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21st Century NovelGraphic devices in literary fiction
Greg Stevenson
21st century novelan investigation of graphic devices in literary fiction
Greg Stevenson
UALCCMAGD2007
Acknowledgements: I would like thank my tutor,
Paul McNeil, and my fellow blogee, Zoe Sadokierski.
Contents
1 Foreword
2 Introduction
6 The new novel?
20 Research: analysis
38 Research: practice
42 Poe’s The man of the crowd
51 The books
68 Conclusion
70 Bibliography
76 Appendix
Foreword
Ten years ago, I was halfway through the graphic
novel Watchmen when there was a break from the
comic strip. A right-hand page had been given over
to a fake newspaper clipping, which was used to fill
in back story for some of the characters1. Ever since
then, I’ve wondered about the possibilities for
graphic devices in prose novels.
In recent years a significant number of innovative
novels have been appearing on the scene. This MA
project was the perfect opportunity to investigate in
detail what seemed to be an emerging trend, while
also giving me a chance to try out some of the
design approachs myself.
Even in the time since I thought of the project,
there have been new and high-profile additions to
this new type of book – such as Steven Hall’s Rawshark texts and Marisha Pessl’s Special topics incalamity physics. I have a feeling there will be many
more in the years to come.
1. Watchmen,chapter 8, page29, DC Comics,1987
1
Amateur photography, too, is on the increase. Those
people who don’t own digital cameras are likely to
have one on their phone.
With the advent of mobile phones has come a
proliferation of pictorial language. Emoticons have
become embedded as a way of simultaneously
humanising text messages and saving on alphabetic
characters.
Globalisation has also found a need for pictograms,
as a form of written language that overcomes
linguistic barriers. Traders, travellers and computer
users rely daily on non-alphabetic symbols to ease
their experience.
In our image-dependent world, pictures also have
the power to persuade. Where words and statistics
are there to be spun and massaged to the ends of
partisan politicians, advertisers and journalists,
pictures can offer objective truth.
And they can imprint themselves on your memory.
This can be illustrated by the Department of
Health’s decision to include colour photographs of
diseased lungs and dying smokers on cigarette packs,
Introduction
“In the industrialised world we are surrounded bypowerful imagery. We depend on the word, whetherspoken or printed, much less than previousgenerations. Cinema, not literature, has been theartform of the [20th] century.”2
Our everyday experience is saturated with imagery.
The average person in the UK spends 148 minutes a
day watching TV, and 164 minutes using the
internet.3 If we live in a city, we can encounter 625
advertising messages every day. 4
This all adds to a high level of visual literacy. People
today are comfortable reading both text and images.
People are also more likely to create their own
images, now that computing devices are ubiquitous.
Networking and photosharing sites such as Facebook
and Flickr are widely used, and act as a public
repository for an individual’s creative output, at
whatever level. And anyone can now be a designer, if
just to pretty up presentations or create invitations or
birthday cards: many computer programmes, at the
very least, offer means to import pictures, select
typefaces and play with layout.
2. Robinson, AThe story ofwriting, London:Thames andHudson, 1995
3. guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/mar/08/news.broadcasting
4. aaaa.org/eweb/upload/FAQs/adexposures.pdf
32
in response to the success of the Canadian initiative,
started in 2001. Research has shown photographs
work better than text, but also that that colour
photographs work better than black and white. And
that bigger is better. 5
5. Crow, D. Leftto right: thecultural shiftfrom words topictures,Lausanne, AVA,2006. pg. 173
4
Novelists sometimes use a bigger toolkit these days.
The use of visual devices such as quirky type-setting,
experimental layout, photos, maps and printed
ephemera has given rise to a new narrative style.
This is used sometimes to show readers what
characters are seeing; sometimes to expand upon or
to subvert the written text; but always to further
immerse readers in the story.
This new type of book occupies a new space in the
literary scene. It is somewhere between the
traditional novel – a series of text blocks wrapped in
a cover, barely seen as the reader escapes to the story
beneath the surface – and that more modern thing,
the graphic novel – an extended comic in book form.
Increasingly, authors are using ‘graphic
interventions’ to extend the written narrative, to
bring the reader back to the surface – to then
immerse them in a more visual way.
This is something different than traditional
illustrated fiction, which obviously enjoys a long
history. In the illuminated manuscripts of the
Middle Ages and William Morris’ handmade books,
nineteenth century book illustration and Surrealists’
artists’ books, visual elements have usually been
The new novel?
“You can’t pinpoint it exactly, but there was amoment when people more or less stopped readingpoetry and turned instead to novels... Someday thenovel, too, will go into decline – if it hasn’t already– and will become, like poetry, a genre treasuredand created by just a relative few. This won’thappen in our lifetime, but it’s not too soon towonder what the next new thing, the new literaryform, might be.”6
“If you live your entire life under the spell oftelevision, the mental world you inherit from theTV is the supremacy of images over text.”7
“The use of imagery to make high culture moreexperiential, and ultimately more accessible, wasrecognised by the popular media at an early stagein its development. Mass media such as newspapersand magazines not only echoed television’s abilityto popularise high culture, it also becameincreasingly visual.”8
6. McGrath, C.,‘Not funnies’, 11July 2004,nytimes.com/2004/07/11/magazine/11GRAPHIC.html?ei=5090&en=e61cb3834b496243&ex=1247284800)
7. Johnson, S.,Interface culture,1997, as quoted bySadokierski, Z.:zoesadokierski.blogspot.com/index.html, 1 November 2006
8. Crow, D., Left to right: thecultural shiftfrom words topictures, pg. 30,Lausanne, AVA,2006.
76
merely decorative – or vignettes of the story. In the
contemporary novels of Alasdair Gray, Mark
Haddon, Jonathon Safran Foer and Mark
Danielewski – among many others – the visual
elements are an intrinsic part of the narrative.
Removing them would alter the story. In these
novels, images no longer merely reflect or illustrate
the writing; they are part of the writing.
In previous years, there have, of course, been
exceptions, though these are historically limited to
the avant-garde. A forerunner and stand-out
example is Laurence Stern’s comic novel The life andopinions of Tristram Shandy (published in nine
volumes between 1759 and 1767). The author uses: a
system of hyphens, dashes, asterisks to embellish the
text, with dashes varying in length and used as
though they were words; blank pages to allow the
reader to interact with the book and draw their own
portrait of a character; a black page when a
character dies; parallel texts in Latin and English;
one sentence chapters; misplaced chapters; and
missing chapters.
8 9
The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
More recently, we have the artist Tom Phillips’
ongoing magnus opus, A humument (started in
1970), which cuts up, ‘treats’ and reassembles WH
Mallock’s 1892 novel A human document, to generate
new visual layers and meanings. Then there is BS
Johnson, whose novel The unfortunates came in a
box, each chapter bound separately to be shuffled
and read at random. This is reminscent of Willaim
Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ method used in his Nova trilogy,
where he randomly reordered his text to then feed
back into his novels’ content and structure.
Poetry was often more forward in experimenting
with form, with Dadaist and concrete poetry, such as
Eugen Gomringer’s Constellations, in which the
typographical arrangement of words is as important
in conveying the intended effect as the conventional
elements of the poem, such as meaning of words,
rhythm and rhyme. Taking it further, Blaise
Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay produced La prose duTranssiberian in 1900. This built on new discoveries
about the left and right brain, and gestalt theory, to
create a 42-section, one-sheet book, which is 7 foot
long when unfolded. It is split vertically with the
right-hand side containing a prose poem about a
trans-Siberian journey, and the left-hand in parallel
10 11
Above: A humument, Tom PhillipsRight: La prose du Transsiberian,Blaise Cendrars and Sonia
Delaunay
consisting of an abstract illumination in brilliant
colours. The text-side uses different-coloured inks
and typefaces, and different justifications to mirror
the route of the railway.
Perhaps less experimental is the use of maps by
writers as diverse as Arthur Ransome in his Swallowand Amazons series and JRR Tolkien in his epic
novels. Though not part of the narrative flow, these
maps do change and inform the reading experience.
Why haven’t there been more of these books?
While it’s true that there are increasing numbers of
novels including typo/graphic devices, they remain a
very small minority. In the context of an increasingly
visual world, why does the vast majority of available
published adult fiction remain text-only?
