Contextual Review / April 2020

Shortly after the Work in Progress show in March, I began to sift through the mountains of literature I'd gathered and half-read. This piece of writing is my initial attempt to gather together that initial contextual review into one place. It's hefty and not as good as I'd like it to be. AND ANYWAY.. it's never-stable.

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What can an interface between storyworld theory and narrative drawing tell us about the minimum necessary conditions for worldbuilding and storytelling?

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“Story goes everywhere and nowhere.”

Jerome Bruner in Actual Worlds, Possible Minds (1986).

Another Narrative, another drawing.

My inquiry examines the intersection of storyworlds and narrative drawing.

I aim to use the notion of storyworlds (Marie-Laure Ryan, David Herman et al) to develop a series of contextual approaches to narrative drawing which I will explore through drawing practice. The application of storyworld theory to making drawing is under-explored; more often it is used as a system to analyse existing factual and fictional worlds across a wide variety of narrative structures. My research will explore how its use as a basis for drawing narrative frameworks can expand our understanding of narrative worlds, and contribute to the field of narratology within visual media; notably, that of sequential and non-sequential drawn narrative.

Inevitably I must begin by defining the term storyworld. This term has existed within scholarly narrative analysis for over 20 years, however in recent years it has become increasingly popular as narrative and media franchises have intertwined. Notably, the expansion of global media organisations, and their intertextualization of multiple media properties, has enabled previously separate ‘worlds’ and ‘universes’ to entwine. Its origins as a term lay in the work of Gerard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov and Jerome Bruner, as well as in the work of David Herman. Its use in the analyses of literature are most prominent, although Jan Thon has increasingly applied it to comic books and video games. I will give a concise overview of the idea of storyworlds, and establish the particular parameters of its definition which connect to my own inquiry.

Marie Laure Ryan suggests that ‘narrativity’ is a “center that is itself organized around a storyworld” (2014: 3). Ryan’s hierarchy puts the storyworld above the plot; for her the storyworld is a place of imagination and fascination, far broader than the “plots that take place in them” (2014: 19) as these worlds are inherently rhizomatic. “Follow the plants,” assert Deleuze and Guattari; “you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities.”. They reach outwards and impicitly describe new dimensions in which other stories are taking place. If a storyworld is a rhizomatic extension of a plot, then I must define what a plot is within the broader function of storytelling. This definition will form the basis of chapter 2. A storyworld arguably cannot exist without a story, be it fictional or factual (Ryan et al), linguistic or visual, spoken or performed. In this inquiry it will be drawn. For the purposes of this writing, I will refer to narrative forms by the use of the word text, be they literature, poetry, films or comics - ‘text’ will broadly represent narrative form. Mieke Bal explains that a comic book is considered a text by those who interpret the term text broadly; in comics (and films) the visual image is used as “non-linguistic sign-system” in conjunction with language texts (Bal, 2008: 4).

Narrative drawing will be the subject of chapter 3. This term is extraordinarily broad, and I will use the work of a number of writers, practitioners and thinkers in laying the foundations for what narrative drawing can be. No single definition exists, but as with Chapters 1 and 2 I will extrapolate a set of rules which will underpin my own drawing practice, and enable the reader to distinguish between the various acts of mark-making which constitute a drawing. I will explain and demonstrate how these marks may converge into a sequential or non-sequential form which, through a set of visual and lexical grammars, can both tell a story and provide the basis for a storyworld. This definition will position the use of drawing in my own practice.

