The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

I vaguely remember J.K Rowling talking about an on-screen version of a character from one of her books, and saying, in response to someone who said “that’s not how I imagined him” that he may not be how they had imagined him, but it was how she imagined him.  It is, I think, a good point, well made.

Of course in some circles of Literary Criticism we are encouraged to ignore any input from the author and work directly with the words on the page, because once a text (a story, a painting, a cartoon, an illustration) is presented as “public art”, that is to say that it is intended for an audience, it is open to an infinite amount of interpretations and should not be limited to any one in particular, even that of the author..

There are, to be sure, many good examples of a text running counter to the author’s intentions, but there are also some terrific examples of the Lit’ Crit’ business racing away with possible interpretations that accord huge significance to ideas that  the author has a very different spin on.  One example would be the ending to Robert Frost’s famous poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1922), where the repeated last line seems to suggest that the “I” of the poem has drifted off into possible hypothermia, which will undoubtedly lead to certain death.  According to Frost’s letters to a friend though, written around the time he wrote Stopping by Woods, the poem was annoying him because he couldn’t think how to finish it and so he decided on the wizard wheeze of simply repeating the last line.  Another example, this time from TV, would be the debate around the significance of the form, the shape, the size and even the colour of “Rover”, the balloon-type guard from Patrick McGoohan’s celebrated serial, The Prisoner.  McGoohan had actually planned a very different “Rover”, a mechanical one, but it sank like a stone in the waters of Portmeirion and because they were already shooting, panic set in, until someone else on the set looked up and spotted a weather balloon, which was immediately cast in the role (6,000 balloons in total).

Such events are very inconvenient truths, and we have created a way to ignore such things by applying a psychoanalytical tactic, and delivering a Freudian analysis of the text.  We say then, that behind her back, the author’s subconscious has been at work and there is no such thing as chance or coincidence, and we should just ignore any biographical details about the author, and work with the words on the page – within reason, of course, for instance the word “gay” had entirely different denotations and connotations in 1930.  I have to say, I do often find this view that the empirical author is some kind of gormless automaton practising a form of automatic-writing a little troubling at times.

For a couple of reasons then, I find I largely agree with the points John Carey makes in his review of Jenny Uglow‘s new book, Words and Pictures, Writers, Artists and a peculiarly British tradition (Faber) in last Sunday’s Times (09/11/2008).

It’s not that I’m against book illustrators per say, or for that matter the people publishers now tell us are “graphic novelists”, but I am against the needless illustration of texts, especially when  those illustrations run counter to the author’s intentions or even instructions, and serve only to place limits and boundaries on the reader’s imagination.  Far from helping to illuminate the text, which was once free-floating and open to an infinite amount of interpretations, the possible meaning of the text is now fenced in by, not the author’s vision, which we have been encouraged to ignore, but the illustrator’s vision.  And often, by the illustrator’s lack of knowledge about not just the text, but the witting and unwitting testimony of the text, what the text does not say because of the rules and institutions at the time of production, and of the illustrator’s lack of knowledge of the signs and symbols at work.  My favourite examples of this is the illustrator who was knocking out very literal illustrations to accompany poems; to him Yeats “Wild Swans” were “just swans” but Ted Hughes’s poem, The Thought Fox, was more promising because he wanted to draw a sort of “computer game/manga-type fox, in a “sort of Middle-Earth type forest”.

“I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.”

Extracted from The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes.

This is on my mind at the moment because one or two posts and reviews over the last couple of days tie-in with some issues I touched on when I wrote about illustrating The House of Usher on my own blog.  Many of the points John Carey raised about how unnecessary and even redundant or counter-productive some illustrators are, certainly had some resonance for me, despite the fact that I am an illustrator to trade, because I have always been uncomfortable with the view that any “classic” or any out-of-copyright work, is fair-game for an illustrated “re-imagining”.  Although I do wish Carey had worded some of his article a little better because his main point, that the illustrators concerned often had little or no familiarity with the particular work they were illustrating, comes over, at times, as a snobbish put down:

