which can be used to disambiguate a text. What Eco (1979) describes as literary topoi, or

narrative schemes of understanding based upon intertextual frames of reference, may aid

the reader to the extent that a text is immediately invested with properties that are the

products of intertextual reference (see also Iser, 1978; Kristeva, 1969) (e.g., allusions to

stock elements of literary experience such as "the villain", "the Cinderella tale", "the happy

ending", etc.)

Ideological Overcoding. Ideological structures are outlined discoursively within a

lexical text through the progression of a narrative sequence of action. The extent to which

the reader can grasp textual ideological structures is determined by a personal ideological

subcode, or gestalt (Iser, 1978). If a text is open, it allows for interpretation against a

different code and is personalized in being uniquely invested with subjective meaning

(Eco,1976; 1979; 1984). In the case of a closed text, however, a given ideological

background can help to uncover or to inhibit the operation of the text on the level of fabula.

For example, ideological bias can work to switch codes and lead the reader to interpret the

code manifest in the text aberrantly, or other than that intended by the writer. That is not to

say that the reader can know precisely what aspect of the writer's ideological

subcode is incorporated in the text; nevertheless, tentative ideological subcodes can be

attributed to the writer when authorial judgements are isolated, usually in the form of

philosophical statements (Eco, 1979) (e.g., in some instances, texts ask for ideological

sympathy from the reader). For example, in the genre of fable, one may ask: What are the

affects upon the reader of a story of an ant who, once exiled from a society of ants because

of a naturally inherited physical trait, returns to heroically save the day because of that

particular trait and now commands respect and love from those who once despised her? If

the reader perceives the ant as being vindicated in the outcome of the action, then there is a

36

sympathy between the embodied textual, and implicit authorial, ideology and that of the

reader. If not, then the ideological code of the reader succeeds in promoting an aberrant

decoding of the text because of subjectivity.

The Reader as Viewer: Visual Codes and Subcodes

Basic Visual Dictionary. With reference to the recognition of basic properties of visual

representations, if the form depicted in a visual text is distinctively analogous, or

representational, the viewer is able to juxtapose figuramatic properties present in the form

against the basic properties of natural forms as experienced in reality according to external

visual paradigms . Forms are iconic to the extent that the actual properties possessed by

corresponding real world referents, are reflected in and not possessed by the represented

figures (see Morris, 1946; Eco, 1979). The conventionality of the imitative code of the

visual text is brought to bear upon the expressive plane but the content plane, the meaning,

may also be affected if the analogous image comes to arbitrarily represent something

outside of itself. In such a case, the visual text becomes symbolic, or contains digital

imagery expression and content of which are determined according to internal visual

paradigms of a particular work or intervisualparadigms drawn from the viewer's other

encyclopaedic sources (e.g., the fox as a symbol of «cunning», the color red representing

«danger», etc.).

Rules of Visual Co-reference. After the initial figuramatic analysis resulting in the

detection of visual syntactic properties, the viewer disambiguates spatial, or toposensitive,

relations among the forms in a pictorial plane. The first tentative attempts at visual co-

reference are confirmed by a more detailed scanning of the forms as co-textual items within

the pictorial plane and subsequent judgements are noted mentally. In this way, the visual

text doubly articulates meaning on both the expressive and content planes (Eco, 1976;

1979; Sonesson, 1989).

(Visual) contextual selections and circumstantial selections. These are coded and

displayed through the figure of form. To be considered iconic, the figures represented in a

37

text must exhibit properties that are distinguishing characteristics of particular types of form

as determined by external visual paradigms . For example, an animal depicted visually can

be distinguished by its physical characteristics; however, if the illustrator wishes to

distinguish between two or more types of the same animal, then the properties endowed the

animal in the illustration will be precise enough for the viewer to cognitively facilitate the

distinction. It is the responsibility of the viewer to eliminate the possibilities of alternative

selection while drawing from an encyclopaedic source of knowledge.

Conversely, if the figures contained in the text are foreign to the viewer's experience,

then the viewer must resort to some external point of reference for clarification. Quite

often, the text contextualizes explanations of items foreign to the viewer in order to

expediate the meaning making process.

Visual Stylistic Overcoding. The cumulative elements which comprise the visual text

are stylistic features coded within the work itself (e.g., the depiction of figures, choice of

setting, perspective, color choice, variation in textures, etc.) and can not be extricated from

the particular context of expression. These stylistic features act as overcoded cues in the

visual text when the viewer is alerted as to whether a work are being used to meet structural

or thematic expectations according to the purpose of communication. For example, an

abstract treatment of form is a stylistic feature of visual text which in itself sets up a series

of associations, expectations and judgements in the viewer with respect to the means of

accepting, decoding and interpreting the images presented.

Inferences by Common Visual Frames. Utilizing the definition posited earlier (see

Inferences by Common Textual Frames), it is necessary to stress that common visual

frames are not necessarily inchoate texts (see Eco, 1979; 1984; Saint-Martin; 1987). The

features which create the overall common frame are identified and isolated visually to

produce overcoding. For example, a farm scene could depict some of the major elements

that are traditionally associated with rural agricultural life: particular animal types (e.g.,

hen, fox, goat, etc.); naturalistic settings (e.g., trees, crops to be harvested, grassland,

etc.); farm architecture (e.g., barn, hen-house, farm-house, windmill, etc.); agricultural

artifacts (e.g., tractor, cart, etc.). This can be described as a common visual frame because

38

of the stereotypical nature of the scene contents.

Inferences by Intervisual Frames. It has already been stated that no text is read

independently of the reader's experience of other texts. Where the external visual

experiences of the reader are elicited to act upon a visual text, visual topoi, or visual

schemes of understanding, may aid the reader to the extent that the work is immediately

invested or overcoded with properties that are the products of intervisual frames of

reference. The viewer must supply the necessary intervisual knowledge to make meaning

from the visual text in this case (e.g., stylization of forms according to convention,

symbolic shapes, other culturally relevant information, etc.).

Visual Ideological Overcoding. In a visual text, the interaction between the forms

depicted, both open and closed (see Arnheim, 1974), produces visual contexts consisting

of formally structured pictorial elements which function on the thematic level to develop a

distinct visual code objectifiable through recourse to language. The ideological

interpretation of a visual text is dependent to a great degree upon the viewer's powers of

visual perception because internal variables (e.g., the ability to perceive color, depth,

topological disjunctions, etc.) may influence the interpretive outcome regardless of the

openness or closedness of the text itself.

Actualized Content: Lexical Intensions and Extensions

Discoursive Structures

The responses to the word level of a text must be actualized by the reader to allow

further amalgamations. Meaning is created through semantic disclosures made by the

reader relative to discoursive structures which isolate the manifested semantic properties of

the lexemes that are virtually present in the reader's store of culturally based information

(Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1988). Therefore, the words in a lexical text actualize no meaning

without the reader. The topic, or theme, of the lexical text functions as a guiding force to

39

insure communication and to delimit the extent of possible semantic properties within the

lexemes to be actualized by making them textually relative. The isotopies, or actual textual

verifications of the topic, present in an expression also direct the meaning making process

by providing a single level of sense from which the reader guides amalgamations (Greimas,

1983).

(Bracketed) Extensions

Once the discoursive structures of the text are actualized, the reader is certain of the

characters, the actions and the events that comprise the plot, since, the intensional semantic

disclosures performed by the reader are realized through the interplay of lexical structures

in relation to and within a total narrative sequence. Suspension of disbelief is then

facilitated by the first overt recognition of a possible world with an inherent underlying

logic corresponding to that of the characters, the actions and the events in the plot (Hodge,

1990; Eco, 1979).

Narrative Structures

Whereas the plot is the basic action of the text, the basic elements from which the story

is generated is the fabula: the make up of the characters, the inherent logic of the action(s)

and the time-line action of events (Greimas, 1987; Eco, 1979). Realization of the fabula

involves a continuous series of abductions, or inferences, experienced linearly by the

reader in the process of disambiguating a narrative text (see Peirce, 1931; Eco, 1979).

Ultimately, the reading process leads from micropropositions emanating from expectations

initiated through semantic disclosures on the level of discoursive structures to more

definitive macropropositions such as themes, motifs, narrative functions and the

determination of various levels of abstraction regarding the fabula upon which the story

itself generates meaning for any given action in the text (Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; 1988).

40

Forecasts and Inferential Walks

Since the fabula is always experienced as a linear and sequential set of abductions, a

disjointing effect is necessarily experienced by the reader, thereby marring the vicarious

imaginative experience to some extent. A n extension of the imagination to presuppose

further action results in aporia, or concerned curiosity, at the major or relevant disjunctions

of the fabula which are set at the level of plot. Here, the reader infers by gathering

intertextual support for the hypotheses created through the discursive structures of the text.

In this way, the expected and/or the unexpected is made explicit "as individuals and

properties belonging to different possible worlds imagined by the reader as possible

outcomes of the fabula" (Eco, 1979, p.218)

Actantial Structures

The lexical text, as narrative, works to verify reader forecasts with respect to the fabula

(Eco, 1978; Greimas, 1983). Narrative is segmented into programs, or stories where the

fabula and every other narrative structure can be further abstracted and reduced to formal

positions which produce actantial roles (e.g., subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver)

according to the modal predication of lexical actants, those acting and those acted upon, that

function thematically on the level of discourse to produce actors, or characters (Greimas,

1970). The active interaction between the lexical actants within expressions on the level of

discoursive structures creates thematic meaning as the fabula is unfolded through the

interplay of actors in the narrative structures. Lexical actants take the roles of actors when

the thematic functions of a text are reinforced as discoursive and narrative structures, thus,

reliably pointing to meaning within a text.

Elementary Ideological Structures

In comparing and contrasting actantial and actorial structures manifest in the lexical text

41

so as to distinguish "textual truth", there is an acknowledgement of the verisimilitude of the

fabula on the part of the reader. This implies a comparison of the textual world with the

reader's own world vision and a suppression of further suspension of disbelief (Eco,

1979). Elementary ideological structure oppositions can be translated into truth

assignments where the reader, utilizing already formulated schemata, makes ideologically

motivated interpretive decisions about the ideology expressed in a given text.

Textual World Structures

Once "textual truth" has been accepted, the text is reduced to binary oppositions and

there is a subsequent assignment of truth values between the textual world structures

determined. The given relations between the lexemes at the actantial level are considered

insofar as they are predicated in the textual world structures as true or false (Eco, 1976;

1979). Ultimately, the reader makes final decisions about the credibility of the text as a

series of reported events, the sincerity in embodiment of ideological beliefs through

convincing characters and the accessibility of the textual world as a fictional experience.

Visual Intensions and Extensions

Plastic and Perceptual Variables

Just as the lexical text is constituted of the sum of individual features which work to

create meaning as a whole, the visual text is comprised of readily identifiable elements that

create a meaningful integrated form of expression. Consequently, the relationships

between the manifest properties of coloremes, or minimal color units comprising a visual

text, disclosed at a point of ocular centration during the act of viewing, may also be

analyzed syntactically and semantically (Saint-Martin, 1987; Arnheim, 1974). The

cumulative effect of two sets of visual variables, plastic and perceptual, upon the

perception process, isolates the latent properties of the coloremes virtually present in the

42

viewer's store of culturally determined visual encyclopaedic knowledge (Gombrich, 1960;

Saint-Martin, 1987). Exploring the general chromatic relations between coloremes in a

particular pictorial text, creates an awareness of how the visual variables determined

through the formal structure of the work interact with respect to the perceptual processes of

the viewer and engender meaningful visual experiences. Color, value and texture are

plastic variables while line, shape, form, vectoriality (focal point and directional tension)

and implantation (position/balance) are perceptual variables (Saint-Martin, 1987).

Visual Anaphoric/Deictic Extensions

Anaphora, for language, is characterized as a network of a relations between two or

more terms, on a syntagmatic axis, establishing linkages in discourse (Greimas, 1983). On

the level of visual text, anaphora can be regarded as the unity and coherence between the

elements which comprise the work that must be maintained to create pictorial sense. The

recognition of form, from schema as objects, in a visual text is deictic because it is

dependent upon the recognition of changes in the intensification or regrouping of coloremes

aggregately within a visual field. Distinct contours between figures (open or closed)

creates analogous forms isomorphic with reality and results in a stable and organized

visual field; whereas, digital, or symbolic, forms rival viewer interpretation because

distinct form contours may or may not be present within the figures. The spatialization, or

placement of forms, within the fore, middle or background of a pictorial plane is a

determinate of the viewer's interpretation of a visual text resulting from variables in

perception(s) according to individual gestalten approximations derived from experience (see

Arnheim, 1974; Saint-Martin, 1987). Ultimately, the viewer can discern visual forms in a

definitive spatial relations and the setting of which they are a part, thereby, setting up a

possible visual world that invites the suspension of disbelief.

43

Visual Metaphorical Structures

It is primarily through closed forms that regions or subregions in a pictorial plane lend

themselves to iconization and are interpreted in relation to the properties manifest in relative

natural forms external to the world of the visual text (Eco, 1979; Saint-Martin, 1987). It is

on the level of visual metaphorical structures that a verbalized equivalent can also be

connected to the representation of form, thus, allowing for the linguistic differentiation of

the pictorial elements of the text which adhere to vraisemblance, or display a direct

correspondence with real world entities. In "global" terms, the extent to which the visual

text reinforces the lexical text can be described as cross-medial agreement. If there is a

direct correlation between the visual and lexical possible worlds projected, then an objective

correlative, or concrete visual representation, of the possible world referred to on a

total textual level is established and elaborated upon through linear visual narrative . If not,

then there is a chiasmos, or separation, between alternative world visions posited, visual

and lexical, that the reader must juxtapose as fabulaic alternatives. The products of this

type of visual stylistic overcoding are literal and figurative visual frames which may or may

not reinforce reader abductions irrespective of stylistic considerations. On this level, the

visual text works to secure thematic considerations as well as the functions of visual

metaphorical structures from which abstractions in the from of macropropositions of the

visual fabula (e.g., themes, pictorial motifs, etc.) are abduced by the viewer.

Visual Indexes

Visual indexes are the result of generative or repressive cross-medial image indicators

built into the conventions of the text as a supportive visual framework for the inferences

drawn from the lexical text. Beyond replication of possible lexical world constructs, the

visual indexes set up cross-medial frames of reference with respect to internal and external

paradigms applicable to a particular text which suppress disjunction and support thematic

concerns on the level of the "global" fabula by providing points for comparison/contrast

44

and clarification/elaboration upon the narrative structures of the lexical text through the

linear visual narrative of the pictorial text. Therefore, the visual indexes serve to limit and

define the viewer/reader's extensional responses in accord with the aesthetic conventions of

the text by aligning the visual contexts appropriately to insure indexicality for the

interpretation of signs and codes, lexical and visual, within a specific schematic and textual

framework.

Visual Actantial Structures

Through the isolation of visual actantial structures, the viewer attempts to furnish

hypotheses necessary for an analytical approach to the pictorial text as part of a sequential

linear visual narrative. The viewer's approach to decoding, however, is non-linear but

correlational in that the interaction of forms within the pictorial setting results in an

awareness of the visual actants comprising a supersyntagm, or combination of elements co-

present in the visual text, as they function to elicit thematic meaning (Saint-Martin, 1987)

over an extended series of visual frames which constitute the visual fabula. The active or

passive interaction of forms creates visual actantial roles (e.g., subject vs. object, sender

vs. receiver) within the picture plane and as the visual plot is unfolded pictorially through

the interplay of visual actants with distinctive thematic functions in the action and events of

the linear visual narrative, the viewer is able to discern the visual actors .

Visual Ideological Structures

In essence, "textual truth" is determined pictorially when the visual text is

acknowledged as 'real' and the subsequent assignment of truth values placed upon a

particular form or relation(s) between forms, as visual actors depicted in a linear visual

narrative, is correlated with the truth values disseminated by the same relations between

relative actors in the narrative structures of its lexical compliment. The reduction of the

visual text to propositions of binary opposition determines if there is an incongruency

45

which must be resigned before the lexical and visual texts are aligned on the level of fabula

to consolidate the total ideological vision of the text.

(Visual) Veridiction

Through (visual) veridiction, there is an attempt at corroboration of assigned truths,

both lexical and visual, within a single textual world structure. The extent to which the

'textual truth' assignments of the lexical text and visual text are aligned thematically on the

level of fabula, determines the aesthetic success of the work as a whole and the viability of

the vision embodied within it.

Summary

The method outlined in Chapter Three is the culmination of inquiry into the

epistemological, theoretical and methodological presuppositions of semiotics (as derived

from the discussion in Chapter Two) (see Eco, 1976; 1979; Greimas, 1983; Saint-Martin,

1987) relevant to the research problem: How does the textual form of the picture book

work, both lexically and visually, as a system of signs and codes to create meaning? In

itself, the method directly addresses the purpose(s) of the study (stated in Chapter One) by

identifying, defining and explaining through the metatextual 'boxes' in Table 1 the

signifying elements constituting the bifurcated nature of form in the picture book as well as

the interaction between lexical and visual text in relation to the reader/viewer's intensional

and extensional acts of meaning-making and interpretation.

46

CHAPTER FOUR

T H E SEMIOTICS OF T H E LEXICAL TEXT

Overview

Chapter Four illustrates the specific applications of the method outlined in Chapter

Three in a formal semiotic analysis of the signs and codes comprising the lexical text of the

picture book Effie (Allison & Reid, 1990). Reference is made to how the reader

constructs intensional and extensional meaning from the lexical component of a picture

book in the form of cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses and to the type(s) and

extent of semiotic interaction between the lexical and visual signs and codes which

engender the genre's textual form. The pragmatic aspects of communication (Peirce, 1931)

between the reader/viewer and the text are considered in Chapter Four (and later in Chapter

Five) insofar as is relevant to the discussion.

Intensional Semiotics: Discoursive Structures to Semantic Disclosures

The graphic clues to meaning provided by the lexical text of a picture book are signs or

cues enabling the reader's progression toward the construction of fundamental semantic

sense from semes, or minimal content units, embodied in the expressions. On the

lexematic level of the text manifesting codes and subcodes in discoursive structures, the

reader must resort to a basic lexical dictionary, present in the conscious mind, as

determined through culture and experience to actualize intensional responses. The

meaning-making potential of the text on the lexematic level is also dependent upon the

reader's encyclopaedic knowledge which can be accessed through the basic lexical

dictionary of associations mentally stimulated by lexical cues. The sentence /Effie came

47

from a long long line of ants/ (Allison & Reid, 1990, p. I) 2 contains composite syntactic

and semantic indicators within the terms of the expression which elicit the intensional

cognitive and affective responses required of the reader to decode the discoursive structures

of the lexical text. The lexeme /Effie/ is a proper noun referential to a human name of the

female sex, perhaps a girl or a woman, and in itself exudes semantic associations

representative of the properties of its human referent imbued within the lexematic form of

expression (e.g., «a woman experienced in the real world as having human proportions

and dimensions»).

