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- Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Popular Fiction Studies
- Sprache: Englisch
Illustrierte Bücher sind für viele Kinder der Einstieg ins eigene Lesen, nachdem Oma oder Papa ihnen vorgelesen und ihren 'Leseappetit' geweckt haben. Mit etwas Glück werden sie bald eifrige, sprachgewandte und weltoffene Leser:innen. Die Bilder in einem gedruckten Text erleichtern den Zugang zu den sperrigen Buchstabenfolgen, indem sie ein Vorverständnis bereitstellen. Das gilt auch für erwachsene Leser:innen, denen das Lesen durch Illustrationen auf diese Weise attraktiv und gelingend wird, dass es bald zu ihrem Alltag gehört. So haben viele Menschen in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen in Frankreich, Deutschland und Großbritannien immer öfter zu den in großer Zahl angebotenen preiswerten Büchern mit Holzschnitten gegriffen und sind selbst zu Leser:innen und Sammler:innen geworden. Die vergleichende Untersuchung dieser illustrierten Erzähltexte zeigt, wie verschieden die Entwicklung in den drei Ländern war, und bietet eine systematische Einführung in die verschiedenen Illustrationsformen und ihre Wechselwirkungen mit den Texten.
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Detlev Gohrbandt
An Apology for Pictures
Studies in Popular Illustrated Narrative in Europe, 1918–1939
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24053/9783823395645
© 2024 • Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KGDischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen
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Internet: www.narr.deeMail: [email protected]
ISSN 2197-6392
ISBN 978-3-8233-8564-6 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-8233-0517-0 (ePub)
Contents
Sir Philip Sidney on the philosopher, the historian, the poet and the perfect picture
The philosopher […] and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example. But both, not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny argument the bare rule, is so hard of utterance and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. For this knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general, that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand. On the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.
Now doth the peerless poet perform both: for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture, I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth.
For as in outward things, to a man that had never seen an elephant or a rhinoceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shapes, colour, bigness, and particular marks; or of a gorgeous palace, the architecture, with declaring the full beauties might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceits with being witness to itself of a true lively knowledge; but the same man, as soon as he might see those beasts well painted, or the house well in model, should straightways grow, without need of any description, to a judicial comprehending of them: so no doubt the philosopher with his learned definition – be it of virtue, vices, matters of public policy or private government – replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom, which, notwithstanding, lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy.
(Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, London: Nelson, 1965: 106f.)
1Introduction
1.1How this study was born and grew up
It is something of a challenge to summarise the topics of this book under one single heading, and a comprehensive title like that proffered on the title page is bound to fall short of one’s various aims. Briefly, this is a study of illustrated fiction published in three European countries, England, France and Germany, between the end of the first and the beginning of the second world war. Before going on to present a sketch of the main perspectives under which I propose to deal with the subject of illustrated popular fiction, I would like to explain how I came to discover this topic after many years of academic teaching and research in the field of English literature. Living close to the French border, my wife and I very soon got into the habit of spending our holidays in France, for our own sakes but also for the sake of our children, who were learning French at school. We soon got into the habit of haunting flea markets and “vide greniers”, always on the lookout for cheap antiques and curios, including pottery and glass, prints and books. One day, I remember, I happened on a stand with a box full of old French illustrated books, including one in a yellow paper cover, which caught my attention. It was La Randonnée de Samba Diouf, a novel by the brothers Jérôme and Jean TharaudTharaud, Jérôme + Jean, whom I had never heard of before, illustrated with “40 bois originaux de Pierre FalkéFalké, Pierre”, an artist equally unknown to me. The volume belonged to a collection called Le Livre de Demain, published by Arthème FayardFayard, Arthème, Paris, in January 1926. And the illustrations were lovely! On the page facing the half-title I discovered a list of the 16 “derniers ouvrages parus dans la même collection” and the announcement of the next title to be published. Dear Reader, I’m sure you know how the story goes on. It took me quite a few years to complete my collection of this series, especially since I discovered that there were so many other series and individual volumes just waiting to be rescued and repaired and read. By and by I started pondering the question of why so many of these illustrated paperbacks had been produced in France during the 1920s and 30s, whereas I had hardly ever come across any comparable illustrated books from the same period in Britain or in Germany. That initial question spawned many others, some of which I would like to share with my readers.
I have concentrated on what may be classed as “popular” books, an epithet that has several different meanings, to be discussed later, but can for the moment be taken to designate illustrated books produced by commercial publishers and designed and priced so as to be attractive and accessible to most people, even during the economic straits of the inter-war years. Books for “everyman”, for “le grand public”, “für das einfache Volk”. These form a segment of the book market that has received far too little attention from art and book historians, and from literary and cultural scholars, who have preferred to focus on the canonical writers and artists, or on the more or less luxurious limited editions typically produced since the 1890s by the private presses. We will see that the “popular” or “demi-luxe” books (as they are sometimes called in France), however much they have been neglected by the academy, were and remain interesting and important from a number of perspectives, which will be adopted in the chapters of this book. By way of a tentative first approach, I shall now sketch eight of these perspectives in order to suggest why illustrated fiction should have been so important during the years after the Great War, and why it remains a fertile field of research today.
