10.13125/2039-6597/3248
The topology of graphic narrative has commonly been conceived of as ‘sequential’ (see Eisner 2008; McCloud 1993) – that is to say, a paratactic arrangement of bordered images to be read in a linear sequence, even when the gridded layout of these images is taken into consideration (as in Groensteen 2009). This sequential organization of space, baked into the epithet ‘sequential art’, is in danger of becoming an orthodoxy.This article considers the ways in which nested spaces – images inside images and worlds within worlds – are essential to graphic narrative, and will argue for a consideration of comics’ hypotactic structure, the layered embedding of the spaces they construct. Comics from the start represent a space within a space: within the ‘discourse space’ of the world in which creators communicate with readers, the flat plane of the page represents a ‘phatic space’ of contact on which the text-worlds of the creator are inscribed. Within that space appear yet further spaces, inscribed in speech balloons, thought balloons, and other abstract enclosures. The article uses Paul Werth’s Text World Theory (expanded and made available after Werth’s death in Gavins 2007) within a framework derived from the functional linguistics of Michael Halliday (previously adapted to multimodal media texts and art by theorists such as Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; O’Toole 2010) to account for the ways in which comics, like language, recursively construct and project spaces in which their narrative takes place. The artice characterises the nature of world-building in graphic narrative, and how the ways in which stories are narrated in this form oblige the creator to build and rebuild the worlds of the story (despite the options available to evade this commitment). The article presents ideas emerging from the development of a functional framework for describing graphic narrative which systematically adapts Halliday’s social semiotics (see Halliday 1978; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) to account for comics, fumetti and bande dessinée. 
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Paul Fisher Davies
Between
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The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
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Essay
2018-07-10
2018-02-19
2018-07-10
2018-07-10
1
Paul Fisher Davies
2018/07/10
10.13125/2039-6597/3248
University of Sussex
2039-6597
15
linguistics
en
The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3248/2995
8
                    The Nested Spaces
                   of Graphic Narrative
                            Paul Fisher Davies


     It is tempting to think of comics as semiotic objects to dissect with
codes, or as neutral containers for a narrative, regardless of form.
Traditions of semiotic analysis may then tempt a theorist to adapt
approaches from linguistics that seek in the comics text parallels of
specific linguistic realisations such as syntax and a lexicon; an
approach which is open to the criticism of ‘reductionism’, a forced
application of frameworks native to one medium inappropriately to
another.
       As an alternative, however, it might be possible to use ideas
from a practical, social linguistics to help make sense of comics,
operating at a functional level of abstraction. This would be to treat
comics creation as a form of communication, of interaction between
persons, socially mediated and performing the same sorts of functions
as other discourses at a broad level — with its own systems and
conventions and affordances at the level of realisation. In short, comics
do what prose does: comics tell stories, recount memories, build
discourses.
       The ‘social semiotics’ innovated by Michael Halliday (1978),
taking a function-based approach to the making of meanings in
language, has been adopted by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006; see also
Hodge and Kress 1988) to help describe meaning-making in
multimodal media texts in this way, and adapted by Michael O’Toole
(2010) to help account for, and offer a language with which to describe,
displayed art, architecture and sculpture.




Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/ May 2018)
Paul Fisher Davies, The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative



