4 Cognitive Approaches to Comics Shots – and Conveys a Sense of Continuity in the Scene

4 Cognitive Approaches to Comics 4.1 Synopsis In part 1 I used the term ‘synopsis’ to refer to Wolfgang Iser’s notion that readers generate meaning by ‘seeing things together’, which is guided by textual structures that activate previous themes or gestalten that have become part of the horizon. I developed this idea further by adding conceptual integration theory in part 3, which elaborates on the possible mappings between spaces. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner identify at least fifteen vital relations (cf. 2003: 101) that become compressed in the blend. In both cases ‘synopsis’ is a metaphor for cognitive operations that are happening in front of the mind’s eye. If we now turn to the architecture of a typical comics page, we find a conceptual illustration and materialisation of this reading model: the fragmented pieces of the narrative – the panels – are separated from each other by a blank space in between – the gutter – that requires readers to cognitively bridge the gulf. Even without any knowledge of gestalt psychology or blending, all comics scholars are challenged to explain how readers are supposed to make sense of this “mosaic art” (Nodelman 2012: 438). As a visualisation of an otherwise cognitive process the medium’s layout also illustrates Iser’s theme and horizon structure, in the sense that the panel(s) attended to by the readers form the present theme and the others around it the horizon. As the ‘wandering viewpoint’ of readers moves on to the next panel, the previous one becomes part of the background: the “theme of one moment becomes the horizon against which the next segment takes on its actuality” (1980: 198; see also Dewey 2005: 199, 211). The figure-ground rela- tionship is very strong in comics and we shall return to this idea again later in this part. One has to be careful, though, not to take this comparison too literally. Iser’s idea of reading is clearly not concerned with the integration of one sentence – or panel, for that matter – after the other into the ongoing story, but with the question of how the foregrounded elements and revelations of the present moment or scene relate to what individual readers have experienced so far as central to their understanding of the narrative. Iser’s approach is holistic and his theory of gestalt-forming rests on translinear integration, which is going to be an important argument against the existing linear conceptualisations of reading comics. Strictly speaking, meaning is not based on a correspondence between textual elements, but mappings between mental spaces that have been activated and set up for mutual illumination by these narrative structures. One could also say that Markus Oppolzer - 9783631810880 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/23/2021 04:28:52PM via free access 230 Cognitive Approaches to Comics readers relate their current impressions, experiences and ideas to previous ones and begin to see larger patterns. At the same time, the panels on a double page of a comic are physically present as material/narrative anchors and remain so until readers turn the page. A focus on cognitive approaches is not meant to discredit the “response- inviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp the text” (Iser 1980: 34), since they are central to reader-response criticism’s understanding of narratives as blueprints or musical scores. The same principle is foundational to a number of cognitive (literary) theories. Catherine Emmott speaks of “long-distance links” (2004: 11) that connect contextual frames across entire narratives and Barbara Dancygier explains the role of narrative anchors as prompts for blending (cf. 2012: 42, 50). These are metonymic links that may evoke entire frames with a single word or image, sometimes using no more than a pronoun or a symbol. There is a whole spectrum of possibilities for blending in comics that ranges from literal synopsis – studying the section of the mosaic that a double page has to offer as a narrative unit, to the more elaborate conceptual integration of mental spaces that is triggered by textual structures. In comics these prompts take the form of verbal and/or visual signs, often in combination. Comics studies already has two widely established concepts that resemble aspects of conceptual integration, which are Scott McCloud’s ‘closure’ (cf. 1994: 63–74) and Thierry Groensteen’s ‘braiding’ (cf. 2007: 145–9, 158). The first covers meaning-making processes on the micro-structural level of consec- utive panels, while the second looks at translinear relations. Groensteen argues that the ‘iconic solidarity’ (cf. 2007: 17–20) between panels establishes links across the entire network and helps to activate and foreground stored memo- ries of previous scenes that are scrutinised and re-contextualised in light of new revelations. It seems that he based his key concept of iconic solidarity and the polysyntactic function of the gutter on Iser’s The