First, these books offered an accessible canon of contemporary and recent texts, especially when issued at regular intervals in publishers’ series or collections. These books were cheap and available not only from booksellers but also from local newsagents, kiosks, railway bookstalls and many other outlets. Thus, even people of limited education and low earnings found it quite easy to assemble a private library of literature (mostly narrative genres, but also philosophical and political essays) that at the same time offered and was integrated with a collection of contemporary art work. In France, cheap illustrated series had long been on offer by publishers such as Calmann-LévyCalmann-Lévy, Georges (Nouvelle Collection Illustrée, 1903ff.) and FayardFayard, Arthème (Modern Bibliothèque, 1904ff., and the Livre Populaire, 1905ff.), so when the war was over readers expected such fare to be made available in a more up to date mode. Inexperienced readers could hope that a series might provide them with books worth reading, books that informed people also read, because they saw them as giving access to information, arguments and attitudes, and might thus be helpful in making a new start in post-war France. Not for nothing did Fayard proclaim their series to be Le Livre de Demain, and FerencziFerenczi, Joseph insist that theirs was Le Livre Moderne Illustré. These new names avoided the term “populaire”, which was retained for genres like the adventure tale, the romance and the detective story produced for less ambitious readers not yet willing or able to outgrow their juvenile preferences. Finally, these publishers’ series were generously illustrated with woodcuts made by contemporary artists of repute (like Raymond ReneferRenefer, Raymond and Jean LébédeffLébédeff, Jean) and their pupils, so that regular buyers were not only accumulating a private library but also a gallery of second-generation expressionist or art deco prints through which, in the course of browsing and reading, they acquired familiarity with the idioms of modern graphic art. We will see that this popularisation of modern graphic art took place above all in France, whereas in Britain it proceeded more hesitantly in a comparatively traditional vein. In Germany, series like the Insel-Bücherei started off again after 1918 with volumes illustrated by KokoschkaKokoschka, Oskar, UnoldUnold, Max and RössingRössing, Karl, expressionist artists whose contributions were gradually, as the rise of fascism took effect, ousted by more conformist styles of illustration, so that the publisher might escape the fate of the Büchergilde GutenbergBüchergilde Gutenberg or the Kurt WolffWolff, Kurt Verlag.
Second, in their combination of text and illustration these books appealed to a class of readers long nurtured on illustrated magazines and illustrated serial fiction, and now increasingly becoming radio listeners and cinema goers: in Britain the BBC was founded in 1922, its weekly listing magazine The Radio Times followed in September 1923 and The Listener magazine in January 1929, while by 1926 the number of cinemas had risen to about 3500. Such mixed media demonstrated for all to see that words and pictures belonged together and could be experienced as forming a whole, whether in everyday life, in education, or in art and literature. This was by no means a new insight, but rather confirmed philosophical and pedagogical ideas discussed and widely accepted since LockeLocke, John and PestalozziPestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, and put into practice by ComeniusComenius, Johann Amos in his Orbis sensualium pictus (1658, English translation 1659) and the French encyclopaedists, and in fields like the illustration of children’s books and schoolbooks. Then, long before the “visual turn”, there was a succession of international exhibitions, from the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London to the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs Modernes of 1925 in Paris, which were above all visual events, advertised in magazines and posters by a combination of word and image. Today, research in the neurobiology of perception provides evidence suggesting that holistic, multi-sensory models are much more appropriate to the experiences of reading and looking than any purist insistence on the sanctity of the word or the uniqueness of seeing.
Third, the visual cultures of advertising, fashion, photography, architecture and design as presented by the various print media, films and many national or international exhibitions of the inter-war years were reflected and affirmed as relevant to contemporary society in the texts and illustrations of books of all kinds. This cultural environment also appears in some of the paratexts, e.g. the decorated and illustrated front and sometimes back covers, and in the illustrated advertisements printed inside the covers or loosely inserted. The inserts often ended up in the waste paper basket, but those that survive provide important clues to the tastes and interests and growing affluence of the readership. Such ephemera are documents of everyday culture, for then as now readers were smokers, travellers, drivers, cinema-goers, holiday-makers, gourmets, bridge players – and of course eager for stories of all kinds in all kinds of books and papers, reading matter for long railway journeys and protracted stops in waiting rooms.
Fourth, these books reflect, narrate and comment the political and moral upheaval of the Great War that resulted in the erosion and often destruction of significant aspects of the old social, moral and political orders. But this experience also opened the road to economic, educational and electoral reforms which had long been on the agenda but been delayed by prejudice, apathy and then the urgency of the war effort. Many people now contemplated ideas of new and better societies, while others yearned for a past that seemed more valuable than anything the future might bring. All three national cultures under consideration appeared to contemporaries as divided, generally speaking, between traditionalists and reformers, monarchists and republicans, christians and liberals, nationalists and internationalists, a multiple dividedness going back at least to the late 18th century, and now sensed as acutely threatening to national identity and unity. For the French, the war of 1870–71 had made the disruption of national identity a personal experience: citizens of Lorraine and Alsace who refused to become German subjects had no choice but to emigrate to “la vieille France”, while those who remained had to adopt German as their public language. Such pressures and conflicts and resulting emotions always seek expression, and narrative fiction is a perfect medium for representing and debating them. We will see that there is hardly an illustrated book of the period that does not participate in these debates both in its verbal text and in its pictures.
Fifth, the issues of national identity just mentioned have analogues in various ‘modern’ debates about questions of social and personal identity which the fiction of the period deals with in detail and in many modes, both verbal and visual. The role of women is clearly one such issue, always implying and implied by the role of men, and by the idea of the family, but increasingly thought of as transcending limiting notions of gender. The significance of paid work for the status of men and women is another issue, often examined in contrast to the life style of the leisured class. Class itself had become subject to questioning and redefinition, with new white-collar occupations like the office clerk or the executive forming a marked contrast to traditional ones like farmer, craftsman, or factory worker. Many narratives focus on the breakdown of traditional categories of class, gender and occupation, and on the decline of institutions, some urging reform and rejuvenation, others advocating a return to the old order. The illustrated book itself, as a semi-manual, semi-industrial artefact, is involved in this “querelle des anciens et des modernes” and is full of speaking portraits, architectures and landscapes, some expressing the past, others envisioning the future.