       This article explores how such an approach may lead to
challenging certain orthodoxies of comics, and to think about the
functions of some elements of comics readers are in danger of taking
for granted — like the idea that comics are made of panels as basic
units, that comics are a hybrid of word and image tracks in parallel,
and that they are constructed from a linear sequence of pictures, like a
“very very slow movie”, to adapt McCloud’s image (1993: 8).
     The idea that comics are essentially art in sequence comes from
Will Eisner’s use of the term in Comics and Sequential Art (2008). This
choice of words allows Eisner to get away from the ‘lowbrow’
connotations of ‘comics’ — to use the word ‘art’ alongside a neutral,
even scientific-sounding term ‘sequence’. Scott McCloud picks up on
and expands this definition in Understanding Comics (1993: 9), making
sequence — in particular, fundamentally the juxtaposed, adjacent
picture pair — the defining feature of comics. This has fallen into
comics studies orthodoxy: what follows from it is the exclusion of
‘single-panel’ newspaper cartoons, and a focus on the importance of
reading sequence that starts with Eisner’s desire to control the reader’s
eye (Eisner 2008: 40–41) and continues to studies of how readers
navigate the comics page pursued by Neil Cohn (2013: 186) and
Renaud Chavanne (2010), amongst others.
     But sequence is just one of the tools of comics. Comics are not
linear and one-dimensional streams of coded meanings like a stream of
sounds and syllables in spoken language, or a stream of text which
may be ‘re-flowed’ as in an .html or .epub document. They exist on (at
least) a two-dimensional plane, in an array, and the reading sequences
of language are in tension against the two-dimensional, planar
composition of art. They are presented as simultaneous to readers’
eyes, not presented in a linear fashion in fixed sequence — not even
like the linear sequence of images (with the truly one-dimensional
sound track) of movies. Thinking of comics as ‘sequential art’ limits
any account of how comics work — how they are created, composed
and read. This includes creating problems with how images relate to
words, as well as how images may relate to other images.



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                                            Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



     It is useful to appeal to the linguistic concepts of parataxis and
hypotaxis to help conceptualise this distinction between linear
sequence and two-dimensional nesting . (The following account draws
on Halliday and Matthiessen 2014: 428–556, Chapter 7.) In language,
paratactic structures of clauses place pairs or sequences of clauses at an
‘equal’ level, each clause at the same level of importance, in temporal
sequence implied, but not determined, by their spoken order:

       “I read a book and I had a bath”

     The linking of the clauses is accomplished by a co-ordinating
conjunction, here ‘and’, though also, in English, a core set of words
including ‘but’, ‘or’, sometimes ‘so’ and other, rarer ones can do this
work.
     The other possibility is to use a subordinating conjunction — and
most conjunctions are of this type. These conjunctions grammatically
subordinate the clause they precede, demoting its role in linear
‘sequence’ and ‘embedding’ it, so that the subordinated clause works
as an adverbial for the clause to which it is attached. For example:

       “I read a book while I had a bath”

      The spoken or read sequence is not reflecting the temporal
relationship between these two clauses (centring around the verbs read
and have); rather, the time relationship is communicated with the
subordinating conjunction. One could say, with the same denotation:

       “While I had a bath, I read a book”

     This puts the clauses into a hypotactic relationship: the one is
contained within the other.
     Thinking of comics images as ‘sequential’ is to think of them in
the paratactic sense. This leads to the conceptualisations of comics
represented in Figure 1: Conceptualisations of Comics, as a text made
not just of images, but of words in collaboration with them.


                                                                                     3
Paul Fisher Davies, The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative



      Rather than the ‘parallel-track’ visualisation of comics in
Conceptualisation #1, so often alluded to in the comics studies
literature since McCloud (1993: 153), or the concept of a reading
sequence which switches between word and image as if the only
relationship can be adjacent juxtaposition (Conceptualisation #2), the
third conceptualisation seems, and looks, more recognisable as comics:
words appear inside images, in hypotactic relationship; images often
appear inside one another, in inset panels, with images arranged in a
page layout (a ‘hyperimage’ like Groensteen’s (2009) ‘hyperframe’);
and words may frame images, surrounding them with commentary,
captions, labels and more.




