Silent books

FANUEL HANAN DIAZ

Visual discourse and the construction of meaning

Picture books as a category are an indispensable part of the territory of children's

books, not only because their presence is unquestionably notable in the
publishing circuit but because they have managed to position themselves as an
authentic expression of the discourse for childhood. Within this category, so-
called wordless picture books, silent books or mute books have gained
enormous visibility in recent years. Although the most classic and monolithic
definition of the picture book has as its fundamental essence the relationship
established between literary language and visual language within these books,
there is a category of them that are defined, paradoxically, by the absence of
texts. Books that develop their narrative and establish the possibilities of
interpretation in visual narration.

Before moving on to aspects related to the definition of these books, it would be

worth mentioning some milestones that have marked the evolution of these
books and given them greater visibility.

The already classic and well-known The Snow Man, by Raymond Briggs, offers
a precedent of how the use of elements of cinematographic language, the
succession of frames in different shots, construct the story of a boy whose
friendship with a snowman opens the way to the fantastic during a monotonous
winter. This book, published in 1978, truly innovated the possibilities that the
image could offer as an independent language, capable of tracing the lines of a
story and ensuring different possibilities of meaning, not only by the play with the
sizes of the frames but also by the silences that were created in the succession
of each scene. An unreal and intimate atmosphere is created by the cold and
blurred tone of the color palette, which also provides a meaning linked to a
strong longing for childhood as a space that adults have blurred.

Another important milestone is the book Emigrants, by Shaun Tan: the impact of
this book was truly decisive in the academic world. Published in 2006, it is
considered a graphic novel, another category that has emerged strongly in
recent years, marking out a new territory for visual discourse.

A man leaves his wife and son behind to find a better opportunity in another
country. There you will find a surprising world, where other migrants tell their own
story. Monochrome images intensely capture the power of narrative shots, in
close-ups that encourage internal explorations and details that hide deeper
misfortunes. All the uprooting with its crackling fears and its ghosts and its
fantasies are incorporated into this journey of no return that today feeds the
crudest dramas of the globalized world.

In fact, the third reference I would like to mention is related to a project launched
by IBBY Italia in response to the influx of migrants to the island of Lampedusa, to
create a library of wordless books that could help integrate hundreds of children
in need, whose first contact with the Other world is offered by these books that
are exclusively made up of images, without texts. This project has shown
different experiences of reading reception that are only possible because we
work with wordless books.

The topic I would like to discuss, that of visual discourse and the construction of
meaning, is urgent today, but also interesting in order to explore how images
have reached very sophisticated levels of significance in children's books. Before
presenting the different categories of this analysis, I would like to refer a little to
the concept of the silent book, known in English as wordless picturebook or
silent book. For Emma Bosch, this is a very complex category of books in its
variants, with very sophisticated possibilities in which the text is not completely
absent.

Wordless albums are books that tell stories primarily through images. If we were
strict, there would be none, since all books necessarily contain a title that
identifies them, the name of the authors, the publishing house and the
corresponding credits.

Even if they are not that radical, the truth is that there are not as many
"authentic" wordless albums as it may seem. So how many words are allowed
for a wordless album to be considered as such?

From this pressing question, there are many answers that allow us to establish
diverse behaviors of the texts that accompany these books, many of which due
to their peripheral location are called paratexts, a key word that arises in the
study of these books. Some of them are an inseparable part of the information
that gives substance to the book, that determines its existence, while others
shed light on its possibilities of interpretation.

Wordless books have evolved into more sophisticated forms of grammar,

considering that grammar supports narrativity, the possibilities of telling a story
and the way in which this story is told. In a way, and at the risk of being
simplistic, we can say, in general terms, that these are books with very little or no
text, which tell a story without the need to be accompanied by a literary text and
that the development of this story involves levels and narrative resources that
absorb borrowings from cinema, art and visual discourse itself. And because it is
a process of spatial composition, visual codes are deployed that can be as
powerful and suggestive as those of literary language.

