Visual Art in Literature
Looking back a couple weeks to Amanda’s post on Flash animation for poetry, I was thinking about how interesting and lacking this mixed media approach is in literature. The truth is I would like to sneak in a few photographs I took into my thesis, and I was trying to find evidence to convince my advisor that this would be a good idea. After tooling around a bit the only contemporary novel of literary fiction I could find that had pictures in it was Jonathon Safron Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which came out in 2005. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has pictures spread throughout the book and at the end has a flip book of a man floating back up to one of the Twin Towers before they fell in the 9/11 attacks. I thought it was kind of beautiful and creepy and hopeful way to end a novel. Of course critics disagreed. They said his use of pictures was just a cleaver way to distract readers from believability issues with the characters and some less than interesting writing. I guess in some ways I can see where they are coming from, there were some places in that novel I didn’t quite believe or feel necessary but overall I did enjoy the novel. It has been a few years since I read the book so maybe now that I’m a little older and wiser I will see more issues with it.
I know and truly believe that an author can’t expect his or her work to succeed because of the use of pictures or sound or anything like that but is it possible to succeed despite the use of pictures in novel? Apollinaire turned his poetry into pictures and those seemed to work, for the most part at least. Barthelme uses pictures in his short stories. The visual arts borrow language in there work often. (Right of the top of my head, Charles Sandison and Rupprecht Matthies who are both on display at the Denver Art Museum if you can check it out.) Is there anywhere else that it works in contemporary literature? Is it a cop-out to use pictures in literature? What do you think?
Dylan and I were having a conversation the other day about the difference between comic books/graphic novels and traditional novels. He’s not a fan of graphic novels. I am. I see this genre as able to tell a story in a multi-layered (or is it multi-genre?) format that the traditional novel cannot. Really, they’re different beasts. Traditional novels have their own special gifts that can only exist in language, but that doesn’t mean graphic novels shouldn’t be taken seriously. They’re an art form, a genre of literature. What you’re talking about, I think, is something in between these two, possibly a new genre altogether. And I think for it to earn respect and trust in the literary world it a novel with pictures or photo or something visual would have to do everything well. The visuals would have to be art. The language, artful. Otherwise, if for no other reason than because it’s new, it will be torn apart by the critics.
I used to think there wasn’t much difference between comic books and graphic novels, then I read Alison Bechdel’s memoir FUN HOME and it blew my mind. The pictures in this book adds to the levels she builds with her prose and story. The result is that it’s a reading experience with an extra dimension that you wouldn’t get with words only. So, no I don’t think it’s a cop-out to use pictures in literature. If it’s done right, it can enrich the book.
Oh another example, I recently read David Eggers short story in the New Yorker that he based on the screenplay he wrote for Where the Wild Things Are. Although I liked it and the characters were my old friends from that much loved story, I missed the drawings of Maurice Sendak and so it felt flat compared to how I feel when I read the illustrated books.
W.G. Sebald uses photographs in his novels — or at least in one of them, which is sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read, “Vertigo.”
I’ve never read him, but he’s well-regarded and his use of photos is definitely part of his overall approach….i guess i’m just saying you could use him as another example that it’s a legitimate approach. The photos are grainy and super-ordinary.
coincidentally, I just reread Eugenie Grandinet, by Barthelme, the other day, and it has photos and illustrations, as you note. what a strange story.
Bartheleme did this a bunch in his books. He included drawings, charts, all sorts of stuff. (I can’t remember, who was the postmodernist guy who included a quiz for the reader in his story?)
Anyway, in Don B’s case, sometimes it was a riot; sometimes it was baffling, but it certainly wasn’t meant to be a sideshow.
Harry Crews’ memoir, “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place”
includes really cool drawings by Michael McCurdy. I also love the original illustrations in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
I just wrote a book titled “The Color Wheel”, which is a collection of 27 short stories each related to a color. The stories are my attempt as an artist to create a self-portrait of my life using words. I have chapter titles such as “Blue Sky,” “The Great White Shark”, “Indigo Doorways,” “Yellow Belly”, etc.
I’m now creating 27 original paintings to go with each story. Between the stories in the book, and the paintings on the wall, I have created an incredible self-portrait of myself. I’ve learned a lot about myself, and dug deep into the core of who I am as a person. Regardless of what anyone else thinks are says, I’ve already been incredibly successful.
I think ultimately, it’s all about the ideas that you have, and your execution of those ideas. If done correctly, nothing is a “cop-out.”