Whether it is the omniscient author
or a man in the book, he must gather up his experience, compose a
vision of it as it exists in his mind, and lay _that_ before the
reader. It is the reflection of an experience; and though there may be
all imaginable diversity of treatment within the limits of the
reflection, such is its essential character. In a pictorial book the
principle of the structure involves a point of view which is not the
reader's.
It is open to the pictorial book, however, to use a method in its
picture-making that is really no other than the method of drama. It is
somebody's experience, we say, that is to be reported, the general
effect that many things have left upon a certain mind; it is a fusion
of innumerable elements, the deposit of a lapse of time. The
straightforward way to render it would be for the narrator--the author
or his selected creature--to view the past retrospectively and
discourse upon it, to recall and meditate and summarize. That is
picture-making in its natural form, using its own method. But exactly
as in drama the subject is distributed among the characters and
enacted by them, so in picture the effect may be entrusted to the
elements, the reactions of the moment, and _performed_ by these. The
mind of the narrator becomes the stage, his voice is no longer heard.
His voice _is_ heard so long as there is narrative of any sort,
whether he is speaking in person or is reported obliquely; his voice
is heard, because in either case the language and the intonation are
his, the direct expression of his experience.
Pages:
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262