Texts and illustrations, as we know, in picture books, coexist in a relationship of

complementarity and expansion. However, in this category of silent books, the
construction of meaning is generated from the magnificent and provocative
language of images. During this journey, I would like to delve into some
resources that, in my opinion, represent creative possibilities to encourage the
reader to search in the imprecise and inexhaustible universe of the visual. How
does a visual metaphor spark important insights? How does the invisible take on
new meanings? Is there silence in these wordless books? Transformations,
mirrors and concepts of the world impose unfathomable geographies that
challenge and provoke the reader.

Visual metaphors. Visual metaphors are constructed with terms that are neither
contiguous nor similar, as is the case with this photo of a cage in a cloudy sky or
the lung-like shape of this wonderful but sick forest, like that of a smoker. The
most powerful visual metaphors are built with terms that are not closely related,
such as the cage-cloud or lung-forest binomial. However, in the book Avant et
aprés, by Matthias Aregui and Anne-Margot Ramstein, winner of the Bologna
Ragazzi Prize, the double page works as a hinge that contrasts images,
sometimes contiguous and very delicate, like this flower that opens or these
leaves already eaten by caterpillars, more distant images like this one that is of
particular interest to those of us who write, or a visual paradox that proposes the
dilemma of what came first, the chicken or the egg. The juxtaposition of each
pair of images in smooth or more abrupt transitions generates intense reflections
on the effects of time.

The transformations in the visual world are inexhaustible, often revealing hidden
forms of things, merging disparate elements or telling us about imperceptible
changes within beings. In The Forest Within Me, by the Spanish director Adolfo
Serra, we witness the story of a boy who, in the middle of the forest, tries to find
himself, but instead discovers the presence of a character who accompanies him
back to the city. There this enigmatic character begins a process of loss of
identity, vanishing like birds in the wind. Destitute, in the middle of a concrete
jungle, the boy finds a small plant that has germinated and reminds him of his
primitive origin, and so begins a change that transforms him into a wild being.
Now, with his new look, he will return to the forest, on a journey to find his true
essence. In this search, many possibilities for reflection are woven, from solitude
as a shared feeling to the recovery of a natural state that makes us freer and
happier. The alter ego, the shadow, the reflection and the wild form an axis of
intense vital questioning.

The world is a room. I wanted to take a quote from Pablo Picasso to explore
this topic. Referring to a certain dark vision that can be seen in many of his
paintings, Picasso states that the modern world “resembles a furnished room in
which we all, gesticulating, await death.” This idea of the world as a room seems
incisive to me and I think that many silent books propose concepts of the world,
reflections on how the world is built, how it works and how we are supposed to fit
into it. Zoom is an excellent example of how a philosophical conceptualization of
the world, of the infinite and the small worlds contained in existence, makes us
see the smallness and ephemeral nature of our personal journey. Different
images reveal, in succession with pure black, that what we see seems to be only
a small part of a whole, until that eye above the universe that acts as a zoom
back reminds us that the entire planet is just a point in space, gravitating in the
most absolute darkness. Intelligent book that makes us think about one of the
great mysteries of existence. In this regard, I would like to reproduce an
anonymous Tuareg prayer, which connects with the depth of this message:

With the desert before you, do not say, "What silence!"

Say: I don't hear
With the desert before you, do not say, "How arid!"
Say: What a strange beauty!
With the desert before you, do not say: How vast!
Say: Where do I begin?
Wordless books also allow us to enter into those paradoxical crossroads where
we don't know if they give us answers to questions we ask ourselves, or if they
bounce back to us questions we had never thought of asking ourselves. Capital,
by the Portuguese author Afonso Cruz, outlines a vision of the contemporary
world, based on the question we all ask ourselves at some point: what we came
to do in this world. A boy receives a piggy bank in the shape of a pig as a gift,
and grows up with the sole goal of becoming a rich man. His life is destroyed by
his obsession with money, while the pig grows gigantic and grows until it devours
the entire city. Another form of dehumanization, in contemporary dystopian
societies, banking as an all-consuming, soulless abstraction, becomes a new
model of the world, even of a system where the wounded planet we inhabit has
taken the form of an expressionless piggy bank. Can books of this nature leave
you unscathed after reading them?