Zoe Sadokierski, in her PhD blog on typo/graphic
devices in novels sees a resistance to image:
“Despite growing popularity of both graphic novelsand fiction integrating graphic devices, there is aprevailing sense in the literary community thatimages cheapen, or detract from, good writing.Images in books are either for children, the
12 13
A map of the lake, Swallows and amazons, Arthur Ransom
constitute a selling point... After a while thegimmickry starts to remind one of a clownfrantically yanking toys out of his sack: a fatalimage.”10
Rick Poynor, in a review of VAS: an opera in flatlandin Eye magazine, has a different idea of why we’re
not seeing more of these books:
“There were good reasons to hope that the newdigital tools, which for the first time combined allstages of writing production in a single, accessibledevice, might inspire a new school of writers. So farit hasn’t happened in print – for three basic reasons.First, because most writers have no desire to give upany aspect of their autonomy and no interest inextending the designer’s role. Second, because mostdesigners don’t possess the degree of writing talentor commitment that ambitious writing requires(this is not meant to be harsh: designers’ primaryskills and interests lie in design). Third, becausewithout works produced in sufficient number toestablish their place in the bookshops and reviewspages, there can be no viable market for books ofthis kind.”11
10. as quoted bySadokierski, Z.:zoesadokierski.blogspot.com/index.html, 1 November 2006
11. Poynor, R.,‘Evolutionarytales’, Eye, no. 49,vol. 13,eyemagazine.com/opinion.php?id=71&oid=242
15
illiterate, or gimmicky add-ons; a respectable pieceof writing for an educated audience should bearticulated through words alone. The hegemony ofword over image in print is widely assumed: comicbooks are lowbrow, novels highbrow; people ‘growout of ’ illustrated books; cultures without a writtenlanguage are considered ‘illiterate’; images aresupplementary or illustrative to words.”9
This outlook is reflected in reviews of novels
including typo/graphic devices. Sadokierski searched
reviews of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loudand Incredibly Close, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of QueenLoana and Jodi Picoult’s The Tenth Circle, and found
that the graphic elements were not being analysed in
terms of how they affect the narrative. More often
they were just described as gimmickry.
A good example is “A tired bag of tricks”, BR Myers’
review of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close inThe Atlantic:
“What may hurt the book even with its intendedaudience are the various diversions that both writerand publisher seem to have thought would
9. Sadokierski, Z.:zoesadokierski.blogspot.com/index.html, 1 November 2006
14
“ghettoized in [the bookshop]… surrounded by
fantasy and role-playing game manuals”,14 whereas
all of the books that I read for this project are
shelved in the A-Z stacks with the other novels.
A cultural trend?
Of the 15 books I researched, 10 were published in
the last seven years. It seems clear is that this new
novel is mainly a 21st century phenomenon – a sign
of the times.
A similar thing is happening in other media.
British theatrical production company Punchdrunk
“creates a theatrical environment in which the
audience are free to choose what they watch and
where they go… [which] immerses the audience in
the world of the play…”15
Guardian reviewer Lyn Gardner describes the
experience at the Punchdrunk production of Faust:
“Punchdrunk’s latest piece of immersive theatretakes you to places you have never been before…Wander through the labyrinth of rooms overseveral floors and you may stumble across some
14 Spiegelman, A.,introduction toCity of Glass[graphic noveladaptation], Faber,2004
15.From thePunchdrunkwebsite:punchdrunk.org.uk/main2.htm
17
There are exceptions. In 2005, Extremely Loud andIncredibly Close was Overall Winner in the V&A
Illustration Awards, with a judge describing the book
as “a rare and really impressive example of a text
with fully integrated visual elements.”12 But Safran
Foer was more art director than illustrator. He
collaborated with in-house designer Anne Chalmers
at Houghton Mifflin to design the book, and the
photos included were either found images or
commissioned.
Conversely, Chris Ware’s graphic novel JimmyCorrigan, the smartest kid in the world, won the
Guardian First Book Award in 2001. Guardian
literary editor and judging panel chair Claire
Armitstead:
“…Both in imagination and in execution ChrisWare has produced a book as beautiful as anypublished this year, but also one which challengesus to think again about what literature is and whereit is going.”13
Poynor’s point about bookshops would seem to apply
more to graphic novels than novels including graphic
devices. Art Spiegelman complained of being
12. as quoted bySadokierski, Z.:zoesadokierski.blogspot.com/index.html, 1 November 2006
13.books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,614821,00.html)
16
18. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillaz
16. arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/review/0,,1925545,00.html
17.blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2007/10/the_masque_of_the_red_death_le.html
18 19
performances at the 2005/2006 award shows… 3D animations of the band [were] projected ontransparent film placed on stage, creating theappearance that the band members were actuallypresent on the stage… The band’s official website,www.gorillaz.com, is a virtual representation ofKong Studios, the band’s studio and home. Inside,visitors can browse through each member’sbedroom, their recording environment and even thehallways and bathrooms... the lobby has a remixmachine, the cafeteria contains the message boardon the wall and Murdoc’s Winnebago contains avoodoo doll of 2D.”18
What Punchdrunk, Gorillaz and novels including
graphic devices have in common is their ability to
involve the audience in new ways, to make the
experience more immersive. They use the visual as a
tool to bolster the suspension of disbelief necessary
to enter any fantasy world – by letting the audience
walk around the set and interact with the actors; by
having only the animated band members on stage;
and by showing, for example, photographs taken by a
novel’s protagonist. Here, visual elements are being
used to add another dimension, to flesh out the
fantasy, to draw the audience in.
true wonders: a high school Walpurgis night hop infull swing, a tiny candlelit chapel where the coffinof Gretchen’s baby is surrounded by lilies, a barwhere Mephistopheles gives Faust a rejuvenatingpotion and he first spots Gretchen amid the orgy ofchurning witchy flesh. The performers appear andmelt back into the shadows as if by magic.”16
And in reviewing Punchdrunk’s current production
The mask of the red death:
“The fascinating thing about this immersive theatreexperience is its duality – something in the way itworks allows you to be both spectator andparticipant simultaneously. It’s like those wonderfulmoments between waking and sleeping, when youfeel as if you have some control over your dreams,but they still veer off in wild directions.”17
In 1998, music experienced a similar innovation:
“Gorillaz is a virtual band created by DamonAlbarn of Britpop band Blur, and Jamie Hewlett,co-creator of the comic book Tank Girl. The bandis composed of four animated band members: 2D,Murdoc, Noodle and Russel… at the band’s live
Research: analysis
The first part of my research involved finding and
reading examples of the new novels. These are
shown in the list to the right.
Via Google, I came across the blog of Zoe
Sadokierski, sessional lecturer and tutor in the
School of Design at UTS, where she is currently
working on a practice-led PhD investigating the
integration of graphic elements in contemporary
fiction. We started a correspondence and, soon after,
a blog that reviewed novels focusing on how devices
work within the narrative – More than words:typo/graphic interventions in literary writing19.
The reviews (so far) from the blog can be found in
the appendix.
Categorising the novels
Once I’d read the books, I categorised them to see if
any patterns emerged. In four of the books –
Slaughterhouse 5, A heartbreaking work ofstaggering genius, Coma and The Selman-Troyttpapers – the graphic elements didn’t add enough to
the narrative for them to be worth analysing, so they
were left out. The table over the next two spreads
shows how the others break down.
19. graphicinterventions.blogspot.com
2120
Poor things, Alasdair Gray
House of leaves, Mark Danielewski
The Frankenstein diaries, Hubert Venables
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time,
Mark Haddon
VAS: an opera in Flatland, Steve Tomasula and
Steven Farrell
Extremely loud and incredibly close, Jonathon
Safran Foer
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius,
Dave Eggers
Rings of saturn, W.G. Sebald
Everyman’s rules for scientific living, Carrie
Tiffany
Breakfast of champions, Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut
Generation X, Douglas Coupland
Coma, Alex Garland
The raw shark texts, Steven Hall
The Selman-Troytt papers, P.J. Barrington
Special topics in calamity physics, Marisha Pessl
The invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick
22 23
Book
Everyman’s rulesfor scientific living
The curiousincident of the dogin the night-time
VAS: an opera inFlatland
Extremely loudand incrediblyclose
Rings ofsaturn
Breakfast ofchampions
Generation X
Pointof view
First
person
First
person
Third
person
First
person
First
person
Third
person
First
person
Type of graphicdevice
Photos, tables,
letters
Photos,
diagrams, maps,
letters,
ephemera
Typo, diagrams,
photos, other
Typo, photos,
flick-book,
ephemera
Photos,
ephemera
Doodles
Footnotes, illos,
photos
Purpose of device
Included in
journal
Included in
journal
Various
Multiple voices;
included in
journal
History;
illustration;
symbolic
Comic/ironic
Comic/ironic
% pageswith
17%
(44/256)
32%
(86/272)
100%
49%
(176/356)
26%
(78/296)
70%
58%
(122/211)
Integral?(1 = no5 = yes)
2
3
5
4
4
2
1
Yearpublished
2000
2003
2002
2005
1995
1969
1991
24 25
Book
Special topics incalamity physics
The invention of Hugo Cabret
Poor things
House ofleaves
The Frankensteindiaries
The raw sharktexts
Pointof view
First
person
Third
person
First
person
Various
(incl.
first)
Various
(incl.
first)
First
person
Type of graphicdevice
Illos,
footnotes
Illos,
flick-book,
photos
Typo, illos
Typo, photos,
ephemera
Photos,
ephemera
Typo, illos,
photos
Purpose of device
Contain clues,
illustration
Interactive:
flick-book
Included in
journal; multiple
voices; ironic
Multiple voices;
interactive;
symbolic
Included in
journal;
illustration
Interactive;
symbolic
% pageswith
4%
(20/514)
68%
(360/526)
66%
(210/318)
100%
100%
27%
(114/428)
Integral?(1 = no5 = yes)
4
5
4
5
5
3
Yearpublished
2006
2007
1992
2000
1980
2007
Key findings
� 10 out of the 13 books were (or were mostly)
first person narratives (76%). This would seem
to quite a shift from the usual ratio. A quick
survey of 100 novels on my shelves showed
41 were written in the first person, 59 in the
third person.