                         Figure 1: Conceptualisations of Comics

      The key point here is that comics and graphic narrative is not just
‘paratactic’ in nature; and here is a danger in thinking about it as
‘sequential art’, which leads to a focus on parataxis. Rather, hypotaxis
is crucial to comics, and its importance should not be underestimated,
in the essential function of comics as creating spaces within spaces, and
stories within stories, and logical relationships between images and



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                                        Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



text groupings that are not only a matter of juxtaposition in linear
sequence.
      To help think about this ‘nested’ creation of spaces within comics,
and the importance of the hypotactic relationships that are created
among ‘clusters’ of images and words1, it is useful to turn to Paul
Werth’s “Text World Theory” (1999), developed after his death by
Joanna Gavins (2007) to account for hypotaxis and framing in narrative
written fiction.
      Werth points out that when we engage in spoken conversation,
this takes place in a shared ‘discourse world’, jointly occupied by the
interlocutors in the discourse. When each says ‘I’, this refers to the
speaker who is there present; ‘you’ refers to one or more hearers
(excepting, in languages such as English, the general use of this term).
Such interlocutors may speak of what the weather is like here, and
what the time is now, and ‘here’ and ‘now’ have referents which both
share when speaking face-to-face. It will be clear that actual
conversations may vary from this ideal, especially when conversation
is mediated by telephony or writing, but the basic scene is this co-
present, shared ‘discourse world’.
      In the genres of fiction, the rules of discourse change. The texts
produced in fiction dislocate the pronoun referents. In fiction, ‘I’ is not
merely a speaker at a different time or place — though fiction is
separated, like a telephone conversation, in space, and also separated
in time, it still takes place in what one can take to be a ‘shared’ world to
some degree, albeit a ‘split’ world (Gavins 2007: 26) — but an
imaginary, invented character: one who does not exist in this, the
shared discourse world physically occupied by reader and writer, but
in a ‘text world’ that is created by the contents of the discourse itself.
‘Here’ for the text is not ‘here’ where it is read; and all the persons or


     1
       Parallel to ‘clauses’ in spoken language, which focus around a verb,
one may speak of ‘clusters’ in comics, focused on one or more depicted
and/or written processes, typically — but not always — enclosed by a frame
or balloon.



                                                                                 5
Paul Fisher Davies, The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative



places or referents exist not in front of the reader and writer but in a
world of shared imagination. (Text World Theory adopts some of these
ideas from the pre-existing ‘deictic shift theory’ in this regard (See
Stockwell 2002: 46; which summarises Galbraith 1995: 19–59), which
noted this function of fiction.)
     Nor is this especially unusual in talk. Even in day-to-day
conversation, speakers may refer to other times and places, quote other
people not present to the interlocutors, re-enact the conversations of
others in the here-and-now. And speakers of languages have no
problem with this. Such speakers are excellent at tracking these text
worlds, and can follow them down to a further degree, in ‘sub-worlds’
that exist in the storytelling that characters may do within the fiction.
When a character tells a story, it is a matter of course to conceptually
‘push down’ a level into the character’s own further text world. For
example, this article might quote Shelley who starts 1818’s Ozymandias
(available in, e.g., Shelley 2009: 198):

         I met a traveller from an antique land,
         Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
         Stand in the desert…

     And now the reader and writer are in the text-world of the
traveller within the text-world of the speaker of Shelley’s poem; and
Shelley’s poem creates a text-world within this current one, of the
discourse represented in this article: ‘I’ writing for ‘you’. Ozymandias
ends in a further text-world, that of the inscription on the abandoned
stone pedestal, before coming back up to the traveller’s world:

         “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings!
         Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
         Nothing beside remains…

     When authors and speakers quote characters, then, within the
text-worlds created by their mutual discourse, this creates ‘projected
text-worlds’, and language users can track these to multiple levels. Not


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                                        Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



only speech, but projected thought can do this, including ‘imagined’
worlds created by wishes, by modal verbs, and in many languages by
counterfactual subjunctive tenses:

       I wish I were in the pub right now…

      The ‘I’ who wishes is not the ‘I’ who is in the imaginary pub, and
the ‘now’ that is speaking is not the alternative now of the ‘I’ who
would be drinking.
      In comics, of course, text worlds like this are inscribed in abstract
enclosures — the enclosures that comics readers, scholars and
professionals call ‘panels’ and ‘frames’, ‘word balloons’ and ‘fumetti’.
In parallel with the nesting function of projected speech and
subordination in syntax, then, one might propose that drawing these
enclosures enacts a ‘deictic shift’ function, creating ‘text worlds’ in
nested structure in comics. This is not to say that such abstract
enclosures are ‘the subordinating conjunctions of comics’, but that they
serve a comparable function in enacting the nesting that enables a
certain type of complexity in discourse. Certainly the idea that word
balloons are comparable to ‘projection’ in hypotaxis is reflected in
Michael Halliday’s functional linguistics; he and his colleague
Christian Matthiessen use the following image from comics (Figure 2)
to illustrate these structures in language (Halliday and Matthiessen
2014: 443):




        Figure 2: from Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar
                    (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014: 443)



                                                                                 7
Paul Fisher Davies, The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative



      In language, projection and expansion may be handled by either
hypotactic structures or paratactic structures; but there is a tendency
towards ‘expansion’ as paratactic unfolding, and ‘projection’ of
thoughts and desires as hypotactic embedding. This certainly seems to
hold as a general pattern in comics, where progression of panel
enclosures tends to take the discourse forward, and balloon enclosures
within them tend to project thought and speech.
      It follows from this that the ‘panel’ and the ‘word balloon’ are in
this functional regard essentially the same order of thing: ‘frames’ are
‘fumetti’ — the panel is always already a speech balloon. Creators draw
enclosures to contain the projected text-worlds they are inscribing for
their readers. These projections and inscriptions happen at multiple
levels, marked often by further abstract signals that indicate the reality-
status of the text-world inscribed: typical codes include ‘cloud borders’
for imagined worlds, ‘curved edges’ for projected speech, usually with
a tail deictically indicating the speaker, black-and-white or sepia for
remembered sequences or past-time sequences, and there may be other
signals improvised in the course of a graphic narrative. (Whispers,
telepathy, electronic speech, psychically or mentally charged images or
speech, may all be marked with more-or-less familiar or improvised
borders.)
      In comics, as in prose fiction, the depicted text-worlds may
include representations of the discourse-world: in Maus, Art
Spiegelman depicts himself as ‘Artie’ son of Vladek, interviewing
Vladek for the narrative of holocaust survival which is the main story
(Spiegelman 2003). At the start of Book 2 of Maus, Spiegelman ‘pops
up’ a narrative level unexpectedly to depict himself as Art Spiegelman
the artist, wearing a mouse mask, creating Maus the graphic novel. In
Logicomix (2009), Doxiadis and Papadimitrou depict themselves
discussing their own narrative, and within that show their subject
Bertrand Russell giving a lecture, in which (a further text-world level
down) he narrates his own past, seeing a billboard depicting the fiction
of Jekyll and Hyde (a further contained text-world), and then an
imagined, modalised text-world vision of himself imagined as those
characters (230-1). The borders of panels and word balloons and


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                                       Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



caption boxes all help readers to track these text worlds, alongside the
colour palettes used, and this is done effortlessly. This is hypotactic
structure: the reading order does not necessarily matter for
comprehension, especially at the bottom of page 231; as long as we
understand the relationships between these images, the sequence in
which we apprehend them does not substantially change that
understanding.
      Comics, then, use these essentially nested spaces to construct the
worlds of the story and continue the narration in a range of voices, at
different levels of reality, time and space; and readers are well trained
by a language-user’s grasp of grammar to tackle this complex nesting.
Mere ‘pictures in sequence’ do not reflect this sophistication, and do
not capture the eminent suitability of the form for creating a rich,
layered set of narrative worlds. Dylan Horrocks has already protested
the importance of world-building as a crucial function of comics, in
addition to their ‘function-advancing’ work in moving narrative
forward (Horrocks 2003). In Text World Theory, Werth and Gavins
propose that some sentences, clauses, and elements of the language are
geared toward the work of ‘world-building’, which is to say
establishing the text-world which can then be referred to by the text
(Werth 1999: 180ff; Stockwell 2002: 137). Other elements of the
language move the narrative forward, or the argument, or whatever
function the text is intending to pursue. ‘World-building’ tends to be
achieved by ‘stative’ verbs, expressing existential processes and
relational processes (to adopt Halliday’s approach to transitivity), and
‘function-advancing’ tends to be done with ‘active’ or ‘dynamic’ verbs
(Gavins 2007: 64), expressing material processes, behavioural
processes, and verbal or mental processes (the ones which so often go
with ‘projection’ of new text worlds).
      One may usefully diagram these functions in comics discourse —
the way comics may use images to realise these functions — as follows,
in Figure 3: Diagram of a Process Stack.




