14
Un juste retour des choses? Or the process in
reverse: “Illustrating” texts, “textualising”
illustrations (Moers and Doré)
Anne Isabelle François
Abstract
The paper examines what happens when a text “illustrates” images originally conceived to adorn other fictions, how it relates to narrative tension (Baroni) and especially how it builds up expectations that vary according to the target audience (the children, who discover the illustrations set in the new narrative; the adult readers who are aware of the original stories). The case study is based on a book for children by German author Walter Moers, A Wild Ride Through the Night. Suggested by 21 illustrations by Gustave Doré (2001). The analysis shows that the anticipation built up by the images is in tension with the narrative imagined around them. The images thus operate both as pause and catalyst, engaging a dialogue with the narrative and the readers’ previous knowledge, acting as an invitation to look beyond and differently.
Résumé
Dans cet article, il s’agit d’examiner ce qui arrive lorsqu’un texte « illustre » des images originellement créées pour illustrer d’autres fictions, en termes de tension narrative (Baroni) et de construction d’attentes et d’anticipations variant en fonction des catégories de lecteurs (les enfants qui découvrent les illustrations originales insérées dans un nouvelle intrigue ; les adultes qui connaissent les récits originaux illustrés par Doré). L’analyse est menée à partir d’un livre pour enfants de Walter Moers, Wilde Reise durch die Nacht.
Nach einundzwanzig Bildern von Gustave Doré (2001). Il apparaît que l’anticipation construite par les images
entre en tension avec la narration imaginée à partir d’elles. Les images fonctionnent ainsi comme pause et catalyseur, jouant sur le dialogue entre narration et savoir des lecteurs, opérant comme une invitation à regarder au-delà et différemment.
Keywords
15 In this paper I propose to examine what happens when a text “illustrates” images originally conceived to adorn other fictions, how it relates to narrative tension and especially how it builds up expectations that vary according to the target audience. This case study will be based on a book for children by contemporary German author Walter Moers: following Terry Gilliam’s lead, famously stating that it seemed his mission in life to make Doré come alive,1 Moers has woven his own story into a set of beautiful woodcuts by the 19th
-century French illustrator. These images are interspersed throughout his 2001 novel: A Wild Ride Through the
Night. Suggested by 21 illustrations by Gustave Doré. Moers’ young hero is Doré himself as a 12-year-old
boy, sent on a quest to complete six tasks, before awakening and realising it was just a dream. The woodcuts reproduced in the book are of gryphons and monsters, naked damsels, dragons and the face of the moon. Moers has plenty to go on and spellbinds it all up into a well-knitted, ingenious tale.
Moers’ novel thus offers an interesting case for exploring the potentials and implications of the relationship between text and image when things are taken the other way round: what happens when a set of images comes first and is then being “illustrated” by a story? Illustrations direct readers, they build up expectations, but for whom? How are they reinvested in a new prose narrative? My thesis is that the process takes into account different target audiences: the children, who don’t know the original illustrations and discover them set in the new narrative; the adult readers who are aware of the original stories adorned by the illustrations. The images operate, I shall argue, both as pause and catalyst, enabling plotting (Ricœur) and narrative tension (Baroni). They engage a dialogue with the narrative and the readers’ previous knowledge, but they also act as an invitation to look beyond and differently.
The presence of the pictures within the text provokes a specific act of looking, but the anticipation built up by the images is also in tension with the narrative imagined around and upon them.2 They provoke a
potentially disruptive effect; they convey their own memories and emotions, transporting them into Moers’ story; the narrative, in turn, charges them with a renewed meaning and depth, with another effective layer. The text thus “illustrates” the images, but it also oversteps them; Doré’s popular drawings act as support for an original plot, but they also stand by themselves. Thus we see two narratives (at least) competing, each one opening specific narrative tensions.
