viz. - illustration

Wandering Christians and Illustration in the Biblical Tradition

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:27:48 +0000

All those who wander are not lost—in fact, wandering is sometimes the point. I did a little of this while touring the Harry Ransom Center’s new exhibit on The King James Bible: Its History and Influences. I particularly enjoyed examining the numerous visuals on display: exquisite Jacob Lawrence and William Blake illustrations, colorful posters for The Ten Commandments and David and Bathsheba, and patterns for Robert DeNiro’s Biblical tattoos in Cape Fear. While some might oppose word and image, the Harry Ransom Center’s combination of both in a single exhibit highlights illustration’s importance within the King James Bible and the wider biblical tradition. Visual illustrations, which once served to transmit biblical stories before widespread literacy or vernacular bibles, work hand in hand with the Bible’s narrative techniques—specifically, Jesus’s parables in the Gospels. In this post, I’d like to briefly consider how one major biblically-inspired text—John Bunyan’s novel Pilgrim’s Progress—incorporates visual illustration to complement its narrative parable, and how tropes of wandering in particular reoccur in both kinds of illustration.

Image Credit: Strawdogs

The image above (of which a slightly larger version is available here) is a frontispiece for the 1833 edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, to which is prefixed the Life of the Author, with a Key to the Allegory, and a Critique on its Beauties. The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegory originally printed in 1678, tells the story of Christian, a man who leaves home for a journey to the Celestial City. On the way there, he gets waylaid in variously places—mostly famously, Vanity Fair. According to the University of Texas’s library catalog entry for the book, the frontispiece was tipped in, which means that the illustration was a loose page incorporated into a bound volume. The image, called “Plan of the road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City,” was originally published by George Virtue, who made his reputation producing illustrated books. While frontispieces generally depict specific incidents or characters from the text (like the frontispiece to Gulliver’s Travels, which presents Lemuel Gulliver to his readers), the “Plan” does not merely serve as précis for the text. This picture, like the Key to the Allegory and the Critique on its Beauties, glosses the Progress’ meaning.

The “Plan of the road” presents a visual representation of Christian’s path to salvation. It shows all of his stops along the way, including the Slough of Despond and the Hill of Difficulty. Yet the illustrator does not draw the path as a straight line—he instead illustrates it as a spiral. But here, the spiral’s direction moves inward, not outward. As Christian wanders in his journey, even at moments when he feels lost, he continually draws closer to his intended destination. Bunyan’s allegory and the accompanying illustration suggest that all Christians approach salvation, even if they stray off the preferred path. This message appears several times in the Bible, specifically in Luke 15 where Jesus recounts the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son.

As recorded in the King James Bible, the prodigal son leaves his father’s house and “waste[s] his substance in riotous living. When he is in need, however, he remembers his father’s beneficence:

“I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. … the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.” (Luke 15:18-24)

When the Pharisees object to Jesus’s communion with sinners, he uses this parable to illustrate the message that God accepts those who return to him, even if they might spend all before then. God’s compassion celebrates the return of the wasteful son: “he was lost, and is found.” This language, transformed by a late eighteenth-century poet into a famous English hymn, directly sets the two states in relation—being lost doesn’t mean you can become found. While the King James Bible contains no visual illustrations, embedded in the text are images in words that have the same effect. Jesus argues his meaning through recourse to illustrations, just like the owner of this copy of Pilgrim’s Progress.

Image Credit: The Blake Archive

What this exhibit highlights for me is that while there is a rich tradition of images in the biblical tradition—as the exhibition carefully demonstrates with hieroglyphic Bibles and frontispieces like the “Plan,” the King James Bible appears within the rise of a hard-line Protestant movement, in which particularly strict sects like the Puritans interpreted the Bible’s commandment against worshipping false idols as critiquing practices of visual representation. Eamon Duffy’s excellent histories The Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath record how the Henrician Reformation removed artistic aspects of worship—including altar pieces and stained-glass windows—from churches to implement Protestantism. Duffy’s work explains how worshippers adapted Catholic traditions to new religious dictates which threatened communal forms of worship like feast days. While the Bible embeds illustration within its text, it has often been perversely read as against the visual. Perhaps what the Harry Ransom Center’s exhibit shows best is that binaries of word and image collapse into each other—while images of word are not processed by the brain in the same way, both kinds of illustration carry powerful rhetorical effects.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Multimedia Children’s Literature and The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Michael Widner — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:19:50 +0000

Cover image of The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Children’s literature is, practically by definition, a multimedia endeavor. The beloved works of Dr. Seuss, Elsa Holmelund Minarik, Roald Dahl, Frank Baum, and countless others have a drawing at least every few pages, if not on every page. But as the audience grows older and gains reading proficiency, the pictures slowly disappear, an indication that all but the simplest of stories can be told in words alone. The multimodal aspects of children’s literature are, then, little more than a helpful scaffold to engage children while building the skills necessary for reading.

But Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (winner of the 2008 Caldecott Medal) is a book of an entirely different order. Selznick describes it as “a novel in words and pictures.” Unlike most children’s novels, in which the art simply illustrates a scene already described in words, the pencil drawings in Selznick’s novel help tell the story.

Image Credit: Screenshots from Amazon.com preview of The Invention of Hugo Cabret

The novel opens with a preface that invites the audience to close their eyes and imagine themselves in a darkened movie theater, just before the curtains separate and the projector clatters to life. Set in 1930s Paris, the book invokes silent films. The drawings throughout are cross-hatched pencil and the page borders themselves look like the cards of text that added written dialogue to early movies. It opens with an extended sequence of pictures that, from a small, distant shot of the moon, grow to fill the page while moving in ever more closely until we see, in glimpses, the principal characters. It thus makes its allegiance to cinema clear early. Yet though the form relies heavily on multiple media in a way unlike most children’s literature, the novel draws on more than just drawings and words.

A combination of detective story, historical fiction, and coming-of-age narrative, the plot revolves around recently orphaned Hugo Cabret, his repair of an automaton of mysterious provenance, and a grumpy old man who runs a toy shop in a train station.

Maillardet's automaton, which inspired Selznick

The machine, like Maillardet's above, is in the figure of a seated person, holding a pen over a desk. Hugo, who has been living in a train station since his father died in a museum fire, becomes obsessed with the idea that his father has hidden a secret message in the automaton, which it will write out once he can repair it; he believes that message, further, will save his life. Having learned the art of horology (what a great word to find in children's fiction) from his father, Hugo is especially skilled at working with gears, springs, and the other mechanisms by which the automaton functions. Once he finally repairs it (he gets parts by stealing small mechanical toys from the toy booth), the machine, rather than writing a message, draws a picture: a scene from his father’s favorite movie, A Trip to the Moon.

The drawing bears a signature: G. Méliès. Part One, in which the mystery is the automaton and Hugo’s own history (which the narrator slowly reveals to us) ends with the discovery of this output; Part Two follows up by trying to discover why the old toy maker knows about the automaton and reacts so emotionally when he finds that Hugo carries a notebook with drawings of it. As we learn, Papa Georges, as his god-daughter calls him, is Georges Méliès, one of the early innovators of cinema, the automaton's inventor, a magician, and, by those who remember him, believed dead. Through Hugo’s efforts, the French Film Academy uncovers many of his films, all of which had been thought lost, and reintroduces Méliès and his fantasy-filled, revolutionary movies to the world, thereby giving him back his purpose, without which he was, in Hugo’s mind, like a broken machine. Fittingly, movie stills and sketches from the real works by Méliès also intersperse the pages, layering yet another visual medium onto the narrative.

A still from A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès

Hugo often thinks of his own mind as a machine of gears and springs. He sees the world as one large machine in which everything and everyone has a function. He has nightmares about broken clocks. He carries gears in his pockets. Machinery ticks through the novel, texturing the illustrations and the imagery, explaining Hugo’s mind, and linking the different parts of the novel. At the conclusion, we discover that, rather than an author, the book was produced by a fantastically complicated automaton that drew all the pictures and wrote all the words, a machine constructed by (who else?) the now adult Hugo Cabret, who has taken the name Professor Alcofrisbas, a recurrent character in Méliès’s films. Machines become, in other words, another medium through which the novel tells its story.

In weaving allusions to machines throughout the work and then concluding with the fantasy of a novel-producing machine, The Invention of Hugo Cabret requires us to consider not only words and pictures, but also the physical machinery of book production and the author as a machine. Recalling the drawing automaton Hugo repairs, the fantastic novel-writing machine inserts itself unavoidably into our visual imagination. Drawings, movies, and clockwork machines are all integral elements of the novel, taking it far beyond picture books. The cinematic aspects join the machinery of creation to create a work that is uniquely beautiful, densely textured, and experimental: traits rarely seen in literature for any age group.

