Visual Devices in Contemporary Prose Fiction

Gaps, Gestures, Images

Simon Barton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137467355
• eBook ISBN: 9781137467362
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book acknowledges that the reader of a novel looks at and sees the page before they begin to read any text placed upon it. Thus, any disruptions to how a traditional page 'should look' can have a large impact on the reading process. The book critically engages with the visual appearance of graphically innovative contemporary prose fiction.

1

An Introduction to Visual Devices in Contemporary Prose Fiction

1.1 Introduction

From the rubrication that can be found in illuminated medieval manuscripts to Laurence Sterne’s challenges to the emerging expectations of the novel form in the eighteenth century, and from the ‘making new’ of the Modernists to the formal experiments associated with Postmodernism in the twentieth century, the page of a book has always been a surface whose capacity for conveying information might be adjusted or extended. We only need to look at the possible font choices of any word-processing program to see how many options a writer now has to subtly alter the initial perception of their text and meaning. Relatively cheap contemporary digital publication software now allows for simple and quick manipulation of text and the page. The advent of new digital technologies gives increased access to unusual page design (though still determined by what a computer allows) and a number of contemporary authors have chosen to actively re-imagine the traditional layout of text on a page, the structures of their narratives and, by extension, subsequent reading processes.

Visual (or ‘graphic’) devices in novels can multiply, support, or trouble, possible interpretations of their narratives, expanding the potential significations of the words on the page. What is most interesting is how these visual devices can challenge the reader or enhance the feeling of interactivity, yet it is something that has been rarely commented upon in the critical arena until relatively recently (see Glyn White, 2005, p. 1 and Alison Gibbons, 2016, 2012). The visual devices in the works of prose that will be examined in detail in this book all have one thing in common: they have all been critically marginalised in the past, often being deemed as being too ‘difficult’ or, worse, labelled ‘gimmicky’. In contrast to this, many of these ‘multimodal’ (van Leeuwen and Kress, 2001, p. 1) and ergodic texts receive positive reactions from readers, sometimes gaining ‘cult’ status, and, in the case of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and

Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007), becoming brief best-sellers. With reference to House of Leaves but also applicable to many other graphically innovative novels, Poyner states, ‘The positive reaction [to these texts]…suggests the degree to which readers’ tastes have already been transformed by exposure to the devices, texture and rhetoric of contemporary graphic culture’ (2003, p. 143). The contemporary reader has no problem navigating disruptions to conventional page layout. In fact, many readers now actively pursue texts that challenge and alter their preconceptions of how a page of text should traditionally ‘look’.

Multimodality is a particularly relevant term when approaching such texts, because, as Norgaard asserts, ‘In Kress and Van Leeuwen’s view, even printed discourse is multimodal and ideally should be analysed accordingly…much contemporary communication consists of a complex interplay of different modes – such as sound, gesture, music, visual images, written and spoken language’ (2009b, p.142). It is worth pursuing the implications that disruptions to the conventional page have on the reading process. The works featured as examples in this monograph will sometimes be referred to as having a ‘high modality’, meaning that they feature many potentially different modes of producing meaning, often through overtly visual aspects of the page. In Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger says ‘Seeing comes before words’ (p. 1). The readers of the pages of novels see the page before they read the words. This is a fundamental observation that prompts refined study of the effects that unconventional pages have on the reader.

1.2 Aims and Structure

This book intends to make a sustained examination of three different types of visual device: textual gaps, textual gestures and visual images. Each example featured in this book can be found on the page(s) of works of fiction by British and American authors in works of printed, contemporary prose fiction. It will analyse such visual devices from a reader’s perspective, paying particular attention to narrative context and the differing interpretations made possible by similar visual devices.

Glyn White defines ‘graphic devices’ (visual devices by another name) as any occurrences that ‘[do] not wholly follow the graphic conventions that arrange words on a page, and pages in a book, in the usual neutral way’ (2005, p. 1). Visual devices can disrupt the reading process in varied ways, what this work intends to explore are the effects that different types of visual device can elicit during it.

Thus, the three main aims for this study may be summarised as follows:

1. To consider the different effects that unconventional visual devices have on the reading process.
2. To analyse, develop and discuss a critical vocabulary for the analysis of works of prose fiction containing unconventional visual devices.
3. To demonstrate the utility of this new vocabulary with analysis of relevant works of contemporary prose fiction.

