film v novel

"But most readers are also moviegoers, even if the converse does not apply. The interesting thing is that the same person who goes to see the film The Brown Bunny, and groans as the insects pile up on Vince Gallo's windshield, will curl up at home with Everything Is Illuminated and chuckle approvingly at finding the phrase "we are writing" printed 191 times in a row...
In short, two aesthetics often exist in the same mind: a moviegoing aesthetic that trusts primarily in personal taste and perception, and a reading aesthetic that is more likely to defer to established opinion."
BR Myers, 'A Bag of Tired Tricks', The Atlantic Monthly Boston, May 2005
"At heart, the two forms, movie and book, are irreconcilable. A book we “hear”, listening to our own reading. A movie we “see”. The images must move, clash and climax. Translating sound into picture requires the director to cross-reference senses. When you get a film/novel such as Perfume (smell) or Chocolat (taste), the book is always going to outstrip the movie – until the film of the future gives us smell-and-taste simulation. On the other hand, when the story moves into altered states (such as Altered States), the movie has the advantage. Film can deliver a stunning visual in a tenth of a second – think The Lord of the Rings, The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense and The Butterfly Effect."
Ken Russell, 'You've read the book - good luck with the movie", Times Online, August 16 2007. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2265338.ece

The limits of images

Marie-Laure Ryan claims: "the narrative limitation of pure pictures stems from their inability to makes propositions. As Sol Worth has argued, visual media lack the code, the grammar, and the syntactic rules necessary to articulate specific meanings. A propositional act consists of picking a referent from a certain background and of attributing to it a property also selected from a horizon of possibilities. Whereas language can easily zero in on object and properties, pictures can only frame a general area that contains many shapes and features...Pictures may admittedly find ways around their lack of propositional ability to suggest specific properties (for instance, through caricature), but there are certain types of statements that seem totally beyond their reach. As Worth argues, pictures cannot say 'ain't'. Nor, as Rimmon-Kenan observes, can they convey possibility, conditionality, or counterfactuality." Narrative Across Media, University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

I'm not looking at 'pure pictures' – within my area of study, the visual always exists within the context of a written text (otherwise it wouldn't be fictional prose) – and I'm also not looking at the 'narrative' potentials of image ... I'm defining the typo/graphic elements in these novels as rhetorical (evocative, persuasive) rather than narrative (driving the plot) devices but the quote above is an interesting start at defining the limitations of images.

The ability for images to narrate (to tell: narrativity) is different than their ability to evoke (to affect: rhetoric)? I'm not suggesting that typo/graphic elements are always narrating (although they do in sequential art, but the narrative drive is to do with cognitive leaps the reader makes across the gutter ... see notes from comics lecture). Not about articulating specific meaning but about creating tone or evoking, the devices are affecting rather than narrating? To use design words, the visual devices are less about communication and more about engagement.

A picture cannot say ain't ... but through tone, texture, size, colour, composition, etc, it can imply a voice or a 'dialect'. Different typefaces, for example, can 'speak' in different voices: the manner in which a graphic mark is made has a language of its own - if I render a phrase delicately in calligraphic script or scratch it across a surface with a rough charcoal, it 'sounds' different to the reader. Using the media I have in my desk draw right now:

Design writer/educator Johanna Drucker sets her students an exercise in which they transpose the headlines of the Wall Street Journal and the National Enquirer in "a kind of design transvestism–so that the banner headline 'Bond Markets See Rates Drop By Slight Margin' took on a screaming impact, while 'Two-Headed Boy Gives Birth to Alien Savior with Telepathic Knowledge of Biblical Past-Lives' was modestly set in the grayest and least exclamatory of formats." (Text 16, 2006)

These examples illustrate the communicative power of typography – where the mode of expression impacts on the communication of the content. This seems blatantly obvious to a practicing designer, and I would think many contemporary readers, but this assumption is hasty. In a recent list-serve conversation, a design academic (I believe from engineering design) commented that he didn't understand how 'page layout' could be considered design. I'm not even going to grace that with a response.

In a recent Book Show interview with Canadian Arts&Culture Journalist Jeet Heer, Ramona Koval asked him what comics can do that literary fiction cannot. He gave an example from Spielgelman's Maus, where the characters are visualised as animals: Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, etc. He points out that this technique is goes back to Aesop's Fables, but here it's so effective because Spiegelman shows, rather than stating it: "gives you a sense of what it's like to be in a culture where these two groups view each other, or are viewed, as totally different races and difference species even ... so as a visual metaphor, and precisely because it wasn't articulated in words ... it's all the more powerful ... a picture is direct, it goes straight to the brain whereas a word always has to be deciphered - the word 'read' comes from riddle, you have to riddle out words." What's important to note is that the visual description evokes a visual experience.