The confluence of these definitions will lead us into the penultimate definition of this paper: world-building. By drawing on definitions of storyworlds and the telling of stories, I will demonstrate its use in the building of worlds. The term world is wide-ranging. In William James’s The Perception of Reality (1869), James postulates that worlds can be equated to a variety of realities, calling them the “orders of existence” (James 1950 in Goffman 1986: 2). We tend to take for granted the interchangeability of the words ‘world’ and ‘reality’, but early 20th century psychology and sociology originated a multitude of approaches to our ability to “generate a ‘world’ of a given kind” (Goffman 1986), dependent on our socio-constructivist encounters, our cultural capital, historical understanding and upbringing. The ubiquity of the term world is extensive and multi-modal, but I will deploy it in a specific context; that of drawing. My proposal for this inquiry used the word ‘frame’ to question the boundaries of worlds, and that is how I seek to draw these interchangeable and amorphous terms into one clear line of inquiry; that of the world built by authors (or in my own case, drawers) and readers, who instinctively frame and unframe worlds in response to a set of visual and verbal cues, and who learn through the practice of engaging with narrative images to both understand and question the representation of story through drawing. The reader’s response to - and implicit co-creation of - possible worlds is a symbiosis between author and viewer, responding to tangible and intangible stimuli within and without the worlds which constitute the frames of our histories and fictions.

Finally, my inquiry will coalesce these definitions into a practical ‘interface’. This definition will form through an analysis of the potential combinations of the four previous sections; through practical visual experimentation, I will formulate innovative approaches to the interplay between theory and practice, and demonstrate new methodological potential for one of our most practiced skills: putting a story onto a surface.

1:

Collaborating in Unreality: Adventures in the Storyworld

The difference between a world and a storyworld.

My interest in the phrase storyworld emerged several years ago as I worked with a student on a small scale research inquiry into how a museum narrative can be diagrammed. Pursuing this further, I started to equate the notion of storyworlds with a narrative environment that I found most familiar, and into which I had conducted both textual and visual research: the stories of the American West in cinema. My most recent practical experiments have used the 1946 John Ford western My Darling Clementine as a basis for exploring the visual mapping of storyworlds. For now, the Western is where I choose to locate my practical experimentation.

Worlds and storyworlds are sometimes used synonymously. But this inquiry will begin by dividing them. Here I will use a range of approaches to delineate where, how and why storyworlds differ from the broader term world. Later I will explore the concept of world-building, which is ontologically different from both world and storyworld.

In Story/Worlds/Media: Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious Narratology, Marie Laure-Ryan argues that a world is significantly different from a storyworld. She equates the term world with “worldview” - a philosophical approach or set of ideas (2014: 32). This form of world generally exists outside the text; John Ford, for example, had an overarching vision of the West into which he set a vast range of Western stories. The storyworld, for Ryan, has three distinctive features from a world: firstly it is unique to a single text, not a body of work. Secondly, it must stem from narrative content, which, potentially, excludes poetry (especially “lyrical” poetry). And thirdly, it is the “world of the characters”, rendering the author’s external world as something other than the story world (ibid). A storyworld is a form of a world which is shaped by a story. It is from that world that individual storyworlds stem. The presentation and performance of a narrative is based on an autonomous world.. It is through this presentation that we engage with the storyworld; that is to say, it is the very specific version of a world that the story denotes (2014: 33). For Ryan, the text becomes the signifer, the storyworld the signified and an external (or, in some cases, ‘real’) world becomes the referent (2014: 34). Any form of media can only go so far in presenting aspects of a world; the ‘world’ is simply too enormous to be contained within a text. Thus, the reader becomes complicit in the construction of the storyworld. They will fill in what is necessary to complete the storyworld from shared or individual points of reference. The reader’s imagination, states Ryan, will “import knowledge” in order to make it logically possible to understand and accept the reality of the storyworld. Unless something is explicitly described otherwise, we will assume it exists in the storyworld as it does in ‘our’ world.

What ‘our’ world is becomes one of the more ontologically exciting possibilities in storyworlds and what David Herman calls story logic. Herman contributed a key definition for the storyworld in Basic elements of narrative (2009); he refers to them as “global mental representations”. In Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (2002), Herman attempts to understand the endlessly complex cognitive processes that are required to comprehend a narrative: for him the restructuring of these mental models is done intuitively and often seamlessly.