“That is a trivial matter, though, compared to Uglow’s uncritical acclaim for book illustrators as a species, and for those who applied their dubious talents to illustrating Milton in particular. He had been dead for 14 years when the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost came out in 1688, and even if he had still been alive his blindness would have prevented him perusing it, which is just as well. The engraving Uglow reproduces from Book I, which depicts Satan rousing his legions from the burning lake, shows the archfiend as a sort of gnome in a miniskirt, with pixie ears and a small curly horn poking out of his forehead. Milton did not suffer foolish artists gladly. He had disapproved of the portrait frontispiece prepared for the 1645 edition of his poems, and requested the artist to engrave a Greek epigram under it. The wretched limner complied, unaware, since he knew no Greek, that the epigram denounced him as a rotten artist.”

The point is not lost on me though, and I remember a cartoonist who had drawn a comic about a meeting of Joyce and Proust in a Parisian café, happily declaring that he had read nothing by either author.  I’m not suggesting that in order to draw a one-page comic about a meeting of these two giants one should first read Ulysses and perhaps just volume one of A La Recherché, but I am suggesting that by a certain age, say twenty five, you should at least have tackled Dubliners or a story from that collection, and at least be familiar with the importance of the symbolism of a piece of Madeleine cake in the story you are drawing.  Something one can probably achieve by reading two sets of York or Cliff Notes, or the excellent Icon Critical Guides – tax deductible for an illustrator, in this sort of instance, as essential research.

There were no such handy cheat guides around during William Blake’s day, of course.  And it is clear, in Carey’s article, that he feels that Blake’s unfamiliarity with Milton’s work, or misreading of it, meant that he should never have been allowed anywhere near Paradise Lost:

“Worst was William Blake, who responded to Milton’s epic with a series of his usual dead-looking muscular nudes. His illustration for the temptation of Eve shows her with a snake wound round her naked body, holding what looks like a yellow plum in its mouth and thrusting it into hers. This is a vulgar travesty of Milton’s poem, where Eve’s temptation is quite specifically intellectual, not sensuous – the result of a debate between her and Satan.”

I have to admit that in this case Carey has a point.  I personally like Blake’s illustrations, but I think they are clearly doing their own thing, and they are not adding anything other than eye candy to Milton’s text, which as Carey points out Milton warned his reader was intended to be writing about things above “the reach of human sense”.

Some publishers, of course, are all over the classics like a bad rash because they are out of copyright and they can simply dial-up a work-for-hire illustrator, who will deliver them a book that effectively repackages their “free” story.  That book of course will be a “graphic novelised” or “re-imagined” version of an established, even Canonised, book, that has perhaps, like Alice in Wonderland or The Wind in the Willows, already been helpfully tagged with illustrations of characters eager to be transposed to comic strip form.

In some cases those illustrations will be exactly what the author had in mind, either because the author actually drew them, or insisted that his ideas were accurately illustrated.  Lewis Carroll’s sketches were nowhere near as expertly executed as John Tenniel’s, but he knew what he wanted his characters in the Alice stories to look like, and he insisted that Tenniel remain faithful to his vision. As Carey points out Uglow’s argument that “despite the author’s bullying, Tenniel’s brilliance shows through (in the illustrations)” is as wrong-minded as it is impudent.  Tenniel did not dream up the characters or tease the form of the drawings from some crudely formed text, he was given the job of a lifetime, that of illustrating a work of exceptional brilliance.  But whilst I do agree with Carey that without Carroll’s brilliance there would be nothing for Tenniel to illustrate, I prefer to think that Tenniel’s excellent job of illustrating the book was made easier because Lewis Carroll had already largely painted the pictures with his words.  Without the drawings, the Alice stories are still brilliant, and the drawings often serve, at best, as a one-dimensional aid to the imagination-challenged reader – or so that a helpful adult reading the story to a very young child, can point to the picture, after reading the text.