Sixth, there is the issue of national unity (from the perspective of today) which was not achieved in Germany until 1871, much later than in Britain (Act of Union, 1707) and in France (the incorporation of Alsace at the end of the 30 Years War, 1648, and the annexation of Strasbourg, confirmed in the treaty of Ryswick, 1697). Previously, Germans had defined themselves through their linguistic identity, promoted in Protestant states by Luther’s Bible translation of 1534, and a regional identity, e.g. as Prussians or Brunswickians or Bavarians. This regional identification remained a strong force, while disagreement about the concept of a German nation, violent during the 1840s and 1850s, and muted during the “Gründerzeit” (i.e. founding period, 1870–1914), continued in the strife between conservative and socialist reformers. In centralised France, the temporary loss of Alsace-Lorraine had enhanced a traditional sense of the singular character and achievement of all the country’s regions, and a need for renewed solidarity with those who had suffered most between 1870 and 1918. This awareness was expressed and fostered in many ways, most effectively through elementary school textbooks like Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877), which was written and illustrated to provide an instrument of republican education after the establishment of the Third Republic in 1875 (WillmsWillms, Johannes 2009: 22–29). Its juvenile protagonists leave the German-occupied town of Phalsbourg for free France, through which they undertake a year-long tour recounted as a geography-cum-history of French landscapes, cities, crafts and industries, and famous Frenchmen and monuments, all of them what Pierre NoraNora, Pierre called “lieux de mémoire” (Nora 1984–92). This composite text (and others like it) leads me to propose the thesis that the narratives assembled by publishers like FayardFayard, Arthème, FerencziFerenczi, Joseph and others in their comprehensive collections together constitute a national encyclopedia of the regions, people and themes of France, “la matière de France” recast 700 years after. Whether this thesis can be extended to England and to Germany remains to be seen.
Seventh, in all the different kinds of narrative, whether oral or written, poetry or prose, from the Homeric epics to the Chansons de geste, from Don Quixote,The Pilgrim’s Progress and Télémaque to the flowering of the modern novel in the 18th century and beyond, place, travel and time are fundamental thematic and structural features. As Vladimir ProppPropp, Vladimir showed in 1928, elements of travel are central to traditional folk narrative, if only because nothing much happens to a hero who stays at home (Propp 1970, 36 et passim). And as Matthias ClaudiusClaudius, Matthias put it, in words that have become proverbial: „Wenn jemand eine Reise tut, so kann er was erzählen“ (Urians Reise um die Welt, 1774, repr. 1966: 425). What is so important about travelling as an element of narrative is that it takes you to places and so gives you the chance to meet all kinds of people, hear their stories and tell your own. This is exactly the starting point of Édouard EstauniéEstaunié, Édouard’s L’Appel de la route (1922), as a Livre Moderne Illustré in 1929 and in HachetteHachette, Louis’s more upmarket illustrated series Les Grands Écrivains in 1930), which can serve here as a first concrete example. Three young men meet in Paris in late 1918 and agree to tell each other about what they have been up to since they last met:
Qu’un soir de 1918, au retour de la guerre, nous nous soyons ainsi retrouvés, trois camarades d’enfance, à la terrasse du café de la Paix, et que, près du désir de mieux nous informer les uns des autres, nous ayons décidés de dîner ensemble au cabaret, ceci, j’y consens, n’a rien que de naturel. Mais qu’ayant suivi, à partir du collège, des carrières parfaitement divergentes, qu’ayant vécu l’un à Versailles, l’autre à Paris, le dernier dans une ville retirée de Bourgogne, nous ayons été chacun témoin d’une des faces d’un drame unique; que de plus, sans nous donner le mot, ni d’ailleurs soupçonner où nous allions, nous ayons eu l’idée, ce soir-là, de raconter ce que nous en avions vu, et découvert de cette manière qu’au total nous avions assisté à une même aventure ; qu’enfin nous soyons aujourd’hui encore les seuls à le savoir tandis que les acteurs eux-mêmes l’ignorent, voilà en revanche de quoi provoquer chez tout être qui réfléchit un «pourquoi» d’autant plus anxieux que nulle réponse n’y peut être donnée. (EstauniéEstaunié, Édouard 1929: 10, italics in the original text)
All three had left their homes to fight in the war and each had witnessed one particular aspect of it. Now, on meeting again by mere chance, they feel the urge to tell each other what they have seen. The result is an unexpected discovery, namely that as witnesses they have all been involved in one and the same adventure, or course of events. This was true of countless Frenchmen, Germans and Englishmen whose lives the war had disrupted. On returning home and telling others about their experiences and perceptions they achieve an awareness, a savoir, which those not present at the telling and listening could not possess. EstauniéEstaunié, Édouard’s prelude to the first tale of his novel thus identifies a situation in which the unanswerable pourquoi looms large, not only as a question to be addressed to the past but also as having implications for the years to come. The first story teller, Pierre Duclos, at the beginning of his tale most emphatically makes this point:
Toute compte fait, déclara-t-il soudain, on a traversé quatre années assez rudes ; quels renseignements en avez-vous tirés ? Pour ma part, aucun … À peine une ou deux lumières sur des choses que je savais. Par exemple, il est clair que la guerre n’est que la souffrance, un grand torrent de souffrance roulant à la même heure dans son flot imbécile une portion d’humanité ; mais c’est de la souffrance collective, de la souffrance dans le bruit. […] À parler franc, une guerre nouvelle m’effrayerait moins que la paix qui guette chacun de nous, car la paix est silencieuse et l’on y est solitaire […] (ibid.: 11)
The only way to overcome the silence and solitude of a deceptive peace is to communicate, to tell one’s story and to listen to other people’s stories, whether oral or written. Always these are stories about what one has seen and heard, and they are intended to make others hear and see. It is only these meaningful narratives that can give substance to the sparse and insufficient lumières Duclos refers to. This idea is reaffirmed when he speaks of the evil of everyday life, “ce jeu de la bête humaine, fabriquant le mal à la manière d’une sécrétion” (ibid.), as having been illuminated for him by the war. Like so many references to seeing and understanding, to short-sightedness and blindness, this can be taken as asserting the need for illumination to continue during the peace. Long before photography and the cinema, it was the illustrated book and the illustrated magazine which had provided such lights and insights for the man on the street, for common people whose active minds were receptive to all the senses, and thus of common sense, for “l’homme moyen sensuel”. The point to be argued, once more, is that none of the senses can function properly in isolation. Instead, all are involved, all the time, in a complicated interaction and mutual reinforcement, complementation and correction, whether at work or at play, whether watching a film or reading a book.