Thierry Groensteen calls comics a “genre found on reticence” (2007: 10). In describing the peculiar alchemy of panel structures and compositional frames, Groensteen explains how comics “offer the reader a story that is full of holes”; the reader is not only expected to reconstruct a reality from a series of fragments of said reality, but goes so far as to speculate as the ability of the reader to forget their “project[ion] into the fiction”. Erving Goffman, referring to an audience’s ability to suspend their disbelief in order to engage in theatre, describes this transformation as a “collaborat[ion] in unreality” (Goffman 1986: 136). In order to construct a drawn visual narrative, the breaking up of visual grammar across a spatio-temporal grid is, ultimately, the system of a comic structure. In my practical and theoretical underpinning, I will argue that the world of the narrative action is shown within these panels, but the storyworld exists outwith. How this intersects with space, time and action is a whole other messy business.

Story Worlds and space time

In what Kai Mikkonen calls a “formal” (and potentially unnecessary) definition, Scott McCloud explains that comics are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud 1993: 9 in Mikkonen 2017: 12). McCloud describes panels as a “fracture” in time and space, “offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments”. The reader’s construction of a reality which is continuous is, for Groensteen, a mark of an “investment [or absorption] in the virtual world” (1999:10); for McCloud, it is what he terms comics’ ability to provide closure (1993 :63). The term closure connects with Noel Carroll’s theory of the nature of narrative closure, wherein he describes a “phenomenological feeling of finality” (Carroll 2007) or with notions of causal closure (Peirce et al).

McCloud quite broadly defines the notion of closure as “observing the parts but perceiving the whole''. Of course, by differentiating between the world and the storyworld, we can question which, in this case, the term “whole” can refer. Doležel tells us that all texts are limited by their boundaries, and as such will most certainly result in “incomplete worlds” (in Herman 2002: 67). Herman reminds us of Wolfgang Iser’s gappiness: where the text lacks information or specificity, an implicit expectation is placed upon the reader to “supply crucial information” (Herman 2002: 68). To develop Gerard Genette’s term paralipsis, the interval between drawings or panels in the framework of a narrative arguably draws attention to what isn’t there through an act of omission. In this case, taking Genette’s position, the narrator is in control of what information is focalized, and what is not. By drawing - or not drawing - the author is choosing what to include or omit.

2:

Telling a story.

Perhaps it is apt to quote, as Seymour Chatman does in Story and Discourse, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: “‘Begin at the beginning’ the King said, gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop’ (Chatman, 1980).” For Gerard Genette, the story is the signified (whereas the narrative is the signifier). He describes narrative as the way in which we tell a story; the story is the “thing told” (Genette, 1980: 27, 33).

In Once Upon A Time: A Short History of the Fairy Tale, Marina Warner tells us that a story “is an archive, packed with history” (2016). Let’s expand on this definition using Genette; a story is packed with content, an event, or a set of happenings (Genette 1980: 25). For Genette, only narration can make a story and a narrative exist; a story must be structured, and that structure must be narrated. Genette’s focus was on the methods by which we tell those stories, as well the event of telling those stories. The story is the original event; the narration is the event of explaining the events which previously unfolded. So, the archive, packed with history, is unpacked through narration. Broadly speaking, this is the definition with which I will work. The narrator, in Genette’s Narrative Discourse, is in control - “in a trance”, able to hold all aspects of the story, all frames of time and space, achieving an “omnitemporality” (Genette 1980: 1978). The story has duration and limitations; the narrative does not. Story exists for Genette “as soon as there is an action or event”, which he describes as a “transformation” (Genette 1988: 22).