The syntactic properties of the lexemes (singular, feminine, noun, etc.) are not

completely actualized in terms of meaning potential until the remaining connections with the

other lexemes in a sentence are established through co-referencing. /Effie/, as a nominal

lexematic form, is unusual because it is used rarely; therefore, an immediate reaction to the

lexeme at the semantic level may necessarily be delayed until more information is

dearchived from the reader's encyclopaedic knowledge of onomastic terms through

abductions drawn from the syntactically determined co-references of remaining terms in the

expression. Consequently, the first semantic analysis performed by the reader of the

lexeme /Effie/ as a sememic unit, presenting a defining set of terms, is undercut with

reference to non-human associations which are blown up rather than narcotized within the

linear manifestation of the lexical text. The lexeme /ant/ qualifies the nominal noun and is

anaphoric in reexpressing and reestablishing a previously made semantic relationship. The

reader's expectations are then displaced with the realization that the lexeme /Effie/ refers not

to a human form but a zoomorphic subject and the sememic level of meaning becomes

redefined textually through semantic disclosures based upon syntactic associations between

the lexemes: «Effie is not a human female entity but an ant». The lack of disjunction

separating /Effie/ and /ant/ on the "deep" level points reliably to non-contrastive relations

between the two lexemes and reveals a semantic resemblance, or conjunction, based upon

the semic category of species. Consequently, the operative semic categories that form the

fundamental semantics of the "deep" level contain the semantic categories that form the

48

elementary structures of signification and the relations and transformations which derive

and constitute those structures, or fundamental syntax (Greimas, 1983). The semantic and

syntactic component of the expressions define spatialization, temporalization and

actorialization in terms of the narrative structures once the subject is disambiguated on the

level of discoursive structures.

non-ant non-human

Figure 6. The deep level of /Effie/.

In considering how the internal spatialization of setting is established on the lexematic level

through the discoursive structures, it is necessary to examine how the syntactic and

semantic conditions in the text lead to the actualization of the actor, or character, Effie

within a particular context of actions and events in relation to other forms of conscious

being referred to in the lexical plot which cumulatively engender a possible textual world.

One aspect is the particular combination of the lexemes /Effie/, /long/, /line/ and /ants/ in a

specific syntactic order which compels the reader to produce a series of co-references that

49

create a spatially ordered sense of "a world" as determined by the linguistic functions of

terms (see Greimas, 1983). For example, the toponym /line/ modifies and is qualified by

the repeated use of the adjective /long/ to create the following semic disjunction:

/long/ v s expanse line non-line

Figure 7. A semic conjunction and disjunction based on spatialization.

The semic category length applied to /line/ enables the contrast in the expression between

the form of ant being represented in the lexeme /Effie/, without a spatial context, to the

form of ant being spatially delineated and referenced in the phrase /hundreds of others/ of

the following sentence, by defining the relations of the subject to the collective form of

being alluded to through the discoursive structures in terms of somatic lineage and

formation, which are also spatial constructs of determination. Therefore, the

figurativization allows for the specific point of conjunction and disjunction, resemblance

or non-resemblance, dividing the lexical actants into subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver

as individual actors in the narrative structures to be determined textually. Spatialization

leads to actorialization through the individuation of being and the creation of actantial and

thematic roles. The separation and segmentation of subjects on the actantial level creates a

disjunction between the two discursive subject sets, /Effie/ (SI) and /the others/ (S2), and

results in the actorialization of the lexical actants, which through the reader's initial

semantic disclosures promoted by the discoursive structures in the lexical text, have

previously been figurativized and identified as characters invested with zoomorphic traits

and properties. The reader's affective responses to the characters can then be said to result

in relation to the process of figuritivization.

Semic iterativity within a syntagmatic chain, such as a phrase or sentence (Eco, 1984)

establishes isotopy, or the coherence and homogeneity of text through textual verifications

of the topic, or theme, which allows for the chain-linking of utterances in the progression

50

from discoursive structures to narrative structures. The discoursive structures of the first

four pages of Effie adhere strictly to the actorialization of the lexical actants by facilitating

the basic syntactic organization of expressions necessary for thematic roles to be defined

through the isolation oiactorial isotopies in terms of subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver

on the level of narrative: «Effie is an ant, with a history, who differentiates from other ants

by possessing a thunderous voice from which the other ants wish to escape». From a

linguistic point of view, the coherence of the text is ensured because the actor /Effie/ is

figurativized and rendered permanent in the lexical narrative as the main subject around

which all relations with other individual or collective actors are structured. The narrative

structure of the lexical text can then be said to unfold through the manifestations of the

subjects in different actantial positions within sentences while resulting in transformations

of values which simultaneously institute, determine and qualify disjunctions between two

or more discoursive subjects according to thematic roles (Greimas, 1970).

It is obvious, however, that the discoursive topic governing the sequencing of the total

narrative is always /Effie/, or more precisely, /Effie's voice/ and the resulting series of

negative reactions to it are manifest in the actions and events of the plot acted out by the

lexical actors on the level of narrative structures which is divisible into programs according

to the actantial and thematic roles of the subject(s).

Temporalization in the introductory narrative sequence (NSI) of Effie attempts to

establish verisimilitude of the characters, the actions and the events comprising the lexical

plot through the citing of an "historical'' point of reference, within the possible lexical

world of the picture book, for the existence of an endomic creature named Effie. The

narrative time frame is suggested in the use of the past tense verb /came/, in the expression

individual actor /Effie/ (SI)

vs. collective actors /others/ (S2)

Figure 8. Textual actors in a relation of disjunction.

51

/Effie came from a long long line of ants/, to establish an in médias res, or interrupted

temporal sequence of actions from past to present, where the action is delineated to have

been predicated before the beginning of the present narrative at an undisclosed past time.

The reader is placed in the middle of the action, with the implication here being that the

forward progression of time begins from the point of first narrative utterance; hence, the

creation of a viable fictional reality is based on the logic of an allusion to an historical past

of the subject as verified in the temporal progression of the linear narrative. The illusion of

verisimilitude, in this instance, leading to an initial suspension of the reader's disbelief.

The first sequence of the total narrative (pp. 1-4) is set up by a distinct temporal

disjunction, between itself and the rest of the lexical text, through which the discoursive

dominance of the actors /Effie/ and the /other ants/ is presented. The subsequent

suggestion of a time frame as having elapsed at a specific, yet undefined, point in the past

is indicated in the lexical text as /one day/ and the change of narrative sequence which

allows for the altering of actantial roles and the substitution of dominant subjects (or

objects) in the narrative structures is established. It is then possible for the lexical text to

present the actorial motives which are necessary for the logic of the characters, the actions

and the events within the lexical plot and for the creation of actantial and thematic roles.

The discoursive strategies embodied within the text itself are validated through the

inferences made by the reader at the level of narrative structures. From a semantic

perspective, co-referencing is not established grammatically but narratologically as the

blowing up and narcotizing of various properties of the lexemes occurs by means of an

overall generative trajectory of linear and dynamic discourse progression. It is then

possible, if required by the reader, to determine what function a particular word performs

/came/ (prior to narrative utterance)

vs. «will continue to come» (post narrative sequence)

Figure 9. Temporalization of the possible world.

52

in the total narrative. For example, the first narrative sequence works toward the figurative

use of language in a simile which represents lexically the dysphoric, or negative

connotations, resulting from the juxtaposition of the lexemes /voice/ and /thunder/ as binary

opposites in terms of level of sound volume. The emotive power of the connotations

associated with the mental concepts represented in the lexeme /thunder/ are relayed back to

the mental concepts represented in the lexeme /voice/ relative to the subjects /Effie/ and /the

other ants/ and this results in the separation of discoursive subjects dominating the narrative

sequence at two polar axes according to the semic category of sound volume in terms of

the isotopy /voice/.

/Effie/ /ants/

Negative SI VOICE S2 Positive

/thunder/ /tiny/

Figure 10. The figurativization of actors according to the textual topic.

Accordingly, there is a natural disjunction set up lexematically on the level of narrative

structures between the two discoursive subjects based upon the extent (or lack of)

proclivity for the production of sound, defined as /voice/, in each lexical actor portrayed

within the sequence. This is clearly defined to be the topic of the discoursive structures in

the introductory narrative sequence. A first structural consequence derived from the

description of Effie's voice as /thunder/ is to give the subjects a specific narrative trajectory

and define the thematic roles (SI and S2) and modal predication of subjects in actantial

structures by which the narrative is segmented into programs. A second result is to

recognize the dimensions of semantic meaning evoked through the figurative manifestations

of rhetorical language use in the expression /voice like thunder/. In this way, a denotation

becomes a connotation linking the reader's cognitive and affective associational responses

with one particular lexeme in modification of the subjects according to the polar axes of the

53

semic category in question. Since there is no literal level of explanation that can

disambiguate the expression adequately in real world terms without the reader's full

participation in acknowledging the special use of lexical terms for aesthetic affect(s) (see

Eco, 1984), the relations between the concepts are meaningful insofar as they allow for the

differentiation of terms from which meaning can be made and not the extent to which the

terms share resemblance.

SI S2

/thunder/ vs. /tiny ant voices/ «non-tiny ant voices» «non-thunder»

Figure i l . The thematization of the actors in terms of the textual topic.

Extensional Responses: From Paradigms to Possible Worlds

In order to determine how a reader/viewer responds aesthetically to a lexical or visual

artistic work, it is necessary to examine how the rational intellect influences affective

choices regarding the acceptability of a possible world vision depicted in a text according to

cognitive and affective modes of understanding established through experience. We, as

readers, bring to the text an encyclopaedic knowledge, developed in relation to culture

through our real world and literary experiences, ready-made frames of reference in the form

of extratextual paradigms and intertextual paradigms respectively (see Kristeva, 1969).

These externally derived paradigms are automatically juxtaposed by the reader against the

internal paradigms of the possible worlds depicted in an artistic text which embody an

internally self-consistent logic of characters, actions and events, the particularized features

of which, may well have no validity for, or application in, the extratextual world. Even

though it may be somewhat speculative to generalize the extent to which paradigms are

truly shared experiences without acknowledgement of the variables present in human nature

54

resulting from differences between individuals, the shared experiences of language and

culture are a homogenizing effect which stabilizes what is the "norm" or "mean" expected

from participants in a particular society. Consequently, it can be concluded that the

members of a given culture share more common similarities than common differences in

behavior and thought (Eco, 1976; 1984; Lotman, 1990).

In the case of Effie, the total text, both lexical and visual, works toward the suspension

of disbelief by narcotizing any ideological disjunctions which may be created between

extratextual paradigms derived from the reader/viewer's encyclopaedic knowledge and the

internal paradigms of the possible world portrayed in the picture book that would impinge

upon and mar the vicarious aesthetic experiences promulgated by the artistic text. From the

first narrative utterance, the reader is alerted to the fact that the story is fictional and not

realistic, since, ants do not possess the human faculty of speech and it is extremely

doubtful that in the history of the world there has ever existed an ant named Effie with

anthropomorphic features of the kind objectified in the visual text. However, there are also

the unique stylistic implications arising from the anthropomorphization of zoomorphic

beings in both the lexical and visual texts which suppress the textual function of isolating

the fictive elements of the story. Indeed, aspects of the possible world of Effie are set up in

the lexical text which are in themselves believable as common frames of reference and

reinforce the logic of the actions of the characters and the events related in the narrative

structures to promote the reader's acceptance of the lexical fabula on its own terms. The

lexical actants which develop figurativized actors, in themselves, all refer externally to

familiar zoomorphic forms and are actualized as such through the particular actions and

behaviors of the creatures described in the text that are synchronous with what is known to

be expected from them through experience. These specific expressions of predication are

chosen in relation to these acting subjects in order to justify figuritivization according to

external paradigms. For example, a real world /caterpillar/ does in fact /wriggle/ as a means

for locomotion and /split his skin/ in the natural metamorphosis to butterfly; a /butterfly/ is

capable of being /blown away/ from the force of air pressure after /landing/ on a flower; a

spider does, in a sense, /parachute/ to safety and a beetle does, in fact, hide all appendages

55

while /spinning/ topsy-turvy. The aesthetic function of the lexical text is to establish a

realistic point of reference for the physical behavior of the subjects, as reinforced by

predicates derived from extratextual paradigms in order to to legitimize intellectually, for the

reader, the fictional portrayal of the zoomorphic forms by actualizing a possible textual

world which corresponds to external reality in degree. A reader/viewer is, therefore, more

likely to accept the non-realistic visual representation of a napkin-bibbed spider, with an

expression of delight, holding a salt shaker in expectation of a potential victim who will

make a tasty treat, if the lexical text does not contradict, but remains neutral to or supports,

the aesthetic purpose of the code being developed in the possible visual world.

Consequently, the obvious lack of specification in the lexical text about the pictorial forms

depicted (e.g., few adjectives) allows for the support of the aesthetic function of the text by

visual elements which act as stylistic indicators and compliment the purpose of

communication by providing an overfurnished set of possible world structures. Whereby,

the reader/viewer is forced to reassess the content of the message conveyed in the lexical

text in order to comprehend the coding processes through which the lexical expressions and

the visual expressions are structured textually.

The aesthetic sign-functions in the lexical and visual texts of the picture book are based

upon the reader/viewer realizing a process of code altering where the communication act

elicits highly original responses (Eco, 1976). For example, the new and surprising

portrayal of the spider (as discussed previously) in the visual text alters our perception of

the 'world of spiders' by allowing the one to emote upon the concept through connotations

which are built upon the normal sign-function elicited in the lexical and pictorial

representation of «spider» and results in either positive or negative feelings which produce

a response in the reader/viewer based upon the deviation from the "norm" —either

definitional or stylistic. From this point of view, the total text of Effie, as expression and

content, becomes unpredictable and semantically ambiguous because multiple

interpretations of the visual and lexical texts can abound which brings into play different

codes that upset the reader/viewer's already acquired knowledge structures, or schemata,

and cognitive and affective modes of understanding developed in relation to experience.

56

Eco (1979) explains,

The contextual interaction brings to life more and more meanings and, as soon as they come to light, they seem fraught with yet other possible semantic choices. . .The addressee 'senses' the surplus of both expression and content, along with their correlating rule. This rule must exist, but to recognize it requires a complex process of abduction, hypotheses, confrontations, rejected and accepted correlations, judgements of appurtenance and extraneity (pp. 270-273)

For example, intertextual frames of reference may provide the reader with the necessary

background information to comprehend how the duality of meaning is structured

figuratively in the first narrative utterance where the lexeme /line/ plays upon two distinct

denotations each of which implies an altered perception of the lexical plot and influences the

consequent mental construction and construing of the possible world on the level of lexical

fabula. For the reader attempting to define the term /line/ within a definite semantic field

which would allow for trouble-free decoding of the lexeme, it becomes necessary to

examine why (and by extension how) the text is intentionally ambiguous in specifying the

correlating rule between the expression and the content. The sentence /Effie came from a

long long line of ants/ plays punningly upon the reader's ability to contextualize selections

from an encyclopaedic knowledge framework in order to determine the definitive meaning

of the lexeme /line/ as qualified by the epithet /long/. The semantic possibilities for the

denotation of meaning in lexical terms, normally actualized and reinforced textually as

sememes, are not readily isolated through the discoursive structures of the picture book in

this instance because the visual text works to support one denotation (Dl) while not totally

suppressing another denotation (D2) suggested by the lexical text (and vice versa).

57

D l : /line/ = common ant formation

vs.

D2: /line/ = lineage; ancestral descent

Figure 12. Possible denotations of /line/ actualized by the reader.

The hybrid use of visual and lexical sub-codes to convey semantic sense by guiding

reader/viewer disclosures, in fact, promotes the textual ambiguity which causes the

humorous tone of the sentence as a result of the conflict of contrasting definitive isotopies

presented in the visual and the lexical texts that generate tension between the two sub-codes

and the potential for an aberrant decoding of the lexemes. The meaning of the lexeme /line/

then becomes equivocal because the visual text amplifies and objectifies the virtual

properties of what one may perceive to be associated with an «ant line», while the lexical

text is left open to sememic substitutions that are at odds with the pictorial portrayal (see

Eco, 1976; Greimas, 1979). This is an example of stylistic/rhetorical overcoding, or a type

of aesthetic ideolect, where the expression alerts the reader to the certain conventional use

of language—doing things with words—and the reader must insert the part of the code

required to complete the aesthetic purpose of communication (Eco, 1976). It is at this point

that the reader may make abductions and predictions as to the unfolding of the lexical or

visual fabuli.

Cognitive and Occurential States: Doing and the Subject

The micropropositions actualized through the reader's initial semantic disclosures

enable the progressive abstraction leading to macropropositions of the lexical fabula, from

the lexical plot, in the form of first references to a possible world. In order for the reader to

move beyond the level of semantic disclosures, however, there are two types of doing

consummated by the subjects in a tract of narrative discourse which must be considered:

58

occurential, or pragmatic, doing (which is a physical form of action) and cognitive, or

psychic, doing (whose object is the attainment of knowledge) (Greimas, 1983). Greimas

(cited from Blonsky, 1985) explains the nature of the cognitive subject in relation to doing

and narrative structure,

Cognitive doing is true doing [sicl it has a subject and that subject aims at an object. In that way we can write that as an entire narrative programme. However, if you take cognitive doing, the subject intends an object but that object is, as we said, knowing; it involves knowing what? Another object, and especially what I call the doing of someone with someone else. (p. 345)

The textual predication of the cognitive subjects in the form of lexical actants is set up as

interpretive doing and takes the form of verbalized (dialogic) and non-verbalized

(occurential) doings (see Greimas, 1970; Bakhtin, 1981). The process of cognitive doing

can be further broken down in modality to states of active and passive transmission and

reception (Greimas, 1983). The different cognitive operations performed during these

psychic states are indicative of the modes of conscious behavior exhibited by the actantial

subjects as actors. Two questions now arise: 1) As the possible subject of an occurential

verb or as a subject of its own cognitive doing, what does the presence of bidimensional

levels of a subject's doing within the lexical text indicate?; and 2) What establishes the

conjunctions and disjunctions between the various actants in the lexical text on the basis of

doing?

The act of communication is a conscious attempt at the transmission of knowledge from

internally motivated sources and the reception of knowledge which in turn stimulates its

interpretation. In the picture book Effie, cognitive doing as the transmission of knowledge

is a dynamic and self-directed process performed by the active subject on both the

pragmatic, or plot-line level of occurrences, and cognitive, or knowledge seeking, axes.

For example, the sentence /Effie set out to find someone who would listen to her/ (p.5)

displays the pragmatic as well as the cognitive dimensions of active doing initiated by the

subject in relation to the object with a definite wil l , purpose and desire. When the

59

protagonist attempts to communicate with other zoomorphic forms in the possible world of

the lexical text, the main object of the pragmatic action is to acquire cognitive knowledge

about the doings of those deemed potential interlocutors. The modality of transmission is

determined from the subject in relation to the object and results in the predication of doing

where there is a wanting-to-do without knowing-how-to-do which leads to

disappointment because the cognitive reception of the knowledge by the objects (or other

cognitive subjects) of the communication act in the actantial role of receiving the

transmission of a message from the sender, is most typically interpreted negatively as

/noise/ in the narrative sequences constituting the first narrative program (NP1). The

reader's resulting awareness of the functions of the subjects as actants in the narrative

structures (e.g., active subject vs. passive object) leads to macropropositions regarding the

total elements of the story engendered within the lexical text. A third type of cognitive

doing, exhibited in a later narrative sequence (refer to NSVIII), can be categorized as the

already interpreted reception of communicated information. It is represented textually in

Effie by the active avoidance, or escape, of any cognitive doing, either the communication

of, or the reception of, knowledge on the part of the other cognitive subjects with respect to

the protagonist.