Will R. Crumb Fail to Offend?

noelradley — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:52:22 +0000

Image Credit: R. Crumb

H/T USA Today

I got my copy of The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb in the mail and have loved reading it so far. It's richly detailed. It's emotive. It's revelatory. But I’m wondering: Will Crumb’s newest work will be controversial as expected? The word-for-word text of Genesis is accompanied by Crumb's comic art. And as the cover advertises, the images leave nothing out. Adam and Eve begin the work with robust nakedness, as you might think. Perhaps less expected are images of the sexual act laced through a great part of the narrative. Crumb draws Adam and Eve playfully tumbling, Jacob’s multiple wives and concubines, Onan’s coitus interruptus with his brother’s wife (awkward!), and Tamar’s seduction of her father-in-law, Judah, as well as many others. Even if you have read the original text, seeing the sexual act illustrated (naked couple in missionary position) does alter your sense of Genesis. You also get a more vivid picture of disturbing scenes such as Lot offering his daughters to be raped in lieu of his male guests, which is previewed here on the LA Times. I believe Crumb’s illustrations utterly transform the reading; Crumbs brings to light how (deviant, troubling) sexual drives shaped the mythological archetypes and changed the literal history of the Jewish people. Still, I'm wondering how likely it is that Crumb will be deemed a blasphemer. Young evangelical children might not get this picture book in their stocking for Christmas, but I personally don’t anticipate an uprising.

Image Credit: R. Crumb

H/T Texas Performing Arts

At Friday night's talk and other events, Crumb has said he expects controversy, and my assumption is that he would expect this protest from the Christian right, the Jewish community, perhaps even orthodox Catholics. One recalls the Christian outrage at the movie The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation was an illustration of New Testament characters. However, Scorsese was not illustrating the Bible but a work of fiction by Nikos Kazantzakis, where Kazantzakis deviated from the canonical Gospel narratives with a sexually tempted Christ, who considers rejecting his role in salvation. Yet, Crumb has 'faithfully' depicted the text of Gensis. And I think his defense that he has drawn the work literally will hold up.

Another buffer to absorb the controversy, I think, is the literacy of the contemporary Bible reader, especially Protestant evangelical and Jewish readers. Although the sexuality of Genesis is shocking to many, devout Protestants, for example, read the older parts of the Bible more exhaustively and are familiar with the intrigues of the Genesis characters. And although they might de-emphasize the non-monogamous, at times incestuous, sexuality of Genesis, Protestants won’t find the wives of Jacob to be news. On the other hand, as pre-Vatican II Catholic and a self-proclaimed non-religious person, Crumb was perhaps relatively less familiar with the content. Since the sexual history is already accounted for, Crumb's emphasis won't offend the base of potential protesters. In fact, this article from USA today with interviews of Rabbi Simcha Weinstein and Jesuit priest Rev. James Martin indicates that at least some Catholic and Jewish scholars think the book is a positive step, introducing the first book of the Old Testament to a new generation of readers. The reviews by secular readers (see Texas Performing Arts for a listing) have similarly been favorable.

Image Credit: R. Crumb

H/T Austin-American Statesman

My guess is that if there is anything controversial, it won't be the Genesis book in isolation, but the book within the context of Crumb’s lifetime of works. Some protesters of Crumb's promotional tour have drawn attention to his past depictions of sexual deviancy--including portrayals of rape, incest, and pedophilia. These artist pursuits make Crumb an unlikely translator and definitely imbue the biblical images of copulation with an unholy glow. My guess is that if controversy arises, it won’t be about what was drawn, but who was drawing it. Just a note: my favorite parts of the book are the tree of knowledge, a gorgeously cross-hatched, gloriously-branching affair, and Crumb’s characteristic ‘big-foot’ depictions of the female body.

I'll write later on Crumb’s and Spiegelman’s talk Friday night on The University of Texas campus, regarding censorship, whether anything should not be drawn, and the counter-valent satire of underground comic imagery. For now, please respond if you have heard any rumblings on the controversy front...

Police should use caricatures to identify criminals

John Jones — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:52:46 +0000

The Guardian is reporting that a study by Charlie Frowd, Vicki Bruce, David Ross, Alex McIntyre, and Peter J. B. Hancock at the University of Central Lancashire published in Visual Cognition found that subjects were able to identify a caricature of a person’s face 40% of the time, but could only identify the same face in a police sketch 20% of the time.

via Boing Boing

History of children’s literature illustration

John Jones — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:20:26 +0000

Slate has posted a slideshow on the history of the illustration of American children’s books. The slides are based on Timothy G. Young’s book, Drawn To Enchant, which explains how images for children went from orderly scenes of proper behavior, like this one by Justin H. Howard for Doings of the Alphabet (excluding, of course, the bratty mischief-makers in the background):

to the madcap drawings of Maurice Sendak:

The book is clearly a must-have for anyone studying children’s literature and visual rhetoric, while the slideshow should be interesting to students and instructors who want to see how our ideas about children and what’s good for them have evolved.

Incidentally, my new favorite name is Hatesope Goop.