- Barthes
It is important to realise that the way an illustration or in fact any image is received by an audience depends entirely on their shared culture and 'history' (experience); that of the audience and that of the artist.
"This same photograph is not only perceived received it is read, connected more or less consciously by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs" - Barthes
As an illustrator then you need to be aware of who your audience is and what they will connote and denote from your drawings. Of course you will also have the text along side in an illustrated fiction. Therefore you need to decide how and what you 'put into' your drawings? Do you play it close to the text depicting only what and who has been described or do you 'extend the narrative' by presenting signifiers that can be decoded by your culturally and historically aware audience to pre-empt or foreshadow the narrative? What are your ethics on this?
"The photograph clearly only signifies because of the existence of a store of stereotyped attitudes which form ready-made elements of signification (eyes raised heavenwards, hands clasped.). A 'historical grammar of iconographic connotation ought thus to look for its material in culture." - Barthes
An example of where the text has been extended by signifiers is the old curiosity shop, in which the death of the character 'Little Nell' is depicted by George Cattermole.
Even though this woodcut is almost 200 years old, as a modern audience we can still decode almost every signifier in this illustration. Our culture and understanding are the same (although historically far more advanced) as those who would have read the image in its first publication.
"Special importance must be accorded to what could be called the posing of objects, where the meaning comes from the objects 'photographed.'
The interest lies in the fact that the objects are accepted inducers of associations of ideas (book case = intellectual) or, in a more obscure way, are veritable symbols (the door to the gas-chamber for Chessman's execution with its reference to the funeral gates of ancient mythologies.)" - Barthes, The Photographic Message.
In the illustration of Little Nell's death there is a menagerie of symbols and representations: the hourglass in the window in which the sand has run out, the signifieds of nature, spirituality and eternal life in the evergreen winter berries. The open window, the bible on the bed.
While the image can easily stand alone with its signs and 'symbols' it does go on to extend the text via deviations. The text states; "Her little bird - a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed - was stirring nimbly in its cage; the strong heart of its child mistress was mute and motionless for ever."
The text allows us to recognise certain parts of the image (the bird cage on the wall - I didn't see it as that at all). 'In a sense, the text is essential to clarify the detonative meaning of the illustration in this regard...' But it is also important that it draws our attention to the fact that within the image the bird is not stirring nimbly in its cage. In the illustration the cage door is open and the bird about to take flight at the open window, continuing on in life in a metaphor of the souls release.
"The relation between this sentence and the image thus couples our ability to 'read' the illustration at a simple detonative level and our symbolic decoding of the signification of open cage door and free bird, with the result of extending the verbal image into another statement of release.
This is one example of how something that appears simply an element of design is also frequently denotataive and at the same time connotative in the illustration." - - Stuart Sillars, Visualisation in popular fiction.
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