� Photos were the most common graphic device
(10/13). Ephemera, experimental typography
and illustrations (that work within the
narrative, rather than extra to it) were the
next most popular (all 5/13).
� In the first-person narratives, photos are still
the most common type of device (8/10), then
ephemera (5/10), and then typography and
illustrations jointly (4/10).
Perhaps none of this is surprising. Based on my
experience of reading the books, the inclusion of
photos, ephemera, hand-writing or doodles seems to
work better when they’ve ostensibly been included
by the narrator – who’s eyes you’re seeing through,
who’s mind you are inhabiting. If, as was the case in
six of the novels including graphic devices, the
narrator is writing in a journal, diary or notebook, it
seems entirely natural for them to stick pictures in,
annotate their words or include newspaper clippings.
For this reason, such inclusions didn’t jar when I
encountered them.
It’s difficult to make a meaningful assessment of
those books that were written only in the third
person when I have found and read just three. But
based on these, it did strike me that the inclusion of
graphic devices was more likely to seem self-
consciously experimental – and didn’t enhance the
reading experience in the same way as with the first
person narratives. An exception was The invention ofHugo Cabret. Author Brain Selznick had the express
aim of emulating the experience of watching early
cinema, and of involving the reader in an interactive
experience. (For discussion of this and other books,
see blog reviews in appendix).
Types of device
As can be seen from the tables, the main types of
device used are: quirky typography, photographs,
ephemera and illustrations. Over the next few pages,
I will give some brief examples of how these and
flick-books are used.
26 27
TYPOGRAPHY
Multiple voices and simultaneous narratives:
different typefaces, italics and increased word
spacing, for example, are used to distinguish between
the narrative voices of different characters,
sometimes on the same page. This is the case in Poorthings, House of leaves and Extremely loud andincredibly close.
Symbolic form: in House of leaves, the text often
echoes the form of the labyrinth in the story. When
Navidson squeezes through increasingly small spaces,
the page margins increase and the text shrinks. In
The raw shark texts, the textual ‘thought fish’ that live
in human streams of language occasionally come up
to the surface of the page. In Extremely loud andincredibly close, a character’s deteriorating state of
mind is shown through shrinking leading (right).
Changing reading pace: in House of leaves and
Extremely loud and incredibly close the authors
sometimes reflect the pace of narrative action by
restricting the number of words to a page – forcing
the reader to turn the page quicker and so physically
28 29
Extremely loud and incredibly close, Jonathon Safran Foer
engage with the narrative.
Footnotes and asides: these change the reading
experience by allowing information extra to the
narrative to be on the same page. Examples
include ironic asides by the author in Generation Xand mutliple narratives and referrals to linked text
on other pages in House of leaves.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Evidence: when photographs are included, they
often add a veneer of reality to the narrative – and
so extend the reader’s suspension of disbelief. In
narratives that are presented as real – such as Houseof leaves and The Frankenstein diaries – this is more
true. Photos are evidence that the events happened.
Characterisation: as with illustrations and
ephemera, in first person narratives, photos are
ostensibly included by the protagonist and so provide
an insight into their psyche.
Irony: in place of “they lived happily ever after”,
The raw shark texts ends with a still of Humphrey
Bogart gazing into Lauren Bacall’s eyes.
Punctuation: in The rings of saturn paragraphs can
be interminable, sometimes unbroken for 10 pages.
In the midst of this dense, dreamlike prose, Sebald
inserts photographs, which are sometimes
illustrative, but often barely connected to the text.
These also function to provide respite to the reader –
allowing them to come up for air and pause while
they ‘read’ the picture.
* Criticalreflection: what I didn’t see wasphotos being usedin the place ofprose description– at the start of achapter or scene.However, this wasthe intention ofsome of BrainSelznick’sdrawings in The invention ofHugo Cabret:
“Selznick wasdetermined tomake this story...work visually. In revising, helisted everypassage thatdidn’t containdialogue or theboy’s thoughts.‘Anything thatwas just adescription, Ireplaced with adrawing.’”
(publishersweekly.com/article/CA6417185.html
3130
The Frankenstein diaries, ‘ed. Hubert Venables’
The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald
EPHEMERA
Characterisation: in first person narratives, as
with illustrations and photos, ephemeral items are
ostensibly included by the protagonist and so provide
an insight into their psyche.
Handwritten items can go further in that the surface
of the page has visibly been “created” by the diarist.
When we read a handwritten letter in real life, we
read the personality behind the letter shapes at the
same time we read the content.
Change of storytelling mode: when, for example,
newspaper clippings and letters are included they
provide an opportunity to change the way the story
is read: its pace, point-of-view, tone, and temporality.
As with the clipping in Watchmen that I mentioned
in the foreword, they can be used in place of
flashbacks to fill in back-story.
32 33
Poor things, Alasdair Gray
The rings of saturn, W. G. Sebald
ILLUSTRATIONS
Characterisation: in first person narratives, as
with handwriting, illustrations are marks on the
page made by the protagonist and so bring the
reader closer to the character as well as provide
insights into their psyche.
Clues: in the ‘visual aids’ drawn by Blue, the
narrator of Special topics in calamity physics, she not
only shows other characters as she sees them, but in
some of her illustrations, she ghosts other characters
on top of them or into scenes. According to
Sadokierski, “this gives a sense of foreshadowing and
perhaps implies that some of these characters maybe
connected in ways the reader may not initially
suspect.”2020. Sadokierski,Z.: zoesadokierski.blogspot.com/index.html, 1 November 2006
3534
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, Mark Haddon
Special topics in calamity physics, Marisha Pessl
FLICK-BOOKS
In the first 42 pages of The invention of HugoCabret, pictures do the traditional job of words. The
reader’s shown the main characters, the setting and
the mood. When we finally turn the page onto a
text-spread, it is because we need to know Hugo’s
thoughts. This is true of the rest of the novel: the
image sequences move the action on and the text
contains dialogue and thoughts.
Extremely loud and incredibly close closes with a
15-page flick book of man falling from the twin
towers – but in reverse, so in flicking the reader
restores him to life. This has been constructed by
Oscar, the book’s child protagonist, who has lost his
father in the tragedy, and so this conveys his wish for
turning back time. As Sadokierski puts it: “as
readers, we are forced to participate in this act,
making the image come ‘alive’ in our hands.”21
In the climax of The raw shark texts, a 40-page flick-
book preceded by seven blank pages shows the
predatory Ludovician, a ‘conceptual’ (and textual)
shark swimming towards the reader.
36 37
The invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick
The raw shark texts, Steven Hall
21. Sadokierski,Z.: zoesadokierski.blogspot.com/index.html, 1 November 2006
Research: practice
To further investigate graphic devices, the next stage
of my research was practice-led. After identifying
different authors’ approachs for using graphic
elements within their narratives, the next step was to
try applying similar devices myself, in the most
appropriate form, to a short story.
I decided to use a common text – Edgar Allan Poe’s
short story The man of the crowd. This was inspired
by Oulipo’s idea of constraints – originally a literary
technique used by Raymond Queneau in which the
writer is deliberately bound by certain rules. More
recently, Matt Madden has used the approach in his
book 99 ways to tell a story: exercises in style. From
his introduction:
“Each comic in this book presents the same story –recounts exactly the same events – but takes adifferent approach to telling the tale. You will findvarying points of view, different styles of drawing,homages and parodies… Can a story, howeversimple or mundane, be separated from the mannerin which it is told? Is there an essential nugget fromwhich all stylistic and physical characteristics canbe stripped? What would that core look like?”22
22. Madden, M,99 ways to tell astory: exercisesin style, page 1.
3938
99 ways to tell a story: exercises in style, Matt Madden
* Criticalreflection: as canbe seen here,Madden’stemplate story isvery simple: heforgets why he’sgone to the fridge.In contrast, ‘Theman of thecrowd’ is complexand ambiguous –and so myexperiments wereabout form andcontent, ratherthan just form (or style) as is thecase here.However, in orderto replace textwith graphicdevices the storyneeded a level ofcomplexity.
