Link: Amazon.com: Dreaming By the Book: Books: Elaine Scarry.
I have been reading from Scarry’s "Reading by the Book" about the power of the verbal arts (of narrative direction in particular), having read of the book in Marshal Weber’s Justice is Beautiful. I am still working on Turndust, and it seemed that it would be interesting to use the insight this book offers in conjunction with my artist’s book. The relationship between what I would call the haptic radar of the imaginary that narrrative offers, the staged directorial emphasis of book form, and book art is interesting. Though Scarry is speaking about written narrative exclusively, there is much in the way that books present narratives of imagining that still holds true in artists’ books. They remain directed experiences, directed unveilings.
Scarry’s writng about veils and transparency as being characteristic of the directed ‘perception’ of imaginary narrative is interesting. Books peel off layers of supposition, building solidity by the interface of many visual phenomena, many of which are rendered ‘transparent’ by the poetic echoes and ‘pre-echoes’ of the unfolding story. Page by page, narrative visual art builds the object for its audience. But this is stretching a point. Narrative artists’ books do something very much like this, but perhaps I need to modify the metaphor that gives my explanation its paradigm and hence its explanatory power. But I suspect that there are family resemblances between directed verbal narrative and its visual cousin. The actions of rhetorical construction are common to them both: although visual art offers something up to the senses, is the narrative of that visual artwork contained in the sensory material of its pictures, or in the narrative instructions they convey? But this is to risk confusing ideas and objects.
So far in my reading of Scarry’s work, she deals with objects, not the ideas of story. The ideas behind verbal narrative and visual narrative can be identical. The objects depicted are not. Except… I know that one of the things I want to do in books is to establish places and objects by looking at them again and again, changing their relationships one to another to set them up in an imaginary space very solidly, because here is a place where something will happen. (My model here is Sophie by Ral Veroni which does exactly this with some classical ruins. (Coincidentally, or not-so-coincidentally, it is printed on semi-translucent paper, which emphasises the continuation and relation of the seperate images. I have never recovered from seeing this book, whose impact I have been trying to recapture ever since.) But it seems to me that exactly this examination, this overlaying of one image atop another as we see it in artists’ book narrative, serves to create properly imagined objects in much the same way as the verbal arts.
Scarry’s book has motivated me to include a verbal prelude to my images in Turndust. One of the things I want to do with this is to carry the seed of the verbal into the visual. My images include writing in my handwriting, which is germane to the other autographic marks conveying the image. To me, I can see my hand in both. I want to open the vista verbally, using the metaphor of the wind, to carry the reader’s intention across the landscape’s solidity and texture. This experiment will, I hope, engage the reader’s intention in the text, then suddenly open this text visually. However, becuse both text and image are hand-drawn, Ihope to sustain ‘the realm of reading’ across the other surfaces of the book. I think that the comparison of images conjured to the minds eye by the verbal introduction, and those deposited and overlayed by my visual artwork will be instructive. I think that they both will serve to construct the narrative. But what is the phenomenology of this depositing and overlaying. I am insisting here on the persistence of the image in the book form. That they go beyond being optical surfaces to becoming narrative information that takes it’s place in the (artificially-constructed, imagined, and not perceptual) linear track of story. To this add the notion (again, I get this from Weber’s citations, this time of Anton Würth quoting Derrida ) that languages’ linear character is a displacement of the cognitive tumbling act that is really going on. [“Linearity is the displacement of multi-dimensional symbolic thinking.”] That multidimensional tumbling act is always the background to reading, and the poetics of the artists’ book are no less susceptible to it than any other narrative.
"Imagine the face of the world. Patches of warmth and coolness stir the air into currents, build columns and rivers of air and vapour that stroke and bathe the surface of the sea and the land. Air pushes through, an invisible phalanx that moves across the world from horizon to horizon. Sometimes violently, as when bark will split and trees crash down under its insistence. Sometimes tenderly, as when the petal of a flower is disturbed, or the head-feathers of a sparrow are perturbed. Stroking, pushing, tearing, You cannot see it. But you can see the clouds move. The crops move, stroked by the side of a hand, springing back from their bending in waves. the dust moves, the leaves are stirred, the stillness is gone. Now,/…"
