This Is Not a Map

Without further ado I randomly alter course two weeks before hand in!

This Is Not a Map

But surely at bottom was the motive that underlies all such fictional maps: the drive for realism, verisimilitude, mimesis--the nearly perfect representation of reality that makes a fiction seem to be true.

We trust a map. It describes the known physical world, the most certain knowledge we have, and in such detail that we can easily check its accuracy. If a map sometimes reveals things we didn't know.... And if you are making up a story that you want people to believe, even if just for a moment, you take all the reality you can get.

These are maps to persuade readers of what mere, unreliable text has already described: This story is true. It happened here.

On any map, some things must be included, and most things must be left out. The principle of selection will vary, depending upon the purposes of the mapmaker--roads and towns will be shown for a gas station foldout, but not necessarily elevation or topography. Like novels, maps have points of view (literally "orientation"). Their details are selected for a particular effect or use, like the details a novelist chooses in describing, say, Crusoe's island. 

 Robert Louis Stevenson understood instinctively that a map is a setting. A map is a fiction.

landscape and allegory have a strong affinity

Here, we may think, we have reached the ultimate point--two meanings of "plot" have simply folded into each other: The plot of ground or space where the story happens has become, without any intervening narrative words, the plot or action that is the very story itself. The map stands alone.

Note to self: Pottermore!!
Why didn't I think of this already!!!

http://www.pottermore.com/

Internal Visualisation.

Its is suggested that Books offer a cathartic escape,

The romantic continuum, visualization in popular fiction. Stewart Sillars

To be cont.

A New Era for Illustration

'In the digital future, texts will be annotated visually, animated and illustrated like never before' -Riddell

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/aug/12/chris-riddell-new-era-illustration

Article written by illustrator Chris Riddell , from the Guardian Newspaper online discussing the future of book illustration in the digital era. (Aug 2012)

" As the digital revolution gathers momentum, traditional print publishing is being forced to change. In this new age of austerity, as chill winds blow through publishers' offices, we need illustrators of the calibre of EH Shepard more than ever. And they're out there - look at Posy Simmonds' wickedly perceptive novel Tamara Drewe, David Roberts' brilliantly quirky illustrations to Mick Jackson's Bears of England and Shaun Tan's surreal and exquisite wordless story The Arrival. Like Shepard, these illustrators' work reaches all ages.

As the Kindle's dread grip on digital publishing is challenged by tablet computers and android smartphones, with their bright screens and high resolution, the need for illustration is growing. Newspapers such as the Guardian and the Observer, meanwhile, are expanding into the internet's broad open spaces - spaces with plenty of room for illustration.

At the same time graphic novels, computer games and CGI animation are blurring the old distinctions and categories in publishing. In the digital future, texts will be annotated visually, animated and illustrated like never before. The austere 'prayer book' paper that permitted the space for Shepard's illustrations to Pepys' diaries is now being recreated in the digital era.

It is a space waiting to be filled by today's illustrators. " Chris Riddell.

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/features/illustration-revival

Similarly this article by Lawrence Zeegen furthers Riddell's optimistic outlook on the illustration industry. (Computer Arts, Issue 174. May 2010.)

"The smart money was always on illustration rising up and breaking free from the shackles of entirely commercially driven projects. A more entrepreneurial spirit has come about, in part due to the fact that digital hardware and software has come down so dramatically in price, coupled with fast broadband/ wi-ficombos becoming standard issue. This has so readily enabled the creation and production, distribution and promotion of images that contemporary illustration has emerged from the shadows to kick-start new self-initiated projects, publications and associated publicity. Equally responsible for the rise in fortune, but far less recognised perhaps, has been the input and impact of a new breed of art and design school educators, who are pushing graduates into a competitive marketplace fuelled with the vision to succeed self-sufficiently."

Radio 4 Open Book

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/80070/

In this episode of BBC radio 4's Open Book, a new illustrated version of A Life of Pi is discussed.

 Tomislav Torjana

In the radio episode the host asks, iis an illustrated re-publication of the award winning novel "an outrageous dumbing down? New trend? The a vision of what's to come? Or just a ploy by savvy publishers to produce gift books for the Christmas market?
Are words no longer enough?"

Presented bellow are illustrator and author reactions to the illustrated adult book.

Chris Riddell, illustrator:
"Anything that adds to the feel of the book as an object, is an all together good thing and is one way in which one can add value to a book tremendously is by the incorporation of the visual."

He suggests a reason to the lack of in book illustration: "The danger almost is to discount the obvious, that sometimes the most obvious thing is the way to go. That's the danger I think with illustration not being more accepted in books, there's a sense that one has to introduce novelty or take an unusual angle. I think sometimes books should just be illustrated directly."

Good illustration should be interpretive, but they also shouldn't overwhelm a text.
In the event of books being more widely illustrated, I think we will think of books as objects of beauty rather than the disposable things that can be throw away after use."

