Pictures and Conversations

Alberto Manguel

“And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “with­out pic­tures or con­ver­sa­tion?” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

When I was twelve years old, I was taken to Baltimore for a stay of six months. It was my first time in the United States. In Buenos Aires, the notion we had of North America was through early tele­vi­sion series dubbed in Puerto Rico, Hollywood films that we watched in batches of three on Sunday after­noons, and comic books. The comic books were trans­lated in Mexico and were there­fore known to us as revis­tas meji­canas. Suddenly, in Baltimore, I dis­cov­ered that the large num­ber of revis­tas meji­canas I had known were only a small part of a seem­ingly lim­it­less uni­verse of comics. For every Superman and Batman there were dozens of tales of other, lesser known heroes; for every spine-tingling Tales of the Crypt there were whole armies of ghastly sto­ries; for every Little Lulu and Disney Comics there were gag­gles of other loony char­ac­ters to be metic­u­lously dis­cov­ered and fol­lowed. I came home with a knee-high pile of newly dis­cov­ered comic books that earned me the envy and solic­i­tude of many a pre­vi­ously scorn­ful fel­low student. 

In Buenos Aires we had our own lot of home-bred tal­ents. We grew up on the adven­tures of Patoruzú, drawn by Dante Quinterno, the only hero we knew who was a Native Indian and, mys­te­ri­ously, also a mil­lion­aire, and whose side­kick was a phi­lan­der­ing good-for-nothing young man from Buenos Aires, his god­fa­ther Isidoro. We traded the large, fat albums of El Tony, in which, together with a good selec­tion of for­eign strips such as “Mandrake the Magician” (by far my favourite) and “The Cisco Kid,” we read the weird and won­der­ful inven­tion of Héctor G. Oesterheld and Solano López, cre­ators of “El Eternauta” (“the Eternal Cosmonaut”), a time trav­eller who vis­its Earth from the remote future. Oesterheld was arrested by the mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment on April 27, 1977, and bru­tally tor­tured. Almost a year later he was seen by another pris­oner “in a ter­ri­ble state”; after that, he was never seen again. 

There were many polit­i­cal comics, from Quino’s seem­ingly inno­cent “Mafalda,” to the fierce satir­i­cal non­sense of Landrú. In his mag­a­zine Tía Vicenta, founded in 1957, he car­i­ca­tured the main polit­i­cal fig­ures of the day as well as cer­tain social types. But his great­est inven­tions were char­ac­ters whose absur­dity raised them high above the norm: Señor Porcel, who always insists that he is right; Cateura, the butcher who forces his son to study Latin “so that he will become a good butcher”; Rogelio, the man who rea­sons too much. A genius in his own right was Oski, whose won­der­fully baroque and crazy draw­ings (cou­pled with an equally baroque and crazy text, full of spelling idio­syn­crasies) won the admi­ra­tion of, among many oth­ers, Julio Cortázar. 

As chil­dren are all over the world, we were admon­ished for read­ing comics, mainly by adults who never read at all or who sup­posed that the only lit­er­a­ture worth read­ing was that endorsed by aca­d­e­mics and dusty crit­ics. The pro­hi­bi­tion added to the delight: we sus­pected that beyond the sheer plea­sure of fol­low­ing a story open to us in words and in images, we were read­ing some­thing else — some­thing that we were not sup­posed to see or know. 

The rela­tion­ship between words and images has trou­bled soci­ety for cen­turies, at least since the days of Greece and Rome, but espe­cially in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What were the lim­its of each in time and space? Did one assist or take away from the other? Which served the imag­i­na­tion most effec­tively? Rhetorically, the prob­lem was known by its Latin tag, ut pic­tura poe­sis, “as is paint­ing, so is poetry,” which Horace devised in his Ars Poetica in the first cen­tury bce, but this com­par­i­son only served to stress the dif­fer­ences between the two media. Two cen­turies later, the notion that “paint­ing is mute poetry and poetry a pic­ture in words” was, accord­ing to Plutarch, already com­mon­place. Whether words revealed pic­tures that were “mir­rors of the world” (Fray Luis de León) or pic­tures could be seen as “incar­na­tions of the Word” (Pico della Mirandola), it was obvi­ous that there was a rela­tion­ship between what was revealed to the mind through a rea­soned and con­ven­tional code of signs (the alpha­bet) and through an intu­itive and sen­so­r­ial code of lines, colours and shapes (visual images). This inti­macy between images and words is implicit in the Greek verb graphein, which means both “writ­ing” and “paint­ing,” as does the Chinese word hsieh.

For our ear­li­est ances­tors there was no dis­tinc­tion between these two meth­ods of record­ing. The ear­li­est exam­ples of writ­ing known to us (now crim­i­nally destroyed in the unre­stricted loot­ing of Baghdad) were two clay tablets dat­ing back six thou­sand years, one depict­ing a goat, the other a sheep, each sur­mounted by a small inden­ta­tion that archae­ol­o­gists have inter­preted as denot­ing the num­ber ten. The image of a goat was also the word for goat, much as, in the early Greek reli­gion, the thun­der­bolt stood both for Zeus and for his attribute. For these ancients, a pic­ture that was word­less, or a word that did not carry an image, was impov­er­ished if not inconceivable. 

Perhaps the strongest, clear­est expo­si­tion of the rela­tion­ship or con­flict was given in the eigh­teenth cen­tury by the German scholar Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon, a study of the now famous sculp­tural group carved in Rhodes about 25 BCE and dis­cov­ered in 1506 in the ruins of the Bath of Titus in Rome. For Lessing, words could (or should) fully describe and explore the emo­tions; images, how­ever, required greater restraint and found the power of the emo­tions. Lessing pointed out that a poet can depict the emo­tions of a char­ac­ter at any given moment and allow the reader to fol­low his or her progress through the nar­ra­tive; a painter or sculp­tor is bound to the instant and is there­fore con­strained to a sin­gle expres­sion. For Lessing, one “read­ing” evolves in time, the other in space; both require the active par­tic­i­pa­tion of the audi­ence. “One must be young,” the aged Goethe wrote in 1814, “to under­stand the influ­ence that Lessing’s Laokoon had on us, tear­ing us away from the pas­siv­ity of con­tem­pla­tion and open­ing up the free realms of thought. The ut pic­tura poe­sis, so long mis­un­der­stood, was all of a sud­den brushed away; their sum­mits seemed very dif­fer­ent to us, though close in their foundations.” 

Lessing’s dilemma had, in fact, been solved long before, but its solu­tion had to be estab­lished as a par­tic­u­lar artis­tic genre before its roots could be revealed. The sequence of fig­ures and signs on the murals of ancient Egypt, the friezes of the Greek tem­ples and Roman mon­u­ments, the mor­al­ized Bibles and Bibliae pau­pe­rum of the Middle Ages, the emblem books of the Renaissance, the polit­i­cal car­toons of the sev­en­teenth and eigh­teenth cen­turies — all antic­i­pated the form that would achieve its con­se­cra­tion in those comic books of my child­hood. The reader I am today owes them a debt of thanks.