• Nem Talált Eredményt

The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a “nature” to which only it has access. At some moments this struggle seems to settle into a relationship of free exchange along open borders; at other times (as in Lessing’s Laocoön) the borders are closed and a separate peace is declared. Among the most interesting and complex versions of this struggle is what might be called the relationship of subversion, in which language or imagery looks into its own heart and finds lurking there its opposite number. (Mitchell, “What is an Image?” 529)

Both Winfried Georg Sebald and Iain Sinclair frequently incorporate visual elements in their books. In The Rings of Saturn Sebald incorporates in the body of his text photographs of photographs or of paintings, and of various documents, such as a diary, a newspaper cut, a map, or a catalogue of silk samples. In the short story collection Slow Chocolate Autopsy, a collaboration between Sinclair and the visual artist Dave McKean, we find three “graphic stories” delivered in a format experimenting with the comics layout.

As it will be shown, in both books digressive and associative narrative techniques are used (Long 137, Bán 115), and they both feature the topic of walking.

They are both tempted to create an archive of knowledge,1 and both face the impossibility of collecting knowledge with archival techniques, such as “unification, identification, classification and gathering” (Long 12). The goal of this paper is to argue that the visual inserts juxtapose to the narrative layer, by the frequent appearance of the structure of the grid, the symbol of rationalization. Word and image are of equal importance in these works (Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 47), and they together create what Mitchell calls “imagetexts” (Picture Theory 89). These imagetexts reveal the complexity of the questions these books ask about coming to terms with our past and representing both our cultural heritage and the process of coming to terms with it.

Visual elements have power: they foreground the physical aspects of the printed text. When a picture, as it very often happens with Sebald, interrupts the sentence we are reading, or is inserted between two syllables of a word, we start to regard not only the content, but also the appearance of the text. In effect, the photo

1I use the word ‘archive’ as defined by Michel Foucault: “the idea of accumulating everything . . . , the desire to contain all times, all ages, all forms, all tastes in one place” (Long 11).

“opens up the eye of the text” (Louvel 40): typography, text layout, the rhythm of lines, the position of page numbers, paper quality—all the features that contribute to the physical appearance of the text become noticed.

However, pictures have traditionally been considered essentially different and even alien to words, and often subordinate to them (Mitchell, “What is an Image?”

527). Mitchell warns us to avoid comparing text and image, as they can have a “whole ensemble of relations” apart from similarity or difference (Picture Theory 89). He adds: “the medium of writing deconstructs the possibility of a pure image or pure text, along with the opposition between the ‘literal’ (letters) and the ‘figurative’ (pictures) on which it depends. Writing [is] . . . the ‘imagetext’ incarnate” (Picture Theory 95).

Sebald’s works and Sinclair/McKean’s unconventional graphic story do not make word and image distinctions possible. Each page of the graphic stories in Slow Chocolate Autopsy illustrates this impossibility, while some obvious examples from The Rings of Saturn are those instances when the boundary between text and image is not distinct, but they melt into each other.

The real question to ask when confronted with these kinds of image-text relations is not “what is the difference (or similarity) between the words and the images?” but “what differences do the differences (and similarities) make?”—that is, why does it matter how words and images are juxtaposed, blended, or separated? (Mitchell, Picture Theory 91)

My answer to the above question is that in these two books taking the juxtaposition of word with image into consideration adds an extra interpretative layer to the narratives. Sebald and Sinclair have been linked on account of sharing common topics and a similar perspective, but not on account of the similar logic of their (very different) visual inserts and imagetexts. They both express concern about the representability of the past, they question the established cultural canon. Aimless walking is one of their important common motifs, related to which they both express deep concern about “the catastrophic outcome of the dreams of modernity” (Davies 250). Zsófia Bán shows that walking can be linked to the wandern motif of German literature (115), while in Image, Archive, Modernity, J. J. Long states that walking is a form of resisting modernity, its rationalist logic and practical devices of transport (133, 145).

Introducing The Rings of Saturn and Slow Chocolate Autopsy

Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn tells the story of the narrator’s journey in East Anglia.

Walking along the Suffolk coastline or across fields, and visiting the towns of the area serves as a method of approaching and a method of writing about past moments of cultural decline (Bán 115). The story of the walk can be considered as a frame in which the narrator inserts his intricately structured micro-narratives about earlier travels (to the same towns, or to Belgium, for example), people he researched (for instance, Sir Thomas Browne) or books he read (Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,

or Browne’s Museum Clausum, among others). The photographs that interrupt the narrative in what seems to be a random fashion are rarely referred to in the text.

The majority of Sinclair’s works, for example Lights out for the Territory (1997) or London Orbital (2002), belong to the psychogeography movement, and their aim is to record all layers of culture of a chosen area, a “local community”

(Bond 14). The first psychogeographers in France in the 1950s and 1960s wanted to study the city, their urban environment, with a combination of objective and subjective methodologies: “On the one hand it [the movement] recognized that the self cannot be divorced from the urban environment; on the other hand, it had to pertain to more than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be useful in the collective thinking of the city” (Sadler 77). Sadler is critical about the psychogeographical practice: to him it “offered a sense of violent emotive possession over the streets” (81). However, Guy Debord, the founding father of the movement clearly intended it to be an objective science: “Psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”

(Introduction n.p.).

According to Debord, the three key features of psychogeographical method are derive, détournement, and spectacle. Derive refers to the spontaneity that is essential in the mapping of the city. Instead of a plan, an openness to impulses should govern the psychogeographer on his/her route. Détournement refers to the psychogeographical montage practice: elements (of the city) are taken out of context, and assigned new meanings. “The walker in derive, who is therefore not orientated by convention, can playfully and artfully ‘see’ the juxtaposition of the elements that make up the city in new and revealing relationships” (Jenks 155). Finally, psychogeographers are critical about ready-made visual relationships: “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle n.p.). Commodities, ‘see-worthy’ spectacles are challenged by psychogeography, which for Debord was also a political stand. Ford quotes Debord:

“Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle” (36).

Sinclair and McKean’s Slow Chocolate Autopsy—Incidents from the Notorious Career of Norton, Prisoner of London is a collection of short stories with a psychogeographic interest. The character called Norton appears in all of them, but the stories do not allow for a coherent interpretation of Norton’s character: he is as changeable as the city he lives in. Instead of a person, it is rather the city that can be considered the protagonist. Three of the chapters are labeled “graphic story”: in these Sinclair’s dark world and drifting narrative style is matched by McKean’s often disturbing and very intricate montages. These chapters use and abuse the toolkit of comic books, they are balancing on the boundary of coherence and incoherence. Panel connections are loose and elliptical, while panel boundaries are frequently and deliberately blurry and uncertain. As a rule, individual panels or pages risk information overload—or loss of information into the irrelevance of noise. “The page

manages to simultaneously look and not look like a comic. . . .The visual/textual clash presents a writhing vision on which the various distinctions that typically distinguish the comics page collapse into each other”, writes Venezia (n.p.), who also argues that in the case of these unique montages the traditional text-image distinction does not hold.

In this paper I examine only the first graphic story, The Griffin’s Egg in detail, and mention the other two, The Double Death of the Falconer, and Scrip. Scribe.

Script only briefly. In all three of these stories the characters are frequently shown to be walking, and the narrator of The Rings of Saturn is also a keen walker. The pace of walking allows for noticing and brooding over one’s environment. Walking can also be interrupted by stops. As mentioned earlier, walking can be interpreted as a revolt against modern means of transport (Long 6). De Certeau compares the act of walking to the enunciative function of speech acts (97–99), and emphasizes its spontaneity:

Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks”. All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity. They therefore cannot be reduced to their graphic trail. (99)

The scepticism about maps expressed here (“cannot be reduced to their graphic trail”) is a central topic of both Sebald and Sinclair/McKean, and is going to be examined in detail. But first I am going to explore the significance of the act of walking and its relationship to photography in Slow Chocolate Autopsy and in The Rings of Saturn.

Photograph, text, walking in Slow Chocolate Autopsy

For the psychogeographer walking is the key to deciphering the city.

[The] act of walking is an urban affair and, in cities that are increasingly hostile to the pedestrian, it inevitably becomes an act of subversion. . . . [T]he street-level gaze that walking requires allows one to challenge the official representation of the city by cutting across established routes and exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the

city’s inhabitants. (Coverley 12)

Walking is just as evident for Sinclair’s characters. In The Griffin’s Egg, the ex-studio photographer Turner is walking in the city, quite uncertainly, as he does not know what to focus on. Norton hired and dismissed him in quick succession: “What am I supposed to do? Norton has the entire city on file—but he’s left me with no instructions.” (85) Their project would have been “providing pictorial evidence to support research undertaken by a man named Norton. To gain access to—&

photograph—the riverside penthouse apartment of millionaire political fixer, &

blockbuster novelist, Lord Kawn.” (85) Turner, instead of spying on Kawn, walks and takes snapshots of a church. He does not organize the pictures he takes (87). He does not edit or interpret the city the way Norton would have demanded when he was hired.

Norton’s and Turner’s distrust of the other’s medium constitutes the body of the story. Turner was hired as an interpreter, but for him photos need no explanation:

“Who needs a writer?”(88) He does not accept the primacy of language: “Fucking writers. Think there’s no memory without language” (90), while Norton calls the camera “an unreliable instrument of fiction, cursed with memory” (86). As various font types are used in the graphic story, their diversity is significant. I propose considering them imagetexts and assigning each font type to a character. The majority of the story is narrated in Axel Turner’s font. Whatever Norton is saying or thinking is in capitalized Century Gothic (84, 86, 88, 91). The way Norton’s sentences are remembered by Turner is printed with a font type imitating handwriting (87). Lord Kawn’s voice hovers bodiless above the story, like the mechanical voice in The Double Death of the Falconer, which in turn imitates J. L. Godard’s Alphaville from 1965. Lord Kawn’s sentences are given Lucida Console font (91, 92, 93).