This introduction highlights the diverse critical issues that surround these areas, from the relationship between the reader and text to the form of the book and Saussurean and Derridean linguistics. It provides a rationale for the choice to feature works by certain authors and to exclude others, and attempts to fill in any gaps in current knowledge of this area. The structure of this book is straightforward, unlike many of the idiosyncratic fictional works that feature as examples within it.

The subsequent chapters focus in detail on examples of visual devices in the works of prose fiction, but this introduction (and by extension, this book) broadly concerns four major areas:

1. The reader and their interaction with the graphic surface of the page.
2. The form of the book, including typography, images and other paratextual elements.
3. Theoretical approaches to text (the linguistic sign).
4. The issues of Representation and Graphic Mimesis.

The main focus and central aspect of this study is how the reader approaches visual devices in contemporary prose fiction. This is the first and central aspect to this study and always takes precedence over the other four aspects. The form of the book is connected to the first aspect as it is the form that dictates the (implied) reader’s cognitive response to the book. The second, third and fourth chapters explore the implications that gaps, textual arrangements (or gestures) and images have on the reading process. The third aspect is really the foundation of the study and will be explored in more detail throughout this introduction, especially in relation to semiotics and the materiality of text and the book as object. The fourth and final area, representation and mimesis, is highly important to this work because many of the visual devices that appear on the pages of prose fiction have a representational role to play. For example, at times, the texts that are used as examples here attempt a variety of different representations, such as the representation of sight and the representation of intellectual activity or thought. They attempt to give the reader a more accurate representation of characters’ actions, physical and mental. All these devices have a representational role to play; it is up to the reader to understand what they represent.

This book contains three large chapters (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) and two case studies (Chapters 5 and 6), followed by some conclusions (Chapter 7). The three main chapters focus on particular types of visual devices (textual gaps, textual gestures and images respectively) and then analyse them with close readings of a variety of contemporary texts in order to demonstrate the viability of the new critical vocabulary and the implications that they have on the reader. The two case studies apply all the devices discussed in the three main chapters to two unconventional, graphically innovative, and previously critically marginalised novels, Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse (1992) and William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), in order to demonstrate their effectiveness for close reading and further literary study. There is a distinct lack of current critical material on these two novels, especially material that acknowledges the implications that their numerous visual devices have on their reader(s).

Chapter 2 of this book (‘Reading Textual Gaps’) explores a variety of examples of textual gaps, lacunae and aporia in works of contemporary prose fiction. It aims to categorise similar types of textual gap and highlight the different effects that they have on the reader. These ‘gaps’ are approached by breaking them down into four different but common types: extended or additional blank spaces, missing content, blocks of monotone colour and physical holes cut into the page(s). The chapter discusses representation and new visual verisimiliar narrative techniques that portray conscious and unconscious thought. For example, textual gaps found in the middle of sentences and in-between the words that form a first person interior monologue can represent the pauses in thought that are common in the psychological realism or the inward turn favoured by some of the Modernists of the early twentieth century. Gaps have always been present on the graphic surface of the page, after all, ‘what most frequently interrupts written language is space’ (Lennard in Bray et al., 2000, p. 3) – a shrewd and uncommon observation that gives room for the analysis of the space that is so apparent on a page of prose. On a traditional page, gaps can usually be found in the margins, in-between words and letters, at the end of chapters and on lines that feature dialogue. On graphically innovative pages gaps can be used in all sorts of idiosyncratic ways. In B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo (1964) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2011), there are incisions made into the page(s), creating gaps as holes that completely remove text from lines but have a secondary effect of showing text on pages underneath that hole. Johnson’s earlier novel, Travelling People (1963) and Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing feature large blocks of monotone colour that completely remove any of the potential for text to be placed on their pages. Johnson’s Trawl (1966), Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru (1975) and Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), feature large extended gaps of blank space between words that extend the conventional short gap found in traditional novels and challenge the reader’s preconceptions of how a line of text should appear on the page. This chapter remains focused on the representational implications of textual gaps, and how the reader finds meaning from them. In some instances gaps between words on the page can represent punctuation that may otherwise be missing (see Lennard in Bray et al., 2000). Many of the novels featured in Chapter 2 extend conventional gaps, use ellipses, and change the layout of narrative in ways that incorporate blank space, and could all be argued to be types of punctuation.

