This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905â1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group â much like Beethoven's piano sonatas or Keats's great odes â in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward's novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.
1 The Silent Film, the Sketch and the Portrait in Godsâ Man (1929)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266808-2
On March 7, 1936, the following announcement appeared in the New York Times:
There will be a special photographic exhibition of scenes from Lynd Wardâs novel in woodcuts, âGodâs Man,â [sic] at the New School for Social Research this evening, and the Film and Photo League will show on the screen at 5, 7 and 9 P.M. a filmstrip version produced with Mr. Wardâs permission.
Both exhibition and filmstrip may have been the first but they were certainly not the last attempts by photographers and filmmakers to translate Godsâ Man into another medium. Over the years, and particularly in the early 1960s, Ward received a number of letters requesting permission to adapt his novel for television and film and also set it to music.1 In the early 1970s, one producer began making an animated version of the book (it never came to fruition), and a few years later another succeeded in creating a fourteen-minute color animated film based on the novel. In spite of its association with an archaic, medieval form of craftsmanship, many readers saw something modern in Wardâs experimental novel, something that cried out from the privacy of the codex form for a more public form of exhibition. And what they saw, as some critics have noted, was Wardâs skillful deployment of techniques used by the silent film in designing the scenes in his engravings.2 He absorbed the aesthetic of the moving picture in the âslow timeâ of his carved images and relied on readersâ hands to activate the plot by turning the pages. Many filmmakers simply wanted to accelerate this process, catching up these âstillsâ in the rapid movement of cinematic art. They understood the novel as the basic script from which they might produce a more contemporary, fast-paced movie with a musical score.
As it turned out, impatience with the silence of the novelâs engravings and its picture gallery format had been demonstrated earlier by William Soskin, the literary editor of the New York Evening Post. A few months after Godsâ Man was published, Soskin thought readers might find it engaging if he disbound the book and displayed reproductions of its pages in consecutive order over successive days. Hence, from April 23 to May 12, 1930 (omitting Sundays), the Evening Post printed from eight to ten images from the novel each day in the arts section. Soskin threw down a challenge, âCan You âReadâ a Novel â in Woodcuts?â, and supplied his own summary of Wardâs story, encouraging readers to âcheck against the authorâs meaning, in the synopsis printed below on this page.â3 His narration of the bookâs first ten images indicates Soskinâs desire to hurry them into a swiftly moving plot:
Caught in a violent storm at sea, the youth navigates his frail boat through menacing waves and finally sees the dawn of light, calm waters and a distant shore. Drifting toward that shore, the boy, who is an artist, draws the scene. When he lands he sees a vision of a golden city in the distance, and the lure of its shimmering towers causes him to set out upon a journey to attain them. On the way he gives his last money to a beggar on the road. He reaches the outskirts of the city at night, when the glitter of the towers has become a mysterious and menacing darkness.
(April 24, 1930, p. 15)
The emphasis on sustained action continues in Soskinâs later synopses, which sacrifice the aesthetics of the designs, their visual symbols, allegory and iconography, for a brisk Aristotelian pace that distills the essence of Wardâs basic storyline. That Godsâ Man is broken into fragments and extended over three weeks, as if it were a nineteenth-century novel published in installments, only adds to the emphasis on temporal continuity, a belief that Wardâs visual experiment was indeed a âpuzzleâ that must be verbally transformed into forceful narrative language to be deciphered. The ekphrastic urge to make these stark black-and-white engravings âbreathe lifeâ is evident in Soskinâs slip into color (âa golden city in the distanceâ). Like the animators from the 1970s, Soskin saw the silence of Wardâs black-and-white engravings as a challenge, if not a threat; he sought to make them move and speak in our world by countering their silence with an onslaught of adjectives â âfrail,â âmenacing,â âshimmering,â âmysteriousâ â the wordâs heraldic defense against the austerity of the quiet image. Soskin wished to employ a kind of conversion therapy, returning Godsâ Man to its original genetic form and waking the conventional novel hibernating in its silent shape.
Ward confessed later that he was not altogether happy with the editorâs gloss, his âliterary phrases and emphases.â4 But it is telling that he raised no objection to the exercise itself or the serial re-publication of his novel in a mass-circulation newspaper. Nor did he discourage the various filmmakers who approached him over the years from adapting his book. On the contrary, his correspondence shows that he always welcomed these projects and was willing to provide as much help as he could. Visual appropriation of his work was thus condoned, at times even encouraged. It was the verbal translation and interpretation of Godsâ Man that made Ward uneasy. As he later admitted to Irving Steingart, âto undertake to put a book of this kind into words must necessarily fail to convey the peculiar combination of understanding and emotion that I hope this pictorial narrative at its best can achieveâ (Steingart, 1). He went on in the letter to regret the constraint placed on readersâ interpretive freedom by Soskinâs own verbal âcolorationâ of the story.