Figure 13. A representation of the levels of a subject's doing.

60

Lexical Actants and the Modality of Discourse

In essence, the point of convergence and investment of both the syntactic and semantic

components on the levels of discoursive semantics and narrative syntax creates actors from

actantial subjects with at least one thematic role and one actantial role through which the

cognitive and occurential doings as a series of actorial transformations are worked out

temporally in the plot. The segmenting of narrative sequences according to temporality

disjunctions makes possible the analysis of the lexical text in which the principle actantial

roles of the subjects are defined and interdefined in the concatenation of utterances that

form syntagms within distinct narrative programs belonging to a larger narrative trajectory

(see Greimas, 1988; Hjelmslev, 1943; Eco, 1979). The syntactic role of a subject in a

narrative sequence is not stationary but in a constant state of flux with respect to its

occurential and cognitive doing at a given time frame in the narrative program. It is the

seeking of new positions to occupy in the paradigmatic organization of the discourse as

syntagms which compose the narrative structures forming the elementary level of surface

narrative syntax that enables the subject to accomplish its function in the total narrative

trajectory. The thematic objectives and goals which constitute the functions entailed by the

subject with regard to the total narrative schema are then actualized textually on the level of

thematic content.

There are thirteen narrative sequences (NSI-NSXIII) in Effie documenting the

transformation of the protagonist from villain-exile to heroine and the subsequent

transformations of the other subjects in terms of cognitive and occurential doing (see

Appendix D). Greimas (cited from Blonsky, 1985) explains the progressive functions of

subject-actant transformations in narrative discourse,

The hero becomes a hero only at a given moment in the narrative route; earlier he was not a hero, and perhaps at a given moment he will cease to be a hero . . . A journey often characterized by acquisition of competences . . . Thus we can call a hero a competent subject who has the will to do and power to do. That is a hero. If there were no will to do, there would be no hero, but what if one can will but not be able to do? (p. 347)

61

Consequently, the dynamic nature of the hero is determined by the "lack" or "absence of

lack" (see Propp, 1928; Greimas, 1970) of the subject, as actor, at a given time with

respect to other subjects also predicated in a particular narrative route. Explained

grammatically, the modifications of the predicate are incurred by the syntactic position of

the lexical subject at various points in the narrative route and reveal the modality, or

syntactic organization of discoursive structures, where the subject acting upon a

corresponding object modifies its predication and defines the actantial roles of both lexemes

as subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver thus resulting in the creation of thematic roles for

each of the lexical actants according to the terms of relation. The sentence /Whenever she

spoke, the whole nest of ants ran to get away from the noise/ (p. 4) contains a definite

modality manifest expressedly in the discoursive structures within a hypotactic structure

specifying "the hierarchical relation linking the two terms situated at two different stages of

derivation (e.g., the relation between main and subordinate clauses, between modified and

modifier, etc.)" (Greimas & Courtes, 1979, p. 145) in terms of the subject's doing versus

being. Referring to the protagonist, the lexical subject /she/ takes on an actantial role of

sender in relation to the expression /the whole nest of ants/ which embodies the receiver of

the message in the object /ants/ within the planes of cognitive and occurential doing. On the

one hand, the subject/sender /she/ (SI) wishes to establish cognitive and occurential lines

of communication with the collective subject /ants/ (S2) who, manifest in the discoursive

structure of the sentence as object/receiver, wish to avoid the cognitive and occurential

reception of the message because of previously interpreted knowledge about the means of

transmission (e.g., Effie speaking = /noise/ = «discomfort»). The cognitive competence of

the subject that presupposes performative doing, being-able-to-do and knowing-how-to-

do, in the context of the relationship between the sender and the receiver of the message in

any act of communication is absent here.

There are two reasons which explain why Effie is incompetent in the act of

communication: 1) because of the loud voice she possess; and 2) because she is naive to

the fact that her voice is unbearably loud for the other animals. Consequently, the cognitive

and occurential communicative objective of the subject/sender can not be fulfilled in this

62

instance with respect to the object/receiver. The lexical actants can, therefore, be examined

in terms of conformity and non-conformity to the deixes in question (e.g., voice and sound

volume), as represented by the semiotic square, and their disjunction can be determined

upon a paradigmatic axis as "elements that can occupy the same place in the syntagmatic

string, or, in other words, a set of elements each of which is substituted for the other in the

same context" (Greimas & Courtes, 1979, p. 224) (see Appendix C). If we consider

which other lexemes in the course of the narrative program may be substituted for the

particular lexical actants in this sentence and maintain the same semantic sense as well as

the paradigmatic disjunctions established through the syntax of the discoursive structures,

then the issue begins to take on contextual implications as there must be an equivalence of

thematic roles between the different lexical actants for substitution to be possible (see

Appendix D).

Functions, Motives and Thematic Roles

"Functions as units of action are narrative invariants, while the agents performing those

actions are textual variables" (Nôth, 1990, p. 371; see also Propp, 1928; Eco, 1979;

Greimas, 1983). Therefore, the narrative utterance, defined as NU=F(A) (where

NU=narrative utterance, F=function and A=actant), is based upon a logic of relationships

between the thematic counterparts of actants operationalized in the possible lexical world of

the text as actors according to the categories of "knowledge", "desire" and "power" (see

Greimas, 1983). Thematic roles embody an entire narrative program made up of shifts in

temporal sequence and are capable of actualizing and of summing up, through syntactic

analysis, the body of cognitive and affective mental activities performed by the reader to

make the necessary linkages between the actantial roles accomplished by lexemes on a

syntactic-grammatical level and the resulting thematic roles on a semantic-content level

which creates characters, or actors. From this perspective, if we look at occurential doing,

or pragmatic action, in a narrative tract and define it on a grammatical level but with

semantic investiture, it is possible to glean from the analysis a thematic element that

63

produces the semantic field of logic from which the occurential level of narrative can be

structured and wherein it lies (Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983).

ants

denigrative + escape communicative search

(Cognitive) Effie (Occurential)

Figure 14. Thematic roles of the subjects in terms of cognitive and occurential doing.

In Effie, the thematic roles—both cognitive and occurrential — are derived from the

semantic disclosures which result in the "deepest" levels of intensional meaning making

that place the actants in a syntactic relation of binary opposition determining searcher vs.

escapee and communicator vs. denigrator. The predication of the action in the expression

/ran to get away from/ in NSI concretizes the actantial roles of the subjects around which

the narrative sequence (and all of NP1) is syntactically structured for the reader to

semantically realize the virtual properties of the language manifest on the lexematic level in

the form of figures that are extended into discourse configurations through the thematic

roles of the actants. (see Appendix D)

The discoursive level of structure also aims at eliciting the processes utilized by the

reader to test expectations and forecasts on the level of the lexical fabula. To recognize a

given lexical fabula, the reader must first identify a narrative topic, or main theme, through

abductions built from micropropositions to macropropositions during the course of

reading. The abduction process functions as a series of cumulatively effected mental

hypotheses to be tested through trial-and-error against the actual textual verifications of the

lexical fabula. Narrative sequences one to thirteen in Effie contain parallel actantial

structures embodied in three thematic roles manifest by two main actors, Effie and the

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object searched out to talk with:

NSI-XI: subject vs. object [searcher vs. escapee]

sender vs. receiver [communicator vs. denigrator]

NSXI-XIII: helper vs. opponent [rescuer vs. adversary]

Figure 15. The narrative as determined by actantial and thematic roles.

Ironically, the actor Effie is the simultaneous textual representation of the narrative

functions performed by the villain-exile, the helper and the heroine. This is a literal

contradiction but it is figuratively and thematically plausible in the possible world of the

lexical text if we consider the sum total of narrative utterances as two separate narrative

programs (NP1/NP2), or story lines, based upon the actantial and thematic roles of the

main textual subject, /Effie/. Then, the first phase of the story in NP1 ends after NSX

where the protagonist transforms from villain-exile to heroine in the form of helper and

adopts a new actorial role as actantial and thematic subject in relation to other subjects

within the cognitive and occurential doing of the second narrative program (see Appendix

D).

The sequencing of NP1 and NP2 in figure of functions reveals the importance of the

original conjunction and disjunction based upon individual physical characteristics set up

between Effie, as an actor, and the subsequent subjects presented in the lexical text. The

introductory narrative sequence, NSI in NP1, thematizes the actantial role of the subject

/Effie/ through the relationships created between the lexical subjects according to the

categories of "knowledge", "desire" and "power" and defines the actors which will isolate

the functions, or actorial roles, through the narrative sequence of utterances on micro/macro

levels (Propp, 1928; Greimas, 1983; Eco, 1976). The comparison of /Effie/ with /the other

ants/ in NSI can be said to be the result of a gradual process of isolating through the

reader's semantic disclosures the physical properties, both natural and static (immutable),

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natural and kinetic (mutable), that are common to the actors in the sequence and to

differentiate later through disjunctive contrasts the virtual properties of the lexemes that will

be necessary to distinguish between textual actors on the thematic level. While functioning

as textual subject-actant and possessing both thematic and actantial roles to single out the

themes of search, escape and isolation which are reiterated in the plot structure from NSI to

NSX, /Effie/, as a lexeme, is invested with potential textual meaning—Effie is a gregarious

ant with a large mouth with a natural compunction for loud conversation whom other ants

and animals wish to escape from cognitive or occurential contact with.

Actantial Structures and the Level of Fabula

The conceptualization of fabula is the result of the continuing series of abductions made

by the reader about the possible world of the text and is experienced step-by-step during the

course of the reading act with regard to how the textual actors change or develop at each

phase of the story (Eco, 1979). Left to wonder, the reader , therefore, sets up probabilities

and disjunctions about the characters, the actions and the events during the course of the

narrative in the form of macropropositions.

The reduction of the fabulaic elements of the lexical text into a series of narrative

structures (à la Propp, 1928) is an inevitable prerequisite in order for the reader to travel

further toward the "deepest" intensional levels of meaning that the lexical plot reveals as

manifest in the actantial structures of the lexical text from which to abstract the lexical

fabula. The reduction of those same elements to binary opposites in the form of

conjunctions and disjunctions (see Bremond, 1970; Greimas, 1983) can then be performed

to identify the elementary ideological structures of the text. The text, however, in narrating

the steps of its own construction at the linear level of manifestation, creates its own model

reader. It guides the reader from beginning to end in how to read it through the steps of its

production (Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; Iser, 1978) and elicits specific expectations on the

level of the lexical fabula. For example, through subdivisions in chapters, paragraphs and

other graphic devices determining lexical text construction, the temporal distribution of

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narrative action is spread across the surface intensional levels as warnings, connotative

hints, allusions, innuendoes, devices of suspense, archetype, etc., which lead the reader to

expectations and forecasts in the form of propositional statements (Eco, 1979). The

confirmation or contradiction of the reader's hypotheses is then settled in the final outcomes

of the lexical fabula in terms of veridiction, or "truthfulness" of textual world structures,

and are validated by the accessibility of the possible world depicted. After NSI, it can be

forecast by the reader that Effie's voice will offend other creatures in the possible world

created within the narrative structures of the discourse. The interplay of lexical actants is

set up according to the functions of the actors that govern the form of the narrative

utterances by establishing distinct thematic roles to be acted out in the plot. Therefore, the

narrative sequences are paralleled with respect to the main actantial subject /Effie/ as

determinant of the lexical plot and lexical fabula. It is indeed expected that the reader infer

this important conclusion in order to predict the subsequent progression of the lexical plot

as a series of failed attempts at communication by the protagonist through which the lexical

text engenders an elementary ideological framework manifest as world structures: Good

vs. Bad, Positive vs. Negative, Life vs. Death, Nature vs. Culture (Greimas, 1983). What

is considered acceptable or unacceptable in the possible world created according to the

textual world structures established through the reader's abductions of the lexical fabula, is

held up for scrutiny and judged according to the reader's already formulated schemata.

Ultimately, to create a sense of empathy for the character as victim of her own prowess,

the actantial structures in the lexical text of Effie work toward the thematization of the terms

by which competence is measured in its possible world. It is true that Effie may be

"mistress of mayhem" but it is a naive and inadvertent malice caused by an immutable

character trait deemed as flawed within the possible world of the lexical text which brings

about the succession of accidents that occur through the interplay of the characters during

the course of narrative action. The succession of failed attempts at communication because

of the lack of understanding displayed by other actors is the reason for the gradual isolation

and resulting insularization of the protagonist. This leads to visual and verbalized textual

expressions of the actor's feelings of inferiority and self-pity through which an emotional

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identification between the reader and the protagonist is achieved—a bond of psychic and

emotional pathos for the plight of essentially a likable character who is pray to fortune and

bound to physical nature. Consequently, the dramatic tension in the plot is heightened

since the narrative structure of the lexical text, as reinforced by the visual text, works

toward the movement of epiphany, or revelation, where the protagonist's true heroic

potential is actualized in the suspenseful climax of events.

Archetype, Genre and the Hero

It is at this point that the reader cannot distinguish between the possible imagined events

and the events as they have actually occurred to that point of the story (Eco, 1979; Lotman,

1990). Therefore, the reader bases his/her thinking upon intertextual frames of reference

rather than logic (Eco, 1979), the essential criteria being verisimilitude of the lexical fabula

to events having previously occurred in other stories. Also, the intertextual frames of

reference, or experiences of other stories where animals are endowed with human

characteristics and pursue both psychological and physical human goals, accessed by the

reader, make the story of Effie more palatable as fiction and stimulate the suspension of

disbelief; since, the reader may refer to these intertextual frames as ready made literary

topoi, or common narrative schemes of understanding, according to the structural

archetypes set up through genre (Frye, 1957; Eco, 1976; 1984). In providing an

intertextual frame of reference for the reader, the story line in Effie is a rather common

adaptation of the literary archetype containing the anti-heroine in the low-mimetic mode

(Frye, 1957) of "Cinderella" or "The Ugly Duckling", where through the intervention of a

helper, in the form of either a preternatural or natural agent, the protagonist succeeds in

gaining peer acceptance and secures a happy ending. In fact we have come to expect the

anthropomorphic characterization of zoomorphic life forms in children's literature since we,

as a culture, name animals in an effort to befriend them and rationalize the logic of the

relationship between human and non-human beings through anthropomimesis . It is in this

sense that Effie is a fable and can be read and interpreted on at least two levels: 1) the

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story of an ant with a special power of voice or 2) an animal story containing a moral

lesson and allegorical to some degree when juxtaposed against the human condition.

The story of Effie is poised toward the tragic until the commoedic peripeteia, or reversal

(used here in a non-tragic sense) where, again through naively motivated action, the

protagonist is transformed from well-meaning villain-exile to unexpected heroine. Even if

it is not specifically stated in the lexical text in order to reinforce the mood of suspense until

the fabula unfolds naturally as a complete course of "global" narrated events, the reader

may suspect such an outcome as elicited through macropropositional abductions. For

example, when the reluctant interlocutors return in haste toward Effie in NSX, there is a

definite attempt at communication made by two of the other subjects (e.g., the spider says

/At a time like this?/ and the caterpillar interjects /Run for your life/) What the reader is left

to abduce from the dialogue and the pragmatic action in the visual sequence is that danger is

imminent and the threat is serious enough to propel the actors toward a previously

interpreted and known danger—Effie. The protagonist, however, decontextualizes the

action and misinterprets it as a change of heart on the part of the other subjects. At this

point, the reader is more aware of the gravity of the situation than is the protagonist who

still pursues the original motives for communication and is left perplexed. This is revealed

in the questions posed by Effie (e.g., /You've changed your mind?/, /Welcome back!/,

/Have you come to talk with me?/) all uttered by the protagonist under the adverbial

qualification of /hopefully/. It is clear that Effie has misunderstood the cognitive and

occurential dimensions of the action of communication as well as the motives for the

attempt. From a semiotic perspective, the message has been decoded aberrantly through

the proxemics, or body language, of the figures portrayed in the text according to a

physical code of actions where the protagonist interprets the cognitive and occurential doing

of the other actors in light of previous experience. For a short while, the reader may

actually be encouraged into a temporary identification of knowledge with that of the

character because of the sympathetic viewpoint nurtured in the picture book by the portrayal

of the protagonist up to that point in the lexical and visual texts. The visual and lexical texts

working in cross-medial agreement provide the clues necessary to deduce the relational

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logic which leads to the correct macroproposition that subsequently disambiguates the

textual subcodes at a later point in the narrative.

Life search vs. escape Death communication denigration

Figure 16. The motivation for doing in the narrative.

Superimposing the motive for the act of communication upon the doings of the actors in the

specific situation enables the reader to decode the message as «danger», whereas, the

protagonist confuses the motives for the action by relating the action to a context

determined through personal ideological sympathies; therefore, Effie cannot easily interpret

the message through the action in the plot which results in the verbally externalized search

for a possible motive.

The Semiotics of a Possible World: Textual World Structures

The notion of possible textual worlds is situated in the framework of two types of

modal logic manifest in the lexical text discussed thus far: 1) the logic of perception and 2)

the logic of actions (Petôfi, 1973; Eco, 1979). Eco (1979) defines the concept of possible

worlds as follows:

(i) a possible world is a possible state of affairs expressed by a set of relevant propositions where for every proposition either p or ~p ;

(ii) as such it outlines a set of possible individuals along with their properties ;

(iii) since some of these properties or predicates are actions, a possible world is also a possible course of events ;

(iv) since this course of events is not actual, it depends on the propositional attitudes of somebody; in other words, possible worlds are worlds imagined, believed, wished, and so on (p. 219).

