In fairness, McCloud considers a wide variety of panel-to-panel transitions, and some of those unquestionably do call for filling-in with mental imagery to one degree or another. But there's good reason to believe that doesn't happen in the case of simple actions and motions like the eyeblink he uses to illustrate the point. Sometimes gutters work because they don't need filling in.The imagery evoked by prose fiction is purely mental from the outset, generated internally as directed by the author's descriptions and storytelling. In Dreaming by the Book, Elaine Scarry identifies one common technique authors use to animate imagery and convey a sense of motion, which exploits precisely the same gutter effect we find in comics:
If an image is present, then disappears, it seems to have moved. This act of subtraction is an easy operation to perform, since it takes almost as much mental labor to sustain an image over three, five, or twenty-five seconds as to compose it in the first place. Permitting it to vanish requires no work, since, left to itself, the image vanishes on its own.In Image and Brain, Stephen Kosslyn calls this way of animating mental imagery a "blink transformation":
When Charles Bovary first travels to Les Bertaux at dawn on a winter morning, as he nears his destination we are asked to picture the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the small boy who acts as his guide. The following sentence requires three still pictures in the mind, a boy in front of a hedge, a hedge with no boy in front of it, a gate with a boy in front of it: "The boy slipped through an opening in the hedge, disappeared, then reappeared ahead, opening a farmyard gate from within." . . .
The extraordinary sense of violent movement in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights depends on many practices, one of which is addition and subtraction. Often Bronte's most powerful scenes are dyadic: two pictures appear in the mind, bang, bang, two acts of imagistic assertion, with the second simply erasing or subtracting the first. Here is Nelly describing the last meeting between Catherine and Heathcliff before Catherine's death.An instant they held asunder; and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace.Two spatially separate persons are imagined--click--and now the two are jammed together. The verb, "made a spring," dictates this sudden revision without precisely specifying how it happens. In fact, we are explicitly relieved of the requirement to imagine the transition: "I hardly saw . . ." The scene continues:He flung himself into the nearest seat.We move across two pictures: Heathcliff (with Catherine in his arms) standing; Heathcliff (with Catherine in his arms) sitting; and the word "flung," rather than precisely being an embodied action that we see, simply acts to force us, as would an imperative, to change the picture to the second item of the dyad. The image of Heathcliff in the chair arrives in the mind as though it had been flung there.
Such seemingly continuous shift transformations [i.e. continuously rotating, panning over, or zooming in on a sustained mental image] are to be distinguished from blink transformations. Objects sometimes can be transformed by allowing one image to fade and generating a new one that is altered in the specified way; objects transformed in this way do not appear to move through intermediate positions.Given Point A and Point B, we're generally able to infer motion without needing to generate mental imagery to represent it--without, that is, filling in the gutter. It's a good thing we can do that, too, because stuff is moving all around us all the time, and we catch only a very small percentage of it in the act. Our attention is frequently drawn away from moving objects and then back to them again. If I'm watching a car move along a road, and look away for a moment, when I then look back at the car in its new position, I don't need to rewind and visualize it moving through the part I missed to understand that it's moved through that part. I don't need to do that, either, if two comics panels show a car at different points along a predictable trajectory.
UPDATE: McCloud responds.
11 comments:
Well, it is odd but my impression is that what you and Scott are talking about is the same thing, except that you are describing it differently, which makes it appear different. I think Scott's idea of 'filling in' the way he illustrates with that little panel is an abstraction, and in fact does NOT really refers to a literal imagining of the intermediate steps as it SEEMS to suggest. Rather, just like you pointed out, it indicates the process of inferring the existence of intervening motion from the two end points. In fact, in the science of visual perception (I literally have a PhD in this :P) this sort of thing is termed a 'perceptual fill-in' (although I believe the exact term is more commonly used for, say, the inference of continuous contours and objects when part of the contour or object is occluded). Does that make sense?
And please ignore the typos and grammatical errors in the preceding, I am a bit tired :P
The last part of your comment makes perfect sense, Doruk. What I don't understand is why you try to say McCloud's illustration doesn't mean what it plainly does mean. There's no question that we're able to infer the intervening motion between two endpoints. But he literally draws a "Cartesian theater" which displays intermediate steps. That's exactly the part I'm disagreeing with, and I don't understand why you think he's not actually saying that.