Eighth and finally, this brings us to illustration itself. “Illustration is one of the most discredited genres of art”, says John AshberyAshbery, John, reviewing a 1979 exhibition of “Fantastic Illustration and Design in Britain, 1850–1930” in Providence, Rhode Island (Ashbery 1989: 380). But he immediately adds:
The trouble is, we all like it. Most people first experience art in the form of a comic strip or illustrated children’s book, and the heat of that first encounter, like that of first love, is never entirely equaled afterward. Later on we become aware that illustration isn’t quite respectable, and the love no longer dares speak its name. (ibid.)
There will be more to say about what determines the status of different kinds of illustration in the hierarchy of the arts during the period under consideration here, but for the moment AshberyAshbery, John’s remarks may serve to remind us of the contemptuous neglect it still generally meets with after childhood and primary education are over and when the child has learned to read so fluently that illustrations no longer seem to serve a purpose. Almost always, it is the ability to read a text which is regarded as the primary goal, while illustration is seen as only playing an ancillary part. But the ability to look at pictures in a competent manner could equally be the main target, with reading and speaking serving as supporting skills. At bottom the neglect of illustration is due to a misconception about the nature and relation of verbal and visual perception and expression, twins of remarkable but imperfect power, whose peculiar strengths each serve to make up for the limitations of the other. Neither is self-contained, both need and always receive the support of the other, as Catherine J. GoldenGolden, Catherine J. explains in her summary of ideas about illustration from Walter BenjaminBenjamin, Walter to Robert Patten (Golden 2000: 2–6). There will always be moments of mute contemplation and admiration in the face of a powerful painting or sculpture, but sooner or later this silence will yield to words trying to express and indeed expressing the beholder’s emotions and reflections. This topic is explored by David FreedbergFreedberg, David in his The Power of Images (1989: Chs. 1–3), on spontaneous, conditioned and repressed responses to pictures.
In the course of this study, the etymology of “illustration” and the different meanings and uses of the word will be referred to in order to remind us that illustration is always the illustration of something, usually but not necessarily of an accompanying text. An illustration can equally refer to an absent text, e.g. a text unknown to the viewer, or to a text not yet spoken or written, so that it precedes the text. In that wider sense any drawing or painting or sculpture is an illustration – none of them have full existence in a state of wordlessness. From this radical insight we can move forwards to a more comprehensive concept of illustration than that in current use. Again and again, writers have insisted that illustration must be subservient to the text, even reformers like Édouard PelletanPelletan, Édouard. But that is an error, a logocentric illusion, for illustration is by no means secondary, neither in the sense of derived from and inferior to the word, nor in the sense of necessarily coming after the word. Rather illustration and word are necessary adjuncts of each other: all the word sequences we hear or read evoke sensory images of some kind, and all the visual images we see give rise to naming and telling. In an essay called “Out of a Book” (1946), Elizabeth BowenBowen, Elizabeth remembers her childhood reading experiences when “at the very touch of a phrase there [was] a surge of brilliant visual images” (Bowen 1986: 52). Seamus HeaneyHeaney, Seamus, in his poem “Seeing Things”, in the volume of the same title (1991), tells us how contemplating a sculpture of the baptism of Jesus on the façade of an unspecified cathedral leads to a verbal account:
[…] Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility
The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself. (HeaneyHeaney, Seamus 1991: 17)
Carved lines do not remain mere lines, they are identified as representing things, making them present by recalling them to the beholder’s memory. Thanks to his memory, to his store of knowledge, “seeing things” is equated with naming them. Beyond what can be seen lies what is known or what can be imagined – the waterweed and the grains of sand, for example. The visible summons the invisible, and equally the visible summons the verbal. What we beholders achieve as a result of these processes is a balance. Not a static one, but one that remains dynamic, even when it has been quiescent. There is also a balance of the same kind between words and pictures: words are very good at doing some things, and not nearly so good at others, and the same goes for pictures. Luckily, where words falter or fail, a picture may succeed, and vice versa. It all depends on how the words and the pictures co-occur, or how one follows on from the other. Throughout this study I shall therefore be arguing for a conception of illustration that accords it a status equal, in principle, to verbal narrative. Of course, some illustrations are better than others, and some are quite awful, and the same goes for texts, so we must investigate into the criteria on which such judgements may be founded. We will find that some criteria stem from the graphic techniques employed, others may relate to a period or genre style, and yet others to the relation between an illustration and the typography, paper and binding of the book in question. The relation between verbal and visual representation will remain at the centre of the discussion and all these relations will be explored in some detail in a sequence of case studies in chapters 4 and 5.