Genesis
Moers explicitly claims he aimed at challenging the artist who inspired him, building on Doré’s own freedom when illustrating other authors, in order to transport his young readers into a familiar and yet original dream world. Moers himself started as a draughtsman, a satirical cartoonist and author of comics, before becoming a novelist.3 He states that in his own work, images have always come first. Even now, dedicating
himself mainly to prose narrative, he still illustrates his own novels himself, adding in a 2011 interview that 1 The statement is quoted by Moers in an interview: “Doré bewundere ich seit meiner Jugend, aber diese intensive Beschäftigung ist erst vor ein paar Jahren losgegangen. Auf einer Reise durch Amerika ist mir ein Buch über den Regisseur Terry Gilliam in die Hände gefallen, der darin den bemerkenswerten Satz sagt: ‘Es scheint die Mission in meinem Leben zu sein, Gustave Doré lebendig werden zu lassen.’” (Siemes); “I’ve admired Doré since I was a young boy; I have been intensely preoccupied with him only for a couple of years. During a journey across America, I stumbled upon a book about director Terry Gilliam, with this remarkable sentence: ‘It seems to be my mission in life to make Doré come alive’.” (my translation).
2 “Regarder veut dire garder deux fois.” (Didi-Huberman 67).
3 He created such popular characters in Germany as “the little asshole” (das kleine Arschloch) or Adolf die Nazisau, a satire of the Führer. Let’s not forget that Doré’s first work (1847) was also a comic strip featuring the labours of Hercules (cf. Groensteen). Moers clearly follows the narrative structure of Hercules’ labours in his novel about young Gustave.
16 drawing is a sort of “meditative aid”,4 that comes more easily and naturally to him. A Wild Ride Through the
Night is actually the only Walter Moers book not illustrated by Moers himself.
Commenting on the genesis of his novel, Moers actually offers a larger frame of reflection upon the relationship between text and image in general and Doré’s practice in particular. Doré’s illustrations might often be fitting the writer’s prose but, according to Moers, that is not the aim of the French artist.5 Moers
interprets Doré’s images foremost as an expression of the French artist’s creative freedom, Doré thus refusing a commonly accepted principle of hierarchy. Moers specifically stresses Doré’s ruthless way of using the literary works as mere pretexts; Moers thus justifies the fact that he retained only a limited set of images:
The most balanced relationship between literature and illustration is to be found in comics. Otherwise the image should be subordinated to the text. Doré, in his masterworks, did it the other way round and almost killed the prose with his illustrations. This is why I have only granted him 21 images. That should teach him a good lesson!6
Doré is without any doubt the greatest illustrator […] the best illustrator of all times. He mastered everything: comical as well as realistic drawing, kitsch as well as high art. No other graphic artist will ever achieve a production as vast and complete, with so many levels. Doré is the king. It’s a fact with which we have to reconcile ourselves and humbly bow our heads.7
The creative origin of the novel is founded in a life-long admiration for the French artist’s work, “le plus illustre des illustrateurs” (Kaenel 1978), but the process of crystallisation started with one specific woodcut, although Moers finally decided not to include this particular image into his third book: “The impact of this woodcut for Charles Perrault’s fairy-tale Le Petit Poucet [Tom Thumb] was indeed so powerful, that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days.”8
Moers has chosen a set of 21 particularly striking images amongst Doré’s voluminous production,9 that
act as support for his narrative: he thus tells with Doré’s images a sort of faerie biography of the French artist himself as a young boy, reproducing the images within the story and listing his sources at the end of a book intended for children:
The woodcuts reproduced in this volume are taken from the following works illustrated by Gustave Doré: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Orlando Furioso by Lodovico Ariosto; The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe; Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; Legend of
Croquemitaine by Ernest l’Épine; Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais; Paradise Lost by
John Milton; and the Bible.
4 “Das Zeichnen ist so eine Art Meditationshilfe für den Text. […] Zeichnen ist Spielen, Schreiben ist Arbeit.” (Kreitling); “Drawing is a sort of meditative aid for the text. […] Drawing is a game, writing is work.” (my translation).
5 On Doré’s practice in particular and the effects of illustrations in general, cf. Kaenel 2004.
6 “Das ausgewogenste Verhältnis von Literatur und Illustration findet im Comic statt. Ansonsten sollte sich das Bild dem Text unterordnen. Doré hat es in einigen seiner Großwerke umgekehrt gemacht und die Literatur mit seinen Bildern fast erschlagen. Deswegen hat er bei mir nur 21 Bilder gekriegt. Das wird ihm eine Lehre sein!” (Moers 2001). My translation.