In retrospect,perhaps I couldhave just treatedone aspect of onepage of the story.
This was for three main reasons:
1. in order to make the experiments, as far as
possible, systematic.
2. in order to make them comparable.
3. in order to take some of the decision-making out
of the design, so I could concentrate on the
graphic devices.
My first book, which is text only, can be considered
the template. The others – ‘exercises in style’. The
best of each experiment was bound into a book.
These books were constrained in the following ways:
2. Illustrated text; 3. Blurred text; 4. ‘Travelling type’;
5. Photos only; 6. Map-book; 7. ‘Found notebook’;
8. ‘Secret box of stuff’.
The books fall along a spectrum from conventional –
straight text and text with illustrations, to
unconventional – the hollow book filled with objects.
Together they make up the final outcome of the
project.
In an interview, Maddon also describes the effect of
other constraints:
“…In fact, any creative work has all kinds ofconstraints already built into its process ofcreation. Jens Baetens makes a useful distinction inhis article ‘Comic strips and constrained writing’between deliberate constraints and what he calls‘negative constraints’… that is, constraints that arelargely imposed from without, such as pagedimensions… deadlines… even drawing ability orlack thereof… These kinds of constraints rarelyaffect the content of the final work in a direct way,but they certainly play a role in the creativeelaboration of a given work. In between these‘negative constraints’ and the more deliberate,arbitrary constraints of the [Oulipo] variety, fallthings like traditional formats, genres and drawingstyles.”23
So, with a common story as my departure point, I
imposed (where possible) some negative constraints,
such as a page size of 100 x 150mm and the typeface
Poliphilus.
23.madinkbeard.com/blog/archives/matt-madden-interview
4140
Poe’s ‘The man of the crowd’
For my text, I chose a favourite of mine: Edgar Allan
Poe’s The man of the crowd, an enigmatic Gothic
tale involving ambiguity, madness, claustrophobia
and a dark, illusory setting. A set text on a course
when I studied English an undergraduate.
I remembered that each time I’d read it, it had
yielded new or alternate meanings. Given that I was
going to be working with it for a year, it seemed
suitably intriguing and complex.
It was also 3,500 words – short enough to be
reworked several times without breaking it up, while
long enough to be bound as a book.
Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American poet,
short story writer, editor, critic and one of the leaders
of the American Romantic movement. He is
considered a progenitor of detective and crime fiction.
His life was often troubled. He became estranged
from his foster father after acquiring gambling debts
when at the University of Virginia, which he later
got kicked out of. He struggled with alcoholism.
42 43
observing the ‘dense and continuous tides of
population’ outside. He looks at ‘the innumerable
varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage and
expression of countenance’ and idly categorises
people by vocation, class, morals and mental health.
As night deepens and the rays of gas-lamps ‘threw
over everything a fitful and garish lustre’, the
narrator is forced to merely glance at the faces that
pass. Even so, he ‘could frequently read, even in that
brief interval of a glance, the history of long years’.
And then ‘there came into view a countenance (that
of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy
years of age) – a countenance which at once arrested
and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the
absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression... “How wild a
history”, I said to myself, “is written within that
bosom!” Then came a craving desire to keep the
man in view – to know more of him.’
The narrator leaves the coffeeshop and trails the old
man through the rain and cold, feeling the fever in
his body. There seems to be no pattern to the man’s
movements, until it becomes obvious that he
becomes anxious when the streets are empty and
feels relief when surrounded by crowds. The
His wife (also his cousin, who he married when she
was 13) died of tuberculosis in 1847, leading to
increasingly heavy drinking.24
“On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets ofBaltimore delirious and ‘in great distress, and... inneed of immediate assistance... [he] was nevercoherent long enough to explain how he came to bein his dire condition, and, oddly, was wearingclothes that were not his own.”25
The cause of his death “is undetermined and has
been attributed to alcohol, drugs, cholera, rabies and
other agents.”26
Many of Poe’s stories can be seen to reflect some of
the darkness in his personal life. The man of thecrowd is no different in this respect.
The story in brief
The narrator is sitting in the bow window of D__
coffee shop on one of Victorian London’s busiest
streets. After months of illness, his strength is
returning, ‘the film from the mental vision’ has
departed and he’s taking great pleasure and interest
in everything. Darkness starts to fall and he takes to
24. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe
25. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe
26. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe
4544
narrator continues to follow him as he seeks comfort
and anonymity, walking and often running to the
next busy street when crowds disperse.
This goes on all night, into the next day, until finally
– after 24 hours – it becomes dark again and they
find themselves once more by the D__ coffee shop.
The narrator gives up and stands in front of his
quarry to look into his face, to try to understand. But
nothing – the man walks past without seeing, to
continue his tireless quest. The mystery is intact.
Critical readings
In her essay “Gumshoe gothics: Poe’s The man of thecrowd and his followers”, Patricia Merivale sees the
tale as a metaphysical detective story. She quotes
Stefano Tani to explain:
“The confrontation [in the metaphysical detectivestory] is no longer between a detective and amurderer, but between... the detective’s mind andhis sense of identity, which is falling apart; betweenthe detective and ‘the murderer’ in his own self.”27
She then neatly sums up the two camps critics tend
to fall into when looking at the story.
“Parts of my argument have been anticipated andconfirmed by Patrick Quinn, who as early as 1954saw the title character... as the future double of thenarrator: ‘Dr. Jekyll foresees the Mr. Hyde he willbecome’... by Jonathon Auerbach, who through thewindow, which is also a mirror, connects the crowdand the man sections of the story into a coherentreading... The other substantial group of critics...follow the line of thought originated byBeaudelaire and Walter Benjamin, see the flaneur in the narrator and the problem ofurban modernity...”28
My reading
For me, as with Merivale, The man of the crowd is
all about the narrator. As a first person narrative the
story is told through him and it’s him we as readers
must rely on.
Poe introduces the story with a meditation on
secrets, guilt and their effect:
“...There are some secrets which do not permitthemselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors,
28. Merivale, P,Detecting texts,page 105
46 47
27. Merivale, P,Detecting texts,page 101
and looking them piteously in the eyes — die withdespair of heart and convulsion of throat, onaccount of the hideousness of mysteries which willnot suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then,alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden soheavy in horror that it can be thrown down onlyinto the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.”
On first reading, it might seem that this introduction
describes the motivations of the old man, the
narrator’s quarry. However, if you read the story as
an hallucination conjured by the narrator’s feverish
mind, then the old man and his despair are the
narrator’s projections, and so the guilt is also his.
Aside from the narrator’s fevered mind, one good
reason for reading the story as an hallucination is the
impossibility of the circular 24 hour walk, which
brings them back to where they started.
For me, the narrator’s guilt is the real mystery. Poe
leaves this largely unwritten, but he does leave
clues, most of which are in this passage [with my
emphases]:
“I had now a good opportunity of examining hisperson. He was short in stature, very thin, andapparently very feeble. His clothes, generally, werefilthy and ragged; but as he came, now and then,within the strong glare of a lamp, I perceived thathis linen, although dirty, was of beautiful texture;and my vision deceived me, or, through a rent in a closely buttoned and evidently second-handedroquelaire which enveloped him, I caught a glimpseboth of a diamond and of a dagger. Theseobservations heightened my curiosity, and Iresolved to follow the stranger whithersoever heshould go.”
If the old man is the narrator’s idea of himself in
years to come, then the cloak perhaps represents the
hidden – secrets “that will not suffer themselves to
be told”. The rent allows us a glimpse of these: we
see a diamond, a symbol for wealth, but perhaps also
avarice; and a dagger, a symbol for murder. Together,
these represent the reasons for the narrator’s future
as a “fiend”. He has killed – perhaps out of greed, or
to maintain his social position – and this concealed
knowledge will lead – is leading – to his madness
and his downfall.
48 49
The more I read the story – the descriptions of
gamblers and drunkards, and the darkness in all of
us – the more I also see Poe. By this I mean, perhaps
it is also in part a confessional, a cry for help, a
writing out of his despair. But maybe that’s an
interpretation too far.