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The concept of the possible world is essential for examining the notion of inferential walks

or forecasts of the lexical fabula and for discriminating between the process of actualizing

discursive structures through semantic disclosures and ascertaining an extensional

framework for the analysis of lexical text. It helps avoid the problems associated with

textual intensions by providing an overfurnished set of textual elements that compose

world structures complete with acting individuals possessing properties and performing

psychic and somatic actions in the courses of possible events. Therefore, the inferential

walks, expectations and predictions both within and without the world of the text, concern

different possible outcomes of the lexical fabula imagined by the reader rather than the

actualization of the lexical and textual meaning according to semantic disclosures made in

relation to the reader's basic lexical dictionary. A possible world, however, is definitely a

rational cultural construct because it arises from the reader's experience as encyclopaedic

knowledge (of which the basic lexical dictionary is a component) where the framework for

the lexical fabula "is a mere spatio-temporal meeting of physical qualities, relations with

other characters, actions performed, or passions suffered" (Eco, 1979, p. 221). For

example, the fact that the discourse reveals that Effie is an /ant/ leads the reader to a certain

set of cognitive and affective mental operations whereby the semantic disclosures are

referenced in terms of a real world entity in relation to the lexical term; however, the

substitution of the reader's real world conception of «ant» with its representation in the

possible lexical and visual world of the text is established through the cross-referencing of

paradigmatic indexes, non-textual and textual, that support the imaginary characterization

of the ant with anthropomorphic properties as in the visual context (e.g., the power of

speech, human-like teeth, footwear, human emotions, etc.) through which the fictive is

established by actualizing the semantic content of the lexematic level of discoursive

structures. The real world references to individuals and their properties in a state of affairs

(situation) is essential and practical since no fictional world is or can be totally autonomous

as a schema for a possible world and still be consistent in providing a comprehensible plot,

a viable fabula and convincing actors. There must be reference to some real world

constructs in the form of individuals, anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, their properties and

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events or situations which are in fact representational cultural constructs because a possible

world interpretation is idiosyncratic in its dependence upon individual conceptualization

systems and ideational schemata (see Eco, 1979). The fact that a text is subject to

potentially different readings due to individual experiences results in interpretive openness.

It may be conceivable in the possible world set up by the lexical text of Effie that

zoomorphic forms (insects and mammals) are capable of anthropomorphic type

communication and this fact may well be compatible with some individual ideologies or

cultural attitudes but incompatible with others. Even so, there is a certain amount of

narcotizing of some properties and blowing up of others on the level of discoursive

structures through semantic disclosures which must occur for this trope to be accepted as

an integral literary and visual stylistic device.

The diagnostic measure by which the validity of the properties given to the individuals

are judged on the basis of logicality or factualness is in essential relation to the textual topic

pertinent to the discourse on the level of narrative. Consequently, the accessibility of the

possible world is affected because it is the discoursive topic which outlines the textual

world structure(s), not in a broad or "global" sense (Eco, 1979), but as a narrow

determinate used for its interpretation in relation to the real world as represented mentally

and referenced linguistically in the reader's encyclopaedia of associations. Therefore, the

textual verifications of the topic (as discussed earlier in isotopy) actually limit the

associations which are established as possible world structures because the discoursive

topic is very specific in identifying and guiding the semantic association on levels of

meaning analysis. Through the reader's semantic disclosures, the characters, the actions

and the events in the plot of Effie are determined specifically to produce a possible world

which engages the reader's imaginative identification and aesthetic cooperation in the

suspension of disbelief whereby the fictional purpose of communication is acknowledged

and accepted. The fact that the realism of the textual world structures projected in the

picture book does not coincide with or correspond to the world actualized outside of the

lexical text does not limit cognitive and affective mental associations or aesthetic responses

that aid the reader's construction and experience of the fictional world of Effie, but

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promotes the juxtaposition of the actual, or real, world structures with the possible, or

fictional, textual world structures and corresponding individuals with specified properties

in the picture book.

Actual World «ant» W Q : X I speech clothes emotions looks (-) Fictional World «ant» W, : X 2 + + + +

Figure 17. Contrastive properties of the subject in two world structures.

In essence, the two individuals (XI and X2) depicted in the two world structures (W 0 and

Wi) are not the same individuals but X2 is a supernumerary to X I since it differs in

essential properties and, through disjunction, results in the stylization of X 2 as an

anthropomorphized version of X I . The stylistic difference of personification within the

two world structures is necessary for the lexical fabula of the possible world with respect to

characters' actions, wishes, beliefs and motives to be viable in the genre of the fable and to

be ideologically successful in conveying the dianoia (as an overall theme or didactic

purpose) of the text.

In essence, the textual world structures manifest in the lexical text reflect a self-

regulated possible world established by the author through language to guide the reader on

two codic levels: 1) a deigetic code, or the narrative aspect of discourse construed as the

relations between the lexemes at an actantial level which are predicated in the textual world

structures as true or false (see Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983); and 2) a proairetic code, where

the code of actions contained in the lexical text treated thematically as a syntagmatic unit

yields a moral lesson (Barthes, 1964; Frye, 1957). It is the combination of textual world

structures related through narrative and the direction of the narrative programs of the lexical

text that give rise to thematic oriented questions in the reader which require answers: Why

does the ant speak? What does that mean? Is there a reason for giving the ants and other

zoomorphic beings human traits? Is the protagonist's voice really as abrasive as the text

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indicates? Does the protagonist have no redeeming features that merit the reward of

friendship? The answers to those and similar questions are thematically oriented since, in

this particular instance, Effie as a text is closed because "it is immoderately 'open' to every

possible interpretation" (Eco, 1979, p. 8) and is determined by genre and fictional, as well

as, moral purpose.

As a traditional literary archetype of westernized culture, the fable is engendered with

specific attributes which the reader has come to expect of the genre. Even a beginning

reader who is in the process of developing intertextual competence is alerted to similarities

and differences in story elements which are assimilated and determined through the overall

thematic intentions of a specific genre. The textual world structures manifest in fable, of

which Effie is a representative work, demand the temporary freezing of what the reader has

come to expect from the realistic genre of fiction and promote an acceptance of the non-

mimetic function of the text as it turns inward on itself centripetally (see Bakhtin, 1981;

Frye, 1957; Lotman, 1990; Todorov, 1977; Hirsch, 1983). Scholes (1974) explains,

Every literary text is the product of a pre-existing set of possibilities. Therefore, literary study must operate by proceeding from the set of possibilities toward the individual work, or from, the work toward the set of possibilities which is in fact a generic concept. Genres are the connecting links between individual literary works and the universe of literature (p. 128).

Genres are also connecting links between the writer and the reader within a particular

cultural context since there are demands made upon the writer to communicate within a pre-

specified literary tradition, a relevant and culturally viable message to the reader for the

purpose of either entertaining or distracting, of being didactic or teaching a moral lesson.

Therefore, the genre determines the accessibility of the textual world structures by placing

the work in an historical and literary context dependent upon style and message, or more

formally, as genre and theme (Scholes, 1974; Frye, 1957).

The aesthetic function of the plot is to bring the arrangement of motifs (e.g., recurrent

images, themes, etc.) to the attention of the reader in a causal chronological order so as to

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engage the reader emotionally and to develop the theme, or overall didactic purpose, of the

communication. To this end, the genre provides the familiar formalization in structure of a

lexical text which is necessary for the communication of the message to be expressed

through a fictional literary work and to be summarized by the reader as propositional

attitudes or opinions. For example, it really does not matter to the reader that Effie contains

non-realistic portrayals of zoomorphic forms because in itself that is not the purpose of the

attempt at communication of a message on the part of the text but a feature of the formalized

structure of the text's genre by which the purpose of communication is fulfilled. It is

expected, rather than rejected, in the possible world of the picture book, as representative

of the fable genre. The abstraction of an overall state of affairs presented and relayed

through the interaction of characters on the level of cognitive and occurential action builds

through the reader's abductions from micropropositions on the level of discoursive

structures to macropropositions where it is possible to ascertain the lexical fabula.

Consequently, the ideological framework of the lexical text—embodied in the propositional

attitudes of the characters as cognitive and occurential doing in the form of verbalized and

non-verbalized actions—can be determined through relations of conjunction and disjunction

which yield a plethora of possible worlds. The textual world structures gleaned by the

reader through the characters and the actions and the total of events represented are then

judged accordingly by the extent to which those propositional attitudes are engendered

within the text. The reversal of Effie's fate and that of the other ants is dependent upon a

coincidental moment of action which alters the elementary ideological framework of the

text. There can be no doubt that this is the moment of climax in the plot where the

protagonist fulfills heroic potential through the help of an unknowing agent. The plot has

been building to this moment of triumph after a series of successive failures expected by the

reader. The need to release this tension built in the plot through the continual delay is only

achieved because the protagonist is frustrated by the lack of individuals with which to talk.

It is a moment of stasis, or heightened still-framing of anxiety, where the rope of the plot is

stretched so tightly that any vibration in the course of the narrative structures will cause it to

snap. It foreshadows what the reader expects, a tragic resolution. Ironically, the natural

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propensity in the protagonist for loud speech—which has been denigrated thus far in the

possible textual world—brings the situation about to its commoedic resolution and the

subject gains heroic status in the process. The themes can be abstracted by the reader in the

form of different propositional attitudes expressed as relationships of conjunction and

disjunction within the lexical text. The plot, consequently, fulfills the thematic expectations

of the fable genre as literary archetype in the commoedic mode when the story can then be

determined successfully on a thematic level as an allegory because the world structures

predicated in the text support the reader's conclusion through veridiction.

Summary

Through the application of the method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book

outlined in Chapter Three, cognitive, affective, and aesthetic aspects of meaning-making

are addressed in Chapter Four by providing pragmatic (Peirce, 1931) and theoretical

explanations in semiotic terms for both the intensional and extensional acts performed by

the reader in relation to the linguistic structures of signification identified in the lexical text

of Effie. The method of semiotic analysis utilized in Chapter Four offers ample dimensions

for an examination of lexical text according to the research purpose(s) stated in Chapter One

so as to facilitate a comprehensive study of how the lexical signs and codes function on

numerous levels to engender the picture book form with meaning-expressive potential.

Within the picture book genre, however, a "reading" of the text lies not only in decoding

the lexical cues by which a reader synthesizes meaning, but is further qualified in relation to

the co-existent visual signs and codes of the text used as the expressive form of pictorial

content. The following chapter furthers the semiotic analysis of the picture book while

considering the levels of interdependence between the lexical and visual components of the

text and the viewer's intensional and extensional acts of meaning-making.

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CHAPTER FIVE

THE SEMIOTICS OF T H E VISUAL TEXT

Overview

Chapter Five illustrates the specific applications of the method outlined in Chapter

Three in a formal semiotic analysis of the signs and codes comprising the visual textual

form of the picture book Effie in relation to the lexical text and the reader's cognitive,

affective and aesthetic responses as viewer. The intensional and extensional acts performed

in visual meaning-making are explained in both pragmatic (Peirce, 1931) and theoretical

terms according to the semiotic principles of textual analysis (discussed in Chapter Two).

References to other picture books, Tuesday (Weisner, 1991), Tar beach (Ringgold, 1991)

and The eleventh hour: A curious mystery (Base, 1989), are made to show how the method

is applied to a diversity of examples in the picture book genre.

The Elements of Visual Text

Any work of visual, or pictorial, text achieves its existence through color or value

(lightness and darkness) arrangements. A visual text, like a lexical text, can be examined

according to the syntactic elements of its construction and the semantic purpose of its

composition at both a microstructural level and at macrostructural level of analysis (Eco,

1976; 1984). At the level of microstructure, the "deepest" visual structures are established

through morphology and function of color, or value, groupings whereby the total formal

compositional elements interact to create thematic meaning at a macrostructural level (see

Saint-Martin, 1987; Arnheim, 1974; Gombrich, 1960; Eco, 1976). To facilitate the

analysis of how a visual text functions at both microstructural and macrostructural levels to

create signifying potential through the separation and organization of color, or value, within

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a visual field, a semiotic methodology may be utilized to identify and explain how the signs

and codes of a visual text interact in the presence of a viewing consciousness which

actualizes the text's meaning potential.

Microstructures: Plastic and Perceptual Variables

Plastic variables are defined as color, value (lightness and darkness) and texture;

perceptual variables are defined as line, shape, form, vectoriality (focal point and

directional tension) and implantation (position/balance) (Saint-Martin, 1987). The

combination of plastic and perceptual variables within a visual text constitutes the body of

textual articulation within the visual field of the viewer at points of ocular centration. The

rapid peripheral scanning of a visual field on the part of the viewer is essentially an attempt

to link the focal points, or microstructures, of the viewer's intensional ocular concentration

(Arnheim, 1974). It is an exploratory analysis of the visual variables, plastic and

perceptual, manifest in the text which the viewer must perform so as to locate the

transformations of these visual variables in relation to each other spatially (see Arnheim,

1974; Saint-Martin, 1987). Consequently, the process results in a cognitive and affective,

conscious and subconscious awareness of the visual elements (color, value, texture, line,

shape and form) within the microstructural framework of the visual field which are

dependent upon perception and the aesthetic experiences evoked in the viewer in the act of

meaning-making.

Plastic Variables: Color, Value and Texture

The Semiotics of Color

Color is not an inherent property of objects in our visual field. It is the product of a

perceptual phenomenon consisting of the interaction between light and an object. White

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light is composed of a spectrum of light rays (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet) of

which the red light ray has the longest wave length and the violet light ray the shortest wave

length. Light sources emit all spectral light rays so that they in turn may be either reflected

or absorbed in the object being viewed by the pigment—a synthetic inorganic or organic

substance that enables the reflection or absorption of light from a surface so as to allow for

the perception of color. If all the light rays are reflected, the viewer perceives the object as

white; if all the light rays are absorbed, as black. To perceive a color such as green, all

light rays are absorbed except a predominance of the green light ray which triggers

perception of a green hue on the retina. Green is then seen as a property of the object

viewed. Therefore, color is perceived by the viewer when an object selectively absorbs

and reflects various light rays depending on surface pigment. The array of color variables

are infinite and the possible combination of light rays specifically reflected are indefinite

(see Saint-Martin, 1987; Arnheim, 1974).

Color and Human Perception

There is difficulty in attributing to specific color perceptions definitive qualities in that

human perception of color correlates with numerous variables. Differing chromatic

constitutions seemingly imperceptible to the eye may qualify perceptional stimuli and

physiological variants of perceptual mechanisms within individuals can disqualify the

homogeneity of color's physiological effect(s):

Two human eyes do not see color in the same way in a spontaneous way, before being subjected to a gestaltian type of adaptation . . . These differences are accentuated with age and are sometimes greater from one individual to the next, because of the coloration of crystalline as well as individual variables of the yellow pigment of the macula lutea, in which the capacities of absorption of short waves may vary in the different groups". (Saint-Martin, 1987, p. 21)

Colors modify the perceptual stimulation experienced by the viewer due to the conditions of

perceptual contact in which he/she is placed. Since no color or predominance of a single

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color ray can be viewed in complete isolation and because color perception is modified

through its juxtaposition with various chromas (or hues), colors are inherently dependent

on their surrounding milieu to define the influences they may concur upon optic perception.

Because of the indeterminacy of the dynamics of color due to influences extraneous to the

hue itself, semiotic theoreticians of visual text have lacked a quantifiable base from which

to discuss the potential nuances of color and its dynamic properties (Noth, 1990; Saint-

Martin, 1987; Arnheim, 1974). Ironically, it is the postulated structural dyad of visual

textual articulation and the arbitrariness of human perception in classifying colors which

have caused semioticians to disagree about the ontology and nature of color as substance

and matter (Goethe, 1963; Sonesson, 1989). It is, however, in relation to human

perceptual processes that color has been studied and defined.

The first step in realizing color is to perceive it as differences within a visual field (see

Arnheim, 1974). Colors (chromas or hues) reflect a distinct value (lightness or darkness),

tint (white additive to pure color), shade (black additive to pure color) and intensity

(pureness of color). Although responses to color, or color vibrations, lack a scientifically

quantifiable method for delineating the subject's neuro-physiological viewing reactions, it

has been identified and recognized by color theoreticians (Arnheim, 1974; Goethe, 1963;

Verity, 1980; Gombrich, 1960) that color is capable of significantly affecting emotional

responses in individuals and of evoking innate psychological reactions within the viewer

which are stimulated by associations derived from the internalization of color as perceived

in natural elements within the external environment.

Color is an important vehicle for identifying, comprehending and ordering the features

of our external world and possesses immediate signifying potential. At a pragmatic (see

Peirce, 1931) level, color takes on a symbolic meaning in relation to external referents

where the primary definition of the object(s) perceived relates to connections made through

one's psychological world. Arnheim (1974) points out that "Red is said to be exciting

because it reminds us of fire, blood and revolution. Green calls up the refreshing thought

of nature and blue is cooling like water" (p. 368). In social communication, color has

come to contain metaphorical expressive potential in delineating human emotional states

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through language. For example, the phrase /seeing red/ is used to denote a state of

heightened anxiety and emotional fervor relative to normalcy—anger. The basis for the

mental connections between the color red and the state of agitation which it conveys

conceptually is purely arbitrary and subject to the influences of cultural convention (Eco,

1976). Even though the affects of learning (e.g., experience, culture, education, etc.) can

influence an individual's reaction to color stimuli, the affects of color upon psychological

and aesthetic responses are too spontaneous to be solely attributable to the acculturation

process (Gombrich, 1960; Arnheim, 1974). Eysenck (1988) suggests that "the ability to

make correct aesthetic judgements . . . seems to transcend cultural national boundaries. It

is related to some objective core of beauty which is difficult to define, but which has been

measured with some success in simple colors, color combinations and simple forms" (p.

151). It is in this basic sense that colors express emotional states and that the choices made

by an artist are dependent upon the desired emotional experience which he/she wishes to

impart to the viewer. It is generally acknowledged that the colors yellow, orange and red

can be employed to convey an emotional sense of warmth and cheerfulness that is lacking

from the cooler, more subdued, psychic associations promulgated in the viewer by green,

blue and violet (Goethe, 1963). Although no scientific hypothesis has been established to

correlate specific psychological reactions to color in subjects, it has been ascertained that

colors of strong brightness and high saturation and the hues of long wave vibration,

produce a state of excitement (Arnheim, 1974; Goethe, 1963; Itten, 1973). In essence, a

bright red is more active than a subdued, greyish blue. Clinical research into color

psychology suggests that individuals display color preferences which are directly related to

the emotional impact of the colors (Verity, 1980). The results of the experimental studies

were based on the selection of colors and the ordering of such selections so as to reveal

personality traits the individual holds in affinity to the emotional aspects and potential of

colors.

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Properties of Color Formation: The Color Wheel

Ultimately, colors, cool or warm, are subject to the affects of color combinations,

values and intensities within a visual field. Colors change in relation to their chromatic

surroundings (see Arnheim, 1974; Saint-Martin, 1987). Goethe describes the relational

properties of colors in Theory of color.

Single colors affect us, as it were pathologically, carrying us away to particular sentiments. Vividly striving or softly longing, we feel elevated toward nobility or lowered toward the ordinary. However, the need for totality inherent in our organ guides us beyond this limitation. It sets us free by producing the opposites of the particulars forced upon it and thus brings about a satisfying completeness, (cited in Arnheim, 1974, p. 358)

A single color will give a different appearance depending on the colors adjacent to it.

Certain color combinations intensify the dynamics of an illustration while others serve to

produce a more serene effect. Using the Twelve-Color Wheel (the most common

organizational framework for the twelve basic colors), secondary and tertiary colors can be

identified. The three primary colors which form a triangle on the wheel (blue, red and

yellow) can not be derived by mixing pigments. Secondary colors are produced by mixing

adjacent pigments and are located centrally between the primaries. Six tertiary colors are

mixtures of a primary and adjacent secondary colors. Colors opposite each other on the

color wheel intensify their own brightness (especially at full intensity) when placed

adjacently in a visual field and are subsequently classified as complementary colors. When

red and green (opposites on the color wheel) are placed side-by-side, both colors are

perceived as more intense and dynamic than would they be if placed in a context where

their complements were unavailable. This technique is often employed by artists when

their purpose is to produce brilliant color effects which serve to impart a compelling

vibrancy to the image. Consequently, if not used throughout an entire composition,

complementarity could serve as a point of capturing and focusing the viewer's attention.

