Which came first? The word or the image?
Clod Iremonger, by Edward Carey.
What is the difference between writing and illustrating?
The NY Times Book Review has authors write short pieces reflecting on their work. This Sunday I read the “Author’s Note” by Edward Carey, an English writer and illustrator. His note, “Drawing Inspiration,” is very interesting, and I have copied a few excerpts below…
- “I can’t imagine working any other way. I don’t draw at first to create a work of art — I’m drawing to see and think about the people I am creating.”
- “You give a character a shifty face and then an angelic one. You figure out the face you require. It’s fiction after all, make-believe. Whether the story is set in an accountant’s office in Des Moines or in a land called Splott, sometimes nothing helps the imagination as much as a little hard evidence, as having your character look back at you. Who am I writing about? Oh yes, you, there you are.”
- “Sometimes the act of drawing can change the personality of the character or present new ideas. Sometimes drawing and words contradict each other, and then they each change, and I find myself deleting words and erasing lines until everything agrees. This is how I make a book: by hiding from writing by drawing, or the other way around.”
- “What a character looks like is one way of unearthing him — of seeing how he fits in the world, how tall he is, how his shoulders sit, whether he chews his fingernails or not. Does he part his hair, how strained are his eyes, how does his mouth fall, is he angry, hurt, shy? As I draw him I think about how he walks, how confident he is, whether he minds being drawn.”
- “So much the business of writing is spent in avoiding it in a hundred different ways, and drawing is another of these. I push the computer away, get out the pad, sharpen the pencil and a nose starts to appear. (I always start with the nose, it’s in the center of the face.) And then, fairly quickly, someone is there in front of me. Ah there you are. Who are you?”
This semester, we have spent a lot of time looking at the relationship between words and images, but we haven’t really stopped to consider what these words and images are doing. What do William Blake’s illuminated books, ekphrastic poems, hacked books and erasure texts, and Lawrence’s The Great Migration all have in common? They all tell stories. In “Drawing Inspiration” Carey describes his experience as a writer and illustrator who uses both words and images to tell stories. While reading his article, I began to think about the differences between writing and illustrating- if they are even different at all. On the surface level they seem very different, but after reading Carey’s note, I am not convinced. In our discussion of Lawrence’s The Great Migration, we tried to create all of these different definitions to talk about the work, but why do we need different definitions at all? At least to me, it seems like writing and illustrating aren’t very different, so what does this say about words and images? In class on Friday, we described an illustration as an “image that serves the word equivalence of meaning, not value restricted to the word diagram (word comes 1st).” Looking back I think we were taking a very one-sided view of illustrations. Words do not always come first. In class we brought up the exception of kids, who have yet to learn a system of language, so they rely upon images to understand the story. We limited this exception to kids, but I believe Cary’s note opposes this limitation.
For him, “a whole book can start with a single absent-minded pencil sketch.” He just finished The Iremonger Trilogy, “a trilogy set in a vast Victorian rubbish heap, and it all started with a single pencil sketch of an unhappy boy in a bow tie looking very worried. At first that was all there was, just this sickly, grim-looking chap. Now, four years later, there are three books and hundreds of illustrations.” Everything started with a drawing, not a word. Illustrations are not limited by language- they overcome the limits of language. With this understanding, I want to look back at Lawrence’s The Great Migration. For him, the images came first, not the words. He made each of his paintings to tell the story of African Americans moving from the South, and he added the captions later. In his work, the images tell the story and the words provide context.
For Carey, images and drawing are his anchor. They are the threads that tie everything in his stories together. When he is lost, the image is what he returns to. When he is afraid, he uses drawing to overcome his fear- just like Amy Bagwell uses art to frame her poetry to avoid public speaking. When we are afraid and lost, we return to the most basic elements of who we are. While some could argue that words are the basis for some and images are the basis for others, I have to disagree. Why? Because of the exemption we raised when defining “Illustration” in class. Children rely on images, not words, to communicate stories and ideas. Carey and Bagwell rely on images, not words, to push their creativity forward. Yet, if you all recall, Bagwell describes herself as a poet…not an artist. For her, “the poem always comes first.” Does this mean that I am wrong, and that for some, words do dictate the image? No. Where do Bagwell’s poems come from? How does she see these poems? As words appearing in her thoughts and floating in or brain, or are words a way of capturing something else she sees- perhaps images? For writers like Bagwell, who return to text to anchor their creativity, I propose that the words they are writing on the page originate from images in their imagination. They capture this in reality with language, which is no different from how Carey relies upon images to anchor his ideas in reality.
This answers my titular question, “Which came first? The word or the image?” The answer is clearly the image. For our definition of Illustration- “the image that serves the word equivalence of meaning, not value restricted to the word diagram (word comes 1st)”- I propose that the exception is the norm. Like our younger and sometimes wiser counterparts, adults also place precedence on the image. Images are how we first engage with the world. They are the basis for the first and only way we tell stories. Cavemen used illustrations on walls, children’s books use pictures, and all of us use our imaginations to allow the images of a story to unfold before us.
When we study these word+art texts, we should remember these origins in our analysis. The image came before word, and all of the stories we tell take root in the image.
References:
Carey, Edward. “Drawing Inspiration.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 12 Mar. 2016. Web. 13 Mar. 2016.
Carey, Edward. “Edward Carey.” Edward Carey RSS. Edward Carey, n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 2016.
Churchill, Suzanne. “Relations between Words & Images.” Word Art | ENG 393 | S16. Suzanne Churchill, n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 2016.
I love this post, Andrew, and the bold and exciting ways you draw together many of the texts and themes of the course. I completely agree with you that some of the divisions between words, images, and the various relations between them may be porous–and may not hold up under scrutiny (especially by WJT Mitchell). But I still think taxonomies are useful ways of organizing the world at least temporarily (which is why I like Sean Hall’s This Means That, despite its limitations). I also disagree with you that images definitely come first, even for infants and children. After all babies in the womb hear words before they can see anything. Their vision may not be sharp at birth–they certainly learn to see and differentiate colors and shapes, with the help of words to guide them.
If you are opposed to taxonomies and classifications, why is it important to say which came first? Why not consider that words and images are both parts of a complex system of language, without which we would not be able to think, communicate, or understand each other–without which we would not be fully human!