Hold Still

Abstract

In her recent memoir-cum-biography, the aptly entitled My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland makes the following observations, highly relevant for this study: “Description can only expose so much of the self or contain so much of a memory or an experience. Photos and objects offer alternative access points to Carson’s history of identity formation and love” (99; my emphasis). She later adds: “All of these artifacts of Carson’s life, fragmentary though they may be—her photos, her clothing, her paralyzed arm that she hid or did not hide, her will, her letter—can also be seen as a memoir” (116). Of course, in my corpus, the “artifacts,” at least the photos (but also the occasional excerpts of diaries, newspaper clippings, drawings, paintings …), are embedded in the book. In addition, some of these photos are artworks, not just family pictures. However, I find Shapland’s expression “access points” very useful, especially as a more practical, less theoretical follow-up to the concept of conceptual blending. Combined mediation does not necessarily mean blending but it certainly means diversifying the ways of telling a story, doubling the access points to somebody’s life story. A photo, a verbal description are two ways of ‘looking at’ a person, two ways for this person to present herself to the reader/viewer. From these two input spaces, the reader builds an enhanced narrative (enhanced by this double presence). Thierry Groensteen distinguishes between “two expressions of the I-character, its verbal and graphic expression.” In other words, there are two access points to this “I-character,” just like graphic and verbal expressions offer two access points to the I of the autobiographer. From a purely scientific, cerebral point of view, this book will not disclose the exact neuronal patterns taking place in our brains when we are confronted with a hybrid unit, simply because I lack the sufficient knowledge and resources to do so. I have already explained that few studies have concentrated on such artifacts and the phenomena pertaining to them, Neil Cohn being one of the few exceptions (and he works exclusively on comics and graphic novels). The purpose of the previous chapter was nevertheless to provide an overview of these scant resources and see how they can be applied to this corpus. I will carry on doing so in the following pages by keeping in mind that the cognitive analyses offered remain modest and should be improved in further studies. The fact is that sometimes, the best way to describe how “words and images work together” is the word “bricolage” (McLennan 545). Indeed, it is hard to find a more fitting one to describe what happens on a page embedding two media, as it means something constructed or created from a diverse range of available things. At this stage, it is also very important to keep in mind photography’s inherent ability to capture reality, and thus to be seen as a referential enhancer in a hybrid narrative. Even though the following claim can be disputed in some cases, it remains predominantly true that “photography has a history of seeking to capture experience, to banish the unknown with an all-consuming and acquisitive light” (McLennan 552). The transactional theory of reading views a text in terms of a reader’s experience of it, as an event in time: “Every reading act is an event, or a transaction involving a particular reader and a particular pattern of signs, a text, and occurring at a particular time in a particular context” (Rosenblatt 5). According to this theory (with which I am in full agreement), the way we construct meaning is a transactional event, inevitably influenced by the context of reading. The term “transactional” normally relates to an exchange or interaction between people, but here it also embraces interaction between text, reader, place, time or again context understood broadly as a combination of all these elements. But we can stretch it to encompass the interaction between two media, complicating even more the context of reception. What we have studied so far is the interaction between words and images, the possible combinations it offers and some of its potential semantic outcomes. It is this latter aspect I am going to explore even further by focusing on case studies drawn from the same book.