Using complementary colors within close proximity of each other in a visual text is termed

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a simultaneous contrast which suggests that one color simultaneously intensifies the

brilliancy of the other. The front cover of Effie demonstrates how complementary colors

serve to draw attention to a color designated as a significant focal area(s) for the viewer's

gaze to be directed. Green frames the ant, Effie, on the horizontal pictorial axis while red,

intensified by the green surroundings which border the central figure, is used for the

lettering to feature the title, Effie in the upper left quadrant. Similarly, the brilliant red

chroma of the tongue creates a second area of interest which competes for the viewer's

attention by creating tension between the focal points. Effie's tongue draws the viewer's

attention while exuding a vibrancy which is itself imparted to the organ and serves to create

two primary focal areas. Before viewing the book, the reader can in no way be precise in

predicting the visual plot or fabula (the thematic context and content will be actualized at a

later phase); however, the intensity of the chromatic motif as well as the intentional

focusing of attention upon certain topological regions in the visual plane allow the viewer to

make inferences based on initial reactions to colors which promote an emotional tension or

mood. Had the title and tongue been depicted in a pale, soft tint of yellow, the effect(s) of

the total image would have been less dynamic and perhaps would have been less likely to

succeed in alerting the viewer, consciously or subconsciously, to the quick-paced plot of

the book, but made allusion to a tranquil emotional landscape of a peaceful story line about

an ant. In this depiction of the protagonist, Effie is an effervescent ant being with special

powers of speech as indicated by the large human-like mouth and the active intensely red

tongue.

Analogous colors (colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel) when used within a

picture plane, function to create a harmonious unity of expression due to their close

relationship within the color wheel. Such combinations of colors are not derivative of

states of psychic and emotional agitation within the viewer, but possess an internal self-

consistency of properties which manifests itself in the quality of sameness. In Effie on

page twenty-nine, when the encounter between the protagonist, as hero, and the elephant,

the helping agent, isolates the theme of friendship as the motivating force for both subjects'

need to communicate, the undercurrent of desire for a commoedic resolution which has

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been building to a climax in the plot and fabula manifests itself in an effusion of yellow and

orange hues (pink also) which envelop Effie and the elephant in a rich warmness. While

the dense greens used in the foreground frame the inner scene, a contrast is achieved by

the chromatic disjunction. In this way, the artist uses analogous colors to serve as an

objective correlative for the harmonious relation between the two subjects and to establish

a type of pathetic fallacy where the external environment is sympathetic to the psychic and

emotional states of the characters. This is also the only point in the picture book where the

color scheme utilized for the sky is altered significantly. The picture book Tuesday

(Weisner, 1991) contains an analogous color scheme of warm green and blue hues which

also characterizes the dream-like and ethereal compositional motif of the nocturnal

adventures of the frogs. Essentially, the mood is subdued and almost silent as the frogs

hover on lilypads high above an unsuspecting sleepy town.

Color and Value

Another property of color which influences our experiences of it is value

(lightness or darkness). A work containing predominantly light values can serve to convey

an emotionally pleasing effect (e.g., cheerfulness), while one containing primarily dark

values can be perceived oppositely as foreboding or sombre. In first introducing the

elephant to the viewer of Effie, the artist chose to portray the subject in its naturalistic

environment using a preponderance of colors light in value thereby toning down the

traditional emotional perceptions of the elephant as an intimidating creature (chiefly because

of its massive structure). The representation of the animal as amiable and unintimidating is

achieved in this way through the visual text even before the lexical portion of the text has

conveyed any information about the actual nature of the character. Thus, the light values of

the color scheme undercut any negative visual stimuli which may support an impulse in the

viewer to actualize pejorative associations with respect to the subject. The negative

properties of elephants are effectively narcotized. In fact, the suspense that is built into the

plot before the elephant is identified to be the supposed ominous and evil persona whose

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shadow covers the page in dark values is really undercut after the viewer is allowed to see

how harmless the creature really appears. It is the sudden shift from dark to light values

after a static moment which builds dramatic tension that visually reinforces the theme of

epiphany. Effie has found a friend that she no longer needs to run away from. It is a new

source of life and a rejuvenation of hope. The fabula is then lifted to another level where

the previous actions of the characters that hinged upon denial and escape are juxtaposed

with the promise of acceptance and friendship.

Contrasts in value can also be used to initiate vectoriality (focal point and directional

tensions) within a picture plane in that the viewer's attention can be focused to certain areas

because of contrasting value regions in relation to the predominant chromatic hue of the

visual stimuli. One page twenty-eight when Effie meets the elephant, she is but a tiny dot

in the visual plane; however, in using a dark value as a contrast to the light values of the

elephant and the scenery, the visual text immediately gravitates the viewer's attention

toward the direction of the minute ant form instead of the elephant form which is much

larger in dimensions and proportions within the pictorial plane. This example serves to

designate emphasis upon the power which value contrast can achieve in visual text since the

differences in proportion of the two subjects is not really a factor in determining the focal

point of the viewer's attention.

Intensity and Luminosity

Colors can also be classified according to intensity, or pureness, of chromatic

representation and luminosity, or brightness. The luminosity of the color pigment depends

on the spectral structure of the light reflected by the pigment itself. For example, yellow

appears the brightest of all because it is nearest to white and violet the least bright because it

is nearest to black. Colors of high intensity and high luminosity convey a lively and

dynamic quality to the visually created mood. Also, since every hue has its own individual

luminosity, the differences in luminous intensity of different colored surfaces on the same

plane bring out by contrast the diverse lightness or darkness of the colors themselves and

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create illusory movements and varieties of structural effects. Many of the colors used in

Effie (e.g., red and green) are high in intensity and color saturation thus reinforcing the

energetic mood generated in the viewer by the hyperbolic activity of the protagonist and the

quick-paced action of the linear visual narrative. The intensity of the colors used in Tar

beach (Ringold, 1991) fluctuates with the vicissitudes of the narrator's emotions and alerts

the viewer of narrative epiphanies. When the narrator describes a vignette from a childhood

dream which is especially pleasing, the intensity and saturation of the colors increases and

the artist supports the optimistic mood of the text by choosing combinations of

complementary colors to enhance the effect in vivid patterns and textures.

Low intensity colors immediately convey to the viewer a more subdued portrayal of the

character's actions and result in the slowing down of the plot. Again, intensity and

luminosity contrast can be used to direct the attention of the viewer to areas that stand out as

discordant focal points in relation to the remaining visual field which would create

vectoriality, or directional tensions, within the image. When Effie opens her mouth to yell

and save the ant hill , the frame is engulphed by the shape of a mouth and the excited

vibrations of her loud voice is conveyed through the selected depiction of the "roar" (see

page twenty). The mouth, portrayed as the hollow expanse of a cavern, is depicted in a

very dark value of red and, concurrently, a red of very low intensity is framed by a

brilliantly luminous red tongue and above it a uvula also high in chromatic intensity but less

bright. The viewer's eye is drawn back and forth between the tongue and the uvula almost

emulating the explosive vocal vibrations that would be evoked within the scream of the

protagonist.

Color can also be implemented within the illustration in conjunction with black, white

and grey values. It is generally agreed by art theoreticians that these are not colors but are

neutrals . Warm colors which are considered in themselves as active, again depending in

degree on intensity, luminosity and value, seen in conjunction with black, gain in energy

and passive colors, from the warm hues placed next to black, lose energy. Active colors

seen next to white lose energy and passive colors increase their potential for creating a

cheerful mood. Effie begins with a diagonal curving line of black ants on a high intensity

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field of yellow. The yellow is made more active by the placement of black ants within the

picture plane which accentuates the busy mood of the image and the industrious activity the

ants, in themselves, are a part of. The foreground tends to project toward the viewer to

suggest an expansive visual field and reinforce the illusion of diagonal and horizontal

motion (see Kandinsky, 1976).

Haptic Aspects of Vision: Textural Inscapes

Riegl identified the haptic vision as "capable of touching with the eye" (cited in

Gandelman, 1991, p. 5), not merely brushing but penetrating the surface and finding

aesthetic pleasure in texture(s). The optic vision is concerned with scanning objects

according to their outlines or linearity and angularity (see Lowenfeld, 1952). What is the

relationship between the senses of vision and touch?

This perspective of correlating touch with vision was first developed by Descartes and

then elaborated by Berkeley as follows:

The locating of the objects in the world and their identification—what is today called pattern recognition—and even more so the evaluation of the distance between the observing eye and the points of his focusing on the surface of these objects are synaesthetic operations. The purely optical (without synaesthesia) is only capable of apprehending points on a plane surface, (cited in Gandelman, 1991, p. 6)

The traditional Greek meaning of the word synaesthesia (cruvecrôiaia) is translated as

sensitivity to and empathy with a given psychological and emotional state of another person

or thing. Here, however, the sense of empathy and sympathy which allows for human

beings to experience and show touching emotionalism is transferred to the tactile aspects of

vision as an empathetic aesthetic experience. In essence, viewing a work of art is one step

in experiencing its depth, both as spirit and as substance, while establishing one's point of

physical, psychological and emotional relation to the forms perceived.

Texture produces a very tactile quality within the experience of the viewer. The

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textured image connects the sense of sight with the sense of touch. Through visual

representations of texture, one can achieve empathy with what the depicted scheme would

feel like were it to escape from the two-dimensional page surface in which it is entrapped.

Therefore, texture conveys the surface qualities of objects. In a two-dimentional visual

field, such as that provided in a picture book format, variations in light and dark values

create the illusion of surface qualities by which focal interest can be achieved and

maintained. For example, the broad expanse of yellow chroma within the ants'

environment is imbued with variations in texture through the use of shaded pebbles and

slight ridges which add visual interest to the field of yellow. The pattern evoked by the

textures gives the planar surface a "graded" effect which suggests angularity, or depth, as

the eye moves from the foreground to the background along the diagonal trajectory.

Visual distance can also be established within a pictorial plane through textual variation.

Proportional variations of a textural size in relation to relative shapes and forms suggest a

depth of fields within the picture plane. Through the visual text alone, the viewer can

identify a rapid distancing between Effie and the butterfly when the protagonist

inadvertently /blows away/ the butterfly with the power of her voice. In the visual frame

which introduces the butterfly to the plot, the textures of the grass forms are uniform in size

and relative shape. The proceeding frame, after the fall, depicts the butterfly from above,

much smaller in size and surrounded by blades of grass far more densely textured than the

blades around Effie; thus, the differences in proportion suggest to the viewer great distance

between the two characters.

Texture is dependent on the quality and potential of the medium from which it is

produced. Generally, textures are achieved through value and color changes within a

visual field. In the case of Effie, the medium itself possesses a three-dimensional quality

circumventing the need to use value changes to allude to changes in texture and depth. The

plasticine artist preparing the image for photography is actually creating a tactile-textured,

three-dimensional, reliefed surface which, when photographed, creates its own shadows

and highlights which otherwise in paint or other dry mediums would have had to be

achieved through the application of chroma and value changes so as to give the illusion of a

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variated surface. The plasticine being pressed and molded by hand leaves indices of the

human hand involved in its formation. The residual finger print textures inform the viewer

of the part a human agent played in the birth and creation of the characters and scenery.

Some of the landscape such as the sand scenes are not produced by hand modeling but by

the spreading of the medium using a spatula-like instrument. This change in surface values

serves to vary the textural quality of the pictorial plane and to create interest through

directional tensions between the focal areas within the composition. Unity of texture(s)

within an artistic composition or similarity of motif adds harmony and cohesiveness to the

image; however, if exaggerated the technique can lend itself to a monotonization of the

visual field which is not likely to capture the interest of the viewer.

Optic Aspects of Vision: Line, Shape and Form as Outscapes

Lines are used in composition to delineate and describe shapes, contours and forms.

Lines may vary greatly in thickness, weight, directional tension and character. Horizontal

lines tend to convey a feeling of repose and serenity; vertical lines a character of stability

and strength. Diagonals impart a feeling of dynamics, energy and action, while curved

lines imply a soft, gentle energy and zig-zagged diagonal lines imply aggressive expression

and energy (see Gombrich, 1960). In Effie, there is a predominance of diagonal lines

throughout the composition with very few horizontal or vertical lines used in the visual

field. The pictorial text serves to fuse the entire visual fabula with the dynamic and kinetic

nature of Effie's character through the selection of diagonal line arrangements that reinforce

the illusion of movement. The elephant on page twenty-nine is defined visually through the

lines showing the positive shape of the elephant against the negative shape of the

background in which the line of value change defines the shape of the elephant as depicted

using curved, flowing contour lines and shapes that suggest to the viewer, the amiable and

gentle character of the ants' new friend. Whereas, the ants on page twenty-two are

portrayed in an arrangement of diagonal angles of lines and shapes serving to convey to the

viewer the over-emphasized frenzy of nervous energy the ants are feeling in the fear of

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losing their lives and their home.

Line can also be implied through a linear positioning of points along a vertical,

horizontal or diagonal axis. The first page of Effie depicts a zig-zagged line of ants moving

up the page. Although the ants are not connected, the regularity of ant shapes within a

linear progression causes the eye to follow directionally alternating diagonals of the

perceived lines. The diagonal format of the line again conveys the industrious and energetic

linear activity of the ants and establishes a character trait that is a natural phenomenon as

well as stereotypical of the species.

Form is similar to shape in that it delineates the boundaries of an object but in contrast it

could be said that "form is the visible shape of content" (Shahn cited in Arnheim, 1974, p.

97). Gombrich (1960) elaborates,

Everything points to the conclusion that the phrase the "language of art" is more than a loose metaphor, that even to describe the visible world in images we need a developed system of schemata . . . It has become increasingly clear since the late nineteenth century that primitive art and child art uses a language of symbols rather than "natural signs". To account for this fact it was postulated that there must be a special kind of art grounded not on seeing but rather on knowledge, an art which operates with "conceptual images". The child—it is argued—does not look at trees; he is satisfied with the "conceptual" schema of a tree that fails to correspond to any reality since it does not embody the characteristics of, say, birch or beech, let alone those of individual trees . . . But we have come to realize that this distinction is unreal. . . A l l art originates in the human mind, in our reactions to the world rather than in the visible world itself, and it is precisely because all art is "conceptual" that all representations are recognizable by their style, (p. 87)

Shape conveys schematic information which enables the mind to translate the visible

schema of an object through an already existent mental encyclopaedia of shapes. Form

adds another dimension of mental modeling to the schema by further delineating the

qualities of the depicted shapes and creating the physical reality as an internal psychic

structure or schematic representation that can be identified linguistically. A form can be

defined contextually in relation to its environment and to a certain degree by the means of

its production. When discussing the form or formal qualities of a work, the term takes on

an alternative nuance of meaning in referring to the visual organization of the work which

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suggests the work's arrangement of pictorial elements ( color, texture, line and shape) and

how they may be arranged to create directional tensions, balance and proportion of

composition. It is this formal aspect which is a major determinate of a work's conventional

features with respect to genre. Abstraction of form detracts from the mimetic

correspondence between life and art (and language) and allows for greater freedom of

interpretation within an unrestricted realm of content. Vraisemblance, or the

representational depiction of forms, demands the codification of form according to external

environmental or contextual constraints which limit interpretive openness (see Eco, 1976).

The Word as Visual Text: Typography and the Shape of Form

Two additional features of form in the visual text elaborate upon or clarify the thematic

concerns of the lexical text by suppressing possible disjunctions between the visual fabula

and the lexical fabula: typography and framing of lexical text. Typography is the selection

of typeset, or the printed form, of visually represented language used in a text. Not only

does each letter of a word have its own unique shape, but all the letters of the word

combined give a shape to the word form. Words then can be arranged in infinite ways to

create sentences and narratives. It is the visual shape of the word that engenders printed

language with meaning potential and expressivity when read. We recognize the shape and

produce the necessary mental operations required to decode the denotative and connotative

aspects of printed words (see Iser, 1978) in a relationship of conjunction or disjunction

with other words in a syntagmatic chain (see Eco, 1976). Therefore, the altering of the

shape of a word can affect its perception if the context of communication is made clear

enough or elaborates a code against which the reader can check mental associations made

with reference to the syntactic and semantic structure of printed language.

In Effie, there is emphasis upon the visual representation of language which must

classify the printed word as a component of "visual text". The positioning of the lexical

text within a visual frame is strategic in focusing the viewer's perceptions upon specific

areas of the visual text which ultimately effects the way a text is read. For example, on

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page one the sentence /Effie came from a long long line of ants/ (p. 1) is at the bottom right

of the page and separated from the conglomerate of ant shapes. The major vectorial

tendency of the visual field is an upward diagonal push which suggests a bottom-up visual

reading that connects the end of the ant line on page one with the ant line on pages two and

three and provides some visual continuity of framed structure. We may speculate, then,

that the reader is intended to view the sentence after a brief first orientation to the visual

field (the converse also being possible) before moving to the next visual frame, the implied

continuation of the first. It should also be noted that the overwhelming cadence of the

sentence is trochaic with three successive accents on /long long line/ to emphasize an

acoustic and visual sense of length through the alliterative properties of the words. Thus,

allowing the reader/viewer to transform the visual configurations into aural sense

impressions of form which also denote and connote meanings as well as promote aesthetic

responses to the text.

The spatialization of the sentences on page three at the upper left and bottom right of the

page works to build suspense by delaying reception of the most thematically important

piece of information: /Effie's voice was like thunder/ (p. 3). The previous sentence is

place at the bottom right, above which, the protagonist is depicted in physical contrast to all

the other ants in the line. The point of view then begins to alternate between Effie's

attempts at communication and the affects of the powerful voice which she posses. The

power of the voice is conveyed through the difference in script size, boldness and case.

When Effie speaks, the words are capitalized in bold upper case letters to emphasize the

difference in volume compared with the narrative voice in the text and the speech of other

characters. The verbs used to characterize the voice of the protagonist (e.g., /boomed/,

/roared/, etc.) are also onomatopoeic of the actual sounds produced and referred to in the

real world in order to index the sound type according to external paradigms of the reader's

experience.

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Vectoriality (Focal Points and Directional Tensions)

The viewer in fronting an illustration is subject to the visual dynamics which constitute

the directional tensions of the image presented. A visual image in its arrangement of

colors, points, surface elements, shapes, lines and forms culminates in a perceptual

experience in which the properties of these visual components compete for the viewer's

attention. In being drawn toward certain points during optical scanning of a visual field,

the eye does not jump from one point to another but follows a linear pattern of movement

toward various elements at specific focalities in the picture plane which attract attention.

Tension manifests between the focal points of ocular centration creating a fluid energy

within the picture plane which draws the viewer's attention around the image. A single

area or point may attract interest and areas of secondary contrast from the mean of pictorial

elements draw attention but only as the eye tires of the dominant variation and moves to

new points in which to encounter fresh stimuli (see Gandelman, 1991).