David Herman agrees with Genette’s assertion that a narrated series of such transformative events does not constitute a narrative; it is the interweaving of these elements into a structure of goals and behaviours, of “beliefs, desires and intentions”, that allows events to cohere into a narrative (Herman 1999: 82-83). My recent work on My Darling Clementine focused on a cohesion of story-events, which is both enabled and disrupted by narration; the original narration of John Ford’s storytelling intercut with my own meta-narrative of the possible events of a wider, storyworld whose intersection with Ford’s story continues to allow the plot to move forward ‘naturally’. Nothing has changed the sequence of events as intended, thus the story remains intact in its original form. Events happened. In terms of paralipsis, Ford chose to tell the story without feeling the need to explain why a stagecoach arrives at a key moment in the action; to Ford it isn’t necessary to explain the reasons for its existence. David Jenkins’ description of this arriving stagecoach still gives my thesis its title: “another narrative, another film” (Jenkins, 2014). It is simply an event. My work on Unentwined Clementine (Jackson, 2020) aimed to both remedy and disrupt this omission; to maintain the story whilst examining the gappiness of the narration. My intention here is to make that gappiness manifest; not only through the inclusion of previously-absent elements, but to insert those elements into literal gaps on the page - the spaces between panels, themselves a static representation of Ford’s camera framework. This is no longer Ford’s narrative - though it is ‘his’ story. It became mine during the conversion, and it becomes the viewer’s as I publish and exhibit it.

3. Narrative Drawing.

Whatever graphic style an artist uses, she is always not only depicting something, but also expressing at the same time a visual interpretation of the (fictive) world. Every drawing style implies an ontology of the representable or visualizable (Rawson 1987).

When Neil Cohn first starts to discuss schema in The Visual Language of Comics (Cohn 2013: 10) it is in reference to the authorship of characters within drawing, notably the "graphic structure[s]" that allow us to recognise and create forms. Cohn's approach to comic books' visual language is to use the grammatical structure of written language to explore the morphology of drawing systems in sequential imagery. He describes morphology as the study of "units of meanings manifested in a modality" (Cohn 2013: 23), and seeks to explore how these can be seen as visual units "stored in people's memory" (Cohn 2013: 24). Cohn expands on this by using what lexicographers and grammatologists call open- and closed-class items. Andrew Carnie tells us that "parts of speech that allow new members are said to be open class. Those that don't (or where coinages are very rare) are closed class" (Carnie 2013). Cohn argues that "most .. drawings are open-class items" (Cohn 2013: 24) as they can be added to easily through invention, adaptation, stylistic shifts et al. But in comic books, for example, he states that a closed class exists in the form of speech bubbles and motion blurs.

Cohn's work, and Simon Grennan's further exploration (and critique) of these ideas leads me to question the schema within my own modality. As an illustrator, much of my work is commissioned based on an existing portfolio which demonstrates a style. Though the content of these illustrations changes at a perceptual level (as I draw a wide variety of things) the way in which I make a mark is, essentially, the same. Grennan, in A Theory of Narrative Drawing (2018) describes the making of a mark as a goal-oriented drawing where the goal is twofold: to make a mark (thus making the drawing 'complete') and to use that mark to depict an intention of showing (thus making the drawing 'complete'). He says that the drawer "selects from a number of possible .. actions" (Grennan 2018: 2) which can combine into a schemata of sorts, akin to syntactical choice in constructing a meaningful sentence; conversely, those actions also may not combine into a meaningful whole, but be simply a set of drawn marks. He presents the difference between drawing as action, and that action of drawing resulting in depiction (2018: 8). There are activities and there are goals. They don't always overlap. Sometimes the same activity achieves the same goal - for instance, when the act of making a type of mark depicts the same thing; To demonstrate the artist’s "fluency" in the storage of vast, complex schemata, Cohn uses a diagram to show how comic artist Erik Larsen's combination of schemata form a distinctive, systematic lexicon of hands, noses, forearms and jaws (Cohn 2013: 29). But there are times, says Grennan, where the same marks are made to achieve "very different goals" (Grennan 2018: 9); I sometimes copy and paste a mark made for the edge of someone's face in a line drawing to become a part of a foot, which I suspect is not ‘making’ the same mark, but recognising that an activity designed for one goal can effectively be bastardised for another purpose elsewhere. I do this a LOT when I am working on Photoshop. I also find that the line used to draw the tip of a forehead is often standardised across any face I draw; I may later edit this into a more accurate line, but its initial mark is a form of anchorage from which other lines may rhizomatically emerge.