To close, I would like to refer to other ways in which the silent book generates
construction of meaning in the reader. The Red Herring, by Gonzalo Moure and
Alicia Varela, really inspires the construction of stories. Pictures full of details
connect with invisible threads the secret stories contained there, while a red
herring (a nod to the English word red herring, which refers to a false lead) floats
freely, almost swimming through the pages. At the end, an envelope that serves
as an essential paratext offers some of the stories and invites the reader to begin
their own tales. Without a doubt, despite the fact that it is a book without text, it
opens up infinite possibilities for the art of creating stories. The strange also
penetrates as a dialogue of unexpected elements in the same painting, as in the
Korean book The Gift, by Page Tsou, which tells of a family's unexpected visit to
a museum. The boy feels really strange and this uneasiness of the unusual
arises from the moment a huge cicada lands on his sweater, while the boy's
stupefied look tells us of a contained feeling of repulsion. At the ticket office he
hands the entrance ticket to an official, who has a label on his suit that says
“untitled,” as if it were an anonymous work of art. When he hands over the green
ticket we can see that it has the text “Open your eyes” written on it. In the next
scene, the official extends a clawed hand, while the ticket, now red and in
reverse, says “Open your mind.” From this scene onwards, the fantastic space
opens up, and the world takes on another meaning. Can these gestures be
powerful resources to install the strange as part of that restlessness that impels
the reader to go beyond the obvious?

The mirror behaves as another category that expands and explodes the
possibilities of constructing meaning. Barbara Lehma's The Red Book, published
in 2004, is so silent that it doesn't even have a title on the cover. It is the story of
a girl who finds an abandoned book in the snow, while far away a boy finds the
same red book on a beach. From there the book becomes filled with other
metaphors, serving as a map and as an entrance to another world. Both can be
seen throughout its pages. The reason for the trip appears, the girl takes flight in
a bunch of balloons. Meanwhile, the book slips from his hands and falls open to
the floor. In its open pages we can see how she arrives at the remote beach
where the boy she has connected with lives. The book can now reflect what is
happening in that world that has opened up between them. In the end, a new,
cautious reader is about to pick up the red book that has fallen to the floor. The
image of the book is thus constructed as a mirror that reflects the world back at
us, but which we can also cross to enter parallel universes, as Alice did.

Silent books can become sophisticated artifacts that offer a reading experience
beyond the immediate; they can move and amaze, they can soothe the retina
and leave a deep aesthetic mark on the soul, but they can also install disturbing
experiences, unanswerable questions, desires to search, seeds of the strange
and deep seas of content, conditions that make the construction of meanings
possible.

Lecture given at the Complutense University of Madrid, July 2017.

Literature
BANYAI, Istvan. (1995). Zoom. Mexico: Economic Culture Fund.
BOSCH, Emma. (2012). “How many words can a wordless picture book have?”
In OCNOS. Journal of Reading Studies. No. 8. Basin: University of Castilla-La
Mancha.
BRIGGS, Raymond.(1988). The snowman. Madrid: Altea.
CROSS, Afonso. (2017). Capital. Barcelona: Youth.
DIAZ, Fanuel Hanan. (2007). Reading and looking at the picture book: A genre
under construction? Bogotá: Norma.
LEHMAN, Barbara. (2004). The Red Book. Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin
Company.
MOURE, Gonzalo and Alicia Varela. (2012). The red herring. Madrid: SM.
RAMSTEIN, Anne-Margot and AREGUI; Mattias. (2013). Before and after. Paris:
Albin Michel.
SERRA, Adolfo. (2017). The forest within me. Mexico: Economic Culture Fund.
TAN, Shaun. (2016). Emigrants. Granada: Barbara Fiore Editor.
TSOU, Page. (2017). The Gift. Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum.