ARTICLE / Books Without Words

Is a book still a book if it doesn’t have any

words? In this article Anna Ridley takes a closer
look at wordless picture books and discovers
there’s more than one way to tell a story.
Aug 11, 2014

The term ‘wordless picture book’ seems to suggest there’s something

lacking in this purely visual form of literature. Which there is. But when
pictures are left to do the talking it’s incredible to discover how much they
have to say. Referring to Perry Nodelman’s Words About Pictures, this
article looks at recently published picture books that rely predominantly
on images to construct a narrative and considers what roles words and
pictures each play in illustrated books for children.
In exploring the different ways words and pictures communicate meaning,
Nodelman points out that ‘pictures tend to be diffuse, words explicit’. The
advent of the modern picture book saw an unprecedented integration of
words and pictures where the two became interdependent. Nodelman
argues that for wordless picture books to be successful, they demand a
previous knowledge of how stories operate and that to be able to build a
narrative from images, readers need guidance on what it is they are
looking for. This process of taking meaning from an image involves
‘imposing language upon it’, says Nodelman. When Salvatore Rubbino
describes developing the book he made at art college A Walk in New York,
into a picture book for children he refers to the words he added as being
necessary to ‘anchor the pictures’. In Image Music Text, Barthes employs
a similar term, ‘anchorage’, in relation to photographs, explaining the need
to constrain the meaning we take from an image. Although text may not
be a feature of wordless picture books, they nonetheless rely on textual
elements or the reader’s translation of image into word for the experience
to be more than purely aesthetic.
By comparing a book of singularly conceived artworks that have been
bound together in a book with a wordless picture book, it becomes
evident that to construct a narrative whose meaning is clear, its images
need to function as a connected sequence. The most explicit use of
sequenced images is seen in comic books and graphic novels where
multiple frames show the step-by-step development of the story. Jim
Curious by Matthias Picard, like Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman 35 years
before it and more recently, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, is a wordless picture
book that uses this convention to great effect. However, Picard pushes
readers one step further by removing some of his frames altogether so
that when Jim is shown doing an underwater roly-poly readers must draw
on their knowledge of this convention to understand Jim is shown in four
stages of motion, rather than as four separate entities. Picard also uses
consecutive frames for dramatic effect: three horizontal frames are used
to slowly ‘zoom out’ on a scene of Jim swimming along a wrinkled rock
face, revealing that Jim is in fact eye to eye with a large whale. Picard’s
use of multiple images on a single page to communicate action, as well as
atmosphere and emotion, contributes to a full and complex understanding
of the nature of Jim’s silent journey.
Singular, full bleed images can also function as an action sequence when
one page directly relates to the next. For this to work, each image needs
to explicitly direct the reader’s attention forward in the story. A classic
example is the acutely unbalanced compositions in Iela and Enzo Mari’s
1969 The Apple and the Butterfly that project the reader’s eyes off the
page in a way that, as a stand alone piece of art, would lose our attention
altogether. Using a highly graphic style of illustration, the Maris
incrementally change one element of a picture at a time to trace the
metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. They use their
compositions not only to construct a narrative, but to conceptually
support the circular nature of the story, leading the reader to the end of
the book, around the back cover, onto the front and back into the book to
experience yet another life cycle of a butterfly.
More recently, Sunkyung Cho’s exquisitely produced The Blue Bird uses
composition both directionally and metaphorically to draw parallels and
distinctions between a pig and a bird whose lives have become
intertwined. The pig saves (or perhaps steals) the bird when it is still in its
shell by taking it out of its natural habitat and integrating the bird into its
own life. The rounded shapes of the pig’s spotted back and the bird’s
spotted shell are the only apparent similarities they share. The
composition of the illustrations indicate the imbalance in their relationship
but without words, neither character’s voice is able to dominate and
readers must contemplate the story from both perspectives. Judging by