Act of Reading (cf. 2007: 114, 175). Importantly, the “moving viewpoint” (Iser 1980: 16) does not coincide with any of the textual structures or perspectives that are presented sequentially – but also concurrently, in the case of comics – to the readers (cf. Iser 1980: 35; see also 21, 47, 96). Groensteen’s concept of ‘overdetermination’ (cf. 2007: 29) resembles Iser’s notion of foregrounding, as it ascribes a privileged spot to an element of the composition, which may result from the position of the panel on the page, its salience (e.g. size, shape), or its importance to the scene or the entire network (iconic solidarity). The gaps have a grammatical function in the narrative and invite both sequential and translinear blending, for which the groundwork can be found in Iser’s theory: “an ‘overdetermined text’ causes the reader to engage in an active Markus Oppolzer - 9783631810880 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/23/2021 04:28:52PM via free access Synopsis 231 process of composition, because it is he who has to structure the meaning potential arising out of the multifarious connections between the semantic levels of the text” (Iser 1980: 49). This process relies on a silent understanding between creators and readers that narratives can be meaningfully reconstructed (cf. Groensteen 2013: 19). At the same time, this does not mean that readers have to detect and actively pursue every single possible connection while reading, but to pick up the most important drift of a scene, based on its foregrounded and repeated elements. Iser’s retroactive effect, the process by which previously formed gestalten are “constantly evoked in a new context and so modified by new correlates that insti- gate a restructuring of past syntheses” (1980: 111), is a purely cognitive operation. In this case, a character may appear in a very different light in the present scene, which challenges readers to reconcile this realisation with his or her previous behaviour. Contrary to computational models of cognition, this does not involve filling the slots of mental models and thus updating files, but holding two specific social interactions involving the same character in working memory, exploring potential correspondences and obvious differences and actively working on a rec- onciliation of the two on a higher level of understanding (cf. Pfister 2000: 172). This can result in a tentative new gestalt or blend, but it could also mean that readers have to operate with two competing explanations for a certain amount of time. The fragmentation of a single character into several versions of itself is not unusual in autobiographical writing, where we usually encounter different younger selves that may resist easy blending or what Dancygier calls ‘viewpoint compression’. Chapter 4 is concerned with the question of how these two theories of reading comics – McCloud’s and Groensteen’s – compare to the cognitive approaches I introduced in the third part. The fragmentation of the comics narrative and the tensions between the disparate elements have to be extended, however, to the relation between words and images, which also become blended into a unified perceptual whole. Comics scholars, who – judging from their bibliographies – have never heard of conceptual integration theory, use very similar terms and concepts to describe how reading takes place in this medium. Here is an example from Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith and Paul Levitz’s The Power of Comics: “The chief task of comic book creators is to reduce the imagined story to images encap- sulated in panels. The reader must then work at blending those panels into a narrative experience” (2015: 153). In most cases, panels are not snapshots, single moments or atomistic building blocks of comics narratives, but already blends themselves. They contain compressed vital relations for which Duncan, Smith and Levitz, following Will Eisner, use the term “encapsulation” (2015: 108; see Markus Oppolzer - 9783631810880 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/23/2021 04:28:52PM via free access 232 Cognitive Approaches to Comics also Eisner 2006: 39). Readers, then, have to find ways to further re-blend them into larger units – a process that Iser calls gestalt-forming. However, the blends within single panels may be intricately layered and highly compressed, which means that readers have to ‘unpack’ them first. In this sense, compression and decompression are both creative and receptive processes. Political cartoons, for example, often showcase a high degree of compression that challenges readers to identify and understand the whole network of mappings. Charles Hatfield, to name a second example, describes the work of Jack Kirby in the following manner: “The power of drawings …[ ] stems from the tension between reading the image as a single moment and reading it as a synchro- nous compression of an extended length of time” (2012: 47; see also Baetens & Frey 2015: 166).

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