The more abstract the talesman’s tools, the more play exists for us in the audience to reshape the tale in our own minds
Yesterday in ‘I Yam What I Yam’ I wrote about the joy of the first Max Fleischer studio Popeye cartoons. One thing I love about them is the linework, which is flexible and almost 3-dimensional in its effects.
Maybe it’s not so clear where the connection lies between pen and ink drawings on animation cells, and telling stories. It involves the level of abstraction and what that means for us as we hear or read or watch a tale.
Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics has a very nice section on how cartoonists can create drawings that are more or less ‘realistic’ (or looked at the other way, more or less ‘abstract’) and I highly recommend you check out what he has to say.
The gist of McCloud’s argument is that more-abstract or ‘cartoony’ figures allow more of us to identify with the characters represented. The more ‘realistic’ figures, on the other hand, are so specific that we understand them as ‘other’ than us, not archetypes, not ink-blots that allow us to fill them with our own dreams and longings.
In just this way, telling tales using words alone can be thought of as the most abstract way to represent events to an audience. How many times have we read a story or book, then gone to see the movie adaptation of it, and thought the actors cast in the roles don’t fit the way we ‘saw’ the characters at all? We each of us create some sort of image of the characters as we hear or read the tales, and these images are more or less well formed, depending on how imaginative we are and how visual our brains can be.
It lies in the talesman’s power to make his characters more or less amenable to this process of visualization by his audience. He can describe a character more or less specifically, he can focus on one or two visual traits and leave the others alone, not even mentioning them. Or he can leave a character as a name alone, or even a mere functionary noun such as ‘the coachman’ or ‘the bartender.’ There is also the character of the character. We tend to build composite sketches in our imaginations of various ‘types’ of people, whether loud and outgoing, flirtatious, bold, shy, nosy, grasping, generous, or what have you. These archetypal ‘Everyman’ characters are built up within societies over time, and in seeing standard portrayals of Jealousy, Greed, Power, Asceticism, we come to draw our own versions of these stock social characters. I’m sure that different cultures have different ways to represent these stock characters, and that the stock ‘company’ of one culture will differ from that of another culture. At the same time, there should be overlaps and parallels. An ascetic will likely be seen as thin and gaunt, with large deep eyes, in most of the world. A man of the world, jolly and hearty, is likely to be drawn as stocky or overweight, with laugh-lines about his eyes.
One interesting sidelight to this topic is where McCloud discusses Hergé’s famous ‘Tintin’ cartoon. Hergé (and his stable of background artists, inkers, and assistants) drew the characters in quite the abstract or ‘cartoony’ style, but was very specific and much more realistic in drawing ships, machinery, buildings, and backgrounds. What might seem at a remove as being a divided and unharmonious approach was rendered smoothly due to consistency in line; the backgrounds are not ‘photo-realistic’ by any means, and are only drawn with brush and pen and ink, and filled with flat expanses of color, like the cartoony characters.
This approach, McCloud believed, allowed us to accept the world as ‘real’ but left the characters as more or less cyphers, blanks into which we could fill ourselves, our dreams. Tintin himself, after all, has a face no more developed than Charlie Brown of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strip.
The equivalent in prose might be a world with detailed specific descriptions of background and devices and customs, but whose characters are vague, un-concrete sketches, identified by name and occupation alone, so that we have only their personalities to guide us in imagining what they might look like.
In yesterday’s post, I noted:
More realism = less fun!
I’ll extend that here in regard to all tales:
Less concreteness = more Romance!
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, July 23, 2008)