1.2Adjunctive relations between verbal and visual artefacts
Illustrated books consist of combinations of text and illustration forming a whole of a very particular kind. It will therefore be important to examine the nature of the two main components, and the relations and interactions between them. These will turn out to be relations between acts of seeing and understanding, with different kinds of seeing and things seen, and different kinds of adjunctive response to both text and picture, including speaking, writing and even drawing. Adjunctive responses are enabled by certain verbal and visual structures characterised by a degree of indeterminacy, e.g. alternative analogies like “So are you to my thoughts as food to life, /Or as sweet-seasoned showers are to the ground” (ShakespeareShakespeare, William, Sonnet 75:1f.), or the ambiguous brushstrokes in BonnardBonnard, Pierre’s “Le Chasseur d’Images” discussed below. In each case, the reader or beholder may feel called upon to work out approximations to the implied meanings. Senses like hearing and smelling may also be involved. These perceptual and communicative activities are all illustrated, visually and verbally, in the opening episode of Jules RenardRenard, Jules’s Histoires naturelles(1904, repr. 1941). Following the arrangement in the book, we will begin with the full-page illustration by Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) that precedes the text:
P. BonnardBonnard, Pierre, « Le Chasseur d’Images » (RenardRenard, Jules 1941 : 5)
The illustrations are reproduced as process prints of pen and brush originals that mostly keep to very simple black and white contrasts, without intermediate shades of grey. Under the title, printed in a bold Glyphic (or incised) type, we see the narrator in profile, who looks very much like RenardRenard, Jules, standing at the edge of a field with a staff in his right hand. The sky is full of big cumulus clouds, that may be a village on the horizon, but because of BonnardBonnard, Pierre’s broad brushwork, one can’t be sure. We should bear such lack of certainty in mind whenever we are concerned with visual perception, or any other kind of perception, since our senses are liable to be imperfect and misleading. Just look at the illustration again: is that a bird flying across the cloud above the huntsman, or just a shadow? Here is the first paragraph of Renard’s story about the hunter of images, meaning mental data resulting from different kinds of sensory input processed and stored in the mind:
Il saute du lit de bon matin, et ne part que si son esprit est net, son cœur pur, son corps léger comme un vêtement d’été. Il n’emporte point de provisions. Il boira l’air frais en route et reniflera les odeurs salubres. Il laisse ses armes à la maison et se contente d’ouvrir les yeux. Les yeux servent de filets où les images s’emprisonnent d’elles-mêmes. (ibid. : 6f.)
All the senses participate: the taste of fresh air, the sniff of healthy scents, the sight of drizzling rain on the river feeling like gooseflesh on his skin, the sounds the huntsman hears all around him. If he keeps his eyes wide open, they will serve him as nets to catch images: “les yeux servent de filets”. As he walks through the countryside of the Nivernais (the region around Nevers) he becomes a fisher of images: the first image is of the footpath he is walking along, the second is the river, the third the fields of wheat and lucerne, with a skylark (or is it a goldfinch?) flying overhead. Then he enters the woods, and now, in the shadow of the trees, he inhales their fragrances and hears their soft rustling. Here is the short paragraph about this part of the hunter’s walk, in which his perceptions lead to an astonishing climax:
Puis il entre au bois. Il ne se savait pas doué de sens si délicats. Vite imprégné de parfums, il ne perd aucune sourde rumeur, et, pour qu’il communique avec les arbres, ses nerfs se lient aux nervures des feuilles. (ibid. : 8)
In order that the hunter may communicate with the trees, his nerves connect up with the veins of their leaves. In French the connection between the literal and the figurative use of “nerves” is more evident than in English, where leaves have veins, or in German, where they have “Adern”, though botanists also refer to the “Nervatur” of a leaf. RenardRenard, Jules’s striking analogy between “nerfs” and “nervures” alludes to the vague but common knowledge of the time that the sensory organs communicate with the brain via nerves, and thus creates a powerful sense of our perceptual empathy with the world around us. This reading may be reinforced when we remember that “se lier” is often employed in the sense of “making friends”, or “sticking together”. But now our huntsman has had more than enough: “vibrant jusqu’au malaise, il perçoit trop, il fermente, il a peur, quitte le bois” (ibid.), so he returns home:
Enfin, rentré chez lui, la tête pleine, il éteint sa lampe et longuement, avant de s’endormir, il se plaît à compter ses images. Dociles, elles renaissent au gré du souvenir. Chacune d’elles en éveille une autre, et sans cesse leur troupe phosphorescente s’accroît de nouvelles venues, comme des perdrix poursuivies et divisées tout le jour chantent le soir, à l’abri du danger, et se rappellent au creux des sillons. (ibid. : 9)
His head is full of images, and once he has put out the light he is at leisure to count, recount (F: raconter, G: erzählen) and review them as they are revived in his memory, one image jostling the next, like a flock of partridges, safe at last together in the deep furrows of some field. In this context, the field is nothing less than a metaphor for the cerebral cortex, the deeply grooved layer of “grey matter” covering the cerebral hemispheres, and divided into four lobes; the frontal lobe (concerned with planning activities, control of movement, working memory), the parietal lobe towards the back of the head (processes and integrates information about touch and space around the body), the occipital lobe, at the lower back of the head (processes visual input) and the temporal lobe below the frontal and parietal lobes (concerned with hearing, language and memory). RenardRenard, Jules will not have known about this functional geography of the brain, but he knew very well that the images were recorded in his head, together with the sounds and smells and touches, so that he was able to recall them. In his Journal for 23 May 1902 he notes: “L’homme porte ses racines dans sa tête” (Renard/Barousse 1995 : 72). We can take a look inside a human skull, with the forehead on the left and the back of the head on the right, and discover the four lobes of the cerebral cortex:
The four lobes of the cerebral cortex (cp. KandelKandel, Eric R. 2006: 111)
In his fascinating In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006), Nobel Prize winner Eric R. KandelKandel, Eric R. has written both an autobiography and a history of the sciences of perception, thought and memory to which he has contributed so much himself. In the chapter on “The Brain’s Picture of the External World” he summarises the state of research in the 1960s in a way that throws light on “Le Chasseur d’Images”:
The Gestalt psychologists argued that our coherent perceptions are the end result of the brain’s built-in ability to derive meaning from the properties of the world, only limited features of which can be detected by the peripheral sensory organs. The reason that the brain can derive meaning from, say, a limited analysis of a visual scene is that the visual system does not simply record a scene passively, as a camera does. Rather, perception is creative: the visual system transforms the two-dimensional patterns of light on the retina of the eye into a logically coherent and stable interpretation of a three-dimensional world. Built into neural pathways of the brain are complex rules of guessing; those rules allow the brain to extract information from relatively impoverished patterns of incoming neural signals and turn it into a meaningful image. The brain is thus the ambiguity-resolving machine par excellence! (ibid.: 296f.)