Directional tensions within a picture plane animate one's experience of the image

through movement caused by the directional tensions. When visual elements differ from

their surroundings in a pictorial text, the eye is compelled toward the difference. A shape

of large proportion will draw attention of focus if encased within an area of small shapes,

just as an angular shape will stand prominent in a scene composed of predominantly curved

shapes. If more than one area pervades as inconsistent to the norm, these points compete

for the viewer's attention resulting in an optic impulse for constant movement within the

visual field. On page twelve of Effie, two forms alienate themselves from the

surroundings: the ant because of its contrasting dark value and the grasshopper because of

its contrasting lighter value. The eye of the viewer is suspended in focal dynamic tension

as it oscillates between the two forms while seeking a final resting position. Isolating an

object from other groupings within the visual plane also directs optical perception to the

area. The overall design, however, must work as a unified whole connecting the isolated

area of optical attraction to the overall design through repetitions of elements such as color,

texture, line, shape or form which exist within the primary focal points elsewhere in the

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illustration. On page nineteen, the ant form on the left stands on its own and in isolation

attracts the viewer's attention. The figure is undoubtedly connected to the rest of the textual

image in that the ant's shape is repeated in a clustering motif of ant shapes in various

physical positions on the right. Balancing the protagonist with a group of similar species,

inclines the viewer to feel a tension which is in psychological identification empathetic to

the emotional states of the figures conveyed. The group of ants are petrified with fright

while Effie is very much alone in a state of naive and fearful bedazzlement of the

mysterious shadowy figure which is about to descend on the hoard. The facial expressions

also convey the inner psychological and emotional state of the figures as some of the ants

are portrayed with contorted and grotesque features associated with a painful experience

and resulting emotional turmoil (e.g., fear, panic, anxiety, and isolation), whereas Effie is

comparatively complacent in expressing an open-mouthed, circular shape that connotes

breath-taking, fear, surprise and wonderment.

Directed tensions can also be created through the use of lines and linear shapes which

act as stimuli to guide the viewer's attention to a desired area. On pages sixteen and

seventeen, the reader is drawn down the path as its linear shape encased by the framing of

grass forms stands in contrast to generate interest and directional tensions which pull the

viewer down the path and into the visual field following the movement of the characters

from the foreground of the first frame to the top of the second frame. Focal points are not

essential within a pictorial plane; however, the purposeful arrangement of directional

tensions by the artist may be an attempt to vivify the viewer's aesthetic responses to the

work through controlling the energies produced within the visual frames and overall text.

In some cases, this technique is supported by the lexical anchoring or relay of the content

(see Barthes, 1964) within the visual text to that of the lexical text in order to create a total

context for the act of communication. If there are many competing focal points of interest

within the image, the resulting experience for the viewer is one of a confused and

disoriented state. Such excessive use of directional tensions could be used in illustrating a

state of chaos but is not conducive to a balanced and harmonious composition. The scene

where all the insects are running away from Effie is chaotic and causes the viewer to search

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the visual field because there is no specific focal point or consistent unity of colors upon

which to fixate an ocular centration. Consequently, the lack of order or underlying logic in

the visual field opens the text to aberrant interpretations of the pictorial code: Has Effie

terrified the other insects to such an extent that they react with such extreme fear? The

possibility is open for miscommunication between the text and the viewer/reader based

upon inferences drawn from the previous incidents of the plot as it unfolded; therefore, the

visual text requires more lexical relaying of information in order for the viewer/reader to

interpret the message properly.

Implantation (Positioning in the Plane and Balance)

In assessing pictorial balance, the viewer mentally weighs the visual elements (color,

value, texture, line, shape, and form) on the picture plane as they are distributed across the

visual field. Desire for balance is an innate human tendency (Arnheim, 1974) and an image

in which the pictorial elements confirm imbalanced arrangements within the compositional

plane serve to cause a feeling of psychic and emotional (conscious and subconscious)

discomfort within the viewer. An equal distribution of visual weight is a common

denominator of compositions aimed at creating a sense of harmonious arrangements.

Purposeful imbalances of the pictorial plane can be controlled and practically applied for

visual texts in which the theme aims at the attainment of a desired disquieting affect of an

uneasy response in the viewer. On page ten, Effie is depicted on the extreme left and at the

top of the visual field to the extent that the total form has been cropped to a minimum of

essential defining parts. The imbalance of the composition enhances and supports the sense

of instability, inadequacy and insecurity Effie must be feeling in not having succeeded at

finding a friend with whom to converse. In essence, the imbalance in the compositional

structure of the visual text projects the unique emotional content of the image outward to the

viewer in order to achieve the pathos, or sense of pity and fear, required for the fabula to

succeed penultimately in its resolution as a story of triumph.

Such slight imbalances can also be employed to draw viewer interest. Due to our

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intrinsic sense of gravity, visual texts which are weighted more heavily in the bottom

region of the picture plane result in a comforting sense of stability. As the arrangement of

visual weight moves up the vertical axis of the picture plane, the image increasingly evokes

a sense of dynamics and instability. Page seven of Effie depicts the butterfly

predominantly in the top left of the illustration. Although the weight of the butterfly is

balanced by the grassy region on the lower quadrant of the visual field, as the focal point

high in the picture plane the butterfly achieves a weightless grace and airiness usually

associated with the species that would have not have been conveyed to the viewer were the

subject situated in the lower half of the composition.

Symmetrical balance in which the centre axis separates two identical arrangements of

visual elements on either side of the axis is the simplest form of composition exemplifying

perfect but similarly static balance. As a result, the mood of an image can be delineated as

austere and ordered through the symmetrical arrangements of pictorial elements. A

dignified subject would appropriately be illustrated through a symmetrical arrangement so

as to emphasize personality and identity traits by way of the psychological impressions

achieved through compositional arrangements. The elephant on page twenty-four is

depicted in near symmetrical arrangement to convey to the viewer a dimension of the

elephant's persona as dignified and stately. The character traits endowed the elephant are

also supported by the viewpoint from which the viewer is allowed to see the subject,

looking up at it, which functions to emphasize the overwhelming stature and magnitude of

the animal so as to promote the illusion of size and significance.

Asymmetrical balance is achieved when dissimilar objects are arranged in the visual

field in order to attain balance of the visual field. This form of balance is less static in

contributing to infuse the visual field with tensions and movement. On pages sixteen and

seventeen, a vertical composition presents us with a variety of asymmetrically arranged

pictorial elements. The large, dark, simple shape of Effie which draws our attention is

balanced by an intricate arrangement of smaller shapes culminating in a mound of yellow

sand on the far right side of page seventeen which attracts the eye and proves to complete

the necessary weight to achieve visual balance of the vertically oriented visual field.

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Color can also function to achieve balance within a pictorial plane. A large area of low

intensity color and values can be balanced by a small area of high intensity color and value.

On page twenty-five, the large, grey elephant's head in the upper left quadrant is balanced

by a small, brightly colored yellow quarter-circle which opens in the expanse of grass for

the ants to cluster together. The large, dull grey area is counterbalanced asymmetrically by

the yellow area. Brighter and more intense colors are visually heavier and can therefore be

used to balance larger light areas. It should also be noted that large simple shapes can be

balanced by smaller more complex ones. The simple shapes of the elephant's head and eye

on pages twenty-six and twenty-seven are balanced by Effie's intricate arrangement of

body shapes and angles.

Asymmetrical balance can also be achieved through placing heavier dominant shapes or

colors closer to the center while situating the visually lighter and less dominant objects

toward the outer edges of the picture plane. Such balance create for dynamism within the

viewer's experience of the image because at first it alludes to imbalance before equalizing

the visual weight. On page thirty, Effie is situated left of center as a dark figure being

visually counterbalanced by the placement of an isolated tree running off the edge of the

picture plane. The directional tension between the two focal points because of the dark

values used to depict the subject causes the viewer to follow the line of visual forms from

Effie to the tree and eventually into the background. It must be acknowledged that rarely do

visual balancing arrangement techniques work in isolation. Illustrations generally employ

several methods within the visual field to achieve the type of balance and visual dynamics

conducive to creating a desired psychological and emotional attitude within the viewer.

Visual Anaphoric/Deictic Extensions: A Possible Visual World

Viewed in totality, a visual text is a supersyntagm made up of supersigns composed of

smaller pictorial structures of signification and is, in a "global" sense, quite different from

the plastic and perceptual variables which constitute the work syntactically and semantically

from the viewer's perspective (Eco, 1976; Saint-Martin; 1987 Prieto, 1966; Arnheim,

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1974). The mind must grasp the whole work of art and internalize the visual experience

before the senses can react to the individualized parts and general features which may then

be conceptualized through recourse to language. The eye/brain does not initially

differentiate each of the individual components of a visual image but instead it will organize

the components into a more comprehensible and unified whole. Arnheim (1974) explains

the wholeness of human perceptions that constitutes the Gestalt theory of visual text,

If one wishes to be admitted to the presence of a work of art, one must, first of all, face it as a whole. What is it that comes across? What is the mood of the colors, the dynamics of the shapes? Before we identify any one element, the total composition makes a statement that we must not lose. We look for a theme, a key to which everything relates. If there is a subject matter we learn as much about it as we can, for nothing an artist puts into his work can be regarded with impunity. Safely guided by the structure of the whole, we then try to recognize the principle features and explore their dominion over dependent details. Gradually, the entire wealth of work reveals itself and falls into place and as we perceive it correctly, it begins to engage all the powers of the mind with its message, (p.8)

It is this intrinsic wholeness of a visual text in relation to the nature of human perception

which places limits upon and interferes with semiotic analysis. Yet, in attempting to

understand a visual text by furnishing cognitive and affective, conscious and subconscious,

hypotheses for an analytical approach to larger aggregates of coloremes, it is necessary on

the part of the viewer to perform visual semantic disclosures based upon the syntactic

structure of the visual text as a composite supersyntagm. On one level, the syntactic

structure of a visual text is composed of differences in color the properties of which are the

result of and subject to particular laws of color (as discussed earlier). On another level, the

agglomeration of color within a pictorial plane from the chromatic formlessness of dots and

lines to create shapes which take on specific forms and dimensions engender the visual text

with semantic meaning potential only outwardly expressible through recourse to language.

The recognition of form as the main principle of correlation between visual elements

(color, value, texture, line, shape, form) constituting a pictorial text is the result of gestalt

regroupings or disjunctions within a visual field. Once the dimensions of form(s) are

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identified, lexically as well as pictorially, the underlying logic of organization within the

pictorial plane becomes apparent through subjective gestaltian approximations made by the

viewer to determine the spatialization of forms and their interrelations within the visual text

which engender a possible visual world. The major criterion for the evaluation of form is

vraisemblance, or a direct visual correspondence to reality, where the viewer's experience

of naturalistic forms in the real world is necessarily the determinant for recognition. One

cannot identify linguistically and cognitively assimilate a form which is not familiar to one's

own visual experience (see Arnheim, 1969). Therefore, the figuritivization of shape into

form is textually determined by the capacity of the viewer to identify the resemblance of a

pictorial shape to a referent, or predesignated and already accommodated form, in external

reality and the extent to which the resemblance holds true determines the success of the

figuritivization for the purposes of communication between the viewer and the visual text.

The basic schema of an ant identified in Effie is anatomically accurate to the point where

the viewer can confidently state that some of the zoomorphic forms depicted in the picture

book are indeed ants, or creatures with a three-part segmented body structure, black, red or

brown in color, possessing six appendages and a single set of antennae, while others are

not. There are, however, inconsistencies between ant forms found in the external world

and ant forms depicted within the internalized visual paradigm of the text that must be

reconciled before the viewer can accept the "truthfulness" of the possible visual world of

Effie and suspend disbelief fully. It is true, however, that all artistic representations of

reality are in fact abstractions of reality to some degree because of non-reconcilable

perceptual variables that affect and determine the external portrayal of form in relation to its

mental interprétant. To some extent, the viewer's eidetic memory intrudes upon the visual

perception of forms by providing what is depicted with properties defined in terms of the

vestigial remains of the viewer's previous experiences with the form in the real world. The

viewer subconsciously fills in any gaps between the stylized image and the real-life referent

in order to assimilate and accommodate the new visual experience within the ready-made

schemata of an encyclopaedic visual knowledge (Eco, 1979; Arnheim, 1974); however, the

responses resulting from subconscious processes of visual understanding are much more

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difficult to determine and it is not possible to generalize what the particularized networks of

visual associations for an individual might be without basing the analysis in the specific

realm of a viewer's experience.

Despite natural differences, the ants, and indeed all the zoomorphic forms in the picture

book, are anthropomorphized in physical and intellectual capabilities to the extent that the

occurential and cognitive doings of the visual actors exhibited in the text by the artist

deviate radically from what is feasibly expected from these animal types in real world

terms. For example, all the zoomorphic forms represented in the picture book have the

power of speech and possess psychological and emotional complexity of will manifest as

needs, wants and desires which are depicted in the visual text through the characters' facial

expression and actions. These are the correlatives of non-verbalized forms of somatic and

psychic consciousness objectified in the text as visual metaphorical structures from which

the viewer draws inferences to realize the cognitive and occurential dimensions of doing

performed by the subjects depicted in the linear visual narrative. The lexical text, in turn,

reinforces and extends the visual portrayal of the characters by offering the verbalized

equivalents of actorial consciousness in the form of dialogic discourse (see Bakhtin,

1981). It is this disjunction between "the real" and "the fictional" that the viewer must

address through extensional responses: first, on the level of visual anaphorical/deictic

extensions in order to permit or to reject the thematization of various aspects of physical

behavior and psychological or emotional demeanor exhibited by the subjects in the linear

visual narrative and, second, on the level of visual indexes where cross-medial frames of

reference are set up by the viewer's macropropositions in order to determine the extent of

contiguity between the lexical and visual possible worlds established in the text. The

process of aesthetic encoding and the means of decoding must be clearly identified by the

viewer in order to verify abductions which visual semantic disclosures generate in the form

of "frame-by-frame" micropropositions during the act of visual meaning making. It is not

by chance that as a consequence of anthropomorphic stylization in the visual text, some of

the zoomorphic forms in Effie also wear clothing and other apparel which accentuates the

characteristic features of their species in order to amplify the comic portrayal according to

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one or more aspect of the common visual frames of reference afforded the viewer (e.g., the

caterpillar wears multiple pairs of sandals and the butterfly wears a ballet outfit to float

through the air). This visual trope based upon hyperbole, or exaggeration, and is used to

inspire the cognitive and affective responses in the viewer leading to humor. Yet, it is

because the most obvious facets of the subjects' physical structures are transformed in the

fictional representations that the viewer is alerted to the recodification of real world forms in

terms of conventions established specifically by intervisual paradigms drawn from the

genre of fable where textual world structures, already determined by the possible world of

the text, facilitate the aesthetic purposes of communication. Since the suspension of

disbelief is to some extent dependent upon a knowledge of existing visual conventions

which are the product of previous experience of texts (e.g., genre), the ability of the viewer

to access intervisual frames of reference as the basis for either accepting or rejecting the

possible visual world depicted in the text is a determinate of his/her aesthetic cooperation in

acknowledging the fictional construct being developed.

If the viewer can identify the network of relations governing manifest elements in the

pictorial text which define the functions of forms as visual actors in spatially determined

roles governed by temporal sequences, then the visual plot can be realized linearly as a

continuous pictorialized narrative of characters, actions and events. Later, on the thematic

level, the visual fabula can then be abstracted as propositions which actualize the artist's

purpose of communication. The viewer's basis for judgment then becomes the internal

self-consistency and the logic of the possible visual world portrayed in the pictorial text as a

familiar fictional archetype and not the verisimilitude of the forms, the actions or the events

in the sequences composing the linear visual narrative.

Visual Metaphorical Structures: Cross-medial Agreement

Once the denotative aspect of identifying and lexically naming the specific forms that

are depicted in the visual field has been achieved through figurativization, the most

fundamental semantic level of visual communication between the pictorial text and the

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viewer has transpired and the connotative aspects of the representation can, therefore, be

built upon the viewer's literal conception of the forms through definitional and stylistic

variations. The depiction of the caterpillar on page five of Effie is an example of how

possible initial abductions regarding the genre of the picture book may be confirmed in

accordance with the progression of the linear visual narrative because the viewer has been

prepared for the anthropomorphization of the caterpillar by the like presentation of the ants.

There are no real world zoomorphic forms with human tendencies of the type depicted in

the possible visual world of the picture book; however, the viewer must be persuaded to

maintain the suspension of disbelief required in order to accept the pictorial tropes used by

the artist to portray the subjects anthropomorphically for the aesthetic and thematic

purposes of the work to succeed as "visually truthful" text. In the case of Effie, if the

viewer has not realized the first steps leading from the micropropositions drawn from

inferences in relation to specific visual frames depicting the spatialization of forms toward

the macropositions of the visual fabula resulting from the portrayal of the action as events

within a linear visual narrative, then the thematic significance of the visual plot cannot be

abstracted from the presentation of actorial doing, both cognitive and occurential, in the

pictorial text. This important phase of meaning-making begins from the recognition of the

thematic function of form (see Arnheim, 1974).

The rejection of the possible visual world is the result of the inability of the viewer to

comprehend the underlying logic of elementary structures of visual signification

constructed from the relations and transformations of elements comprising the pictorial text

and based upon spatialization between forms as visual actants which derive and constitute

those structures, or fundamental visual syntax. It is obvious in the first four pages of Effie

(identified as NSI in the lexical text) that the protagonist maintains a relation of

conjunction and disjunction to the other ants which is determined on the levels of somatic

resemblances, psychological empathy between visual actors and social position in the

possible visual world. The conjunction is delineated strictly through spatialization (see

Arnheim, 1969) by the protagonist's dutious role in the regimented routine of the

cumulative population of ant forms in long lines during the performance of laborious tasks.

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The disjunction becomes apparent in the representation of Effie relative to the similar ant

prototypes which appear, in the text, to be suspended in varying states of animation over

three consecutive visual frames to suggest an elapsed time. The cross-medial agreements

between visual and lexical texts support these conjunctions and disjunctions by stylistically

overcoding the points of similarity and contrast that are the most thematically relevant. The

viewer at this stage has already performed the necessary visual semantic disclosures

required to amplify or suppress the latent properties of form which distinguish the

protagonist from the rest of the ants and the visual topic is then pictorially identified as

being based upon a disjunctive physiognomic relation: the shape and size of Effie's mouth

relative to the same feature presented in the other ants. In essence, the bigger mouth is a

visual metaphorical structure representing greater vocal power which, in turn, reinforces

the disjunction between the visual actors and isolates it pictorially as the topic for the source

of discontent to all the other zoomorphic forms in the beginning of NSI in NP1. Also, the

lack of physical elaboration in the portrayal of the ants virtually guarantees that the viewer

will interpret the image of the mouth as thematically important to the visual text because of

the absence of pictorial clues to the contrary. Therefore, this particular feature characterizes

the visual representation of the protagonist in relation to the other zoomorphic forms and is

thematized with respect to the outcome of the linear visual narrative.

