Newswise — How would a novel or autobiography end up if the writer hadn't doodled, painted, photographed or clipped pictures from other books or magazines to help shape the finished book?
That's a question Professor Julie LeBlanc of U of T's Department of French and the Centre for Comparative Literature is trying to figure out as she pores over the diaries, notebooks and memoirs of such famous writers as Carol Shields, Frida Kahlo, Andre Maré, Roland Barthes, Anny Duperey and Marie-Claire Blais.
"Language is sometimes deficient when it comes to the textual representation of reality," says LeBlanc, "and it's an arbitrary system of communication which cannot always express what a novelist or autobiographer wants to communicate. Various forms of visual images such as paintings, drawings and photographs are often introduced by novelists or autobiographers in their manuscripts to express what language cannot " even if these images never make it into the published work."
Even the most talented of writers (Zola, Baudelaire, Kafka, Grass) have resorted to creating 'picture books' in the manuscripts of their novels and diaries to help them, many never meant to be seen by an author's fans. Published or not, this process can and did help many famous writers visualize their finished product, says LeBlanc. "You learn a great deal about writing when you delve into these notebooks and book drafts and that includes the whole cognitive process that was put into play as these authors were creating," she says. "I think they often came to the conclusion at some point that they had to call upon another medium such as drawing or painting the faces of their characters or using a photo of an actual geographic location in order to help them in the textual representation of these elements."
LeBlanc's work, Self Imaging in Life-Writing, which she will publish in book form in 2006, is partially funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Victoria College.
RSS