Reading Lat's Kampung Boy Series As a Bildungsroman for Children

Southeast Asian Review of English, 51.1(2012/2013): 4-20. Illustrating Childhood: Reading Lat’s Kampung Boy series as a Bildungsroman for Children Shalini Teresa Fernandez The graphic narrative is a medium through which children can be introduced to literary works in an accessible and engaging fashion. As John Berger in Ways of Seeing comments, “[s]eeing comes before words” (7). He continues, “[t]he child looks and recognizes before it can speak” (7). This pull towards the visual, the ability of the eye to non-verbally identify and decode the connotative meaning of images and the visceral connection between the eye which sees and the “I” who decodes the images, then, is what makes the graphic narrative a popular medium for encouraging children to read. We live in an image-saturated and dependent world. Images come at us at high volume and speed – literally, thousands of images a day in the form of advertisements, billboards, publicity, infomercials etc. in print and electronic media. Kevin Maness in “Teaching Media-Savvy Students about Popular Media” comments that contrary to common assumptions that children are “passive audiences of the media, lacking the critical, analytical skills to resist media manipulation” (46), most of them actually have quite well-honed media literacy skills “gained through years of informal media literacy training” (46) as a result of their exposure to and interaction with popular media. He continues that “[a]lthough these skills may be used unconsciously; they are effective and often sophisticated” (47) suggesting that most children’s visual literacy is high. Cultural and media theorist, Sut Jhally in “Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture” points out the embeddedness of what he calls the “image- system” (251) within social life. He observes that in order to properly carry out its function, the advertising industry in the first half of the twentieth century “literally…taught [consumer society] how to read the commercial messages” (250) that were being produced by the advertising industry. He concludes that “by the postwar period the education was complete” (250) and consumers had learned how to decode the visual/commodity image-system effectively. Jhally’s article, although written about advertising in 1990, points prophetically to the state of visual affairs in the twenty-first century, especially with the massive growth and popularity of social media. He says, “[a]s we head toward the twenty-first century, advertising is ubiquitous – it is the air that we breathe as we live our daily lives.” (250-1).1 Now, in the twenty-first century, we could just as easily say the above about the presence of visual-content-loaded social media. Consequently, due to the “ubiquity” and embeddedness of image- systems within contemporary culture and the media, it would not be far-fetched to conclude that many 1 Edmund B. Feldman is in agreement. He comments in “Visual Literacy,” that “our culture is increasingly represented and perceived in visual terms” (200). FERNANDEZ4 Southeast Asian Review of English, 51.1(2012/2013): 4-20. children have a relatively strong ability to recognize, understand, and decode the images they see - a point in support of employing the graphic narrative as a medium to develop literary awareness in children.2 On the value of graphic narrative as a means of engaging young people’s interest in literary work, Christina Sanchez has this to say: “by being mediators between young people and adults, between high and popular culture, comics and cartoons are ideally suited as an intrinsically motivating teaching material that can draw students’ attention to demanding linguistic phenomena in a playful way” (276) because they focus attention on both text and image. While Sanchez is interested in the use of comics and cartoons for primarily linguistic teaching and acquisition, I would contend that graphic narratives are an effective medium through which to also encourage the development of a literary understanding of the text in children. The visual elements of the graphic narrative can be effectively used to assist young people in producing readings of mood, atmosphere, setting and sensuous imagery that can be read parallel to and in tandem or tension with the verbal text. Images, as Berger reminds us, are not unmediated – he comments, “[e]very image embodies a way of seeing…The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject. The painter’s way of seeing is reconstituted by the marks he makes on the canvas or paper. Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception and appreciation of an image depends also on our own way of seeing” (10). Every image, thus, is not a transparent window conveying information but is always, already mediated, shaped and framed by the eye of the artist/author and also the eye of the receiver/reader. It is, in essence, always already a re-presentation – a semiotic encoding and decoding that produces meaning. Both the artist’s “way of seeing” and the reader’s “way of seeing” engage to produce meaning in the image. This aspect of our engagement with the image is important, especially in our production of meaning when we read imagistic texts like the graphic narrative, where a significant part of the story is told in the graphics. Importantly, Jhally also reminds us that “the grammar of …images…is clearly different to the grammar of verbal or written language.” (253). Edmund B. Feldman concurs. He points out, as Jhally does, that “visual communication …relies on an innate grammar of images” (196) and that “[r]eading images …involves a sampling or trial of several logical sequences before the viewer finds one that is capable of carrying him through a whole visual organization with some degree of formal, sensuous, or cognitive satisfaction” (198). The “grammar of images,” as both Jhally and Feldman suggest, operates through our ability to perceive and understand visual signs – to take into account and “notice lines, shapes, colors, textures, and light intensities” 2 Of course, this conclusion comes with many assumptions, the least not being that the societies and cultures involved are technologically developed enough for the multiple images-systems to exist within them, and that the children in question are able to participate in a visually rich environment. FERNANDEZ5 Southeast Asian Review of English, 51.1(2012/2013): 4-20. (197) and then organize these into meaningful sequences of information. Feldman points out that this process in itself is common to both reading words as well as images but that the difference lies in the possibilities offered by images for creative, flexible, and multiple organizations of perceptions. Thus “more than one valid reading of an image is possible…testifying to the complexity of perceptual sequences that a reasonably interesting image can sustain” (198). This complexity and multiplicity of readings is often restricted in verbal representation because it is “necessary to forget what symbols look like and to remember only the sounds they stand for” (197) and then to “interpret the symbolic meanings of the words and their sequential or syntactic meanings based on their positions in a word string or sentence” (197). Thus, the decoding and interpretation of verbal meaning is strongly regulated by the symbolic meanings attached to the words, and sequential structure of syntax. This, we could argue, could limit the possible readings that could be generated from the text. Mark Bernninger, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn are in agreement, although more poetically so. They state: Literature, both written and oral, is an exercise in sequential linearity. Texts are like a river, flowing on in a line, just like this one, from left to right, or from right to left, usually top to bottom, page to page to page. Pictures, on the other hand, are like lakes, not flowing at all, just lying there—meaningful surfaces, abstractions, reductions of three-dimensional events into two dimensional circumstances. When reading pictures, our eyes scan the surface, constructing temporal and meaningful sequences. As the picture remains static while the text flows past, our eyes are more or less free to roam, and thus the picture exists in a magical world in which time is not a line but a complex loop, and in which everything can acquire a temporal and causal connection to everything else:… pictures are not simply frozen events, but rather complex circumstances. (1 – 2) Because the pictures are “static” they are present to the eye much more than the text – we are able to see the picture more wholly than the text whose form slips from our gaze as we proceed along the page. Thus, the image offers possibilities of interpretation and reinterpretation both in connection to and separate from the flowing text. Furthermore, Feldman concludes that “[i]t is quite possible… that the formal and sensuous complexity of much visual imagery accounts for its emotive power” (199). Thus, the process of reading a graphic narrative is then not passive – a mere looking at pictures that reinforce words, or which are read like words - but an active “seeing” or perceiving of the nuances of the story through the image. The image often offers a richness and depth of detail that efficiently transcends words. The image does not merely tell a story, but at times, even many stories, and is also open to the discovery of details that provoke curiosity, evoke emotions, and captivate the attention. FERNANDEZ6 Southeast Asian Review of English, 51.1(2012/2013): 4-20. In considering the nature of graphic narratives, Charles Hatfield in “Comic Art, Children’s Literature and the New Comic Studies” comments that early academic studies of graphic narratives (comics and cartoons) considered “that comics at best play a developmental role in the reading life of children, that they are by nature “easy” reading, and that the images in comics function either as crutches or distractions to the novice reader and are of little value in themselves” (364).

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