View of Simon Grennan, A Theory of Narrative Drawing

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IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 18, No.3 (2017) 76

Simon Grennan, A Theory of Narrative

Drawing

Nicolas Labarre

Simon Grennan’s A Theory of Narrative Drawing is an ambitious endeavor, a difficult yet rewarding book. In spite of an elegant cover, featuring a near-perfect recreation of a Hellboy episode in the style of Chris Ware, and though is it published as part of Palgrave’s “Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels” collection, comics are but a subset of Grennan’s preoccupation in this volume. This is less a book about comics than book which makes it possible to think about comics from a different standpoint.

Grennan is both a practitioner and a scholar of comics, and is notably the author of Dispossession, a significant contribution to the understanding of the potential of adaptation into comics (Grennan and Trollope 2014; Grennan and Miers 2015). In A Theory of Narrative Drawing, he establishes from the onset that his goal is to produce not a survey but a rigorous system, one in which every relation is applicable in every case, and from which no element can be omitted (xii). The construction of this system entails a meticulous accretion of concepts and demonstrations, which culminates in the description and analysis of two “drawing experiments” in the final third of the book. In these experiments (chapter 3 and 4), Grennan treats the practice of redrawing pages in an existing style - a fairly popular occupation for cartoonists , usually as homages or as exercises in nostalgia, intericonicity and storytelling1_{- as a way to verify some of the key postulates formulated earlier in}

the book.

The key to Grennan’s theory is formulated early on: drawing cannot be described satisfactorily as an “assemblage of effects”, produced by a catalogue of devices (2), and needs to be conceived as a intersubjective activity in which production and reception are intimately tied to the “potential resources of the body” (14) . Other theoreticians have brought the body to bear into comics studies, most notably Ian Hague (2014) and

Patrick Grant (2014) but Grennan makes it the central element of his approach, as it is indispensable not only

to mark-making but also to any interpretation of descriptive drawings, for instance.

To replace the assemblage approach, Grennan offers to substitute an aetiological (goal-directed) approach: drawing is undertaken with a specific goal in mind, and the resulting trace evidences that goal. This conception makes it possible to account for the apparition of new effects and techniques (5) but also for failed or imperfect attempts, in which the drawing works, while any single trace within it may fail (6). Furthermore, there is no

1 See for instance the numerous examples on this blog: http://redrawncomics.tumblr.com/

Simon Grennan, A Theory of Narrative Drawing

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, XII, 277 pages, 16 b/w illustrations, 10 illustrations in colour

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bijective relation between intent and activity: “the same activity can be directed towards the achievement of many different results and [...] a number of different activities can achieve the same goals” (8). Representations in different styles may therefore be conceived and perceived as “resembling” an object, while never functioning as a systematic equivalence for that object: the depiction is seen along with the object of the depiction, the goal along with the mark (36-37). The drawing is never transparent, or self-evident, and it resembles an external object not as a result of its formal proprieties, but inasmuch as it generates “affective correspondences”, which can rely on recalled experience, but also on formal systems, such as emanata in comics (59-60). Because drawing, thus described, is concerned with the effects on affects of the viewers, there is no substantial difference between a fictional and a descriptive drawing. In both cases, percepts are adjudicated by beliefs, “social and cultural knowledge” (97-98), though of course the nature of these beliefs is likely to be different in each case. This brief summary does not do justice to Grennan’s meticulous construction of drawing an as embodied, intersubjective activity, which subsumes traditional pragmaticism and engages with competing systems, such as Neil Cohn’s The Visual Language in Comics (2013)”number-of-pages”:”221”,”source”:”Library of Congress ISBN”,”event-place”:”London ; New York”,”ISBN”:”978-1-4411-7054-5”,”call-number”:”P99.4.P78 C64 2013”,”shortTitle”:”The visual language of comics”,”author”:[{“family”:”Cohn”,”given”:”Neil”}],”issued” :{“date-parts”:[[“2013”]]}},”suppress-author”:true}],”schema”:”https://github.com/citation-style-language/ schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json”} . This interdisciplinary approach may be all the more useful for having been published in a comics studies collection, since it brings within the discipline a number of concepts and methods more commonly found in drawing theory and philosophy.