Ultimately, the viewer becomes aware of how the pictorial text is structured actantially

and if it is in agreement with the actantial structures of the lexical text. It is not possible for

the artist to produce the homogeneity of negative reaction required from the zoomorphic

forms toward Effie for the resolution of the visual fabula to be effective without isolating

the underlying reason for the overwhelmingly pejorative response and assigning specific

thematic functions to the visual actors comprising the action of events in terms of cognitive

and occurential doing. We can see that Effie possesses a substantially bigger mouth but the

facial expression can suggest a number of possible interpretations such as excitement,

happiness or even naivete which are contrary to the dysphoric connotation developed

through the lexical text. Without recourse to cross-medial agreements between the lexical

and the visual texts, there can be no way to elaborate upon the thematic significance of the

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physiognomic differences perceived between Effie and the other ants which give rise to

visual actantial roles in the modality of predicated actions and events represented within the

pictorial text. To enhance the visual metaphorical potential of the expression /Effie's voice

was like thunder/ (p. 3), the superior physical trait of the protagonist is manifest in the

physical feature of a larger mouth to accommodate the viewer with a symbolic equivalent or

visible referent to the louder voice and to pictorially identify the associative logic of a

comparison deemed feasible only within the possible world of the text (e.g., the wider

Effie opens her mouth, the louder her voice then becomes). The correlation is strictly

associative and non-rational because the larger mouth is symbolic in representing

something outside of itself and does so in accordance with the aesthetic conventions of the

text which determine how the encoding of pictorial elements is accomplished through the

isotopy delineated in the lexical text and incorporated into the metaphorical structures of the

visual text (Eco, 1976). In reality there is no physiological basis for the correlation but the

visual symbol, or visual metaphor structure, works to join the two disparate semic axes,

size of mouth and loudness of voice, in order to create the illusion of a correlation for the

viewer and guide macropropositions of the fabula. This is an example of the type of cross-

medial agreement which comes to dominate the pictorial text of Effie as visual stylistic

overcoding for the purpose of identifying and developing the distinctive personality traits of

the characters which define their functions in the visual actantial structures of the picture

book. If we seek an explanation as to why an ant would wear shoes or walk upright, a

satisfying answer to the problem must contain specific reference to the logic inherent to the

visual and lexical structures underlying the possible world developed in the text. The

stylized depiction of the actors cannot be taken literally, but only figuratively, as visual

metaphorical structures which build a mood or tone upon which the textual level operates

openly in association with the viewer's intensional and extensional responses to achieve the

cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses that focus and realize the purpose of

communication.

This process of visual encoding is derived from what Gombrich (1960) defines as

"Toffer's Law", where expression may transform any shape into the semblance of a being

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endowed with life, identity and a living presence. Gombrich (1960) explains the

justification for an abbreviatory style of pictorial narrativity as follows:

One thing only is needed for the pictorial narrator—a knowledge of physiognomies and human expression. After all, he must create a convincing hero and characterize people he comes into contact with: he must convey their reaction and let the story unfold in terms of readable expressions, (p. 339)

The interpretation of psychic and emotional states of consciousness in a visual subject are

connected to synaesthetic judgments made by the viewer resulting from an empathy with

the external expression and manifestation of internalized states of being, like anger or

shame, that are observable in the visible constitution of its physiognomy. The basis for the

conclusions drawn from any like abductions is visual experience since the projection of the

viewer's synaesthetic feelings allows for empathy which is ultimately derived from real

world experience or knowledge of other visual examples. The information received from

the visual representation of inner states of being through physiognomy allows the viewer to

abduce macropropositions through a series of inferences in a particular situation which aid

in the construction of the visual fabula. For example, when the pigs fly on the last page of

Tuesday (Weisner, 1991), the viewer is hardly as surprised as the pigs themselves who are

undergoing the surreal psychic experience of defying the natural physical capabilities

endowed them by nature. This is because the linear visual narrative has come full circle to

parallel the beginning of what may well be a recurrent phenomenon and the viewer is

invited to imaginatively complete the cycle of events in conjunction with the original visual

plot by mentally substituting the pigs for the frogs in the supersyntagm of the linear visual

narrative. The range of psychic and emotional states experienced by the subjects can be

read through the various facial expressions and physical gestures exhibited. The pig figure

in the upper left hand corner is left wide-eyed and open-mouthed to connote a sense of awe

and fear which is paralleled in the form by the spread-legged stance adopted, as if searching

for a place to touch firmly down. Yet, the pig figure between the direction markers

pointing north-east is utterly comfortable and sated with the experience of flying as is

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connoted through the closed eyes, the drawn smile, the pulled-back ears and the more

naturally relaxed stance. This technique of conveying thematic information visually

through the physiognomic expressions and physical gestures of the subjects is particularly

effective in picture books that contain little or no lexical text because the pictorial text can be

brief without needing recourse to language in order to clarify the method of encoding

embodied within the linear visual narrative plot beyond what the viewer actually needs to

decode it on the level of fabula. In this sense, a picture book like Tuesday (Weisner, 1991)

is more open to multiple interpretations than a picture book like Effie because the visual

text is not anchored to a particular context of meaning making where the purpose of

communication is developed in close relation to the relaying of information from the lexical

text, without which, the viewer would be unable to disambiguate and understand the visual

narrative sequence (see Barthes, 1964). In this respect, Effie as a total text is "closed" or

guides the viewer/reader to an foregone thematic purpose or moral lesson in the conclusion.

Visual Indexes: Within and Without Culture

Two types of visual indexes serve to limit and define the viewer's intensional and

extensional responses: 1) a syntagmatic index which enables the juxtaposition of elements

within a visual text and 2) a paradigmatic index which allows for the assimilation of visual

elements of form to a series outside the text in culture. By providing cross-medial frames

of reference that contextually link the visual and lexical codes and subcodes in the text, the

visual text parallels the lexical text in that it also generates the circumstances for its

production and reception in the model viewer, or a viewer who is in essence a mythical

construct of the artist (see Arnheim, 1988; Eco, 1979) because no real-life viewer can

apprehend totally the intensional and extensional structure of a pictorial text. The visual

text of Effie promotes a stylized depiction of naturalistic forms (e.g., ants, caterpillar,

butterfly, grasshopper, etc.) and sets up the means and standards by which to decode the

pictorial elements as actors, sequences of events and linear visual narrative relative to the

purpose of communication: in broad terms, to divert and instruct the reader. In this way,

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the visual text is structurally centripetal, or inward turning and self-supportive in its

construction because the possible visual world depicted does not have any relation to or

validity for the real world (which is necessarily outside itself) and is thematically

centrifugal, or outward reaching in its purpose, because of the intended implications of the

allegorical message with respect to the human condition (see Frye, 1957; Bakhtin, 1981).

It is not necessary for the viewer to move beyond the visual text to look for clues to the

sources of thematic meaning within external reality since it is possible to use selections

from internal visual paradigmatic indexes drawing upon the juxtaposition of visual elements

within the pictorial text to read the visual linear narrative and to abduce the visual fabula in

terms of a composite series of actions performed by visual actors. Then, if necessary, the

viewer can move between intratextual and extratextual visual paradigmatic indexes to

abstract the visual fabula and derive thematic meaning.

In The eleventh hour: A curious mystery (Base, 1989), there is a deliberate crossing-

up of external visual paradigms, as accessed by references to real world referents, in order

to create the internalized visual paradigms of zoomorphic forms upon which the picture

book relies to achieve its expressive purpose of attempting deliberately to confuse and fool

the viewer through the circumstances of its production in a complex coded structure.

Especially since the text openly alludes to the "curious mystery" which focuses thematic

objectives in the aim of communication around the viewer/reader's powers of observation,

detection and abduction (see Eco, 1979). Consequently, it is of no surprise that there are

no real focal points in the sequence of tightly compressed visual frames presented in this

picture book which may aid the viewer's search for information required to break the

mysterious code. The viewer is constantly searching for a lull in the overload of visual

stimuli carrying information to be processed by the eye/brain. This enables the artist to

overcode the visual text with so much stylistic variation in the formal arrangement of

pictorial elements that it is virtually useless in providing the viewer with a single code from

which to derive clues to construct meaning. The viewer must then rely upon the interplay

of the visual and lexical texts to relay the necessary information component so as to provide

a guide to the overall code and process of decoding which is also embodied deeply within

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the structure of the visual text, yet hidden until the key code is extracted through abductions

or the instructions of the author/artist.

The masquerade and mystery theme outlined in the lexical text allows the artist to

develop the disguise motif pictorially whereby the animals are perceived not only as

familiar zoomorphic forms according to external visual paradigms drawn from references to

such forms through the lexemes, but also as fictional alter-egos which establish internal

visual paradigms that function as indexes for gauging cross-medial agreement. The

zoomorphic forms are characterized internally in the visual text by joining an aspect of the

animals' real-life "value" (e.g., physical properties, derivation, historical, cultural

importance, etc.) with the costuming required to facilitate the masquerade theme in order to

create the internal visual paradigm which will support the semantic implications of the

lexical text and repress miscommunication while generating processes of code-making

through the viewer/reader's abduction. The success or failure of the purpose of

communication in this picture book depends upon its ability to be open to multiple

interpretations (a great deal of which will be erroneous due to the need for trial-and-error

methods of detection, analysis and deduction). For example, Sam, the crocodile, is

masquerading as a judge and wears the traditional wig, cape and three-piece suit, complete

with pocket watch, associated with the external paradigmatic conception of what a "judge"

should look like. The viewer may ask a simple question, "Why is the crocodile dressed as

a judge?" A possible symbolic reading of the visual image in thematic terms could be as

follows but this is determined by an individual's encyclopaedic knowledge and ability to

contextualize semantic selections within the possible world of the text.

On the surface, the pairing of the external visual paradigm of "the judge" with the

pictorial representation of the crocodile form is incommensurate; however, the crocodile

has been traditionally associated with wisdom or evil in western culture deriving from its

resemblance to the serpent or dragon as the symbol of knowledge before the fall of man.

The thematic aspect of the crocodile's symbolic function is never really actualized in the

visual text and it does not need to be in this case because of the mystery and masquerade

theme which leaves the text open to multiple and contradictory interpretations. It could be

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argued, however, that this is an underlying feature of the logic of characterization for all the

zoomorphic forms depicted, though the viewer would be hard-pressed to analyze and

justify some of the more obscure connections because the encoding of the visual text is

openly associational and not totally rational. By accessing external visual paradigms as

developed in relation to the concepts evoked in the lexical text, the crocodile is then

presented for the viewer as a unique, internal, visual paradigm able to stand on its own

because the means and purpose of anthropomorphization depicted in the creature comply

with the possible visual world of the picture book and the genres of fable and mystery.

Similarly, the depiction of characters in Effie functions to accentuate the commoedic

aspects of the possible world being developed in association with the lexical text and to

establish internalized visual paradigms which work as indexes to focus the viewer's

extensional responses, or what Barthes (1964) has termed, anchoring the message of the

visual text. For example, the overwhelming blueness of the spotted caterpillar, the multiple

pairs of sandals, the tufts of hair that bristle out angularly from the creature's head and chin

and the drowsy facial expression suggest a relaxedness of manner that is reminiscent of

"beatnik" culture. The next visual frame undercuts the given impression of the caterpillar

by contorting the features of the subject in order to reveal the startling power and affect of

Effie's voice referred to explicitly in the lexical narrative. The caption which reads /But she

was talking to thin air. The caterpillar nearly split his skin in his hurry to escape/ (p. 6)

reinforces the visual metaphorical structure developed in the picture book by providing the

relational isotopy through which the pictorial text is indexed in relation to the lexical text

and understood at the level of both lexical and visual fabuli in conjunction with the viewer's

reactions to the connotations of the image presented, especially since there are no other

principle closed forms in the visual frame upon which the viewer may rely. The lexical

allusion to /air/ is represented visually as a puff of air released forcefully from the bulging

caterpillar. The swelling of the eyes and cheeks connotes the impression of tightness

which refers directly to the lexical metaphor /nearly split his skin/ because it denotes in

figurative literary terms the rush in which the caterpillar wanted to escape from the source

of the irritation, objectified in the previous visual frame, in the form of the protagonist who

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has taken on the visual actantial role of the searcher. This type of cause-effect implication

in the pictorial representation defines the mode of presentation in the sequencing of

character actions and events which comprise the linear visual narrative in the picture book.

It is an effective means of smoothing over any of the possible disjunctions created through

the segmenting of visual plot into frames which could affect the communication between

the viewer and the pictorial text. Therefore, the interaction between the lexical and the

visual texts facilitates the means for explaining the thematic implications of the mental

concepts evoked by the lexical and visual images presented in both literal and figurative

terms. This is achieved in this instance by the viewer drawing first upon the internal visual

paradigm of the caterpillar acting as a visual index and, in turn, eliciting information from

the external visual paradigm of "the beatnik" (or any other similar external paradigm) to

make cognitive and affective associational judgements that will guide meaning making.

Intertextual knowledge of caterpillars in general and of the nature of the psychic and

emotional state connoted by the expression of the subject enables the viewer/reader to

decode the phrase /split his skin/ both literally and figuratively in conjunction with the total

text. A caterpillar does indeed /split his skin/ in the transformation from one physical state

of existence to another, a butterfly, but the operative topic presented in the lexical text is

that of /escape/. Effie must be the cause of discontent, always acting upon unsuspecting

others with the same results, before the transformation from villain to heroine can occur.

Visual Ideological Structures in Actantial Structures

Even though the focal awareness of the viewer shifts from primary to secondary areas

within the visual field, to comprehend the pictorial text on deeper levels of intension

depends upon identifying the logic of relationships between the major forms figurativized

in the pictorial plane, as visual actors, with specific functions in visual actantial structures

to motivate thematic concerns in the linear visual narrative at the level of fabula. The

succession of visual frames in a picture book predicates the action in this way by showing

the progression of the plot temporally in terms of visual actantial structures in the pictorial

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text which may or may not correspond to the actantial structures presented in the lexical

text. A "frame-by-frame" examination of cross-medial agreement reveals the extent of

synchronicity in the modalization of actantial structures on both textual levels and results in

the concretization of actorial roles within the linear based narratives. For example, it has

been established that the story of Effie is told in the lexical text through the sequencing of

the protagonist's actions from an implied past to an implied present. The pictorial text

functions to embellish the allusion of historical reality necessary for the fabula to be

accepted as tenable as well as identifying the principal visual actants within the syntagmatic

structure of the linear visual narrative related over twenty-seven frames as it is derived from

the narrative structure of the lexical text. The visual text then indeed elaborates upon the

lexical text by pictorially isolating the actantial and thematic roles of the lexical actants

(subjects/objects) in the narrative structures by objectifying their cognitive and occurential

doings in terms of searcher vs. escapee, communicator vs. denigrator, in visual actantial

structures which suppress misinterpretation of the lexical text on the level of fabula. In this

way, the visual ideological structures aid in establishing textual truth by confirming the

elementary ideological structures promulgated in the lexical text. The visual portrayal of

lexical actants reveals not only the non-verbalized dimensions of occurential actions but

also shows the cognitive dimensions of those actions which infuse the text with additional

levels of psychological and emotional levels of complexity that can be ascertained by the

viewer through the physiognomy of the pictorial forms and promotes further

macropropositions on the level of fabula. This is evident in Effie where the progression of

the linear visual narrative is a paralleled series of failed attempts at communication on the

part of the main visual and lexical actant in the text. As the situation becomes worse

because the object of the search has not been attained (e.g., someone to talk with) despite

the will-to-do being present in the visual actor, the psychological and emotional state of the

protagonist is made visually apparent on page twelve in the form of a facial expression

which connotes despair and grief. The protagonist now becomes the object of pity through

which an emotional identification on the part of the viewer is achieved as endearment for

the suffering of an individual who is less than adequate compared to other individuals in the

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possible world of the text and, therefore, anti-heroic in a thematic sense (see Frye, 1957).

It is because the visual narrative program presents situations closely aligned to the narrative

program in the lexical text, where the repeated failures of the protagonist create specific

thematic roles stemming from the narrative functions of actors (e.g., villain vs. hero, exile

vs. friend) with respect to occurential and cognitive doings, that the viewer/reader is

capable of summing up the visual and lexical narrative as a series of interrelated lexical and

visual actantial structures that are revealed in the modality of predication according to

subjects as objectified in both the lexical and visual texts. The lexical narrative of Effie is

sparse in descriptive vocabulary and lacks the adjectives necessary to characterize, in full,

the cognitive and occurential relations between actors; hence, the visual text builds upon the

limitations of signifying potential within the lexical text by describing with greater detail

what lexemes such as /ant/, /elephant/ and /beetle/ are verbal representatives of within the

textual world structures of the picture book and delineates specific visual actantial roles and

thematic roles for each form of being in the text in relation to the protagonist who controls

the lexical and visual narrative programs by virtue of being the main subject of both textual

levels. This is an important consideration for picture books that are constricted to

containing vocabulary and visual imagery which developing readers will need to

comprehend both syntactically and semantically within structures of lexical and visual

forms of signification. Quite simply, it takes many more words to describe an ant and its

actions rather than to portray one visually (see Eco, 1984; Arnheim, 1974) and this self-

evident fact will ease the decoding difficulties experienced by the young reader/viewer

when first exposed to a lexical or visual system of signification. The actantial structures of

the visual text unfold the fabula neatly by presenting a pictorial indexicality, or context, for

understanding the lexical text in terms of visual world structures that work as generative or

repressive cross-medial indicators to verify or refute the abductions, or micropropositions

and macropropositions made by the "viewer" as "reader" during the process of decoding

the lexical text. In virtually all picture books, the visual text enhances and extends the

lexical text by relaying information that redefines the semantic potential of the lexemes in a

syntagmatic chain (see Lewis, 1990).

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Aspects of Visual Veridiction

There is no need for the visual text to overtly justify the means and purpose of its

creation because the viewer, by this stage, has either already suspended disbelief and

accepted the incongruity of formal structures between the world of reality and the possible

world of fiction, or has rejected the aesthetic function of the text by applying external visual

paradigms as common visual frames of reference to the non-realistic but internal visual

paradigms constructed in the picture book. The logic of the depiction of the characters, the

actions and the events in an artistic text is internally self-consistent because the syntactic

relations between pictorial elements which engender the work with meaning potential are

based upon the thematic function of form according to purpose in structure and not a

validity determined by the extent of a work's adherence to external paradigms. Visual

veridiction is achieved when contiguity, or the degree of congruity displayed between both

lexical and visual texts in terms of visual truth matrixes generated cross-medially and

applicable to the possible visual world as represented in the text, is ascertained by the

viewer/reader in the form of propositions.