Kate Mosses, Author:

"These images, these chapter punctuations as I tend to think of them are incredibly enriching  for both the reader and also as the writer to put in."
On her novel, Labyrinth  "The illustrations inform the novel and are the landscape to the novel. The imaginary characters move across a real place very specifically in labyrinth. What we were trying to do...was give almost a tapestry, to give a real richness to the experience that people had already imagined in their heads."


Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi
"Illustrations don't compete they compliment the text. Richer way for getting into the text."
"What an illustrated edition brings to a reader is that the illustrations compliment the text, they don't compete. So you read ten pages of text and in doing that you form certain images and these illustrations either confirm what you've read or on the contrary suggest something else. It is a richer way of getting into the text."

 Tomislav Torjanac's expreiance on illustrating The Life Of Pi.
" Doing things from Pi's perspective seemed like a natural thing for me to do. Every illustration is from the point of view of Pi, So you never see Pi, you see what Pi is doing, the reader become Pi. You never see him you see what he's seeing."

Where have all the book illustrators gone? The Independent.

Where have all the book illustrators gone? An article from the newspaper The Independent.

This article discusses the reasons for the lack of illustrated adult novels in the last half a century  It includes controversial opinions like a lack of decent illustrators and introduces the rise of the inner monologue.


'Up until the Fifties and Sixties it wouldn't be unusual for a mainstream publisher to illustrate adult books. '

'Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape is one of the few British publishers who bucks the trend. "I think a) it's fashion", he says trenchantly. "And b) there aren't that many great illustrators. It's rare you can come across someone who can draw. Even when you're looking for someone to do book jackets, it's hard to find someone who can draw the human figure – it seems to be unfashionable now."

I fully agree with the fashionability of illustration in books being key to its disappearance but the opinion that 'there aren't that many great illustrators' is, I think, another example of fashion. Why do illustrators have to draw the characters to represent what is occurring in the text?

Simon Prosser, publishing director at Hamish Hamilton: It might be", he says, "that illustration is simply unfashionable. I have a strong, deep attachment to books that were illustrated... I remember from my early reading, the classics of natural history, like Izaak Walton and The Natural History of Selborne and they were all illustrated." Which brings us to another issue, the dearth of publishers with some sort of visual grounding.

Does it matter if adult books are all text? Even the greatest enthusiasts wouldn't say you should illustrate everything. You wouldn't wish on any artist the job of drawing much of Virginia Woolf. But the possibility that illustrations could actually illumine writing and draw out elements of a narrative doesn't seem to count for much any more. And as Posy Simmonds, well-known as a graphic novelist as well as illustrator, observes, illustration can do many things for a novel: "There's lots of choice, whether to interpret, decorate, contradict. It can add to or detract from the writing."

On the change in modern literature:

But there is a problem with the nature of modern fiction. As the novelist Piers Paul Read says, "illustrations are best suited to a novel with a strong narrative, that is to say, illustrating an incident – and there are fewer such novels around.

He (Quentin Blake) thinks that the nature of modern fiction is a challenge, but not an insuperable one. "Once novelists got into the interior monologue... that's what spoiled it for illustration", he says. "But there are things you could do that we've lost the habit of doing. There's a wrong assumption that you're going to draw exactly what the text says. But it calls for a bit of thinking. You don't always want to see what the protagonist looks like. Are you drawing surroundings, atmosphere, furniture? There are ways of contributing to novels. Commissioning drawing, I think, is a habit as much as anything. One doesn't want to say everything should be illustrated. But there are moments when something very interesting could be done. We've lost the habit of thinking like that."

The perception of illustration in books as something for children:

Because illustration is now the preserve of children's books, there's a sense that this is where it belongs, with childish things like comics. Or as Quentin Blake says, "there's a feeling it's not quite grown up to have pictures." Posy Simmonds agrees: "there's a sense that pictures are something you grow out of."

On The Resurgance of the illustrated book in the digital platform:

But it's not too soon to write off the possibility of illustration making a return. And curiously enough, it comes from the very development that people darkly assume to be undermining publishing as we know it: digital technology. Kindle makes the reproduction of colour plates far cheaper than now. As Simon Rossiter observes: "Books are more and more in the digital world – there's a real case for making books more special... it would be great to have a special Kindle edition of a novel." Dan Franklin is even more upbeat: "We'll find in the years to come that there's a renewal of illustration in books. Because of Kindle there's a new impulse to make the physical hardback book a more beautiful object. Illustration will be part of that. And when the enhanced e-book is up and running, it will be part of that too."

Pullman on Boarderland conflicts

Philip Pullman answered questions \about his lecture including, When the artists 'boarderland' conflicts with your own and what happens when your view of a characters is not that presented in the illustration. "It comes down to temperament, whether you connect with the illustration on a deeper level, below the level which we can talk about almost. It's a mysterious thing!"
Also addressed is the change a film adaptation has upon your personal 'boarderland' from the book.