RenardRenard, Jules’s huntsman reports walking through a landscape he is familiar with, for he has seen it over and over again, and its salient features are stored in his long-term memory, and are linked there with other kinds of information such as the names of the shrubs growing along the path to the wood, and the names of the fruit they bear. One image is linked with another, wakes it up, as the huntsman tells us, and gives it meaning, for as in language it is the differences we recognise between sounds and shapes that produce meaning. That is what KandelKandel, Eric R. is referring to when he speaks of “relatively impoverished patterns of incoming neural signals”. The brain selects certain details of the information passed on to it via the retina and the optic nerve and compares them with data registered in the hippocampus, the seat of long- term memory. There, the significant elements of everything we see are checked against what we know from earlier experience, and are thus identified. But perhaps it is better to read Kandel’s account than to rely on my simplified one:
The analysis of perception is more advanced in vision than in any other sense. Here we see that visual information, relayed from one point to another along the pathway from the retina to the cerebral cortex, is also transformed in precise ways, first being deconstructed and then reconstructed – all without our being aware of it. In the early 1950s, Stephen Kuffler recorded from single cells in the retina and made the surprising discovery that those cells do not signal absolute levels of light; rather, they signal the contrast between light and dark. He found that the most effective stimulus for exciting retinal cells is not diffuse light but small spots of light. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel found a similar principle operating in the next relay stage, located in the thalamus [above the brain stem]. However, they made the astonishing discovery that once the signal reaches the [primary visual] cortex, it is transformed. Most cells in the cortex do not respond vigorously to small spots of light. Instead, they respond to linear contours, to elongated edges between lighter and darker areas, such as those that delineate objects in our environment. Most amazingly, each cell in the primary visual cortex responds only to a specific orientation of such light-dark contours. […] Deconstructing visual objects into line segments of different orientation appears to be the initial step in encoding the forms of objects in our environment. (ibid.: 300f.)
KandelKandel, Eric R. emphasises that as a result of such research, which confirmed earlier Gestalt psychology and recognised that our sensory systems are “hypothesis generators” (ibid.: 302) rather than instruments for recording data directly and with precision, the foundations for the modern science of the mind were laid. I have quoted these passages from In Search of Memory because they show that it is necessary for us to supplement and sometimes correct our everyday assumptions and intuitions about how sensory perception works. Such background knowledge will enable us to compare our acts of visual perception of the world around us with acts of looking at pictures and illustrations, and help us to find out in what ways they differ and where they follow the same principles. We will also remember that we need the other senses to make up for the limitations of our eyesight, our sense of touch, for instance, which helps us to recognise by stroking carefully over a page (preferably the verso) how a text or an illustration have been printed.
Another dimension we must study is the concatenation of seeing with speaking that is so familiar from our everyday lives: every person, every flower, every tool has a name by which we can call it and identify it. Every picture, every book, every piece of music has a title and an author, though we may not always remember them. Moreover, all of these creatures and artefacts may provoke their perceivers into a verbal response of some kind, whether an exclamation, a comment, a question, a continuation or an anecdote of the “d’you remember?” kind. These adjuncts form an important part of all our responses to literature, whether narrative or drama or poetry. They inevitably come into play in every act of reading and looking, when the fictional or factual world out there and the world of the reader move into close contact. An illuminating example is Virginia WoolfWoolf, Virginia’s Three Guineas (1938, 21943), written in the form of a letter in three chapters in answer to her correspondent’s question “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?”, and a number of related issues (Woolf 1943: 7). In the first part, she comments on photographs of the Spanish Civil War sent her by the Fascist Government as documentation of the atrocities allegedly perpetrated by the rebel nationalists:
They are not pleasant photographs to look upon. They are photographs of dead bodies for the most part. This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a birdcage hanging in what was presumably the sitting-room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid air. (ibid.: 20f.)
