AMERICAN NOVELS WITHOUT WORDS

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 15th 2011

Lynd Ward Gods man The Library of America produces scholarly editions of major American writers (it's modelled on the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series in France) and its list of authors runs from Herman Melville to Kurt Vonnegut. Last year it republished a series of novels without words. This was a first. It confirmed the graphic artist Lynd Ward's position as a major American storyteller.

In a useful review of "Six Novels in Woodcuts" in this week's Times Literary Supplement, the Joyce scholar Eric Bulson lauds "this magnificent two-volume box set". Ward's first novel "Gods' Man" appeared in 1929 when he was in his mid-twenties. It sold 20,000 copies. Bulson explains that as a child Ward learnt from Gustave Doré's Bible illustrations about the power that can be achieved through a succession of images. As an adolescent he learnt from silent movies about how never hearing a word spoken allows the viewer to absorb narrative through moving pictures. As an adult he learnt how the grain of the wood (in his own words, "once a living thing") could achieve effects of light and dark that no other medium could match.

Bulson writes,

The wordless novel is a genre whose very existence is based on a contradiction. And yet, what Ward realized from "Gods’ Man" to "Vertigo" (1937) was the power that an extended sequence of silent pages could have on the way stories could be told and consumed. Characters come to life not by what they say but by how they look and change over time, and large portions of a plot unfold through single page prints instead of paragraphs.