The books
It wasn’t always possible to convey the main themes
from my reading of the story in the experiments.
I had to remember that the main reason for carrying
them out – for making the books – was to investigate
different strategies for using graphic devices. And so,
for example, with book 3. ‘travelling type’ the
emphasis was on the movement in the story and
typographical ways of showing this.
Over the next few pages, I will briefly describe the
making of each book.
50 51
1. Straight text
My first book was the template. As I’ve discussed,
I decided on using a common format, layout and
typeface, where possible, to make the books
comparable and to take some of the decision-making
out of the design.
I decided on a page size of 100 x 150mm for three
reasons: because small books were common in the
nineteenth century; because I have a set of
Bloomsbury Classics (published in the mid-nineties)
and always enjoyed reading them because of the way
they fit in one’s hand; and because the format is
reminiscent of notebooks and so went well with
book 7 (the ‘found notebook’).
I could have chosen a more authentic Victorian
typeface (such as this one, Walbaum) in which to set
the books, but went with Poliphilus just because it
‘felt’ right for the story – somehow through its
slightly irregular lumpiness it conveyed the right
(gothic) mood.
Because they’re the most important symbols in the
story for me, I’ve included diamond and dagger
motifs at the start and finish.
52 53
Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the largebow- window of the D— Coffee-House inLondon. For some months I had been ill inhealth, but was now convalescent, and,with returning strength, found myself inone of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui — moods ofthe keenest appetency, when the film fromthe mental vision departs — achlus os prinepeen — and the intellect, electrified, sur-passes as greatly its everyday condition, asdoes the vivid yet candid reason ofLeibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric ofGorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment;and I derived positive pleasure even frommany of the legitimate sources of pain. I felta calm but inquisitive interest in everything. With a cigar in my mouth and a
It was well said of a certain German bookthat “er lasst sich nicht lesen” — it does notpermit itself to be read.
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die night-ly in their beds, wringing the hands ofghostly confessors, and looking thempiteously in the eyes — die with despair ofheart and convulsion of throat, on accountof the hideousness of mysteries which willnot suffer themselves to be revealed. Nowand then, alas, the conscience of man takesup a burden so heavy in horror that it can bethrown down only into the grave. And thusthe essence of all crime is undivulged.
great variety of devious ways, came out, atlength, in view of one of the principal theatres. It was about being closed, and theaudience were thronging from the doors.I saw the old man gasp as if for breath whilehe threw himself amid the crowd; but Ithought that the intense agony of his coun-tenance had, in some measure, abated. Hishead again fell upon his breast; he appearedas I had seen him at first. I observed that henow took the course in which had gone thegreater number of the audience but, uponthe whole, I was at a loss to comprehend thewaywardness of his actions.
As he proceeded, the company grewmore scattered, and his old uneasiness andvacillation were resumed. For some time hefollowed closely a party of some ten ortwelve roisterers; but from this number one
A loud-toned clock struck eleven, and thecompany were fast deserting the bazaar. Ashop-keeper, in putting up a shutter, jostledthe old man, and at the instant I saw astrong shudder come over his frame. Hehurried into the street, looked anxiouslyaround him for an instant, and then ranwith incredible swiftness through manycrooked and peopleless lanes, until weemerged once more upon the great thoroughfare whence we had started — thestreet of the D—Hotel. It no longer wore,however, the same aspect. It was still brilliant with gas; but the rain fell fiercely,and there were few persons to be seen. Thestranger grew pale. He walked moodilysome paces up the once populous avenue,then, with a heavy sigh, turned in the direc-tion of the river, and, plunging through a
20 21
2. Illustrated text
After ‘plain text’ and before ‘integral graphic device’
comes illustrated text.
Using pen, ink, watercolour and Photoshop, I drew
seven images – snapshots of the story. I kept them
focused on one figure or elements, both to keep
them bold and simple, and to draw the reader’s
attention to an aspect of the story key to it being
effectively read.
In this way, the illustrations are not mere vignettes
of the story, but signposts to interpretation, and so
can be said to function as ‘devices’. This was not the
intention.
I decided not to depict the narrator – given that I’ve
decided that he and the old man are one and the
same. I also didn’t show the old man’s face, for the
same reason, but also because it is unreadable and
therefore unshowable – “a countenance [with]
absolute... idiosyncrasy of expression.”
54 55
* Criticalreflection: itwould have beengood to havetested all of thebooks withreaders to seewhat the visualelements added totheir reading.With more time,this would havebeen aninterestingexercise.
* Criticalreflection:This is the firstreal illustrationproject I’ve done,and I found ithard to maintaina consistency ofstyle. I attemptedto use line weightand watercolourbackgrounds totie them together
3. Blurred text
Using Photoshop, I took the template pages and, at
the page where the narrator leaves the coffeeshop to
begin his 24 hour journey, I blurred them using the
smudge tool.
Like the increasingly squeezed leading that depicts a
deteriorating state of mind in Safran Foer’s
Extremely loud and incredibly close, this was
intended to show the fevered, hallucinatory mind of
the narrator during what could be an imagined
journey. The further they travel and the more
desperate the narrator gets (“wearied unto death”)
the more the type on the page wobbles, blurs and
becomes less legible.
I also did treatments with increasingly squeezed
leading, decreasing margins, baseline shifts and
increased word spacing – and combinations of these.
56 57
4. Travelling type
Here the type starts moving across and around the
page when the narrator leaves the coffeeshop and
starts his journey. The reader has to turn the page
to follow the story and so has to physically interact
with it. By following what is an impossible journey,
the reader perhaps gets a sense of how unreliable the
narrator is.
As I described earlier, Mark Danielewski does
something similar in House of leaves: when
characters are exploring the labyrinth within the
house, the text block turns on the page and shrinks
to mimic the shape of tunnels.
58 59
* Criticalreflection:Though I enjoyedthis experiment,the effect of thefinished bookcould well be saidto be ‘gimmicky’.Without feedback,it’s difficult toassess whichdevices enhanced
the text, ratherthan merelyplaying with it.
5. Photos
Another interactive one. Here the reader has to turn
the pages to follow the scene out of the coffeeshop
window or to follow the old man for 24 hours around
nocturnal London, through changing light.
To take the photos, I bribed various friends to don a
cloak, shrivel into old age and walk guiltily around
London, from crowd to crowd. I followed with the
camera.
The original plan was to follow the route that I’d
made for the map-book (book 6), but this meant very
long empty stretches of road, whatever the day. In
the end, we spent a lot of time in the crowds outside
pubs, down Oxford Street and in Soho and Hoxton.
Obviously, making everything look Victorian was a
no-go, but the blurred, hallucinatory effect of the
pictures made modern fashions and shop signs less
obvious.
The photos were taken with a fairly old digital
camera set up with deep depth of field, slow shutter
speed and high ISO setting.
60 61
* Criticalreflection:Unlike Selznick’sThe invention ofHugo Cabret, thisdoesn’t work inthe way of aclassic flick-book.The frames don’tlead exactly intoeach other. Thereader will oftenhave to look forthe figure of theold man on thepage. But I don’tsee this as a badthing.
There are 150+pages in this book.I wanted thereader to get asense of thepointless andinterminablejourney.
6. Map-book
This book used the format convention of the map to
change the reading experience. For the first half of
the story (inside the coffeeshop looking out), the
book reads as a normal book, with the same 100 x
150mm page size. When the reader comes to the
point where they have to open out and turn over the
page, the journey in the story begins, with links
from the text to points on the route on the map.
The map is a replica of an 1840 original from
Stanford’s. I traced the route by following directional
cues in the story. An example:
“The street was a long and narrow one, and his
course lay within it for nearly an hour... A second
turn brought us into a square, brilliantly lighted...”
Here I had to find a long street that connected to the
previous long street – Tottenham Court Road and
Oxford Street – and turn into a square – Fitzroy
Square.
Despite early, delusional hopes, the route didn’t spell
out any words or trace any meaningful shapes.
62 63
* Criticalreflection:For me, mapsalwayscomplement astory. So, eventhough the routeis an educatedguess, I think itdoes enhance thereadingexperience. I’mnot sure the samecan be said ofrefolding thebook...
7. ‘Found notebook’
How do you make the reader identify more with the
narrator in a first person narrative? By showing him
their handwriting and doodles. That was the idea
behind this book.
The book continues to where the narrator leaves the
coffeeshop. At this point the story continues in
abbreviated form as annotations on a map, which
was folded and inserted in the last pages of the
notebook.
I used a calligraphy pen for the writing, and pen and
ink for the doodles. These were then live-traced in
Illustrator so they could be adjusted to fit the layouts.
64 65
* Criticalreflection:On the upside, thereader will feelcloser to thenarrator byseeing hishandwriting. Onthe downside, hewon’t always beable to read it.