I've been reading Cohn and Grennan concurrently, and trying to come to terms with this idea. My proposal talked of frames at the edges of so-called worlds. The frame offered a way of unboundarying the drawn-world; my diversions into the function of that drawing led me to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the diagram, and my understanding of world-building in and around texts started to veer toward Genette's paratext. But I had been overlooking narrative-drawing in favour of other structural modalities. Cohn's approach to schema connects to my own idea of iterative practice, to an extent; that said, I rarely repeat Cohn's schemata within my own work - possibly because I don't generally draw sequential narratives which require a lexicon of icons. Cohn's work led me to aspects of Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Schemas, says Piaget, "are the basic building blocks of .. cognitive models, and enable us to form a mental representation of the world" (Piaget 1952 in McLeod 2018). Stored patterns of behaviour are what Cohn uses to attempt a structural understanding of comics' visual language, because the way drawings are made resembles the way that we structure language. But Grennan counters this because of the uniqueness of visual depiction: we not only see the depiction, but also the "marks that constitute the depiction" (Grennan 2017, my emphasis).

Simon Grennan uses the term 'seeing-in' which he borrows from Richard Wolheim (Wolheim in Grennan 2018: 25). Referring to Woldheim's 'seeing-in', Tamarin Norwood describes it as "the difficult relationship between surface and image" (Norwood 2015). Quoting Woldheim, "when seeing-in occurs, two things happen: I am visually aware of the surface I look at, and I discern something standing out in front of, or (in certain cases) receding behind, something else. […]". Grennan has a number of issues with Cohn's morphology; principally, that the way we topologically and proximally understand the syntactical structures of language is very different to the way we understand visual signs. An image of a thing can only depict the thing but what, in the image, do we class as depiction? Grennan states that, whilst there is some degree of "'repleteness' in depictions" as there might be within a sentence, where we can count lexical items (Grennan 2017), the way in which we understand and experience the depiction makes its repleteness indefinable. "There is only the depiction and its objects and nothing else", he states. But the associative powers of visual signs are instrumental, not only in the way we deconstruct a 'single' depiction, but even more so when we observe them in a sequence. Switch the order of a sentence structure, says Grennan, and its meaning becomes incoherent; doing the same to a sequence of depicted images may not alter its coherence.

At this still-early point in my research, I am not only trying to assess my own practice (which is clearly goal-oriented in the sense of Grennan's depiction, as I am often trying to render a series of visual codes into a coherent, interpretivist system of signs that enhance the understanding of accompanying linguistic material; that’s my definition of editorial illustration) but I am also mark-making based on schematic uses of marks which, through the physicality of how I move a pen across paper, look like the drawings that I make (or, should I say, Wesley makes - but the goal-orientation of a style adopted by an alter-ego intentionally created in order to explore a style is a whole other thing - maybe a whole other chapter). My research question has recently been hammered into shape. I currently am waiting for my AfR form to be returned from the CRC, and I expect there to be a series of recommendations as to what my project seeks to achieve, how it will do that and why it is necessary.. but I feel most comfortable with the question as it now appears:

"What can an interface between storyworld theory and narrative drawing tell us about the minimum necessary conditions for worldbuilding and storytelling?"

I like the word interface in this form of the question. It also contains the word I am currently most excited about - 'minimum'. Schemata exist, according to Piaget, in order for us to construct world views, or global mental models. Though I am wary of Cohn's morphological interface between words and images (mainly because Simon Grennan's critique is so damning), the word schema has suddenly entered my lexicon in looking for something new, here, in the way a world is drawn-as-story. Something minimal, possibly like a diagram.

4.

