Abstract
As one might expect from the title, in this book, Simon Grennan attempts to present a comprehensive theory of how drawn pictorial representations can function as narrative. Essentially, Grennan wants to take issue with what he terms the ‘technical-activity’ approach to drawing, represented, according to Grennan, in the accounts of visual theorists and philosophers such as John Willats and Philip Rawson (pp. 15, 135). Within this class of positions, drawers are seen as producing drawings by employing particular technical marks because those marks will have specific effects on those who see them. Characterizations of this kind are found in technical manuals where specific techniques are described as ways to achieve particular effects. This position certainly justifies critique, although its semiotic naivety left me wondering if its alleged proponents could really be as Grennan paints them.
The book is divided into two very different parts. In the first part, Grennan takes the reader on a somewhat free-ranging tour through accounts of depiction, embodiment and narrative. The point of departure for this discussion is the complex and sometimes rather muddy philosophical literature on the nature of graphic depiction with its distinctions of ‘seeing’ vs ‘seeing-in’ vs ‘seeing-as’ and the problematic nature of treating visual depictions as resemblance. Cameo appearances are given to philosophers of representation and aesthetics such as Walton, Willats, Wollheim and others, to phenomenologically-oriented discussions by Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, to philosophers of the social such as Schütz and Crossley, to the work of cognitive scientists, including Jackendoff, Johnson, Lakoff, Gibbs and others, and to foundational semiotic accounts of Saussure, Jakobson, Martin and Thibault, and others. Making such a diversity cohere would be a major challenge for any account, but the particular rhetorical technique that Grennan applies is less successful and, as will be explained below, supports only limited critical engagement.
In stark contrast, Grennan proceeds in the second part of the book far more practically in terms of what he describes as self-reflective drawing ‘Demonstrations’ intended to show the ideas of the first part at work. In these demonstrations, he sets out two constructed ‘experiments’ in drawing in which he re-creates portions of selected visual narratives by certain authors in the style of other authors. In the first set of demonstrations, Grennan produces a cycle of re-creations: first, pages 6–7 from Jim Medway’s (2007) Teen Witch are redrawn intended as a trace of comic artist Mike Mignola; second, pages 144–145 from ‘Almost Colossus’ from The Chained Coffin and Others (produced by Mike Mignola in 1998) are re-created in the spirit of Chris Ware (as in ACME Novelty Library, etc.); and third, pages 144–145 from The Complete Maus from Art Spiegelman are produced in the spirit of Jim Medway. In the second set of demonstrations, Grennan takes the script he constructed for Jim Medway, but this time uses it to guide three new drawings, designed as if produced by Romance/Action genre comic artists in the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s in order to illuminate social consensus and its influence.
Although Grennan’s own structuring of the book suggests that he wishes to place equal, if not more, weight on the theoretical component, I find the drawing demonstrations the more valuable by far. Such explicit characterizations of the process of design in this media are certainly welcome and may lead to further theoretical and practical discussion. The procedure followed in each case is the same and Grennan sets this out in detail, and with appropriate critical self-reflection. The targeted groups of the second experiment are also sufficiently different to motivate well the contrasting design decisions taken, encouraging further discussion of the relations between goals, social consensus and the realization of those goals in graphic form.
The first part was much less effective. Grennan makes no apologies for the diversity of authors, themes and positions he picks up here – indeed, he explicitly emphasizes not only that a broadly interdisciplinary approach will be essential for his aims, but that this will also involve applying theories and constructs from particular disciplines to address the concerns of others. While this is certainly not of itself something to criticize, the particular way in which Grennan attempts to span disciplines is more troublesome. At the outset he mentions that lack of expertise may be one problem when engaging with such diversity. However, whether Grennan is suggesting this as a concern for readers lacking expertise or for himself remained unclear to me, although there are reasons to believe that he is also applying it to himself as the text is riddled with circumlocutions of the kind ‘I must remind myself’ (e.g. pp. 8, 15, 31, 67). Adopting the textual practice of reading authors through other authors can be a revealing textual strategy, but Grennan does this with little signposting that this is being done. This effectively obscured sources of potential errors or disagreements; it became unclear whether problems and claimed support were best located with Saussure, Peirce, Schütz, Jakobson, etc. or better attributed to the author’s musings directly.
A useful litmus test for deciding on one’s likely response to Grennan’s discourse strategies is offered by Grennan’s own account of just what the activity of building theories is: The function of theorisations is to explain aspects of experience beyond perception by proposing self-evidencing proofs. Following this imperative, I expect a systematic theory to identify distinct relationships between constituent items that are applicable to every case, in which every item is constitutive and dependent and in which it is not possible to omit any item or relation without breaking the system. A system is then rationally self-evidencing. (p. 38)
Grennan generally employs the notion of ‘self-evidencing’ for his efforts, and it was this that worried me the most. In essence, a good ‘theorization’ is one that tells a good, coherent story about some aspect of experience: its own coherence is the measure to judge whether it has provided evidence establishing itself. Whereas internal coherence is certainly a worthy and, in all likelihood, necessary property of a theory, this can hardly be considered sufficient. A theory must be more than internally coherent, or plausible, or even persuasive; it must also make predictions: otherwise, it is difficult to see what it might mean for a system to ‘break’ and even harder to know if it has broken at all, let alone whether it is possible or not ‘to omit any item or relation’.
This led me to a very particular reading of Grennan’s theoretical discussion. While the second part of the book shows graphic traces being produced ‘as if’ they were produced by someone else, this may actually offer an appropriate construal of the first part as well. That discussion consists of a broad range of textually presented positions made to appear ‘as if’ they support Grennan’s, i.e. they are Grennan’s reconstruals of (some of) their (assumed) contents. Whereas this strategy works well for the second part of the book, for the first part I do not believe it does. The difference, and a very important difference, is that since the realizational form of the first half is textual and not graphic, these reconstruals actually assert, that is, they make truth claims. The graphic reconstruals do not need to meet this rather high bar on appropriateness but the textual reconstruals do. In the end, I was convinced neither that what was being claimed held water nor that it was sufficiently well characterized to allow its leaks to be located.