                                                                                9
Paul Fisher Davies, The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative




                          Figure 3: Diagram of a Process Stack

     In comics, the creator draws what happens, not just what is. In a
formulation attributed to Joann Sfar, “you’re not drawing the cat,
you’re drawing the pounce of the cat” — the process in which the cat is
engaged. For Halliday, ‘processes’ include descriptive and existential
functions enacted by stative verbs (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014:
260–61). These processes ‘stack up’ as a rule, appearing in clusters
simultaneously, when a creator draws what happens in comics (see
Davies 2016: 117–33 for more detail). If the primary aim is to draw the
function-advancing material action ‘running’, the artist is obliged to
draw physical, relational characteristics of the character who runs, and
of course to entail that the character exists. In the act of drawing a
character speaking, in a verbal process, it is normally necessary to
depict the speaking face in the material action, including perhaps
gestures in support, and then relational properties of that face,



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hairstyle, clothes and so on. These functions — which are separate in
language, where a single verb captures each process in a clause — are
simultaneous in comics, and tend to ‘cascade’ downwards in a triangle
of commitments to draw and re-draw foundational, world-building
elements such as the appearance of characters and the backgrounds in
which they dwell, over and over again.
      Of course, all that has just been claimed in the preceding
paragraph is often overturned by comics artists. It is possible to avoid
re-drawing the character by cutting them out of the frame; or drawing
the outside of the house they’re speaking in instead; or drawing them
in silhouette; or drawing the reaction. However, this may be seen as a
response to the basic pattern of commitments, an artist aiming to evade
the repetitions of comics, as ‘Wally Wood’s 22 Panels that Always
Work’ (Wood and Crouch 1980) is motivated by the comics artist’s
desire to make a lengthy dialogue a writer has composed more
interesting over a sequence of panels. Still, the alternatives that creators
may choose nonetheless tend to perform the function of world-
building — drawing a detailed view of a hand instead of a face during
dialogue, or a contextualising drawing of a car in which the characters
are speaking, nonetheless functionally serves to build the world.
      This article has considered, then, the function of abstract
enclosures, how they create nested spaces in comics, and the functions
of the simultaneous drawings of events in the ‘clusters’ that form the
‘clauses’ of comics. Much attention has been paid, especially by Scott
McCloud, also to the negative space on the comics page: the ‘gutter’
(McCloud 1993: 60–93). For McCloud, this is where all the magic
happens — in the space that is left when his operation of
‘juxtaposition’ has happened. This is a superb rhetorical move, key to
his idea of comics as ‘the invisible art’, which happens not in the
drawings but in the minds of the readers, ‘filling in’ these spaces
imaginatively with acts of mental ‘closure’. But it relies on that white
space being there; it relies on border lines separating it out in negative
space; and it does not account for what happens when characters
intrude into that space, or are not separated from that space by panel
borders.


