Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue Vol.X, issue 1 (24.) Images de l’invisible/Images of the Invisible |
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Wordless Books : The Original Graphic Novels |
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Author: Jan Baetens David A. Beronå ISBN: 0-8109-9469-0, EAN: 9780810994690 |
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Recent discussions in the field of comics studies have focussed less on issues of intermediality (how are words and images intertwined in the comics medium, and how does this interaction differ from similar crossings in other media?) than on the difference between mass cultural comics and ‘literary’ graphic novels (and the possible blurring of the boundaries between these two uses of the medium). Yet despite all the differences between the semiotic approach of intermediality and the cultural studies inspired approach on high and low as raised by the emergence of the graphic novel as a label and a marketing tool, the wide range of possible relationships between the verbal and the visual continues to play an important, although ambivalent role in the discussion.
However, despite the fact that all scholars underline the possibility of purely visual comics or graphic novels, the scholarship on this type of ‘wordless’ productions has been restricted either to theoretical thought experiments or to more contemporary works, often very avant-garde (the most notable exception being Thierry Groensteen’s double article on ‘mute comics’ published in the Journal 9e Art: Groensteen 1997 and 1998). None of these studies however tackled the small but culturally crucial tradition of the wordless woodcut novel, very popular from post-World War I until around 1950, but now fallen into oblivion. Launched by the Belgian wood-cut illustrator Frans Masereel, who more or less invented not the technique but the genre, and illustrated in the US by authors such as Lynd Ward and Giacomo Patri, the wood-cut novel can now be rediscovered thanks to the great scholarship of David A. Beronå, the leading scholar in the field of wood-cut narratives, and thanks to the gorgeous presentation of the original corpus by the publisher.
For Beronå, the wood-cut novel (which is still practiced today, for instance by artists such as Olivier Deprez, who made an impressive, although not completely wordless, adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle (Deprez 2002)), deserves our attention for many reasons. First of all, it represents one of the missing links in the history of what is being called today the graphic novel. Indeed, whereas most historical research on the origins of the graphic novel does not make any distinction between comics and graphic novels, here we finally have a study that foregrounds the novelistic predecessors of the graphic novel (its interest can be compared to what has been achieved by David Kunzle’s in his discussion of the origins of the comics). In this regards, Beronå’s book is a key contribution to a better understanding of the beginnings and the later evolution of the medium. Second, Wordless Books proves also of great help in a better understanding of the mechanisms of visual storytelling and visual reading of fixed images. In this sense, it is a more than useful counterpart to all those who try to infer the narrative possibilities of the image from its supposed relationship with some underlying sequence of virtually moving images. The graphic novel is not a sequence of film stills, and Wordless Books is a major tool for a better comprehension of this dynamic. Third and last, Beronå relies on the tradition of the wood-cut novel to also make a plea for a strongly committed type of graphic novel. Often children of the depression era, wood-cut novels have succeeded in showing and telling the great social issues and challenges of their days, and it is clear that Wordless Books has more than a little sympathy for a stronger presence of social and political content (luckily, many graphic novelists seem to have understood this lesson).
Wordless Books has in a sense the best of both worlds: it tells as well as it shows, for the very clear and well contextualized presentations of authors and works by David Beronå are followed by gorgeous fragments, excellently printed and well served by a clever book design. A French translation of the book is on its way, which only proves the qualities of both the scholarship and the artwork. And one can of course only hope that the author will surprise us very soon with a continuation, for the story continues, and we count on David Beronå to rapidly disclose to us the hidden story of the woodcut novel in the second half of the XXth century.
References
Olivier Deprez (2002). Le Château de Kafka . Brussels : FRMK. Thierry Groensteen (1997). ‘Histoire de la bande dessinée muette’. 9 e Art, No 2 , 60-75 Thierry Groensteen (1998). ‘Histoire de la bande dessinée muette’. 9 e Art, No 3 , 92-105 |
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Jan Baetens is Professor of Cultural Studies at the KU Leuven. He is also editor of Image (&) Narrative. E-mail: Jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be |
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