This comment shows how difficult it can be to identify the subject of a photograph, especially when it is not contextualised by an adjacent shot, and so many ambiguous signs are involved. But WoolfWoolf, Virginia goes on to make quite a different point:
Those photographs are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. But the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. When we look at those photographs some fusion takes place within us; however different the education, the traditions behind us, our sensations are the same; and they are violent. You, Sir, call them “horror and disgust”. We also call them horror and disgust. And the same words rise to our lips. War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped. For now at last we are looking at the same picture; we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses. (ibid.: 21)
WoolfWoolf, Virginia’s sketch of the physiology of the brain is perfectly adequate for her purposes and valuable in stressing the interconnectedness of memory and present awareness. It is by looking at the photographs and by speaking about them, and about the memories and emotions activated by what we see in them, that we come to understand what they mean, for ourselves and for other people. We do not need to find the same words, and our feelings may not be exactly the same, but we may be close enough in our responses to understand each other, and to be able to discuss how to proceed in trying to prevent wars or end them. That, however, is probably the point where we will begin to disagree with each other, because we may have different political and ethical convictions, and also differ in our sense of how to resolve the conflict between ideal aims and pragmatic options. Photographs and illustrations can help readers to understand a newspaper report or a novel, but they will not necessarily lead to the same understanding. At this stage it may be helpful to consider some other approaches to questions of reading and response, and to visiting and understanding.
From decorous reading to adjunctive reading
In the first two chapters of his Ferocious Alphabets (1981, repr. 1984), Denis DonoghueDonoghue, Denis (1928–2021) reports on his experience of giving a series of six five-minute talks in a B.B.C. radio programme called “Words”. He remembers how strange it was to be speaking to “invisible people” (Donoghue 1984: 4) and how hard “to put up with the fact that I was talking to people who could not answer” (ibid.: 41). The talks are transcribed in Ch. 1 under the heading “Dialogue of One”. His detailed commentary on the talks follows in Ch. 2 and leads to reflections on “Communication, Communion, Conversation”, which are immediately relevant to our present topic. Recalling these eccentric, one-way talks, he puts the following question to us, his readers:
But isn’t this the situation of the writer, the man of print, sending his sentences to people who are absent? No, it isn’t. Print is a silent medium, like paint on canvas, it does not expect to be answered. No eccentricity is involved in a page of written words or print, there is a decorum ready to receive such things; their invitation is sufficiently acknowledged when a silent reader peruses the page. (ibid.: 41f.)
Now to talk about print as being silent and not having expectations is to use rather misleading anthropomorphic metaphors. Yes, print is a medium, a means by which something is expressed, but it becomes animate when a reader (who is by no means condemned to silence) processes it in the responsive act of reading, just as I am at this moment processing the lines quoted from DonoghueDonoghue, Denis’s book and responding to them in thought, word and script. My first reaction to the double silence was to pencil a big question mark in the margin, and then to add the word “response!”. I was reminded of J. Hillis MillerMiller, J. Hillis (1928–2021) and his The Ethics of Reading (1987), in which he raises the question of what “the real situation of a man or a woman reading a book, teaching a class, writing a critical essay” is (Miller 1987: 4). He explains:
My question is whether ethical decision or responsibility is in any way necessarily involved in that situation and act of reading, and if so, how and of what kind, responsibility to whom or to what, decision to do what? The ethical moment in the act of reading, then, if there is one, faces in two directions. On the one hand, it is a response to something, responsible to it, responsive to it, respectful of it. In any ethical moment there is an imperative, some “I must” or Ich kann nicht anders. I must do this. I cannot do otherwise. If the response is not one of necessity, grounded in some “must,” if it is a freedom to do what one likes, for example to make a literary text mean what one likes, then it is not ethical, as when we say, “That isn’t ethical”. On the other hand, the ethical moment leads to an act. It enters into the social, institutional, political realms, for example in what the teacher says to the class or in what the critic writes. […] If there is to be such a thing as an ethical moment in the act of reading, teaching, or writing about literature, it must be sui generis, something individual and particular, itself a source of political and cognitive acts, not subordinated to them. (ibid.: 4f.)
MillerMiller, J. Hillis is arguing in favour of a double responsibility of reading. The reader’s response to a text should first of all not falsify its message and its pragmatic intent, and second it should be the source of responsible acts, of considered interventions in education, public debate or politics, proposing new insights derived from what one has been reading. Reading which leads to responsible action is entirely different from silent reading according to traditional rules of what is decent and proper, and it is the only kind of reading worth having. We will come back to Miller’s concept of responsible reading in connection with his ideas about illustration.