I have to say, I think Carey’s example of Henry James, who said “he would regard the attempt to impose “a picture by another hand on my own picture” as a “lawless incident” is an excellent example of the very real and correct fears an author might have about the interpretation of the text by the illustrator imposing artificial boundaries on the text.  It is something that Charles Dickens, like Lewis Carroll and Henry James, was rightly determined to avoid.  I don’t mean to suggest that the fate of Dickens’s first illustrator, Robert Seymour, who blew his brains out after an argument about one of the illustrations for The Pickwick Papers, should be the norm, but surely if there is to be only one version of what Samuel Pickwick or Mrs Bardell should look like, that version should be the one Charles Dickens wants.

I think the problem with the two positions though, Uglow’s over-emphasis on the brilliance of some key illustrators, and Carey’s dismissal of many of the same as lesser talents than the wordsmiths, is that, as is always the case, things are never that simple.  Mervyn Peake, for instance, features in the book, and Mervyn Peake happens to be one of my favourite illustrators, whether he is painting a picture with words or a brush.   To complicate matters I draw no distinction between Peake’s drawings for his own books, Mister Pye or the Gormenghast trilogy, and his drawings to accompany the writing of others, including Coleridge – they are all brilliant.  The reason for this is two-fold, and I make no apologies for saying this, author/illustrators are simply different.  In their own work they create a symbiosis of words and pictures, and their understanding of how texts work carries on over to the work they do for other authors.  In other words, put simply, they create pictures that work with the text.    I’m not saying that illustrators who don’t write are somehow lesser illustrators than those who do, or that they are necessarily less sympathetic to a text, but it seems obvious to me that illustrators who write will be more likely to have studied the process of writing, and they will understand that simply mirroring the words on the page, no matter how beautiful the drawing, will not add anything to the reader’s experience.

As Paul Gravett points out, there is currently what he describes as a “vigorous trend, notably among new British graphic novel publishers”, for “stylish strip adaptations of the works of Shakespeare and those of other literary giants”.  It is something he celebrates, and I do wish I shared his enthusiasm for the development, but having seen how badly the great Will Eisner delivered “Hamlet on a Rooftop”, featuring a gang member with a flick-knife, and no idea of the weight of possible sin on Hamlet’s slender shoulders, I can’t say I hold out a lot of hope.  I do appreciate his faith in what this renaissance could be, but from what I have learned of Paul Gravett, I am inclined to think that he is welcoming this “vigorous trend” as a champion of more work and recognition for cartoonists, a cause he has lead for decades, than for the literary merit of what might be being produced.  Although he does, correctly, highlight the Government and almost every parents concern at the depressing decline in reading levels and the literacy rate as a good reason for making books, any books, more accessible, I’m not convinced that these books will be picked up by kids who are not even interested in comic books.  As someone who has studied and taught Literature in English, and History, I’m not convinced at all that “Boys Into Books” is the panacea that we would all like it to be.  Like Paul, I suspect, I would be delighted on a number of levels if indeed it was the answer, but I honestly think is unlikely that an 11 year-old child, acting as primary carer for his drug-addicted lone parent, will have any time to polish his reading skills no matter how much more attractively the words are packaged.

I have to admit, and I hope it is clear, that my preference is for, either work that the author illustrates herself, no matter how technically inept the drawings are, or for the sort of team approach that sees the writer and a penciller and an inker and an editor really work and rework the ideas before bringing the lines to life.  I think the best work comes from the author who illustrates their own work, or from the sort of teaming you find with Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky Crumb or Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, or just to prove that I don’t think you need to be related or married to one another, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, or Harvey Pekar and Josh Neufield, or Darwyn Cooke, or Gary Dumm, or Dean Haspiel.  It doesn’t matter what the relationship is between the writer and the illustrator, although it undoubtedly helps if they are close and work well together, but it does matter about the relationship between the illustrator and the text.  Simply farming the text out to people who draw figures really well, technically, but have no idea what the text and importantly the sub-text is about, is surely the book publishing equivalent of taking a really good song and hiring a boy band to sing it – it generates product, but the culture, and the art form suffer.

Internationally published cartoonist Rod McKie has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.