7 “Doré ist schlicht und einfach der größte Illustrator, […] der beste Illustrator aller Zeiten, er hat alles gekonnt: die komische Zeichnung wie die realistische, den Kitsch wie die Hochkunst. Sein Werk ist so umfangreich und vielschichtig, wie es kein anderer Zeichner mehr erreichen wird. Doré ist der King. Damit muss man sich abfinden und demütig das Haupt senken.” (Engler). My translation.
8 “Die Wirkung dieses Holzschnittes zu dem Märchen Der Kleine Däumling von Charles Perrault war in der Tat so stark, dass mich der Gedanke daran tagelang nicht mehr losließ” (Moers 2001). My translation. Cf. “En marchant il avait laissé tomber le long du chemin les petits cailloux blancs qu’il avait dans ses poches” (Doré 4).
9 “Mit der Zeit kristallisierte sich nämlich eine Auswahl von etwa zwanzig Bildern heraus, die einen besonders nachhaltigen Eindruck auf mich machten.” (Moers 2001); “Overtime, a selection of approximately twenty images coalesced, images that made a particularly lasting impression on me.” (my translation). Thus, Moers not only chooses Doré’s most famous images, but also invites the readers to a sort of “guided tour” of his own, personal Doré, thereby delineating a form of undeniably self-conscious portrait of himself as an artist.
17 For the benefit of those readers who would like to learn more about Gustave Doré, the following pages bear a chronology of the most important events in his life and a list of his principal works. (187) In a world between legend and dream, in a time between childhood and adulthood, A Wild Ride Through the
Night tells the exhilarating adventures of 12-year-old Gustave, a boy who aspires one day to be a great artist.
Opening in medias res, during a fearful tempest at sea, we meet Gustave, skipper of a ship called Aventure, who must tackle a Siamese Twins Tornado before embarking on a fabulous journey. Having made a wager with Death and her terrifying sister Dementia for nothing less than his soul, he has to travel from the earth to the moon and back in a single night and accomplish six tasks. The intrepid young hero has to free a maiden from the claws of a dragon, finds himself riding through a forest full of ghosts and perilous creatures, encountering the Greatest Monster of All, navigating a Galactic Gully and meeting a gryphon, scantily-clad Amazons, and even his own self before awakening in his bedroom, “eyes wide with terror, forehead beaded with sweat, moist strands of hair glued to his scalp” (181), realising that it was all just a dream, an initiation quest, a prophetic voyage. Moers here once more gives his young readers the sources of the images interspersed in the text:
He scrambled up and perched on the edge of the bed. While feeling for his slippers, his bare feet encountered the books he’d been reading the night before, which lay scattered around on the floor: Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and Dante’s Inferno, together with his textbooks on biology, mathematics, geology, physics, astronomy, and philosophy – which reminded him that he hadn’t done his homework.
But right on top lay the sketchbook in which he’d been scribbling before he went to sleep. Picking it up, he stared bemusedly at the first drawing. Its subject – Death portrayed as a black-robed skeleton seated on the terrestrial globe – had been inspired by a line of poetry he’d read. The folds of the robe were a complete fiasco, the skeleton was anatomically inaccurate. Gustave tossed the sketchbook on the floor.
‘It’s an utter failure,’ he said softly. ‘Death was right: I must put in a lot more practice.’ He rubbed his eyes and gave a hearty yawn. Then he got up off the edge of the bed, tottered over to the window, and drew the curtains.
It was broad daylight. (182)
The narrative’s lesson is thus unmistakable: to make your dream come true, you have to practice a lot. And the book actually shows that Gustave’s ambition will come true, that he will manage to become the great artist he wants to be, the woodcuts within the novel bearing testimony to (adult) Doré’s skills and achievements.
Retrospectively, the young readers are also meant to realise that these sources were present throughout the plot, Moers explicitly playing with them (much to the adult readers’ pleasure). On the ship Aventure, at the dramatic opening of the story, Gustave’s “trusty, one-eyed boatswain” (1) is thus called Dante. Amongst the series of travelling companions assisting the young hero, there is a very sympathetic but cowardly talking horse, full of common sense and folk-wisdom, that should seem immediately familiar to the grown-up readership at least:
Standing beside him was a nag that bore not the slightest resemblance to the proud warhorse of his nightmare. Considerably leaner and far less handsome, it was pawing the ground, snorting, and nervously frisking to and fro.