66 67
7. ‘Secret box of stuff’
Forgoing the majority of the text, a hollow book was
filled – as though by the narrator – with objects and
ephemera. Together, in an order of the reader’s
choosing, they form the narrative of the story.
After the handwritten notebook, this was the obvious
next step. Included are letters, photos, scraps of
scribbled-on paper, a newspaper clipping, a lock of
hair, a returned diamond engagement ring, a dagger
(not this one – it’s too big), his physiognomy reading
his bloody glove and sundries.
The good thing about this book is that the contents
can be tweaked and improved upon. The bad thing is
that I have no idea how people will ‘read’ it.
I bought the book for £30 from an antiquarian
bookshop in Pimlico. It took eight hours to cut the
pages out (one by one with a scalpel), and I felt
guilty the whole time.
* Criticalreflection:In order to makethis work, I had toconstruct a backstory to supportmy thesis aboutthe narratorfeeling guiltybecause he’skilled someone.Along with amurder, I’vegiven him anopium habit(would helpexplain hishallucination,perhaps) and afiancee whodumped himbecause of hisstrangebehaviour. So, I’venot so muchenhanced the textas rewritten it.
Conclusion
Graphic devices in novels/stories with first person
narratives can work – they can make for a different,
more immersive reading experience. They are not
mere gimmicks. That’s the main thing I’ll take away
from this project. For me, and for this reason, my
most effective book is the handwritten notebook.
Rather than reworking an existing text, as I have
done here, creating text and image together would
perhaps make for a more successful and integrated
narrative.
This project has been a massive undertaking.
Research into the published novels alone would
merit years of academic study. And I could go on
creating new versions of the story and polishing my
existing ones ad infinitum. But the one thing that
could make my project more meaningful is research
into people’s experience of reading novels including
graphic devices generally – and my books in
particular.
68 69
Bibliography
Novels
Barrington, PJ., 2007, The Selman-Troytt papers, Old Street
Coupland, D., 1996, Generation X, Abacus
Danielewski, M., 2000, House of leaves, Doubleday
Eggers, D., 2000, A heartbreaking work ofstaggering genius, Picador
Garland, A., 2005, Coma, Faber & Faber
Gray, A., 2002, Poor things, Bloomsbury
Haddon, M., 2004, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, Vintage
Hall, S., 2006, The raw shark texts, Canongate
Pessl, M., 2006, Special topics in calamity physics, Viking
Safran Foer, J., 2005, Extremely loud and incredibly close, Hamish Hamilton
Sebald, WG., 1998, Rings of saturn, Harvill
Selznick, B., 2007, The invention of Hugo Cabret, Scholastic
Tiffany, C., 2006, Everyman’s rules for scientific living, Picador
Tomasula and Farrell, 2004, VAS: an opera in Flatland, University of Chicago Press
Venables, H., 1980, The Frankenstein diaries, Viking
Vonnegut, K., 2002 (new ed.), Breakfast ofchampions, Vintage
Vonnegut, K., 2002 (new ed.), Slaughterhouse 5,
Vintage
Editions of Poe; the Gothic; criticism
Jackson, RJ., 1981, Fantasy: the literature ofsubversion, Routledge
Merivale, P., 1999, Detecting texts: the metaphysical detective story from Poe to Postmodernism,University of Pennsylvania Press
Poe, 1977, The illustrated Edgar Allan Poe (illus:
Satty), Clarkson N. Potter, Inc
Poe, 2006, Poe – illustrated tales of mystery and imagination (illus: various), Die Gestalten Verlag
Poe, EA., 1993, Tales of mystery and imagination,
Wordsworth Classics
Poe, EA., 1994, Selected tales: Edgar Allan Poe,
Pengiun Popular Classics
Punter, D., 1996, The literature of terror: volume 2,Longman
Wolf, L., 1975, The annotated Dracula, Clarkson N.
Potter, Inc
70 71
Books and book design
Birdsall, D., 2004, Notes on book design, Yale
University Press
Haslam, A., 2006, Book design, Laurence King
Publishing
Hubert, RR., 1988, Surrealism and the book,
University of California Press
Maggs Brothers Ltd, 1996, Bookbinding of the British Isles, parts 1 and 2 (catalogue),
McLean, R., 1972, Victorian book design and colour printing, Faber & Faber
Melby, J., 2003, Splendid pages, Lund Humphries
Smith, K., 1995, Structure of the visual book,
Keith A Smith Books
Information design
Tufte, E., 2006, Beautiful evidence, Graphics Press
Tufte, E., 1997, Visual explanations: images and quantities, evidence and narrative, Graphics Press
Narrative theory
Brooks, P., 1992, Reading for the plot: design and intention in narrative, Harvard University Press
Brooker, C., 2004, The seven basic plots: why we tell stories, Continuum International Publishing Group
Victoriana
Bentley, N., 1968, The Victorian scene: 1837-1901,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Cowling, M., 1989, The artist as anthropologist: the representation of type and character in Victorian art, Cambridge University Press
De Vries, L., 1973, History as hot news: 1865-1897,
John Murray
Dyos, HJ and Wolff, M., 1973, The Victorian city: images and realities, Routledge and Kegan
Howgego, JL., 1977, City of London from old photographs, BT Batsford Ltd
Priestley, JB., 1972, Victoria’s heyday, Heinemann
Riley, N., 1997, Victorian design source book, Grange
Books
72 73
Miscellaneous
Child, H., 1956, Decorative maps, The Studio
Publications
Crow, D., 2006, Left to right: the cultural shift from words to pictures, AVA Academia
Madden, M., 2006, 99 ways to tell a story: exercises in style, Jonathon Cape
New, J., 2005, Drawing from life: the journal as art, Princetown Architectural Press
Whitfield, P., 2006, London: a life in maps, British
Library
74 75
Appendix
The following reviews are from a blog set up by
myself and Zoe Sadokierski (ZS). To read the full
threads – and see the pictures – go to
graphicinterventions.blogspot.com.
Poor things by Alasdair Gray (Bloomsbury, UK)
– posted by GS, 4 July 2007
Poor things, published in 1992, won Alasdair Gray
the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian
Fiction Prize. Simultaneously gothic fantasy, social
commentary, pastiche and satire, the book is also a
beautiful object, filled with the author’s illustrations
and visual devices. As Newsweek put it: ‘A master of
pastiche and collage in words and pictures, Gray has
found a way to perfectly evoke a cracked, slightly
out-of-balance sense of reality.’
He goes to great lengths to extend the reader’s
suspension of disbelief. We’re told he’s the book’s
editor, merely providing an introduction to the found
text that takes up the bulk of the pages that follow.
There’s a preliminary page of cod reviews overlaid
with a fake erratum slip. The next page has his
biography sitting atop a biography of Alexander
McCandless, the supposed writer of the self-
published Victorian autobiography that follows.
We’re told a series of unlikely events brought the
book into his hands. Intended as a humble gift to the
author’s wife in 1909, she in turn left it ‘for the
attention of her eldest grandchild or surviving
descendant after August 1974’. There having been
no descendants in 1974, it had been thrown out by
the current occupants of her lawyers’ offices. A local
historian found it in a ‘a heap of old-fashioned box
files on the edge of the pavement, obviously placed
there for the Cleansing Department to collect and
destroy’. Then it found it’s way to Gray:
‘He lent me this book, saying he thought it a lost
masterpiece which ought to be printed. I agreed
with him, and said I would arrange it if he gave me
complete control of the editing. He agreed, a little
reluctantly, when I promised to make no changes to
Archibald McCandless’s actual text… the main part
of this book is as near to a facsimile of the original
as possible, with the Strand etchings and other
illustrative devices reproduced photographically.’
In this ‘introduction’ Gray goes on to provide the
reader with ‘evidence’ to prove the factual basis of
76 77
the autobiography to follow. He also explains his
falling-out with the historian:
‘He blames me for the loss of the original volume,
which is unfair. I would have gladly have sent a
photocopy to the publisher and returned the original,
but that would have added at least £300 to the
production costs. Modern typesetters can “scan” a
book into their machine from a typed page, but from
a photocopy must type it in all over again; moreover
the book was needed by a photographic specialist, to
make plates from which the Strang etchings and
facsimiles of Bella’s letter could be reproduced.
Somewhere between editor, publisher, typesetter and
photographer the unique first edition was mislaid.
These mistakes are continually happening in book
production, and nobody regrets it more than I do.’