In his predilection for conveying rapid motion, Ward was also influenced by the Belgian graphic artist, Frans Masereel, whose early woodcut novel, Passionate Journey (1919), he must have studied carefully. Although stylistically less finished than Godsâ Man, comprised of a series of what David A. BeronĂ€ calls âsolid figures and formsâ and âflat, legible images,â Passionate Journey nonetheless addresses similar themes as it pursues a young man seeking out passionate human experience in a gritty metropolis (Passionate Journey2007 vi, vii). The organizing principle of this picaresque novel is not simply movement, but frenetic movement, as Masereel chases the heroâs passage from one new experience to the next in a kind of Whitmanic devouring of life. The modernist rapidity and continual newness of these images accounts for the novelâs interest as well as its aspiration to the medium of film. The very first woodcut shows the main character waving to us from a moving train, summoning one of the early film experiments of the LumiĂšre brothers, and the book only accelerates from there, at one point representing the hero literally running into coitus. Among a host of other activities conducive to the new âmotion picture,â we see the protagonist riding a bicycle, driving a car, climbing trees, doing handstands, leaping across brooks, urinating from the top of a building, playing with children, ice-skating, having sex with a prostitute, fighting in the street and dancing. There are multiple plots but no single narrative line as the hero moves through a kaleidoscope of volatile emotions. Even as he collapses and dies in a forest at the end, the author cannot suppress his hyperactivity. Shifting into a magical register, the final woodcut shows him resurrected as a clothed skeleton striding through the universe and nonchalantly waving to the audience. Ward likely noted the variety and novelty of the characterâs experiences â some outrageous and obscene, others gallant and laudable â but he would have been particularly struck by the sheer variety and succession of incident, the exhilarating movement from one fresh and surprising image to the next.8
Both the silent films and Masereelâs wordless novels no doubt absorbed their kinetic spirit from the near-manic energy of the 1920s coming from across the Atlantic, what Cecilia Tichi describes as âthe constantly accelerating cultural changes and rhythms in the nation ⊠an industrialized age dominated by speed and motion, an age of instantaneityâ (230â231). This ânew high-velocity Americaâ (233), which was quickly becoming a model for the rest of the world, resulted largely from the countryâs experience in the Great War, which as Ann Douglas states, benefitted America. What began as an emergency â entering the war late and having to equip and mobilize troops as rapidly as possible â wound up generating âan ethos ⊠of adrenaline and speedâ that spilled over into nearly every aspect of culture, from steel production and automobile manufacture to the clothing, advertising and film industries (186). âThe war,â as Douglas writes, ârevved up the dizzying pace of change and reinforced acceleration itself, the trademark of American lifeâ (183). Spurred by the war, nearly every industry and cultural institution adopted Fordâs mass-production techniques. Even Hollywood followed suit with Marcus Loew comparing chain store methods in the movies with those employed in the railroads, telephones, and automobiles, and later Warner Brothers overworking their actors and implementing âfactory-like, super-quick production methodsâ (Douglas 189). Small wonder that in the transaction that seals his fate, the hero of Godsâ Man hastily signs the contract, snatches the brush and dashes off to the city. His impetuosity is perhaps less a sign of his youth than a by-product of âtechnological and cultural accelerationâ and the result of âa speeded-up psycheâ (Douglas 200).
Turning now to Wardâs novel, one is immediately struck by a âculture of momentumâ in which the protagonist and other characters are frequently defined by the rapidity of their motion. In more than a third of the engravings the hero appears running or engaged in some type of energetic physical activity â sailing a boat, fleeing from his captors, striding out of church, leaping off a cliff into a river or hiking in the mountains. While painting a picture at the outset of the novel, ordinarily a stationary activity, he is shown on a small boat rocked by the surf (I, 4), a plein air stunt that however unlikely suggests the spontaneity of his creative process and the rapid movement of his pencil. Later, similarly, a family snapshot is realized not as a conventionally static portrait but as kinetic action, the hero racing with his wife through a landscape while recklessly carrying their small child.9 The expressionist style of the novel also lends movement to scenes that would ordinarily come across as still (III, 10) (bit.ly/3mdSDVQ). Ward tilts the picture plane, distorts a characterâs body or face with passion or creates motion in the landscape with an extended fan of incised lines (III, 19â20). Stark white pyramids of light illuminating a scene from above or below furnish additional dramatic movement to the engravings (IV, 1), and in the case of the magic paintbrush, transform a potentially static moment of display into a mystical cosmic event (I, 21). This is no ordinary utilitarian object but a holy relic descending from heaven (bit.ly/3ILLnQj).
In many of the images, as I have suggested, Ward cuts the woodblock to suggest rapid movement in the characters and the background. It is instructive to consider several of the more striking examples. After a military officer has beaten the artist unconscious, for instance, we see him dragging the young manâs limp body down a dark sidewalk (III, 20). He and the prostitute goose-step into the foreground, one foot suspended in air, while the pavement flows around them like a glistening river and the figuresâ projected shadows hasten them to the edge of the frame. A few pages later the artist escapes from jail only to be discovered by the art dealer who alerts the police. In one panel, we see the hero looking over his shoulder midstride as he sprints out of the city (III, 31). The monolithic skyscrapers in the background are set in motion by the plumes of smoke from the factory, and in the sky the dark clouds emulate the forms of his pursuers, closing in on him. These forms suggest the heroâs figure as well, a moving darkness in the landscape. The black shapes abstract and multiply his fleeting form, and project it like a sequence of film stills onto the white sky. By the next image the artist has eluded his captors, at least for the moment, and is making his way furtively along the edge of a mountain (Figure 1.1; III, 32). The claw-like form of his right hand is echoed in the landscape and the rock above magnifies his head like a giant Easter Island statue. The hunched form of his body flies forward in the shape of a white shadow that appears to melt the surface of the rocky slope, liquefying its form.
As we see in each of these three woodcuts, the speed of the heroâs flight sends shock waves through the surrounding environment. The motion of his body and agitation of his mind reverberate in the natural backdrop, which, like many of Edvard Munchâs paintings, assumes the psychic distress of t...