‘Good morning,’ it said.
Although Gustave was surprised to encounter a horse that could speak, another beast with power of speech was no big deal in view of recent developments, so he merely returned its salutation.
‘Good morning,’ he said sleepily.
‘My name is Pancho,’ the horse said, ‘– Pancho Sansa.’
18 Moers states that, ordinarily, illustrations are supposed to serve the prose and the narrative. What he admires in Doré’s practice is the fact that the relation was reversed, Doré using the text, even sometimes tossing it almost completely aside, to give way to his own visions and exuberant dreams – whether they be ‘faithful’ or not to the text. So much so that, according to Moers in his essay “The dreamtheatre of Gustave Doré” accompanying the novel and published online, we are sometimes under the impression, and rightly so, that it is Dante’s or Coleridge’s words that illustrate Doré’s image, not the other way round.
He did not subordinate his own work to the text, but appropriated himself the literary works, so as to use them as models for his own overwhelming visions. He drew the texts by saturating them, occupying them completely, burying them ruthlessly under his creative and visual richness. When Doré illustrated a text, he did not mean to show Coleridge, Chateaubriand or Dante, but only Doré, Doré and Doré. […] You even get the impression that it is the text that illustrates the images, not the other way round.10
In A Wild Ride Through the Night, Moers thus imitates the French “masterthief” (Meister des Klauens) as he calls Doré in his essay: just as Doré did whatever he wanted with the texts he was commissioned to illustrate, Moers does as he pleases with Doré “to teach him a good lesson”. Embedding Doré’s illustrations, “textualising” them,11he is at liberty to interpret for instance Doré’s famous portrait of Don Quixote surrounded by his mad
visions12 as a self-portrait of the French artist himself. Given the power and richness of these images, each
one a story in itself, so powerful that sometimes they almost “kill”13 the text, Moers can freely find other
perspectives and create a new narrative, both unique – even if we can clearly recognize familiar topics and patterns in the book, Moers skilfully reinvesting well-known narrative and mythical structures14 –, and at the
same time embedded in a common memory.
Ekphrasis and disruption of the narrative tension
But this original process also has paradoxical effects in terms of narrative tension, as can be exemplified with this last instance. One of Gustave’s tasks is to meet himself, and one of his companions, theTime Pig, asks him to stop and consider more closely an elderly man sitting in a cell. In the set of 2 pages, Doré’s illustration is reproduced as a full page, with the text on the other page. Thus comes a typical moment of pause in an otherwise breathless story, taking the young hero from one fabulous adventure to the next, building up and maintaining the narrative tension, i.e. the desire and anticipation to know what’s coming next.
Baroni defines narrative tension, and the emotional affect involved, as “the phenomenon that arises when the interpreter of a narrative is encouraged to wait for a resolution, this waiting being characterized by 10 “Doré war nachweislich mit den von ihm illustrierten Autoren ebenso erbarmungslos umgesprungen. Seine Illustrationen erzählen nicht selten eine eigene, von ihrer literarischen Grundlage abweichende, auf jeden Fall aber immer dramatischere Geschichte. […] Er ordnete seine eigene Arbeit der Literatur nicht unter, sondern eignete sich die Texte an, damit sie ihm als Folie für seine überschäumenden Visionen dienen konnten. Er zeichnete sie von allen Seiten zu und verschüttete sie gnadenlos unter seinem visuellen Einfallsreichtum. Wenn Doré illustrierte, wollte er nicht Coleridge, Chateaubriand oder Dante zeigen, sondern Doré, Doré und Doré […] Es macht beinahe den Eindruck, als würde der Text die Bilder illustrieren und nicht umgekehrt.” (Moers 2001). My translation.
11 “Er illustrierte die Texte – ich habe die Illustrationen betextet.” (Moers 2001); “He illustrated the texts – I have textualised the illustrations.” (my translation).
12 Cervantes I, 10: “Don Quichotte lisant et envahi par les personnages de ses livres de chevalerie. Son imagination se remplit de tout ce qu’il avait lu”.