the compositions, the pig’s way of life on the ground limits the bird’s
potential but equally, the bird’s desire towards flight is in opposition to the
pig’s true nature. Purposefully open to interpretation, but ‘anchored’
enough in its visual narrative to persuade most readers towards some
conclusion, The Blue Bird is a beautiful reflection on the complexities and
ambiguities of a life shared with others.
Laëtitia Devernay’s The Conductor draws parallels between the structure
of Western storytelling and that of Western classical music. A conductor
plucks his baton from the forest and all is visually quiet as he poises his
arms for movement. What follows is an incredibly evocative sequence of
illustrations that use flocks of leaf-birds to convey the swelling sounds
and emotional heights of what in my mind was a Beethoven symphony.
The absence of words, helped by its minimal colours, is essential to the
success of this book since it is in these gaps that the amorphous
character of music is conjured up. First published in French as Diapason,
the English title focuses our attention on the influence this central
character will have on events, leaving room for the pleasant surprise that
is the music drawn from our own memories.
The title of Ronan Badel’s The Lazy Friend is even more significant since
without its constraint, the meaning of the images could easily be misread.
A sleeping sloth hangs contentedly from a branch in a rainforest. When
foresters fell his tree, the sloth remains undisturbed and smiling. Thanks
to the title, we know that the sloth is lazy, rather than dead, and that when
the snake follows the sloth to what seems to be his demise, the snake
plays the role of hapless hero rather than hostage taker — a comic reading
that is assisted by the illustrations’ cartoon-like style. Badel uses the
skinny landscape format of the book to narrow our vision on the story’s
horizontal action and to heighten our sensitivity to the symbolic meaning
implicit in the direction of the action. As the forester’s truck carries the
sloth’s tree from right to left, left-to-right language readers will
understand the sloth is being taken away from his home in the rainforest
and away from the resolution of the story. When the direction abruptly
changes just as the sloth’s tree, which has fallen into a river, starts
heading towards a waterfall, impending doom is countered by the
reassurance that at least the sloth is heading towards ‘home’.
Also landscape in format, but with its spine down the longest edge of the
book, is Suzy Lee’s Shadow which uses the gutter between pages to draw
the line between reality and imagination. On the upper pages of the book,
a little girl is pictured in sober charcoal in the secret confines of her family
garage. She delights in affecting the shadows cast on the lower pages of
the book by the bare light bulb above her. With the spine of the book
acting like a mirror line, we start to see the black silhouettes of cardboard
boxes take on suggestions of tropical foliage, while the vacuum cleaner
adopts the role of baby elephant. The little girl lets her imagination run
wild, and while she gets carried away she fails to notice the silhouette of a
terrifying little wolf slip across the gutter, into reality. The diffuse nature of
images make for the perfect medium here for expressing the fluid nature
of imagination, while the interruption of the words ‘DINNER’s READY!’ on
one of the final pages is a fantastic illustration of the way in which words
throw things into sharp relief. At the end, when Lee uses a double page
spread of black pages, they bear specific meaning where in another book
they might have stood for nothing.
Madalena Matoso cut the pages of her book Et Pourquoi Pas Toi? in half
to allow the reader more control in determining the meaning of her
wordless illustrations. The ambiguity of her simplified, graphic illustrations
lets us view the people pictured as types, while highly readable symbols
around them such as laptop computers, laboratory equipment and
crockery serve as indicators of the activities they are engaged in. Details
such earrings, bandanas, and distinctive hairstyles add hints of
personality so that if they were so inclined, readers might use the lower
half of the book to develop a narrative around that individual. By
relinquishing control over how each image is read, Matoso succinctly
conveys the idea that we can become whoever we choose.
Bernardo Carvalho’s dual-titled, wordless picture book Follow the Firefly!
and Run, Rabbit, Run! uses its titles as well as clear visual cues to focus
our attention on certain meaningful actions over and above other activity
occurring within the same illustration. A light bulb-shaped firefly begins
the book by asking, “Excuse me, have you seen a flashing light?” to which