                                                                                11
Paul Fisher Davies, The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative



      Text World Theory, as outlined above, offers a way of thinking
about the white space, the flat plane of the page or screen, in comics
discourse. Text World Theory starts with the idea of the ‘discourse
world’ as the shared world occupied by a writer and reader, a creator
and audience. In comics then, the page itself, up to its edges, the raw
white material of the plane, constitutes the point of contact between
these interlocutors, and so it is the location of this shared discourse
world. For Malinowski (in Ogden et al. 1923) and Jakobson (1960: 350–
77), the sheer ‘contact function’ of human interaction, maintaining a
channel between persons, and (for Malinowski especially) creating a
‘communion’ between individuals establishing intimacy between
themselves, is known as the ‘phatic’ function. In functional parallel,
then, one may adopt this word to describe the ‘phatic space’ of comics:
the plain white space of the page, and/or the material of its plane, up to
and including the edges that a reader holds, edges that are contained
not by an inscribed line but marked off by the world itself, the edges of
the book or device that displays the comic.
      When a character intrudes into this ‘phatic space’, then, they reach
out to contact the reader. When a depicted character is represented
straight on the page, not enclosed (projected) into a text-world by a
bordering line, then the character is ‘unclosed’, exposed to that space of
contact: the reader is brought into contact with the character directly —
as directly as can be achieved. The character that transgresses the
frame appears ‘three-dimensional’, ‘popping up’ into the shared
discourse world of reader and creator by coming into contact with the
phatic space. The background that bleeds to the edge of the page abuts
the material discourse world, occupying the phatic space with its
content, and coming into communion with readers. When the panel
border falls away, the character is left ‘stark’, unprotected, in touch
with the reader. This contact effect is exacerbated when an element is
drawn at ‘life size’, so it appears to occupy the discourse world itself,
or sit directly on the phatic space of communion between creator and
reader. This can be seen in Maus (Spiegelman 2003), in Bechdel’s Fun
Home (2006), in Chris Ware (2012), in Craig Thompson (2004), and
many other works.


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                                        Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



     In this way, the lines of abstract enclosure do not only serve to
advance functions of comics, in expansion and projection; to enclose
text-worlds and created nested spaces of stories; but to present and
withdraw borders between story-world and discourse-world, by the
disruptions of which the characters in the story may come into human
contact with readers interpersonally, engaging with the space of the
reader, and involving the reader in the world occupied by the story.
     The management of nested spaces in comics, then, presenting
hypotactically-arranged text-worlds within text-worlds, sitting within
a phatic ‘contact space’ surface shared by the creator and the reader, is
a function of comics that has not been well captured in the familiar and
frequent conception of it as ‘sequential art’. This article has used Werth
and Gavins’ Text World Theory, and characterisations of processes and
syntactic structures adopted from Halliday’s systemic-functional
linguistics, to help articulate this idea. In comics, the frame is a
‘fumetti’, the panel is a speech balloon; it is into the phatic space which
creators share with readers that those creators inscribe the worlds, and
the worlds within worlds, that comics stories present. It is depth, rather
than just sequence, simultaneity rather than a hybrid linearity, that the
form offers.




                                                                                13
Paul Fisher Davies, The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative




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Horrocks, Dylan, “THE PERFECT PLANET: Comics, Games and
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                                                                                15
Paul Fisher Davies, The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative




                                      The author
        Paul Fisher Davies

Paul Fisher Davies has recently gained his Ph.D. with the thesis title
Making Meanings with Comics: A Functional Approach to Graphic Narrative
in the school of English at University of Sussex, where he is also an
associate lecturer and student mentor. He teaches English Language
and Literature at Sussex Downs College in Eastbourne, UK. As well as
studying graphic narrative form, he has written a collection of graphic
short stories which can be previewed at www.crosbies.co.uk. He has
published in Studies in Comics (‘Animating the Narrative in Abstract
Comics’, 2013; ‘On the Comics-Nature of the Codex Seraphinianus’, 2015)
and The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2016), and has a chapter
forthcoming in Rommens, A. and P. Turnes (eds.) The Question of
Abstraction and Narration: Sequential Media and Abstract Art (2017)

        Email: P.F.Davies@sussex.ac.uk




                                       The paper
Date sent: 15/03/2018
Date accepted: 30/04/2018
Date published: 30/05/2018



                           How to quote this paper
Davies, Paul Fisher, “Title of Article”, Spazi tra le nuvole. Lo spazio nel
fumetto, Eds. G.V. Distefano, M. Guglielmi, L. Quaquarelli, Between,
VIII.15 (2018), http://www.betweenjournal.it




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