And so we turn to the cover of the book-within-a-
book: [picture]
The inside cover and the author’s handwritten
dedication to his wife [picture]
And the contents page, with its ‘William Strang’
etching of the author [picture]
A scrawled cry for help from ‘Bella Baxter’s letter:
making a conscience’ [picture]
When the autobiography draws to a close, we’re
shown the inside back cover and the back cover.
Then Gray the ‘editor’ provides 40 pages of
clippings, illustrations and written evidence for the
fantastical events in the preceding pages. The visual
devices work from first page to last to bolster the
suspension of disbelief - all voices are first-person
and put us in the minds of the characters; the
graphic elements go further and allow us to see
through their eyes.
By designing as well as authoring ‘Poor things’, Gray
has not only produced a beautiful and special book,
he has also provided a different, fuller reading
experience.
The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall (Canongate,
Melbourne, 2007) Posted by ZS 12 July 2007
The title of Steven Hall’s much hyped debut novel,
The Raw Shark Texts, is a play on the Rorschach
Test – appropriate for a thriller about an amnesic
man that openly embraces its many allusions to
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other fiction. The original UK edition sports a Post-it
note quote from Mark Haddon (The Curious
Incident of the Dog and the Nighttime) stuck to the
title page, describing the book as: "The bastard love-
child of The Matrix, Jaws and The Da Vinci Code."
Aside from these references, authors like Haruki
Murakami, Italo Calvino and Paul Auster (who are
all quoted within the text) and films such as
Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Michel Gondry’s
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind drift like
phosphorescent particles through reviews of the
novel. The fact that cinema is referenced as much as
literature may explain why Hall chose to narrate the
climax of the novel as a 20-some page flip book,
rather than prose.
We meet protagonist Eric Sanderson as he wakes on
the floor, retching for breath, with no memory of
who or where he is. Cut to Dr. Randle, his
psychiatrist – “a large clashing event of a woman” –
explaining that he suffers from a rare form of
“dissociative amnesia”, probably caused by the
accidental death of his adored girlfriend in Greece
three years earlier. We have just witnessed his
eleventh relapse, each incident erasing more of his
memory than the last. However, we quickly discover
an alternate explanation: this is actually the second
Eric Sanderson, inhabiting the body of the first Eric
Sanderson, whose human memory and "intrinsic
sense of self" has been eaten by a Ludovician – a
“conceptual shark”.
Hall’s surreal and intriguing premise is that all
human minds are linked by vast 'streams' of
language and thought, and, swimming through these
streams, are thought-fish. The Ludovician is the
most dangerous thought-fish, feeding on chunks
human personality and memory, or, in Eric’s case,
repeatedly attacking until there is nothing left but a
shell of a person.
Eric II's first encounter with the Ludovician occurs
in his living room, when it bursts through his
television in a scene reminiscent of The Ring (and
countless other horror flicks). Hall represents the
Ludovician crossing from the conceptual to the
physical realm visually; the television is a square
frame on the page, the shark a collection of
typographic marks. Before this attack, Eric is (like
the reader) aware of his fragile mental state and
highly sceptical about the concept of a word-shark,
but it bursts through as a real entity – for Eric the
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‘conceptual fish’ becomes a physical predator and for
the reader, the verbal description becomes a physical
(visual) one. As the creature crosses the channel from
conceptual to physical, the description crosses from
verbal to visual.
This device is repeated at several other points in the
novel when the Ludovician manages to locate and
attack Eric (and the motley crew of characters he
enlists on his quest to escape the fate of the First
Eric Sanderson). The most ambitious of these is the
climax, an obvious homage to Jaws, when the shark
attacks, flip-book style, as Eric and co are adrift on a
conceptual-boat (of course).
Despite a wave of praise for his “innovative,
postmodern, metafictional novel”, Hall has been
criticised, like so many novelists who integrate
typo/graphic devices in their text, for resorting to
visual ‘gimmickry’. Steven Poole asks in the New
Statesman: “If you invent a shark made out of words
and then abandon the medium of words to represent
it, what is the point?” Aside from the fact that the
shark IS made out of words – in fact, it’s composed
of fragments of Eric’s story, highly appropriate as it’s
only when Eric reminisces that the Ludovician can
find him – Poole seems to miss the point that the
shark only appears as typographic illustration when
it breaks through the conceptual ‘stream’ and into
the physical world. To describe this device as a
gimmick is to imply that it serves no purpose other
than attention-seeking decoration, ignoring that this
rhetorical device is, in fact, contributing something
to the text that the written narrative alone cannot
achieve. It manipulates the reader’s experience to
reflect that of the characters.
Hall addresses this criticism as kind of literary
snobbishness: "these storytelling techniques are still
considered 'experimental' or even worse, 'gimmicky'
in some book circles; whereas in art you can sit in a
gallery with a dead lobster on your head for a week
without fear of being accused of either." It’s a
complaint shared by Jonathan Safran Foer, whose
novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close also
features a flip-book passage. He concurs that the use
of images in novels is “still considered to be a
gimmick or some expression of the failure of
language”. In a review for the Village Voice Safran
Foer states: "It's a shame that people consider the use
of images in a novel to be experimental or brave. No
one would say that the use of type in a painting is
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experimental or brave. Literature has been more
protective of its borders than any other art form –
too protective. Jay-Z samples from Annie – one of
the least likely combinations imaginable – and it
changes music. What if novelists were as willing to
borrow?"
But Poole wonders whether this ‘borrowing’ is less
about paying homage to other forms and more about
yielding to them: "does it indicate that fiction is
coming to accept a place subservient to film in
people's imaginations? ... Indeed, The Raw Shark
Texts reads mainly like a novelisation of a film yet
to exist."
I think what Hall, and other novelists employing
typo/graphic devices, are recognising is not just the
contemporary prevalence of visual story telling
forms, but a changing expectation from readers. The
flip book device is not just an homage to cinematic
drama, but an attempt to engage the reader in a
more visually evocative experience. Hall offers a
succinct description of the difference between
‘gimmicky’ visual devices and those that are
integrated into the written text:
“I'm a huge advocate of unusual typesetting, visual
elements, even altering the structure of a book itself,
but these devices must always enhance the reading
experience rather than obstruct it ... this new
interactivity is less about the reader having to create
a story and more about offering the reader
opportunities to find more of the story for
themselves … It's not about creating so much as the
offer of a more active form of engagement.”
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan
Safran Foer. Posted by ZS 23 July 2007
Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel, Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close, is composed by three
narrative voices: Oskar Schell, a precocious but
fragile 9-year-old whose father is killed in the
September 11 World Trade Centre attack; Oskar’s
adoring Grandmother, who lives across the road, and;
Oskar’s mute Grandfather, who abandoned his wife
when she was pregnant with Oskar’s father. The
different voices are recognisable at a glance.
Oskar’s is a first-person narrative, typeset in a
conventional literary way. The Grandmother’s
narrative is a letter to Oskar, recognisable by
unusually wide spaces between sentences – a visual
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que referring to the ‘tab’ space on the old typewriter
composes the letter at. The Grandfather’s letters are
taken from his ‘daybooks’ – he becomes mute after
losing his first love in the firebombing of Dresden
and communicates by writing messages in pocket
books. His passages are recognisable by their erratic
typesetting – sometimes a single line per page, as
would be shown to someone he was communicating
with, sometimes totally un-paragraphed stream of
consciousness ramblings. This simple visual device
assists the reader to distinguish between the three
narrative voices, speaking across different continents
and eras concurrently.
Unable to come to terms with the loss of his father,
Oskar embarks on a fool’s errand – he discovers a
mysterious key in his father’s closet and sets out to
find the lock it fits, somewhere in New York. Along
the way, he constructs a scrapbook he calls “Stuff
That Happened to Me’. Images from this book are
scattered throughout the novel. Interestingly, many
images are of things that don’t ‘happen’ to Oskar;
alongside photographs Oskar takes of people and
places he encounters, are images he finds in
newspapers and on the Internet. All these
photographs relate to anecdotes or events in the
written text, but they do not necessarily appear near
that text. So, rather than illustrating the written
narrative, the uncaptioned photographs allow the
reader to see through Oskar’s eyes, providing a rich
visual description of the world he exists in, and is a
product of. Safran Foer considered “the visual world
in which [children] are now developing”, (Khan
2005) sourcing the photographs from the Internet,
newspapers and photo libraries. (Hudson 2005)
The seemingly haphazard way the photographs are
presented – including a 15 page sequence of found
images ranging from a wall of keys, a paper
aeroplane diagram, a pair of copulating turtles and a
body falling from a building when a sleepless Oskar
flips through his scrapbook – emulates, for the
reader, the visual world Oskar inhabits. Safran Foer
says: “To speak about what happened on September
11 requires a visual language. My singular
motivation was to create the most powerful book I
could.” (Village Voice) The most effective way to
evoke a bombardment of random images is to show
the reader those images – sharing Oskar’s experience
heightens our empathy with him.