Building Worlds means building possibilities

Speaking of storytelling’s potential to manipulate the forms of worlds, Siobhan Leddy describes narratives as being able to “bring realities into being’ (2019). Note here the four pluralised words: forms, worlds, narratives and realities. If it were not clear from earlier sections (it might possibly not have been..), we are examining the potential of expansions, duplications, reformattings, reinterpretations, escapes and possibilities within a narrative drawing framework. Jerome Bruner quotes Paul Ricoeur from Time and Narrative: Stories act as “models for the redescription of the world” (Bruner 1986: 7). A redescription, not a new construction. And what does Ricoeur mean by his use of a definite article: the world? To describe world-building we must, to some degree, understand how the concept of multiple, possible worlds became part of our cultural lexicon; for Bruner, the psychological understanding of narrative and experience depends on a theory of possible worlds. Our ability to hold abundant fictions – and multiple truths – in our heads simultaneously allows the capacity for us to narrate, and be narrated to. Plurality allows us to look at the world, like Ricouer, through multiple points of view. But storyworlds are worlds within themselves; worlds, as Marie Laure Ryan points out, with a potential referent in our ‘real’ world. But they become worlds anew, rhizomatically programmed with what Espen J. Aarseth might call ergodic possibilities (1997). Anything can happen, and this is made possible by projecting ourselves onto the events within the text and building that world through experience, tacit cues and implicit provocation.

World-building is something which we are all innately capable of. Here I will outline Bruner’s approach to world-building as a form of framing action. I will use aspects of Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis to help explain our willingness to suspend our attachment to a firm ontological referent, however temporarily. And I will connect this back to drawing as a practice which, when integrated with text, allows worlds to be constructed that sustain SOMETHING SOMETHING.

5:

What is an interface?

“No cause of another universe causes an event in a particular universe. This view permits the one universe to be affected by the other via an interface.” Gamper, 2017

My interface is global. In the instance of Unentwined Clementine it was very much about representing (and tracing) the wider global possibilities extending outwards from the linear narrative. Groensteen considers panel structures within narrative drawing “interdependent fragments of a global form” (2007: 30); cognition - of a world-building narrative - comes through our orientation within and without the frames. My visual experimentation with the notion of drawing acting as an interface between a narrated picture space and the idea of storyworlds has focused on the depiction of spaces and frameworks. It also continues to play with intertextual referents and forms of metalepsis. I am, of course, present through the stylistic mark-making that my drawing entails. Neil Cohn tells us that comics incorporate “the results of two human behaviours: writing and drawing” (2016). In using the conventions of the panel to frame the actions of Wyatt Earp at the OK Corrall in My Darling Clementine, I chose to select compositions from the film language of John Ford, and to use dialogue from the script in the speech bubbles. In some cases I extended this into stage direction - particularly when the drawings I had produced perhaps did not fulfil the goals as I had intended; perhaps a poorly-drawn sketchbook note did not fully represent the pointing of a finger at the distant stagecoach. So I would, in such a case, add the word “look!”. It’s hardly poetry. But the sketchbook is not a cautious, meticulous space for me. The use of a sketchbook is instinctive and organic; deliberate at times, but mainly it sits within Simon Grennan’s BIT ABOUT SQUIGGLES FROM NARRATIVE DRAWING. There’s a rough-hewn sense of purpose but it is a part of a larger goal. Mashing these multiple, mis-sized sequences into something approaching a whole is, as Groensteen puts it, drawing together interdependent fragments. The practice of making is equal to the reading. There are gaps, but the fragmentary nature might allow us to understand the narrative action. In this case, I was simply restaging the narrative action in order to allow an extension of that narrative to take place in the wider storyworld. And I chose to form this interface of narrative drawing and storyworld as a diagrammatic world.

The diagram and the global story-map have been a point of exploration and will continue to be so for the coming months. It is the visual line of inquiry that I think starts to demonstrate the interface between a narrative form of drawing and the construction of a storyworld.