For the moment, we should consider DonoghueDonoghue, Denis’s definition of communication as conversation or communion, and then proceed to his distinction between two basic kinds of reading, which he calls “epireading” and “graphireading”. We have seen that his dissatisfaction with his radio talks was mainly due to the absence of response from his audience. He would have preferred a dialogical format, easy enough to organise nowadays, but not feasible in the 1970s, except as talks given to a limited audience present in a lecture hall. He rejects the minimalist models of communication proposed by linguists like Roman JakobsonJakobson, Roman and I.A. RichardsRichards, I.A., according to which an addresser sends a message to an addressee. Instead, he ranks conversation as “the best form of verbal communication”, which he analyses thus:
What happens in a conversation? Each person describes or tries to make manifest his own experience: the other, listening, cannot share the experience, but he can perceive it, as if at a distance. Complete proximity is impossible. What makes a conversation memorable is the desire of each person to share experience with the other, giving and receiving. All that can be shared, strictly speaking, is the desire: it is impossible to reach the experience. But desire is enough to cause the reverberation to take place which we value in conversation. (DonoghueDonoghue, Denis 1984: 43)
This analysis is important for its insight that a listener cannot ever fully share a speaker’s experience, but he can try to get as close as possible to what she is telling him, and to what she feels about her experience. He must attend to her words, to her emphases, and perhaps euphemisms and ellipses, and also take into account the look on her face, her posture and gestures, the tone and pitch of her voice. All this is much more than just receiving a message. DonoghueDonoghue, Denis sums it up when he says: “It is because each person gives himself to the conversation that the words are valid” (ibid.: 44). The shortest way of putting it is to speak of “desire”, for that implies a falling short or postponement of full understanding. And that is crucial – no reading or rereading of a text or of a picture can ever exhaust its meanings, ambiguities, indeterminacies, first because no text or picture fully expresses, makes explicit, all the meanings embedded in its semiosis, i.e. the process by which something functions as a sign, and second because no reader will identify all those meanings, however much he desires to. In the words of Charles S. PeircePeirce, Charles S.:
It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects […] or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by semiosis I mean, on the contrary, an action, an influence, which is, or involves a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and his interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs. (PeircePeirce, Charles S., Collected Papers V: 484; www.commens.org/dictionary/term/semiosis)
When we try to share ideas clothed in words (or signs) with others, what we as interpretants respond to is the reverberations, as DonoghueDonoghue, Denis called them, or the echoes mentioned by WoolfWoolf, Virginia, produced our minds during the conversational exchange. What we have in our minds is the echoes of words rather than the words themselves, and the echoes of ideas (or objects) in our minds rather than the ideas themselves. Perhaps Donoghue’s use of the word desire, quoted above, is an echo of Roland BarthesBarthes, Roland’ four-part talk “Sur la lecture”, given in 1975 at the Writing Conference in Luchon (Pyrenees), the third of which deals with “Désir” and distinguishes between three kinds of reading, the third being the adjunctive desire to speak up and write caused by reading (Barthes 1984: 44f.). We all have slightly different echoes of words and ideas because our previous experience of them has not been quite the same, even when we seem to be using the same words. The more meaning we can share in talking about them, the nearer we move towards communion, in its basic sense of sharing. Now such proximity between human beings engaged in speaking and listening is an extended foundational experience that has accompanied us all, if we were lucky, from our first moments in life to the present. We generally learn our mother tongue from our mother, or from someone else, the important thing being a continuous and reliable relationship with at least one person. We listen and learn, we speak and practise, and that pattern of reception and production continues for as long as we live. We listened when our mother told us a story or sang a song, and when she read aloud to us, we were attentive listeners. We did not lose these habits when we grew older and learned to read for ourselves. All this suggests that reading and listening are closely intertwined both in the structure of stories and in the social practices of story-telling and reading aloud, and continue to be so in our later silent reading. That is where epireading comes in. It is an insight that one finds in John LockeLocke, John’s recommendation of games for reading in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693: § 156, repr. 1884), namely that speaking and showing come before reading, and must remain important ingredients in a child’s learning to read, for example, AesopAesop’s Fables in an illustrated edition:
If his AesopAesop has pictures in it, it will entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read, when it carries the increase of knowledge with it: for such visible objects children hear talked of in vain and without any satisfaction whilst they have no ideas of them; those ideas being not to be had from sounds, but from the things themselves, or their pictures. And therefore I think that as soon as he begins to spell, as many pictures of animals should be got him as can be found, with the printed names to them, which at the same time will invite him to read, and afford him matter of enquiry and knowledge. (LockeLocke, John 1884: 133)
We can see how up to date LockeLocke, John’s account and advice are from the “childhood reading histories” of (a) Nikki GambleGamble, Nikki and (b) Sally YatesYates, Sally, the authors of Exploring Children’s Literature (22008):
(a) Dad started reading aloud to me when I was very young. […] I developed a repertoire of favourites that I would ask for every night and I knew many poems by heart. From Struwwelpeter I could recite “Shockheaded Peter”, “Harriet and the Matches”, and “Little Johnny Head in Air”. The untimely deaths of the disobedient children were not in the least off-putting, and neither did I believe that I would meet a similar end if I sucked my thumb or refused to eat my soup.
(b) My earliest memories of reading are of some Ladybird books, stories told in rhyme about anthropomorphised animals. One was called Downie Duckling, and the other was about “Bunnies”. These books fascinated me as I learnt the story through the rhyme and can still remember the cadences of this. I was rather threatened by some of the illustrations though, which I found macabre. I much preferred the pictures of the Noddy books by Enid Blyton which I read avidly, and still remember the thrill of seeing Noddy move on a neighbour’s television […] (GambleGamble, Nikki/YatesYates, Sally 2008: 1f.)
The two authors then compare their experiences, finding that they had some in common, while others differed:
We were both avid readers from early childhood and we were encouraged to own and borrow books from the public library. We varied in the amount we were read to at home and that affected the range of texts to which we were introduced. However, sharing books with others in the family, including siblings, was an encouragement and allowed book talk to be engaged in and enjoyed. (ibid.: 3)
These excerpts show that listening, talking and looking were intrinsic elements in their reading histories, that rhythms and rhymes helped them to remember texts, just like illustrations that could both attract and repel. Most of the children’s responses to books and pictures were appropriate, even if they sometimes seemed to fall short of parts of their explicit message, and even if they conversely sometimes added meanings to them that were not obviously supported by the text. This reciprocal surplus of an open text and its co-creative reading, as of suggestive illustrations and their attentive and enriching reception, is a basic feature of all cognitive input/output processes. The key element that encourages such creative attention to words and phrases, to lines and surfaces, is indeterminacy in its many forms, a subject we will return to presently.