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Oskar finds a video of a man jumping from the
second tower to avoid burning to death. Oskar
speculates whether this man is his father – he feels
he could cope by knowing exactly how his father
died. Still images from the video appear throughout
the novel – a visual reminder of how this mental
image haunts Oskar. The novel closes with a series of
these grainy photographs, but Oskar has reversed the
sequence so the body floats back up into the
building, reversing time and undoing the tragedy:
“Finally, I found the pictures of the falling body.
Was it Dad? Maybe. Whoever it was, it was
somebody. I ripped the pages out of the book. I
reversed the order, so that the last one was first, and
the first was last. When I flipped through them, it
looked like the man was floating up through the
sky.” (325)
As readers, we are forced to participate in this act,
making the image come ‘alive’ in our hands. It is at
once beautiful and terrifying, especially if the
images are taken from real video footage from the
Internet – the reader visually reverses a man’s actual
death. The photographs in the novel evoke a vivid
visual landscape of what was, for many people, a
very visual event.
The Frankenstein Diaries, 'translated from the
original German and edited by The Reverend
Hubert Venables', (Charles Herridge, 1980)
– posted by GS 12 August 2007
In The Frankenstein Dairies, Mary Shelley’s original
story has been abridged, annotated and re-presented
in a different form, with graphic elements given at
least as much room as the text. So, unlike the other
novels discussed so far in this blog, the visual devices
in this book were not conceived at the time the story
was written.
The point of this new form becomes clear at the
outset. The ‘Editor’s Foreword’ (as with Alasdair
Gray’s Poor things) asks us to believe that the
Frankenstein legend is in fact true. The graphic
elements are provided both as ‘evidence’ for this and
as a way of bringing us closer to the diarist – the
tormented Dr Frankenstein. Venables tells us a
‘tatttered bundle of ancient, decaying papers arrived
ten years ago from a colleague in Switzerland’ and
that, following research, he has ‘established beyond
all personal doubt the authenticity of the diaries as a
true historical record of fact.’
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From the prologue, which is illustrated by 'the only
known portrait of Viktor Frankenstein' and 'a
portrait of Caroline Beaufort, Viktor's mother':
‘The reader is bound to view with some scepticism
the publication, over 150 years after the event, of a
volume purporting to contain extracts from the
diaries of a figure universally considered never to
have lived… Yet there is some truth in the saying
that there is no smoke without fire, or, more
appropriately, that there is often if not usually a basis
in real life for a legend. Encouraged by this thought,
I therefore began my investigations…’
Every page of typed and annotated diary entries that
follows includes accompanying items from the
editor’s papers. These fall into two categories:
reproductions of the original diary pages and the
diarist’s drawings and miscellaneous items from the
editor’s research.
While all the visual elements serve as evidence for
the claim that what we’re reading is real, the two
categories have additional functions.
The captioned items from the editor’s research
include portraits of key characters, illustrations
showing scientific equipment of the day, a map, a
clipping of a newspaper account of one the
monster’s murders, and photographs. These things
link the events in the book to real historical events,
to the real world in which we live. They also use the
visual language of newspapers and non-fiction
books, and so tacitly ask the reader to accept them as
fact. In this way they extend the suspension of
disbelief in a way that words alone cannot.
The reproduced diary entries do something different.
When reading first-person narratives, any visual
element purportedly created by the narrator bring us
closer to the character by allowing us to see through
their eyes. The marks that they’ve ‘made’ on the
page are human, familiar – believable. This is the
intention here. We see ornate German handwriting
and Da Vinci-like diagrams on aged and stained
parchment. And somehow these marks show us into
our narrator’s mind in a way that is unattainable
through words and text. So, when we see
Frankenstein’s monster, as drawn by its creator, in a
spread that punctuates the text and the action, we
are also shown the moment the sketch was made -
we imagine ourselves in that room with the
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parchment in front of us, the creature lumbering
around with its misshapen limbs and pleading eyes...
Do these graphic interventions work? Well, the
reader does often have to backtrack to read captions
and study pictures, and so the book has a different
rhythm and pace to a text novel. But as the pictures
are so integral to the mood and the ideas behind this
reworking, it doesn't suffer for this.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick
(Scholastic, 2007) – posted by GS 2 September
2007
Hugo Cabret has been beautifully and visually
connected to its subject – early French cinema. Black
and white throughout, 300 out of 525 pages are
double-page pencil illustrations across spreads (a
canvas reminiscent of the cinema screen). These are
in sequence, and are read as a flick-book, advancing
the action to a point where text is needed – when,
for example, the reader needs to know what Hugo is
thinking, or where there is dialogue.
As his editor has pointed out in Publishers Weekly,
Selznick ‘was determined to make this story about
the roots of French cinema work visually’. He starts
by having one of his characters brief the reader on
the unusual experience ahead:
‘…I want you to picture yourself sitting in the
darkness, like the beginning of a movie. On screen,
the sun will soon rise, and you will find yourself
zooming toward a train station in the middle of the
city…’
[pictures]
‘…You will rush through the doors into a crowded
lobby. You will eventually spot a boy amid the crowd,
and he will start to move through the train
station…’
[pictures]
‘…Follow him, because this is Hugo Cabret. His
head is full of secrets, and he’s waiting for his story
to begin.’
[pictures]
In this first 42 pages of the novel, pictures do the
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traditional job of words. We are shown the main
characters – their faces, expressions, bearing, clothes.
We are shown the setting of the novel, zooming in
from a view above Paris. And we are shown the
mood, which emanates from the soft, grainy black
and white pencil drawings, much like it does from
the silent movies of the early twentieth century.
When we finally turn the page onto a text-spread, it
is because we need to know Hugo’s thoughts.
This is true of the rest of the novel: the image
sequences move the action on and the text contains
dialogue and thoughts. Never do we see text and
image on the same page. But there is no jarring
when you switch abruptly between these two reading
modes. To me at least, it felt effortless and natural –
perhaps more so than when they are read together.
Obviously, this story-telling method uses readers’
imaginations in a different way from the
conventional text novel. Rather than requiring
readers to conjure images from the words on the
page – to create the world of the story within their
minds – here readers are given the images. In some
ways, this limits the act of creation involved in
reading. You could argue that it makes the story
experience somehow less involved, less interactive
because readers have less visualising to do – just as
Selznick has argued the converse (in a New York
Times 'Book Update' podcast):
‘…making every picture in the book a full double
page spread and making the reader have to turn the
page, it puts the reader in a different kind of
position than they would otherwise be with a book
because they are actively involved in moving the
story forward.’
So, readers work harder physically interacting with
this book, but perhaps do less work imagining its
story.
An interesting upside of the imaginative constraints
that come with reading a picture book is that it gives
the author more control over what the reader sees in
their mind’s eye. If a novelist just uses words, the
‘visual story’ created in the reader’s mind will be
particular to them – and, for example, a character is
likely to appear differently to each of them. Where
there is an image of that character, there is no room
for interpretation, and no need for conjuring. So, in
Hugo Cabret, when we read the text passages what
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we imagine is likely to have visual continuity from
Selznick’s pencil drawings.
It’s often said that featuring a protagonist on the
cover of a novel is a no-no, because of this very fact
– it stops them from imagining their own. But in
some instances, maybe this would be useful to an
author. An imagined example: some small detail of a
character’s appearance is important to the plot. By
showing it to us, it becomes fixed in our memory –
and in a different way from how we see it in our
minds as we race over the text.
In Hugo Cabret, another function of the image
sequences is in moving the action along at a cracking
pace – at least halving the reading time of a book
describing the same action using text. This probably
explains why I didn’t tend to luxuriate in the
pictures, studying the details, as I’d imagined I
would. It would have been like freeze-framing a film
in the middle of an action scene to admire the
colours and composition. It was only when I’d
finished that I flicked back to enjoy the pictures as
pictures.
I can see this book being unique in the way it
combines words and images, and the ways in which
they’re laid out. In the design, Selznick has
purposefully tried to emulate early cinema, thinking
about ‘the way the language of cinema tells its
stories and thinking about how I could adapt that
language within the form of the book.’
Any novel that didn’t involve cinema wouldn’t need
to visually reference it in the ways Selznick does.
There would be no need to keep to one image a
spread. For example, where there’s a lot of action
there could be multiple images to a page, and where
there is need for pause – say where the reader’s
shown the scene of action to come, and is expected
to spend some time looking at detail, then the image
could take up the whole page. More options provide
the author with more control.
Selznick has definitely broken new ground with
Hugo Cabret, though. One to learn from…
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