This approach to drawing is followed by a similarly methodical approach to narrative, in which classical narratological concepts are reconstructed with an added emphasis on intersubjectivity, relative values within systems and the potential of the body. Though convincing, and precisely articulated to the rest of the demonstration, this approach feels less necessary, in that it ends up upholding many established tenets of narratology (the author narrator/distinction, the disjunction between narrative time and story time, etc.). This acts as a proof of the system - in that the specific conceptualization of drawing does not contradict existing knowledge about narratives - but it does not expand its usefulness. It may also be that narratology is a field more closely connected to comics studies than drawing, because of what Charles Hatfield identifies as the logocentric tendency of the field (Hatfield 2010); the familiarity of narratology and of the various debates within the discipline makes a reexamination seem less pressing.

Comics becomes the sole focus of the book in the two final chapters in which the act of redrawing comics in a different style (as opposed to a Pierre Ménard-like experiment) serve to illustrate part of the system and to put it into action, as they “interrogate intersubjective relationships in story telling” (175). The first experiments uses individual styles (Chris Ware, Mike Mignola, Jim Medway), while the second focuses on collective styles (successive versions of British romance comics), using a common script. Though superficially similar, this is much different from Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story, which Grennan specifically discusses (230-8), in that Grennan’s aim is not to produce pastiches, external imitations, but to “adopt another’s self-consciousness” and form of representation (176), or in the second case, the constraints bearing on a “generalized other”. Though Grennan is careful to note that there is no benchmark for such an experiment (176), he displays a lucid judgement as to which of his attempts succeed. He observes that to fit into a generic style, determined by social

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constraints, is less problematic than to embody another’s author subjectivity, and concludes the book by noting the delicate balance required not to turn this exercises in authoritarian subjugations of the imitated other.

As indicated above, A Theory of Narrative Drawing sits awkwardly within the field of comics studies. Though it engages at length with prominent theories of the form, it produces a theory of drawing that far exceeds the scope of Neil Cohn or Thierry Groensteen’s work, to quote but two prominent system builders. The book presents a strong argument for its intensely pragmatic approach to both drawing and narrative, and provides a much-needed framework to approach the question of style in comics, at the level of both production and reception, yet does not meaningfully engage with specific styles and effects outside of those included in the drawing demonstrations.

It should be said that this is a dense and difficult book. The second reading is rewarding, as concepts elucidate and support each other within the system, but the first can be a frustrating experience, especially as specific examples are scarce early on. The compact mode of writing is to some extent the result of Grennan’s ambition to produce a complete system of strictly interdependent notions, but even within these parameters, some of his choices further complicates understanding. For instance, he sometimes abruptly resorts to unexplained terminology (“noetic” and “preneotic”, 65) and in an attempt not to leave any question unanswered, includes elucidations of specific logic loopholes (such as the description of the solipsistic fallacy at work in Hegel’s and Husserl’s conceptions of consciousness, 127-130) which do not feel necessary to the theory. Occasional enlightening summaries suggest these ideas could have been conveyed in a less compressed and more accessible fashion.

Notwithstanding these reservations, A Theory of Narrative Drawing is an important book, especially in the context of comics studies. Its theory of a generalized embodied pragmatic of drawing makes it possible to think about individual and generic styles in productive and yet unexplored ways. Though the book culminates in drawing demonstration, this framework can certainly also be put to use by non-practitioners. One would be curious, to name but an example, to see how an analysis of Kirby’s work and perception conducted within this framework would complement Charles Hatfield’s perceptive but more impressionistic description thereof in

Hand of Fire (2012).

Sources

Cohn, Neil. 2013. The visual language of comics: introduction to the structure and cognition of sequential

images. Bloomsbury advances in semiotics. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Grant, Patrick. 2014. « Bodies on the Board. Materiality and Movement in the Production of Comics and Graphic Novels ». Sydney: Macquarie University.

Grennan, Simon, and John Miers. 2015. « Dispossession: time, motion and depictive regimes. » In Transforming

Anthony Trollope: dispossession, Victorianism and nineteenth-century word and image, édité par Simon

Grennan et Laurence Grove, 33-54. Studies in European comics and graphic novels 4. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

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Hague, Ian. 2014. Comics and the senses: a multisensory approach to comics and graphic novels. Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies 57. New York: Routledge.

Hatfield, Charles. 2010. « Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies ». Transatlantica. Revue d’études

américaines. American Studies Journal, no_{1. https://transatlantica.revues.org/4933.}

———. 2012. Hand of fire: the comics art of Jack Kirby. Great comics artists series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Nicolas Labarre is an assistant lecturer at the University Bordeaux Montaigne. He is the author of Heavy

Metal, l’autre Métal Hurlant (2017) and cultural history of Heavy Metal magazine, from a transnational

per-spective.