“If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it's a Western”

Paraphrased from Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Next I will start experimenting with several other world-maps. I intend to begin with Once Upon A Time In The West (1969). In Sergio Leone’s vision of a mythical west, he pays homage to myriad genre tropes, to Westerns from Hollywood’s golden age, constructing a world-view that apes John Ford’s own Monument Valley. Leone’s West is based in a mythical construct; its characters are archetypes, its plots predicated on what Will Wright calls the ‘vengeance’ variation of Western narratives; it also includes the notion of the robber baron, disrupting the libertarian, individualist themes of the West by introducing capitalist villainy. Once Upon A Time In The West is very much a self-contained storyworld, and makes little reference to a referent world outside its delineated cinematic geography. The only entrance to this storyworld comes in the form of the railway, thus I have started to think about the train as a device that allows me to draw the map of Once Upon A Time In The West’s world.

Leone’s film famously opens with a 9-minute title sequence at a railway station in the middle of the desert. Three gunmen wait, and the audience waits with them. For nine minutes, there is no story: it is the first event in the movie (if we discount the timeline depicted through the character Harmonica’s flashbacks later on). But it isn’t an event. We might call this world-building, but that suggests information, of which we receive next to none. It immerses us in a moment which is characterful without really depicting characters; world-building without descriptors or dialogue. It is a temporal vacuum, as if Leone began recording the events of Once Upon A Time In The West several minutes too early.

The final credits roll just as a train whistle sounds, out-of-shot. The train arrives at the station, huffing, wheezing; the three gunmen have converged and watch cautiously, tentatively, as if anticipating a presence. There is none. And the train slowly pulls away. And just as the gunmen turn away to reposition themselves lazily around the station, we hear the sound of a harmonica.. And now the story begins.

Let us imagine that Harmonica shared this train with Jill McBain, who is on her way to the town of Flagstaff, as she makes her way to her new husband’s farm. She doesn’t yet know that he, and his three children, are dead. This part of the narrative follows the encounter between the three gunmen and Harmonica. At this point in the narrative, we have yet to meet Jill; but we will later realise she is arriving by train. It isn’t implied that it is the same train, yet in this particular storyworld it so easily could be. So my argument here might be to map this world through a single entry point; that of the train bringing two of the main characters into the world. The railway is being built as the story moves forward; indeed, by the conclusion of Once Upon A Time In The West, it will reach the scene of the final duel. Thus, the progress of the rail (itself a metaphor for the coming civilization of the mythical West) is an example of spatio-topia. It occupies both space and time in the narrative. Thus, I can draw it as a global map; it can represent the limits of the storyworld both in a temporal and geographical sense, and it can have the story take place within its boundaries.

References:

Aarseth, E. J. (1997) Cybertext : perspectives on ergodic literature. USA: Johns Hopkins University Press

Bruner, J., (1986) Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2017) A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia. London [U.A.] Bloomsbury.

Gamper, J. On a Loophole in Causal Closure. Philosophia 45, 631–636 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9791-y

Genette, G. (1980) Narrative Discourse: an essay in method. USA: Cornell University Press.

Grennan, S. (2018) A Theory of Narrative Drawing. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Groensteen, T. (2007). The System of Comics. Translated by Beaty, B. & Nguyen, N. USA: University Press of Mississippi

Herman, D., 2002, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, USA: U of Nebraska Press

Leddy, S. (2019). We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin. [online] The Outline. Available at: https://theoutline.com/post/7886/ursula-le-guin-carrier-bag-theory?zd=2&zi=ryigdyxg [Accessed 3 Apr. 2020].

Ricoeur, P. (1983) Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ryan, Marie-Laure and Thon, Jan-Noël (2014). Storyworlds across Media. USA: University of Nebraska Press.

Shen, Dan (2001). "Breaking Conventional Barriers: Transgressions of Modes of Focalization." W. van Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY, 159–72.

Another narrative, another drawing | Year 01

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