Since Effie contains a stylistically animated and representational visual text, the literary

genre of fable is concretely identified in the possible visual world of the picture book and a

series of expectations are created within the viewer/reader with respect to the textual world

structures of allegory to be developed through the linear visual narrative and later to be

actualized in the form of micropropositions and macropropositions that constitute the level

of visual fabula. A frame can be said to fit sequentially into the linear visual narrative from

which the visual fabula is abstracted and veridict the lexical text through a contiguity

derived from corroborating 'textual truths' established in the possible world of the text

(e.g., «Effie is a lonely créature», etc.). For example, in the frame on page thirteen of

Effie, the distinct separation of forms representing tree roots, grassy plants and leaves of

the natural landscape into a clearing reveals the structural insignificance of the protagonist

as the overshadowed pictorial center and emphasizes the emotional low point of the visual

narrative by creating a psychological empathy for the character within the viewer to

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promote the feeling of isolation through the centric perspective. The top-down depiction of

the ant in the center of the visual frame creates the impression of distance and the illusion of

space and depth through the arrangement of formal elements. The aerial viewpoint gives an

amplified perspective of the ant's body, where the head and mouth are disproportionately

larger than the rest of the thorax, which recedes in segments down and away from the

viewer, to emphasize the downward angular projection of vision. The tops of the leaf-like

forms are shown in order to reinforce the unusual viewpoint and to create effectively the

illusion of a third-dimension while suppressing fact that the visual text is really a two-

dimensional plane. The superimposition of one form upon another also promotes depth

perception and a sense of separateness due to the creation of different spatial planes in the

front, middle and back of the visual field. It is the configuration and organization of plant

forms acting as vectors, or pointing fingers, which captures and directs the gaze of the

viewer toward the clearing in the central area of the pictorial plane where the figure is

completely isolated (see Eco, 1976; Arnheim, 1988). Since the directional forces

represented in the pictorial plane are defined primarily by spatialization, the center, which

serves as the natural point of reference for the viewer (Arnheim, 1988), characterizes the

tensions present within the visual field in relation to the direction, shape size and location of

the forms depicted in a work. In this way, the spatial orientation within the visual frame

relies upon the viewer's sense of kinaesthetic associations (Arnheim, 1988; 1974), or the

ability to vicariously experience the simulation of gravitational pulls, in order to establish

tensions and relations between forms that determine the structure of the possible visual

world as a veridiction of the lexical text. Emotional content is also conveyed through the

structuring of the other formal elements, such as color, or value, and texture, in the visual

frame. For example, the color contrasts reinforce the fragile emotional state of the

protagonist and accentuate the mood of vulnerability which is represented visually by the

use of softer analogous colors in the center surrounded by the seemingly hostile fecundity

and burgeoning overgrowth of the raw green environment. A similar psychological and

emotional state is conveyed pictorially through darker and more textured hues near the

beginning of the picture book before NP1, as supported by both the lexical and visual

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texts, has fully progressed toward the psychic and somatic isolation of the protagonist

within the possible visual world portrayed. The use of color and texture on page eight is

primarily symbolic in directing and focusing the viewer's extensional responses to the

darker and more primitive aspects of the possible visual world of the picture book by

creating diagonal tensions across the dense pictorial plane from Effie's red tongue at the

center to the light values of the fallen butterfly in the upper left corner and the luminosity of

the squiggled yellow line in the lower right corner. The dominant diagonal separation

increases the dynamics of the scene and ties the two opposite corners of the frame together

to freeze the scene at a moment of high emotional tension where the protagonist is acting

out the verbalized and non-verbalized physical manifestations of profoundly distraught

internal sensibilities in the possible world of the text.

Ultimately, the theme of isolation in Effie is serious while the treatment of the theme is

comic; thus, the lack of total cross-medial agreement disjoints visual veridiction on the level

of plot and creates the potential counterpoint for a non-comic but tragic resolution. In

essence, the visual text embodies a series of violent slapstick motifs, or "calamity", like

slipping on a banana peel and falling down a flight of stairs, which the protagonist quite

unintentionally instigates and does not even notice. There are no injured parties, which in

itself is not a real world expectation, but a facet of the familiar comic convention employed

in the picture book to deflate the seriousness of the situation on the level of fabula. We pity

the protagonist and fear the adverse circumstances which are endured because the events

depicted follow the progression of the linear visual narrative through a series of core

archetypes functioning as narrative invariants representative of the human condition: the

desire for friendship, recognition, acceptance and love (see Appendix D).

Summary

Chapter Five contains an application of the method for the semiotic analysis of the

picture book (outlined in Chapter Three) to the linear visual texts of Effie and other works

115

representative of the genre in order to answer the research question: How does the textual

form of the picture book work, both lexically and visually, as a semiotic system of signs

and codes to create meaning? For the research purpose(s) intended by the present study (as

stated in Chapter One), the application of semiotic principles of textual analysis to linear

visual text, like lexical narrative text, elucidates how the visual signifying elements of

picture book form function as systems of signs and codes to create intensional and

extensional meaning for the viewer/reader in cognitive, affective and aesthetic domains of

understanding. By examining the picture book from a semiotic perspective according to the

method detailed in Chapter Three, we are afforded insights into the dimensions of visual

text which characterize the genre's facility for meaning-making through the interaction of

lexical and visual media that comprise the formal structure of such texts. It is this enriching

of our experience of picture books based upon the analysis of textual levels higher and

lower than the sign (Saint-Martin, 1987; Eco, 1984; Greimas, 1983) which reveals the

immensely complex nature of lexical and visual elements of textual form in a work as

actualized by the cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses of a reading/viewing

consciousness. Then, the total text is illuminated and its role in learning can be better

understood in terms of the technical and artistic merits it possesses as a literary form.

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CHAPTER SIX

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Overview

In this chapter, the purpose, the method and the findings of the present study are

summarized. Conclusions are outlined and some recommendations for further research are

offered.

Summary

The present study supports the thesis that the textual form of the picture book, as in any

literary or visual artistic work, functions to create meaning (Kiefer, 1988; Lewis, 1990;

Landes, 1987; see also Eco, 1979; Greimas, 1983; Arnheim, 1974). The premise for the

thesis is based upon the observations of Lewis (1990), Kiefer (1988) and Landes (1987)

who identify the bifurcate nature of the picture book form to be its most unique

characteristic and express the need for a structural analysis of the textual dimensions of

representative works within the genre which would account for the meaning generating

potential of an overall text comprised of both lexical and visual systems of signification.

How does the textual form of the picture book work, both lexically and visually, as a

system of signs and codes to create meaning? In order to answer the research question

posed above , the emphasis of the present study is threefold:

1) To identify the structural aspects of lexical and visual systems of signification, as signs and codes within the picture book which work syntactically and semantically to create meaning.

2) To explain, in semiotic terms, the interaction between the reader and the picture book so as to furnish pragmatic (Peirce, 1931) and theoretical explanations of

117

the reader's (cognitive, affective and aesthetic/conscious and subconscious) reactions for lexical and pictorial hermeneutics (or acts of interpretation).

3) To identify, explain and demonstrate the use of a method of textual analysis designed specifically for the research problem which is applicable to the picture book genre as a whole.

Chapter Two presents an epistemological, theoretical and methodological framework

(as derived from the theories of Eco, 1976; 1979; Greimas, 1983; Saint-Martin, 1987;

Arnheim, 1974; Barthes, 1964 and others) for the analysis of the picture book by

reviewing issues concerning lexical and visual semiotics which are relevant for the

purpose(s) study outlined above from Chapter One. A semiotic method of textual analysis

is appropriate in this case because the researcher is able: 1) to take into account levels

above and below the sign (Greimas, 1983); 2) to examine the means of signification as well

as the content of signification (see Hjelmslev, 1943); 3) to ground the analysis in the text

itself and to examine how the structures of signification are engendered "globally" in codic

terms to form systems of signification (Eco, 1979); and 4) to examine the roles of both the

sender (e.g., a text) and of the receiver (e.g., a reader/viewer) in a pragmatic act of

communication (Eco, 1976; 1979).

Chapter Three consolidates the discussion in Chapter Two by detailing a method for the

semiotic analysis of the picture book which identifies, defines and explains the levels of

semiotic interaction between the lexical and visual elements comprising the signs and codes

that engender textual form in relation to the cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses

required of, or initiated in, the reader/viewer in intensional and extensional acts of meaning-

making. The pragmatic aspects of the communicative act between the text and the

reader/viewer are embodied in the method (outlined in Chapter Three) through the semiotic

theory of Eco (1976; 1979) which addresses the cultural dimensions of signification

systems by building them into the intensional and extensional approach to textual analysis

in the form of extra-textual influences upon the circumstances of utterance (e.g.,

"Information about the sender, time and social context of the message, suppositions about

the nature of the speech act, etc.") (Eco, 1979, p. 14). Eco's (1979) model and method

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provide the primary sources from which the method for the semiotic analysis of the lexical

signs and codes in the picture book detailed in the present study is constructed and to which

adaptations and additions are made that also allow for the examination of visual signs and

codes manifest linearly in the text as pictorialized narrative.

Chapters Four and Five illustrate an application of the method (outlined in Chapter

Three) in a formal semiotic analysis of representative works of the genre. The textual

dimensions of both lexical and visual forms of signification embodied within the various

picture books are identified according to the structural semantics of semiotic theory

(discussed in Chapter Two). An analysis of how the formal structuring of text functions as

a system of signs and codes to create meaning is offered so as to furnish pragmatic (Peirce,

1931) and theoretical explanations in semiotic terms for the reader/viewer's intensional and

extensional acts which lead to cognitive, affective and aesthetic responses.

Conclusions

Several important conclusions may be drawn from the study regarding how the formal

aspects of lexical and visual systems of signification embodied as signs and codes within

the textual structure of the picture book work to create meaning. The present study

demonstrates how the formal dimensions of text in the picture book work to guide the

reader/viewer through the circumstances of its lexical and visual production, or structure,

from the recognition of elements and levels below the sign (e.g., semes or coloremes) to

elements and levels above the sign (e.g., possible worlds or fabula), where meaning-

making is dependent upon the reader/viewer's ability to actualize intensionally and

extensionally motivated responses (cognitive, affective and aesthetic) according to

individualized systems of conceptual apparati based upon real world experience(s) (Eco,

1979; Greimas, 1983; Saint-Martin, 1987). In essence, the unique formal aspects of the

picture book function to engender meaning by provoking and evoking aesthetic responses

on the lexical and visual expressive planes of the text while allowing for fundamental

cognitive and affective communication to take place "globally" on the content plane. It is in

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the relation of lexical and visual forms that the integration takes place to imbue the work

with meaning potential.

Even so, the case of the picture book is not simply the reconciliation of the expression

of content within the lexical and visual texts of a work, but how the expression of content

leads to the creation of personal meaning for each reader/viewer. The study reveals how the

consciously motivated acts of meaning-making required of, and initiated in, the

reader/viewer to realize the signifying potential of the text (at different levels) are reconciled

with the extratextual responses achieved by the reader/viewer relative to the signifying

structures in a text but dependent upon contextual factors which influence their perception

(e.g., culture, education, "competence", etc.). The contextual influences of learned codic

systems (e.g., language or "visual language") upon individual perception and other

experiences which determine "competence" (as defined in relation to cognition of sign

structures, e.g., words, colors, etc.) are identified, explained and accounted for according

to semiotic theory and method. The dimensions of text in its linear manifestation, both

lexical and visual, as a narrative based upon the temporalization of a sequence of events

acted out by characters is revealed through the elementary structures of signification, the

primary signifying features of which (e.g., a word, a sentence, a color, a line, etc.),

convey semantic potential through syntactic construction extending over an larger narrative

structure as is shown in Chapters Four and Five. It is in this sense that a sequence of

related visual frames can be conceptualized linearly as a narrative and warrant a method of

semiotic analysis (similar to that of lexical narrative) developed especially for the purpose

of deconstructing how a linear visual narrative is structured.

In the present study, the encoding of these elementary structures of signification

through which a work achieves meaning and life as narrative is analyzed in terms of the

reader/viewer's creation of a "possible world" conceived as a construct (from individual

experience) upon which disbelief is suspended. It is true that the elementary structures of

signification engender the textual form of lexical and visual narrative structures in the

picture book (e.g., sentences, paragraphs, visual frames, etc.) but it is not in direct relation

120

to them on a microstructural level that the reader/viewer makes abductions in the form of

macropropositions or comparative responses (e.g., forecasts and inferential walks or visual

indexes) regarding the resolution of the plot as fabula (and as an intertextual or

paradigmatic entity). Some of the reader/viewer's cognitive, affective and aesthetic

responses are clearly subconscious interpretive acts which facilitate disclosures that

generate a field of semantic potential (e.g., the seme is a postulate for this type of

reaction). The reduction of the narrative into sequences according to the interplay of actants

(e.g., subject vs. object, sender vs. receiver) which allows the thematic roles of the actors

(characters) or visual actors which govern the narrative structures of the lexical and visual

text to be revealed occurs however at the macrostructural level. The thematic roles of the

actors being acknowledged as "real" develop the ideological motivation of a given text and

predicate the action of the plot accordingly through the characters on the level of narrative

structures and elucidate the fabula. The culmination of the aesthetic experience of reading/

viewing a text is dependent upon the accessibility and the viability of the vision in relation

to the textual world structures, both lexical and visual, and the extent to which they are

aligned on the level of the fabula within the "global" possible world of the text. Through

the method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book detailed in Chapter Three, the

present study demonstrates that there is a definite self-supportive framework of cross-

medial agreement between the lexical and visual components of the text on all levels which

functions to develop the linear narrative manifestations of the plot in each codic milieu.

The progression from the possible world visions portrayed in a text to deeper real

world understandings is a matter of suspending disbelief and accepting the conventions of

the genre as applicable fabulaic alternatives for everyday life (see Kiefer, 1988). Although

it is not true in a literal sense that art is more vivid than life, the imagination reconstitutes

life through art and vivifies it as a heightened portrayal of the human condition from which

we learn more about ourselves. The picture book, by employing both visual and lexical

modes of communication, serves through cross-mediation to supply the reader with an

experience novel to the work but dependent on the world of the self.

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Recommendations for Further Research

Although semiotic methods of textual analysis have been little used in the study of

picture books, the findings of the present study suggest the significance of these methods

for some of the central questions in the field. In particular, semiotics could make important

contributions to understanding how the reading/viewing process influences learning and to

clarifying the potential effectiveness of picture books in learning situations, two research

concerns which thus far have been inadequately addressed (Kiefer, 1988; Landes, 1987).

Several specific recommendations for further research emerge from the findings of the

present study:

1) Because the method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book as presented in

Chapter Three has not been extensively applied to a wide range of picture books in a variety

of styles (e.g., wordless, non-representational, "pop-up", etc.), further research into the

applicability of the method constructed for the purpose(s) of this study (see Chapter One) to

other works representative of the genre is warranted.

2) The lack of extensive discussion in the present study upon cross-medial agreement

between lexical and visual systems of signification which constitute the picture book form

suggests that additional study of this aspect of the genre is warranted. Further research

might be undertaken using a wider range of picture books in a variety of styles (e.g.,

wordless, non-representational, "pop-up", etc.) in order to determine to what extent this

phenomenon is (or is not) prevalent in the genre as a defining feature.

3) Since the present study is theoretically based in developing a method for the

semiotic analysis of the picture book, empirical research assessing the extent to which the

reader/viewer actualizes the theoretical intensions and extensions in the act of meaning-

making as presented through the application of the method in Chapters Four and Five is

needed.

The specific recommendations for further research would empirically substantiate the

method for the semiotic analysis of the picture book as presented in this study.

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NOTES

1. Derrida (1974) speaks of the inflation of the "sign" (language) in written form and defines all written language after "The Death of Speech" as written.

2. A l l further citations to Effie (Allison & Reid, 1990) will refer to page number only. Also, single slashes denote a word or expression used as a sign-vehicle (e.g., /line/), whereas, guillemets are intended to reveal the conceptual content of the word or expression (e.g., «line»).

123

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Appendix A

Hjelmslev"s (1943) Sign Model

Hjelmslev's stratified dyadic sign model. « . symbolizes a relation of interdependence: content-form and expression-form are two constants which depend mutually on one another. —. symbolizes the relation determination between a necessary functive (the constant), which is the form of content or expression, and a nonnecessary functive (the variable), which is the substance of content or expression.

(Nôth, 1985, p. 67)

Appendix B

Propp's (1928) Inventory of Functions

1. Absence 2. Interdiction 3. Violation 4. Reconnaissance ( i n q u i r y )

5. Delivery ( i n f o r m a t i o n )

6. Fraud 7. Complicity 8. Villainy 8a. Lack 9. Mediation, the connective movement (mandate)

10. Beginning counteraction (hero 's dec is ion)

1 1 . Departure 12. The first function of the donor ( ass ignmen t of a tes t )

13. The hero's reaction ( c o n f r o n t a t i o n of t h e test )

14. The provision, receipt of magical agent ( rece ip t o f t h e

h e l p e r )

15. Spatial translocation 16. Struggle 17. Marking 18. Victory 19. The initial misfortune or lack is liquidated ( l i q u i d a t i o n of

t h e lack)

20. Return 2 1 . Pursuit, chase 22. Rescue 23. Unrecognized arrival 24. See 8a above 25. The difficult task (ass ignment of a task)

26. Solution: a task is accomplished (success)

27. Recognition 28. Exposure ( r eve la t i on of t h e t ra i to r )

29. Transfiguration: new appearance ( reve la t i on of t h e hero)

30. Punishment 3 1 . Wedding

Appendix C

Narrative Functions in Effie

1. One of the members absents himself from home.

2. An interdiction is addressed to the hero.

3. The interdiction is violated.

8 a. One member of the family either lacks something or desires to have something.

9. Misfortune or lack is made known: the hero is approached with a request or a command; he is allowed to go or is dispatched.

11. The hero leaves home.

12. The hero is tested, interrogated, attacked, etc., which prepares the way for his receiving either a magical agent or helper.

17. The hero is branded.

25. A difficult task is posed to the hero.

26. The task is resolved.

27. The hero is recognized.

Adapted from Scholes, 1975, pp. 63-

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Appendix D

Temporal Sequence of the Narrative

Narrative Program 1 :

Sequence I. (pp. 1-4) Indefinite past: Sl(Effie)US2 (ants).

Sequence II. /One day/: S1US3 (caterpillar) (pp. 5-6).

Sequence III. /Next minute/: S1US4 (butterfly) (pp. 7-8).

Sequence IV. Continuation: S1US5 (spider) (pp. 8-10).

Sequence V. /long time/: S1US6 (beetle) (pp. 10-11 ).

Sequence VI. /Then/: S1US7 (grasshopper) (p. 12).

Sequence VII. Intermittent: S1US2-S7 (p. 13).

Sequence VIII. Return: S1US2-S7 (pp. 14-15).

Sequence IX. Chase: S1US2-S7 (pp. 16-17).

Sequence X . Climax: SlUnS2US8 (elephant) (pp. 18-27).

Narrative Program 2:

Sequence XI. Heroic Transformation: S1DS8; S2UHS1US8 (p.28).

Sequence XII. Discovery: SlflS8;S2UnS8 (p. 29).

Sequence XIII. Harmony: SlUHS2UnS8 (p. 30).

Where: U = a relation of disjunction H = a relation of conjunction

Ufl = a relation of compatibility