various animals, birds and humans respond with a simple pointing action.
The firefly’s journey picks up speed as he travels from jungle to city and
ends with an exaggerated exclamation as the firefly halts in front of the
flashing light of his dreams: a traffic light. Over the page, the second title
page shouts “Run, rabbit, run!” as we see a white rabbit escaping from a
wire cage on the back of a truck. The cheeky-looking rabbit bounces back
through the book, with a sharp-toothed dog in hot pursuit and despite
having travelled through these images before, our eyes become glued to
his story. Just when it seems the rabbit is done for, an imposing gorilla
visually blocks his hunter’s way and the story takes an unexpectedly
tender twist.
Carvalho’s book is hugely entertaining but most significantly, it suggests
an appropriate level of distrust for young readers to hold against the
apparent fidelity of an image. As Berger articulates in Ways of Seeing, the
Renaissance artist employing the convention of perspective supposed
that a singular vision of the world was brought into focus in the eye of the
beholder, whereas the advent of the camera suddenly revealed that
multiple views are available to our eyes and it is up to the individual to
actively and critically narrow in on the information presented. Carvalho
uses both titles of the book to bring into focus the events he wishes to
highlight, and by including both narratives, suggests that there might be
many more to be found if we look more closely.
Incorporating text to a greater degree are those picture books whose
narrative-bearing illustrations are wordless but nonetheless rely on the
equivalent of an artwork’s caption to help readers decode their latent
meaning. Aleksandra Mizielińska and Daniel Mizieliński’s Welcome to
Mamoko series, akin to Martin Handford’s Where’s Wally? for the
generation before, tell the reader explicitly that there are stories to be
found within the sequential images that follow. It is up to the reader to
impart their interpretation on what’s happening, but only to a degree:
characters such as Otto Trump, the elephant, are introduced at the
beginning and readers are asked leading questions to send them on their
story-finding way. The introduction also suggests there might be red
herrings in the form of a stray pencil, a piece of cheese, and a skateboard.
As Nodelman describes it, ‘Finding a story in a sequence of pictures with
no help but our eyes is something like doing a puzzle. It cannot be done if
we do not know what it is meant to be done, so we must first understand
that there is indeed a problem to be solved’.
Nodelman suggests that without such accompanying words as the title or
the caption, ‘the visual impact of pictures as sources of sensuous
pleasure is more significant than any specific narrative information they
might contain … if [no narrative] is actually provided, we tend to find one
in our memories.’ More than any of the books discussed, the wordless
picture books of Emily Rand, In the Garden and her forthcoming Under
the Sea, impose the least amount of narrative constraint on its images.
Produced in limited risograph-printed runs by Hato Press, In the Garden
has no words printed on it except for the copyright line at the bottom of
the back page. Behind the first hedge-like page, a single red feather floats
enigmatically towards the ground. Behind the second, another. Topiary
hedges are suggestive of a large bunny in profile and a smiling snowman.
It is the format of the book, whose pages are cut to match the profile of
the illustrated trees and plants, that Rand uses to entice readers to
explore further and experience the aesthetic pleasure of the book as an
object. Without strictly determining the meaning her readers will take from
the book, Rand makes it essential for uninitiated readers of pictures to be
accompanied in the reading process, acknowledging that the sharing of
books is a key ingredient in what makes them sources of learning and
pleasure.

As we can see from the above examples, there are numerous techniques
and approaches to communicating a story through pictures. To what
degree this is successful depends on the extent to which the author has
understood the exact nature of their medium, and the likelihood of
readers being able to appropriately decode the messages they’ve
embedded within, a key skill in the development of visual literacy. In her
book Creating Meaning Through Literature and the Arts, literacy professor
Claudia Cornett explains, ‘When we teach for visual literacy, we involve
children in thinking about and expressing in images what is often beyond
linguistic capabilities.’ There’s great scope for wordless picture books to
be effective tools in this process so long as they provide the anchors,
constraints or assistance necessary to focus young minds on a
meaningful and critical reading of images.