Chapter 3 (‘Textual Gestures: Iconic Text and Narrative’) is concerned with unconventional textual arrangements that can also visually or graphically gesture towards events and objects that can be found in the textual narrative. After looking at a variety of textual gestures from novels such as Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992), Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World (2005) and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007), this visual device is separated into three different types: (i) iconic textual images or arrangements, (ii) narrative textual images or arrangements and (iii) iconic narrative. The Raw Shark Texts has many examples of all three types and is used throughout this chapter as a constant to show the scope of different textual arrangements that can be found. Van Leeuwen (2005) called for a grammar of typography and the aim of Chapter 3 is to contextualise various instances of unconventional arrangements and then provide a framework with which to examine them. At times, the typographic arrangement of text on the page can simply be supplementary and illustrative, or representative, and sometimes it can even replace the main textual narrative.

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud notes, ‘Letters are static images…when they’re arranged in a deliberate sequence we call them words’ (1993, p. 8). This statement could be expanded and amended to read ‘words are static images, when they are arranged in deliberate sequence we call them sentences, and so on with paragraphs…’. Understanding the inherent visual nature of the written sign is vital to the understanding of the textual gestures created by typography. It is the arrangement of text on the page that the reader first ‘sees’, after all, ‘seeing comes before words’ (Berger, 1972, p. 1). If the text on the page is arranged in a way that also evokes something else, such as a boat (see Double or Nothing, 1998, p. 137.1), it is that ‘thing’ that the reader initially ‘sees’ before they approach the narrative. Textual gestures as iconic or narrative textual images or arrangements are more than just experimental, idiosyncratic, difficult, or worse, simply ‘postmodern’. They can increase the range of interpretative possibilities and assist in generating meaning for the reader.

Chapter 4 (‘Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Images on the Pages of Prose Fiction’), in contrast to the previous chapter, deals with visual images that are not created by the arrangement of text on the page: photography, illustration and diagrams. The key area in this chapter is the relationship between words and pictures and the representational difficulties inherent in both of these concepts. W.J.T. Mitchell says that ‘the “differences” between images and language are not merely formal matters: they are, in practice, linked to things like the difference between the (speaking) self and the (seen) other; between telling and showing; between “hearsay” and “eyewitness” testimony; between words (heard, quoted, inscribed); between sensory channels, traditions of representation, and modes of experience’ (1994, p. 5). When visual images are placed on the page alongside words the semiotic nature of the sign is brought into question and by extension, so is mimesis. The focus of this chapter is on how the reader approaches visual images alongside textual narrative, what they represent and how meaning is generated from the combination of words and pictures. Thus, it looks to a medium that also features static words and pictures for assistance – the graphic novel and comic art, and two of its most important critical thinkers, Scott McCloud and Will Eisner. Beginning with a short analysis of the pages of two seminal yet different graphic novels – Watchmen (Moore, 1986–87) and Blankets (Thompson, 2003) – this chapter demonstrates how analysis of this medium can inform analysis of a variety of different word and picture combinations in prose fiction.

Will Eisner (2008a) defined comics as ‘Sequential Art’. Illustrations in previous works of prose fiction have often been singular and non-sequential. They often took the form of a wood cut or black and white drawing, not always relevant or specific to the novel that it was illustrating. In contrast to that, some works of fiction feature multiple visual images in sequence, not necessarily with another visual image, as would be in the case of Eisner’s own comics, but rather with the text that accompanies it, forming a juxtaposition of words and images without a weighting of more importance for either form. Lennard’s (2000) short analysis of graphic novels compares the reading of a page in a graphic novel as more akin to the reading of a poem than prose because of the eye movements the reader makes (saccades). At times, images on the pages of prose fiction can either supplement the main textual narrative or replace it entirely.

Eisner explores the difficulties of writing for comics and the problems of using imagery as a substitute for language in Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative:

Imagery used as a language has some drawbacks. It is the element of comics that has always provoked resistance to its acceptance as serious reading. Critics also sometimes accuse it of inhibiting imagination. Static images have limitations. They do not articulate abstractions or complex thought easily. But images define in absolute terms. They are specific. Images in print or film transmit with the speed of sight. (2008b, p. 10)

The novels featured in Chapter 4 attempt to navigate around these limitations. The abstractions or complexities of thought are communicated more effectively via a combination of words and pictures in these works. The words support the pictures and the pictures support the words in a symbiotic relationship. The pictures allow the writer to communicate in another way that may allow their vision to be better understood by the reader, turning from verbal storytelling and narrative towards graphic storytelling and vi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An Introduction to Visual Devices in Contemporary Prose Fiction
• 2 Reading Textual Gaps
• 3 Textual Gestures: Iconic Text and Narrative
• 4 Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Images in Prose Fiction
• 5 Case Study 1: Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse (1992)
• 6 Case Study 2: William H. Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968)
• 7 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index