13 “Doré hat […] die Literatur mit seinen Bildern fast erschlagen” (Moers 2001); “Doré, with his images, has almost killed the literary texts” (my translation).
14 In addition to Doré’s labours of Hercules, Moers wants us to identify several models, in particular the mythical pattern presenting life as a journey (confirmed by Dante’s presence at the opening of the novel), specifically in an Odyssean and Faustian perspective (hence the wager with Death and Dementia), or the traditional quest structure, as allegories of creation.
19 an anticipation tinged with uncertainty which confers on the act of reception a passionate aspect. Narrative tension will thus be regarded as a poetic effect that structures narrative, and in it will be recognized the dynamic aspect or the ‘force’ of what is customarily called a plot” (Kafalenos 377; Baroni 18). Baroni focuses his study on three master functions of narrative: surprise, curiosity, and suspense. These functions work by way of a constant comparison between virtual development – what we expect to happen – and effective development – what actually happens. Roughly speaking, the story manages how the information is administrated in a way that purposely leaves gaps so that the reader can feel intrigued enough to complete them in a game of prediction and bets based on promises revealed in the course of the plot.
Following Gustave’s wild ride through the night, the young reader is taken in by its pace, the linear narrative telling how one task follows another in close succession, until the end – as is usual in an adventure story based on the rapid succession of actions and events. But 21 times, there comes indeed a pause in the plot, when the narrator, often through Gustave’s eyes, launches into a very minute description of Doré’s image – as is the case with the imagined self-portrait of the artist as an old man. The image is requested by the narrative; Gustave is the instance whereof the image emanates:
Gustave was instantly fascinated by the sight of the old man. He studied every little detail of the cell and its occupant, as he always did in the case of objects he intended to draw.
The man was sitting in a high-backed wing chair. Gustave couldn’t tell how old he was. Seventy or eighty, perhaps, but he could have been a hundred. Hale and hearty-looking despite his gaunt frame, he was brandishing a slender sword in the air and vigorously stamping his feet as he read aloud from a book. Most surprising of all, Gustave could actually see what the old man was reading about: the
whole room was filled with adventures – he couldn’t have described it any other way.
Kneeling at the man’s feet was a pretty young woman – from a well-to-do family, to judge by her clothes – who was being chained up by a brutal fiend with a knife between his teeth. One remarkable feature of the scene was the relative size of the figures: the young woman and her captor were less than half as big as the old man.
The room was teeming with even smaller figures, some of them really tiny. Jousting on the floor were two knights so small that they could comfortably have ridden on mice. A dragon the size of a domestic cat crawled beneath the wing chair and was dismembering a big book with its claws.
Elsewhere in the room, a dozen or more knights and soldiers equipped with horses and long lances were engaged in a murderous battle. Gustave even made out a gryphon flying through the air with a maiden on its back. In the left foreground lay a giant’s head which had been hacked off and held up by the hair. […]
The old man remained unaffected by all the commotion around him. He continued to read aloud, defiantly brandishing his sword.
‘Yes,’ said the Time Pig, ‘that old man is you – more precisely, you in eighty years’ time. He’s ninety-two. Almost incredible, eh?’ (146-149)
This topical moment of ekphrasis engages a dialogue between prose and image, inviting the readers to consider this well-known illustration anew. They thus see Doré’s image under a new light; the prose forces them to consider its every detail, the frame that is packed with information and incorporates an entire world, the act of looking here being based on repetition and conservation (Leplatre). The long verbal description, one of the many tours de force in the book, is at once particularly accurate and strikingly uncanny, precisely because of its setting in another story than the original one. Moers chooses to highlight certain aspects of this very dense image, justifying it by Gustave’s vision (he is particularly interested in knights and fair maidens as becomes his age), forcing us to look at it with new eyes, managing to render a well-known illustration slightly unfamiliar.
20 The relationship between the prose and Doré’s image is thus both stimulated and momentarily stopped, precisely because of the richness of the French artist’s creations: his images are par excellence an impulse to launch into a story, each one of them showing us a whole world that feels real, and inviting us to explore it. Moers takes Doré at his word, or rather at his image, and decides to weave this imaginative exploration into a coherent narrative, but where he explores not just one, but 21 different worlds. Each illustration acts as entry point and gateway, explicitly drawn as such by Doré in his images.