Although Norton and Turner stand for two contradictory sides in the debate between word and image, their arguments are represented by McKean with the same logic. Regardless of the content of the text, we are offered complex panels where there is no point in separating word and image. Ironically, Turner’s (verbal) opinion to “Pin down the true images and words are redundant. Stick any two postcards to a wall and you’ve got a narrative. UNEDITED” (88) coexists and forms a frame with the photograph of a Secret Intelligence Service building at Lambeth. His argument for natural, picture-motivated narratives is juxtaposed by a picture of an enigmatic narrative-producing institution.

Another enigmatic imagetext is Norton’s advertisement “WANTED:

INTERPRETER. UNEDITED CITY” (84). However much Norton detests photography, his sentence is printed over a cityscape montage, where the great number of spires highlights the amount of information to edit. An example for page level imagetext is page 91, where Norton’s sentence “Surveillance is the art form of the millennium” is seemingly not part of panel structure: it is not part of any panels.

However, as images, Norton’s words do contribute to the layout of the page. They are printed in the bottom right corner, their line gives balance to a page that is operating, from top to bottom, with lighter and lighter colours. This sentence also reorganizes page semantics: reading it sheds new light on the security camera images, or that Turner is following a person, possibly Norton. The extract of metanarrative provided as part of the montage also centres around surveillance: “Page given over to surveillance imagery—as narrative now moves deeper into Secret State territory.

Panel 1. On surveillance camera” (91).

Photograph, text, walking in The Rings of Saturn

The narrator’s Suffolk walk in The Rings of Saturn offers the excitement of exploration and the pleasure of revisiting familiar places. The narrator compares his previous experience to what he sees, and finding that the routine of life is the same as it used to be reinforces him. He uses expressions like “as I have often found” (51), “I sought the familiarity of the streets” (92), and “I have never encountered” (225). The familiarity of places motivates repetitive actions, as illustrated by the quote below:

Figure 1: Slow Chocolate Autopsy 91.

Whenever I am in Southwold, the Sailor’s Reading Room is by far my favourite haunt. . . . So on this occasion too I entered the Reading Room to see whether anything had changed and to make notes on things that had occurred to me during the day. At first, as on some of my earlier visits, I leafed through the log of the Southwold, a patrol ship that was anchored

off the pier from autumn of 1914. (93)

The narrator’s meditations over the past are rooted in the confirmation of the unchanged present. Finding what he expected, experiencing a certain timelessness create the proper atmosphere for the narrator’s associative broodings. The narrator connects the present of the Suffolk countryside to analogous distant places or atmospheres of the past, known to him via reading. On the one hand, the narrator particularly enjoys moments of arrested time:

I sat alone till tea time in the bar restaurant of the Crown Hotel. The rattle of crockery in the kitchen had long since subsided; in the grandfather clock, with its rising and setting sun and a moon that appears at night, the cogwheels gripped, the pendulum swung from side to side, and the big hand, bit by bit, in tiny jerks, went its round. For some time I had been

feeling a sense of eternal peace. . . (96)

On the other hand, whenever the narrator encounters evidence of change or something unexpected during his walk, a sense of panic and weakness overwhelms him. When, contrary to his expectations, he finds the seaside resort of Lowestoft even more deserted and “run down” than fifteen years before, he writes: “[a]lthough I knew all of this, I was unprepared for the feeling of wretchedness that instantly seized hold of me in Lowestoft” (42). Similarly, when at the Covehithe cliffs he comes upon a couple making love below him at the coast, he is “overcome by a sudden panic” (68) and physical weakness: “[f]illed with consternation, I stood up once more, shaking as if it were the first time in my life that I had got to my feet, and left the place, which seemed fearsome to me now” (68).

Later he is overcome by panic when he gets lost: “I stuck to the sandy path until to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before, or, as it now seemed to me, in some distant past” (171). Parallel to losing orientation in space, he loses his orientation in time. “I cannot say how long I walked about in that state of mind.”

(172)

The view the narrator absorbs must be unaffected by time so that it can serve as the background for his broodings about various instances from the past that support his concern about human civilization. “The narrative is .. . .one of melancholy despair:

the universe is grinding down and humanity is bent on accelerating our eventual demise” (Beck 82). Twenty-one photos of the book illustrate directly the places the narrator visits, the remaining fifty-one support his broodings. The photographs that show stops in the narrator’s wanderings are deliberately “amateurish”. We are offered

five pictures of empty beaches (44, 51, 69, 155, 225), where the universal greyness of the sky and the sea is matched by an unnecessarily detailed view of sand – they could be schoolbook examples of tonelessness and noise. Sebald speaks about grayish tones in an interview: “I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between death and life” (Scholz 108). Amateurishness is turned into a tool: Sebald uses the toneless quality of his pictures to support both the message and the tone of his micronarratives on decay.

The pictures of the walk also seem to be composed in an ad hoc manner. Some examples: the photograph that he offers of a canal (138) resists all attempts at composition, while the photo of the bridge at Orfordness military base shows a tiny structure in the centre, too small to open up an interesting perspective (235). The

The pictures of the walk also seem to be composed in an ad hoc manner. Some examples: the photograph that he offers of a canal (138) resists all attempts at composition, while the photo of the bridge at Orfordness military base shows a tiny structure in the centre, too small to open up an interesting perspective (235). The