The poetics of the rebus: Word, image and the dynamics of reading in the poster of the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

This essay sets out to show how, in some types of poster, the textual and visual elements that make up the image tend to reproduce certain ludic forms of presentation in which a clear reading by the receiver depends not only on a grasp of the play between word and image, but also between these same components within the phrase itself. The effect created is that of a rebus, a form the reading of which involves a quasi-simultaneous apprehension of the words and images which make up the word or phrase in question. The rebus, being an essentially mixed form, incorporates at least two logics of reading: the first, essentially linear, follows the horizontal direction of syntax and the successive order of letters which make up a word; the second, essentially spatial or pictorial, grasps the visual image. In the standard rebus, the operation of the first logic depends on the second, in a process in which the identification and correct pronunciation of the word for the object that the image designates provides the element needed by the word or phrase to complete its overall meaning. In the poster, the form of the rebus is often complicated by the disproportion in size between the visual and textual elements of the message: sometimes the visual element is so big that it becomes, in effect, both the background and a component of the phrase; its pervasive presence has the effect of making its translation by the reader/viewer into a word or syllable unnecessary: its very presence suffices for the overall meaning of the image to become clear. And very often, since the visual component of the rebus in the poster constitutes the principal object of the message, it succeeds in being both clarified and contextualized by the phrase in which it appears. This sort of configuration underlines the double nature of the rebus in which a visual reading — a rapid overview of the word/image nexus — is followed by a second reading which interprets the various visual and textual components of the whole to discover a further or deeper meaning. This process is further complicated by the play between these two modes of reading and the resulting effect — or illusion — of simultaneity and dynamism created. The particular challenge of rebus form is that it proposes a model of verbal/visual interaction in which components of both areas of expression are combined in the same syntax.