Moers, in his accompanying essay, stresses foremost the impact of the well-known images as starting point. The novel originated in Doré’s “marvellous illustration for Le Petit Poucet, one of Doré’s very best.”15
The composition of this woodcut is explicitly an invitation addressed to the viewer to further explore the world represented. We have to penetrate the image, or follow a figure acting as guide penetrating it; we are invited to imagine what is to be found there. The path leading into the depth of this fabulous world is clearly lined out by the visual disposition: the boy occupies a central position; he is in broad light, surrounded by the shadows looming in the back and the sides; he is the only character not turning his back to us. The powerful attraction exerted by Doré’s illustration for Perrault’s fairy-tale, another initiation story, is striking: the image shows the moment when we enter the magical story, the moment of immersion into the land of dreams, terrors, and adventures. Our gaze is focused on the line of brothers penetrating the dark forest, the selva oscura into which the characters advance, looking back at us (like Dante in the opening image to the Divine Comedy),16
entreating us to follow them into the fiction. The illustration invites the viewer to absorb himself in this image, following one illuminated path amongst black trees and densest vegetation.
Fictional immersion and multiple narratives
What is at stake here, both in the prose and in the image, is the process of fictional immersion (Schaeffer 182-187), key to understanding the effectiveness of this process in reverse, based on the superposition of layers and levels. The fictional immersion is, as such, staged in Doré’s compositions. It is the point stressed by Walter Moers in his essay: he underlines the power and impact of these images, based on the expectations raised by them. He states that the images function as fictions in themselves, and can thus be almost totally disconnected from the original prose they are supposed to illustrate. It is finally what Moers shows in his own story, founded on the very principle of absorption and immersion, mimicking with words the effect of Doré’s images: Moers aims at making us feel the reality and endless richness of the worlds represented, making them alive through his prose and narrative structure.
His young hero literally dives into the books he was reading before falling asleep; Cervantes’, Dante’s or Coleridge’s literary worlds become the primary material of his fabulous dream. He lives inside these texts in Moers’ story, but also translates them himself into wonderful images as an adult – images that precisely serve as basis for Moers’ narrative. The novel is therefore to act as adouble and mirror of Doré’s illustrations, allowing us to enter a fabulous land of adventures, just as Tom Thumb and his brothers penetrating into the woods invite us to follow them. Each time, the mechanism (textual or visual) revolves around fictional immersion on the one hand and narrative construction on the other. Both the images and the prose tell a story – the difficulty being that it is only partly the same.
15 “[…] diese wundervolle Illustration zum Kleinen Däumling – eine von Dorés besten” (Moers 2001). My translation.
16 “Mi ritrovai per une selva oscura” (“I found myself within a dark forest”) is the second line of Dante’s Inferno. Doré’s illustration (“Dante, dans la forêt obscure”) to this line takes up the composition already used for Poucet: a character explicitly invites the viewer to follow him into the fabulous realm (Dante 4).
21 Walter Moers’ textual description of Doré’s portrait of Don Quixote surrounded by his mad visions serves to better understand this paradoxical process. The book offers two tableaux (visual and textual) that do not completely coincide. Even less so as Doré’s image is also necessarily charged with another memory and another narrative than the one told by Moers, i.e. Cervantes’ novel. Thus, at this particular moment in the book, there are at least three different stories, three competing narrative constructions that interact and exist at the same time – each of them provoking specific affects and effects in terms of narrative tension and anticipation:
1. The story told by Moers and young Gustave’s verbal description of an image: he sees himself as a 92-year-old man. The illustration takes place within the book’s plot: it is one of the tasks set by Death; the text justifies the description by Gustave’s desire to draw this old man and this “whole room […] filled with adventures”. Therefore “he studied every little detail of the cell and its occupant, as he always did in the case of objects he intended to draw” (146).
2. The story created by Doré in his image: he shows a world that is extremely full, packed with details, where every corner offers a danger or a surprise. This saturation cannot be apprehended in one single glance. The image is a narrative world in itself, a fictional labyrinth, demanding that we pause and consider it in its very abundance. The verbal description only partly captures this variety. The reader has to pause to consider the image in itself, the woodcut conveying its own imaginary world of adventures – and again featuring the process of fictional immersion since Doré shows Don Quixote reading a book.