He also discusses the recent controversy around the Danish cartoon mocking Mohammad: it created massive immediate controversy because it was so easily distributable (no need to translate from Danish) and re-printable. "A visual language transcends barriers of dialect or of history even." So an image may not be able to say "ain't", but it may be able to speak immediately beyond dialect? An international dialect? Obviously there are huge holes in this claim: there's a great Mad Magazine cartoon where a man in a kilt and a woman in jeans are standing in front of two doors with the 'universal' man and woman icons scratching their heads. But perhaps images can EVOKE a visual experience more effectively than words?

What comes out at 3.47am (post-it note to self: drink less coffee)

It started as a rash around the bottom of my monitor. Mostly references I didn't have time to check and questions for later consideration:

As it spread to the upper edges, motivational tips began to appear:

It began to creep from screen to pin-board to wall, then not just in books but all over them, and a few even sprouted in surprising places like the back of my phone and in pockets I never used. I found them stuck to the bottom of shoes I only wear 'out' and, in the kitchen, ingredients for saffron chicken were accompanied by pithy quotes from Barthes and McLuhan. The back of the door developed a reminder of my deteriorating mental state:

I really became concerned when I woke one morning to find my bedside table alive with lurid yellow notes like a swarm of paper butterflies – noisy thoughts I'd released during the night. Yesterday, I scratched an itch at my collar and my hand returned with a note attached:
In the shower last night, I looked down to see a pulpy yellow lump bleeding inky ideas down the drain. This morning, I dreamed I had a post-it note epidermis – millions of scaly yellow reminders obscuring what used to be a pink fleshy person. This is worse than the time I reached into my handbag for a pen and produced a mouse. It has to stop.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

What affect does the inclusion of the notes have? Does it contribute significantly more than if I'd typed the messages? Immediacy. Trueness to form. I went back and reduced the size of the 'keys' note, because I think it works better smaller - to discover that after reading the text before it has more impact? If I were doing this in book form, I'd put that on the following page to delay the 'reveal' - manipulation of pace and reading experience by holding out, like a dramatic pause?

Gimmickry and publishing

To argue why the typo/graphic devices are more than (mere) gimmicks, I need to define what a gimmick is. Merriam-Webster online: "a: an important feature that is not immediately apparent b: an ingenious and usually new scheme or angle c: a trick or device used to attract business or attention gimmick>" (see my post: "this is not a threat" for another definition that is more negative in tone)

So the definition is not necessarily negative, except in 'c' where it is described as a 'trick' (playful at best, deceptive at worst). The negativity associated with the term 'gimmick' in the context I'm talking about – fictional literature – comes from a value judgment about language over image: the perceived 'hegemony' of word over image. Literature is highbrow, but advertising (associated with gimmickry) is lowbrow. So these visual 'gimmicks' or 'tricks' are criticised because they are perceived of as 'hype' - included as marketing hooks (conversation starters?) rather than for their literary merit.

To show where I'm getting the issue of 'gimmickry' from:

AUTHORS:
Steven Hall: "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."

From Khan, Design Week: According to Safran Foer, the use of images in novels is 'still considered to be a gimmick or some expression of the failure of language'.

Arguing for the inclusion of images, from an interview with Gabe Hudson in the Village Voice:
"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 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?"

CRITICS: (I've only cataloged Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close so far)

Myers in an article called 'A tired bag of tricks' says: "What may hurt the book even with its intended audience arc the various diversions that both writer and publisher seem to have thought would constitute a selling point...After a while the gimmickry starts to remind one of a clown frantically yanking toys out of his sack: a fatal image."

Upchurch subtitles his review 'Gimmicks drown out power, poignancy'

Greer: "Oskar's grandfather's letters are the most gimmicky in the novel...He never really comes alive, and is perhaps the one major person in the book that is more a metaphor than a fleshed-out character."

Updike: "But, over all, the book’s hyperactive visual surface covers up a certain hollow monotony in its verbal drama. "

Robert J. Hughes: "The novel's ramblings and gimmicks are meager representations of catastrophe and often badly out of key. The end of the book features a stunt -- a short flip-book of photographs with a body falling upward to a World Trade Center tower, as if we could turn back the clock. We can't, of course, but we already knew that. It is fairly offensive to see a novelist co-opt such an indelible image of desperation and death for such a trite purpose. Whimsy and terrorist tragedy do not add up, at least in Mr. Foer's hands.

