A quick thought about pictorial representation

     I am currently reading Tim Crane's introduction to philosophy of mind entitled The Mechanical Mind (2nd ed.), which I received from my cousin this past Christmas. Early on Crane begins by defending the thesis that mental representation is more basic than linguistic or pictorial representation. While my thoughts here don't really deal with the idea he is communicating, he did make a point that I believe to have interesting consequences for the sorts of decisions made when telling a story visually, as in film and comics. Crane provides an example to demonstrate where language can do certain things that pictures cannot, namely that pictures cannot adequately depict the differences between conjunctions that is needed to express certain ideas (i.e. we can go for a walk if it does not rain). Crane is concerned with the ability of a single image to do this, but it is quite a different matter if we are to add images, as in a sequence, and Crane also gets to this idea in a discussion of mental representations of scenarios. A scenario as it is in your head is really quite simple. You can imagine quite a lot and distill it down to something very simple. Perhaps you are thinking of how your day is going to play out, this might be reduced in your mind to something very much like a single thought. I have this happen a lot when discussing issues with my wife. I think I am communicating what I think the day should look like very clearly, but since the whole day has become an idea in my head I am not very aware of just how much I need to unpack it in order for her to be able to make sense of it. Well, this a lot like telling a story, in fact, it pretty much is telling a story. It is important for a good storyteller to handle their conjunctions with care, if they care to elucidate a good scenario for us. Most people who do any writing have heard something to the effect that a good narrator "shows" his audience the events of the story rather then "telling" those events. It is a warning against being too didactic with a narrative, since such an approach would turn a story from an engaging experience into something like a summary, mere information. It is important then, for the director or penciller or whoever is handling the visual instantiation of a narrative to be conscious of how they are setting up the possibile directions of their story early on in order to create the sort of tension appropriate to the story. Since terms like 'if, then, or, etc.' are better off shown than said, this seems to me to be one of the great difficulties of telling a story well, and the success of the storyteller in communicating them well is at least one measure of success.

     A fine example, which I am sure everyone is familiar with, is that goat in the Tyrannosaurus cage featured in Jurassic Park. Initially the poor animal is set out there so that Mr. Hammond's grandchildren will have the privilege of seeing the massive meat-eater in the flesh. When things go wrong, that goat becomes a signal for suspense. If the goat is gone, you know what is the most likely thing that has happened to it, and if the power is down you know what else. What is so effective about this scene is that so many inevitabilities have been built into it, and they have come about in such a natural way (at least I think). We were all introduced to the characters early on, and we are aware of their propensities. All of these disparate components come together for a moment of unremitting horror. We were never explicitly told that the lawyer is paranoid and irrational, that the granddaughter is not going to be the most cooperative member of the group or that Nedry is bumbling. In each case we had a chance to see all of the interpersonal and logistical conceits of the story play out naturally through character interactions relevant to the plot. All of the if's and then's and either's, etc. were present in our heads already, priming us for suspense.

Another good example is that Arzak strip, in which the pterodactyl-riding hero loses one of his companions to hunger and a weird anemone-like landscape. All without the aid of text, we know that if the animal he is riding gives out, Arzak will suffer the same fate. He needs a place to land, so that the bird can replenish its strength, but the only solid foundation for miles is an old arch watched over by a massive troll. Arzak needs to land, but he has to defeat the Troll first. All of the instruments of the Troll's defeat and the stakes which our hero finds himself in have been exposited to us in a series of pictures, leading to a conclusion made satisfying because of its simultaneous probability given the prior events and unexpectedness (or perhaps, the cleverness of its solution). I find that the most satisfying aspect of the experience of reading this particular comic is the feeling of success at understanding the narrative by connecting the pictures, and the freedom of interpretation available for the incidentals, such as the emotional states of each character. I would venture to say that the fact that the reader has to interpret those states sympathetically (by relating to the facial expressions, rather than text) it makes the impact that much more potent. Of course, those situations that involve conjunctions would be represented linguistically by the use of conjunctions, and the picture is a different form of representation entirely. I hope, however, that I have engendered some thought concerning the relationship between these two forms of representation and how a sequence of images may succeed where a single image cannot and with an impact that linguistic expressions do not provide. This impact is provided by the satisfaction the reader gains from "connecting the dots," the surprise of a clever resolution of the plot elements (or fulfilling expectations without merely meeting them), and the possibility of a sympathetic response. This seems to me to also divide downward, so that each bit of story has to break down in this way, from the simplest relation between characters, environments and so on, all the way up to the entire story itself. 

This is storytelling at the most basic level, the level of syntax or the manner in which a sentence can be analogous to a story. How the bits all work together naturally has a good deal to do with things like folk psychology and issues of story coherence. I shall have to write a bit more of the idea of 'cleverness' in a later post.