It is a possibility that, having been immersed so deeply in that field of science, I might have just assumed he meant what matches my prior knowledge. I will have to read that section again when I go back home.
I also have not read UC for some years, so I don't remember the "Cartesian theater" though it may well be in there.
I remember that my objection to the "closure" argument, as I recall it, is that he was saying that it was something special to the comics medium. I think you're demonstrated that it exists in pretty much all narrative media.
Gene, I take that panel I posted here to represent a Cartesian theater, complete with a screening of the kind of mental imagery I argue is entirely unnecessary.
McCloud is explicit that closure pervades all media and life, but he does emphasize the role it plays in comics.
Scott McCloud actually said on his blog today that his intention was closer to what Doruk explained in his first post. Now whether that intention was communicated clearly is another story, but the point should be weighed in context with the entire book.
For what it’s worth, here’s how I read the panel:
First off, a single panel when scrutinized out of context can become really disembodied from its intended meaning.
When you go through this section of UC, the “take away” is
–the brain constructs MEANING between the panels–
That’s the point that is reiterated; that’s what “sticks.”
If Scott McCloud’s point was solely that specific Pictorial Images are constructed in the mind, then that would be a pretty loaded statement; one that would have been expressed in text, and reiterated.
For me, the panel of the “eye closing” when read in passing just connotes “stuff goes on between the panels.” Specifically, when confronted with an eye open and then an eye closed, the brain decides “the eye has blinked” rather than “this is an open eye and a separate closed eye.”
It never even occurred to me that Scott was suggesting that the brain creates specific images of an eye in the intermediate stages of blinking.
Basically, I think by going to this single panel as the meaning for Scott McCloud’s theory on comics-closure might be a case of “not seeing the forest for the trees.”
Also, while I don’t believe that Scott McCloud’s point was that the brain exclusively creates pictorial images in the gutter, I do believe that it can. In the gutter, the brain can create a specific image, a image-less imaginary sound, a vague conceptual bridge, etc. The abilities of the gutter are very broad, a point I believe McCloud makes very clear in Understanding Comics.
Perhaps if a animated film was made of Understanding Comics, a less misleading image would be showing a panel of an opened eye, then an adjacent panel of a closed eye, then showing a brain with a flash animation of an eye blinking. But, like I said, I pretty much got that message from the book as it was written.
Matthew–you make a lot of good points that make me think my own points weren’t expressed as well as they could be. I’m very familiar with UNDERSTANDING COMICS as a whole, having read it multiple times, and in particular the “Blood in the Gutter” chapter, having reread it a few more times in preparation for my recent posts. I know McCloud’s big, broad point in that chapter is that the brain constructs meaning between panels. I agree with that, and appreciate the witty, insightful way he goes about illustrating it. I never thought for one instant, and never meant to suggest, that his “point was solely (emphasis added) that specific Pictorial Images are constructed in the mind.”
I think I myself expressed just about every point you make in your second-to-last paragraph when I said, “In fairness, McCloud considers a wide variety of panel-to-panel transitions, and some of those unquestionably do call for filling-in with mental imagery to one degree or another.” And I know some of them are a lot more conceptual and abstract, calling for little or no imagery.
So I didn’t think I was taking that panel out of context. It looked to me like he was illustrating one example of one kind of closure, and I tried to make it clear I wasn’t offering some wholesale critique of UNDERSTANDING COMICS, but a quibble over a very specific point. I’m afraid I didn’t offer enough context for my argument (i.e. my broad agreement with McCloud on the vast majority of the rest of that book), if it seemed like I was under the delusion that I was refuting UC on the basis of a single panel.
Yeah, I feel I was too harsh in my criticism. You seem to know UC inside and out from reading your whole post (not to mention a lot of outside theory on the subject). I guess I just thought it was an unfortunate way to lead off the article just because someone who hasn’t read UC might get the wrong initial impression about McCloud’s theory on closure.
You weren't too harsh, Matthew. If I'm going to launch into a criticism like that, I need to be more mindful how it will come across. None of my postings on the topic so far do justice to McCloud's whole discussion of closure. You're right to call me on it.
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