Jonathan Raymond, Artforum: Impressively, the book's bells and whistles actually feel appropriate to its larger meaning, rather than coming across as mere gimmickry.


How many of these authors have websites/blogs? Almost all of the contemporary (last 5 years) I've looked at do. Steven Hall was actively involved in the marketing strategies of his book (TBS interview?), Mark Danielewski released parts of House of Leaves on the Internet pre-publication. The contemporary novel is embedded in a marketing culture, and, more broadly, what Mitchell etc describe as an age characterised by a 'pictoral turn' – how does this context effect the content of contemporary fiction?

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick

I'll start by pointing out that I haven't read this book yet but it's next on my ever growing list. However, the way the book is being talked about is fascinating, I've put together some quotes and comments from reviews and an interview with Brian Selznick on the New York Times Book podcast (does anyone know how to reference a podcast?) Have a look at the website here you can watch an animated version of the opening sequence of drawings.

In the New York Times 'Book Update' podcast, the interviewer, Julie Just, describes the book as alternating between writing and very intricate drawings that "advance the story, not just ... decorate it". A 533 page book (300 are full bleed illustrations) set in 1930s Paris about a young boy who meets film maker Georges Melies, aimed at 'middle-grade readers' (young adult?) it draws inspiration from movies with very cinematic illustrative techniques (close ups, pans, establishing shots, etc ... language from film studies could be useful for me). Selznick says he was 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." So, in some ways, this is an issue of translation - how do you translate a story about cinema onto the page? Some sections - the climatic chase scene is apparently a 36 page illustrated passage - are, in Selznick's words "like having small silent movies throughout".

Just asks him if he was tempted to produce the book as a graphic novel, to "toss out the words". He responds that he "loves the way graphic novels use pictures to help tell their story but what intrigued me more what the way picture books ... tell their story ...the way the act of turning the page in a picture book ... reveals something entirely new ... With a graphic novel you read them very much like regular novels [left to right, down the page, turn the page when you get to bottom right] but with picture books ... you turn the page because you need to see what is going to happen in the next moment of the story itself ... 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." Again, the notion of a reader needing to be 'active' to read visual elements in a book. Selznick talks about making the reader experience time the same way the character experience time in certain parts of the book, so it is active, and it is about the experience of reading. This is also returning to the idea of how important the medium is to the experience of reading. He has very consciously chosen this approach because it is the best way to tell his story.

But what does that make this book? It's not a graphic novel and it's not a picture book. An article from Publishers Weekly quotes:

Selznick's editor for the book, Tracy Mack, has never seen anything else quite like it. "As editors, we're always getting excited about something different, not different just for sake of being different, but truly new," she says. "This to me felt wholly different. It's not a graphic novel. It's not a film. It's more like a picture book where the illustrations are pushing beyond what the words say." ...

This is an editor describing what makes this book a new and unique storytelling form, rather than a novel with gimmicky typo/graphic elements. The article continues:

The original vision for Hugo was pretty standard: a 150-page book with an illustration in every chapter. But Selznick was determined to make this story about the roots of French cinema work visually. In revising, he listed every passage that didn't contain dialogue or the boy's thoughts. "Anything that was just a description, I replaced with a drawing." Mack, who studied painting herself, pushed him even further. "He had a long introduction to the train station [where Hugo secretly lives) but we needed to get to Hugo quicker. I told him, 'Just draw it.' He resisted because he had really come to like that piece of writing, but it wound up being so much better because the visual introduction imparts such a strong sense of place," she says. 'Drawn to cinema', Publishers Weekly, www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6417185.html

This is, perhaps, a technique that is acceptable mostly because of the readership - young adult books are 'allowed' to be more experimental as they 'graduate' from picture books to novels (I claim this from my experience of designing book covers - almost all my freelance work is now for young adult fiction because I am privileged with far greater creative freedom). Yet this combination of word and image can be a powerful and unique.

"So I was thinking about the role narrative illustrations play in chapter books. [from what I could find on the net, a chapter book is aimed at 9-12 year olds with one line drawing per chapter] Something in the illustration is usually referred to in the text, and usually you put something in the illustrations that adds to the story, but in almost all cases the pictures could be removed and the story would not suffer. That's not the case in picture books, and I was thinking especially about those books in which the words stop and the pictures absolutely take over, like the wild rumpus [from Where The Wild Things Are]...I mean, it's a book about movies. A movie is a visual experience...I asked myself, 'What if parts of the story were told only in the pictures? Could I take out some of the text and replace it with pictures?'" Sue Corbett, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 1/4/2007

Selznick talks about drawing from scenes in French cinema - how better to pay homage to a visual medium than visually?