3. The story told by Cervantes, more or less illustrated by Doré. The character of Don Quixote himself as well as his adventures, are also present in the book, looming within young Gustave’s story and underlining it – at least for the adult readers. This plot does not coincide completely with Moers’ story: for instance, in Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote is not 92 years old.
Thus the relationship between text and image seems particularly tricky, acting on all three narrative levels and plots at once, with a potentially disruptive effect but also productive distorsions between the different levels. One can also argue that it is a very effective (and economical) way of multiplying the layers of meaning and resonance within the novel, enriching all three stories at once and in return. Every image (and it should also be noted that Moers has chosen Doré’s best known images illustrating well-known narratives) acts as a mirror ball that shines and radiates in three directions at once. The book builds on all these various memories and fictional worlds at the same time: 12-year old Gustave is and is not Don Quixote; he is and is not the real Gustave Doré; the woodcut is and is not an imagined self-portrait. Moers thus deepens his own narrative, pointing also to other horizons and imaginary stories, endowing Doré’s image with a new dimension – since he inserts it into a new plot – and at once capitalising on Cervantes’ story that also resonates within his book. With this process in reverse, he manages to achieve a reactualized affectivity that builds upon the existing memories conveyed by the illustrations and their accompanying texts and therefore gives them new dimensions. Thus A Wild Ride
through the Night has indeed been suggested by 21 illustrations by Doré, but the suggestions go both ways: the
prose is enriched by the images, but the images themselves are endowed with a renewed meaning and acquire a new level of attention. Doré’s images are reinvested, in a two-sided and reciprocal relationship that appears both extremely unstable in its dynamics and extremely fertile.
Finally the narrative tension also acquires a new depth; it varies according to the reader’s previous knowledge of Doré’s work and Cervantes’ or Coleridge’s texts. We recognize Doré’s illustrations (and identify the original narratives), but we also have the chance to see them as we have never seen them before. Thus
22 Moers manages to instil narrative tension not only in his textual plot, but also in his original use of these images: the children will want to hear what happens next to young Gustave; the adults are also curious to see how Moers will reinvest Doré’s illustrations and weave echoes of Dante, Cervantes or the Bible into his own story. Both audiences are caught by an anticipation and a tension of a narrative nature, savouring the clever tale and witty dialogue between prose and image, feeling all three affects analysed by Baroni in his seminal book: curiosity, suspense and surprise.17
The book is undoubtedly a very skilful, playful and effective introduction to Doré’s work – and one can surmise that he would have liked it – but it also is an invitation to explore further the great intertexts as well as the complex mechanisms of fictional immersion and narrative tension, the dynamics between text and illustration in a narrative perspective. Whether or not the process can be generalised, is however another story, such treatment in reverse being the exception rather than the norm, although the novel is clearly based on a well-known narrative pattern rich in mythical overtones.
Works Cited
Baroni, Raphaël. La Tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité et surprise. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2007. Print. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. L’Ingénieux hidalgo de la Manche Don Quichotte. Trans. Louis Viardot, avec
les dessins de Gustave Doré gravés par H. Pisan. Paris: Hachette, 1869. Print. Dante. La Divine Comédie. Illustrations Gustave Doré. Paris: Hachette, 1861. Print. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Blancs soucis. Paris: Minuit, 2013. Print.
Doré, Gustave. Les Contes de Perrault. Paris: Hetzel, 1862. Print.
Engler, Katja. “Walter Moers als sprechende Tapete.” Die Welt Online. 2 Sept. 2001. Web. 15 Jan. 2013. (http://www.welt.de/print-wams/article614838/Walter-Moers-als-sprechende-Tapete.html)
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Anne Isabelle François, ancienne élève de l’École normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm, agrégée de lettres
modernes, docteur de l’École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) et de l’Université de Dresde, est maître de conférences en littérature comparée à l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. Spécialiste des littératures allemande et anglaise des xxe et xxie siècles, ainsi que des rapports entre texte et image, elle poursuit ses
recherches, dans une perspective de Gender et de Cultural Studies, sur l’imaginaire occidental au sein du Centre d’études et de recherches comparatistes (CERC – EA 172).