Shaping an Image of Europe: Half Way Over Iceland (George Bowering: “Discoloured Metal”)

One of the main objectives of shape prose is to show weaknesses and limitations of written language or to emphasize the descriptive power of visual language. Text is physically transformed into illustration(s) to re-introduce the authority of the visual. This provides authors with endless possibilities of expressing the third entity of meaning, and this expands the freedom of interpretation on the part of readers of multimodal texts. The third entity of meaning is a term which I coined in the course of my doctoral research to refer to the new and semantically largely independent meaning derived from the interpretation of the verbal and the visual meanings in a shaped (or in some other way multimodal) texts, in other words, the meaning which is created through the semantical interrelations of the verbal and visual. How is the reading of the text influenced by its multimodal shape? Hallet writes: [visual forms of gesture; a.r.] direct the reader from written discourse to visual elements in the margins of the page and urge them to interrelate the different semiotic elements, thus breaking up the linear continuity of the verbal text and transforming the act of reading into a hypertextual activity (Hallet 2014, 157). Indeed, reading a multimodal shaped text always is an interdisciplinary task which requires from readers a certain sensitivity for both the verbal and the visual, and the meaning that arises from their interaction. Shaped prose is sometimes referred to as shaped-prose, pattern prose or visual prose, analogous to classification of poetry that features similar visual elements of layout. All these terms describe short prose which can be defined as short stories, and which feature the following types of graphic devices of artistically altered graphic layout (the typology is taken over from my Dissertation defended at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria, May 2018. Tutek, Nikola (2018) Visual and Verbal Interrelations in Canadian Short Fiction, Dissertation, pg. 299.): Rendering literary message through the usage of fonts, punctuation (for example, Bowering’s consistent disregard of apostrophe in contractions in The Rain Barrel), interpolation of paragraphs and other sections of text by numbering and lettering. This type of graphic devices is focused on typography and structure of integral texts. Rendering a literary message through physical re-arrangement and negation of integral texts. This type of graphic devices partially focuses on spacing, that is, on the usage of negative spaces. Negation of texts is achieved with parts of texts which are crossed out but still fully legible (for example, in Bowering’s “Staircase Descended”). Sentences and words which are arranged in this manner are never physically disintegrated, and no textual message is lost or hidden. Rendering a literary message through physical layout which fractures the text. This device features ‘gorging’ negative or colored spaces which do not respect the border of a sentence, a word or even a character. Parts of texts covered by ‘gorging’ negative or colored spaces cannot be retrieved (for example, the white circles covering the text in Bowering’s “Discoloured Metal”), hence, some of the textual meanings are deliberately lost or hidden. Graphic layout of the text, which is printed in a shape that alludes to a semantic feature of the text. This type of graphic devices can but do not have to cause a part of the textual message to be lost or hidden (such is, again, Bowering ‘s “Discoloured Metal” where the gorging white circles hide parts of the text and also allude to an airplane window). The difference between the third and the fourth types is in the fact that the third type hides parts of the meaning of the text by erasing them, and the erased, blank spaces inevitably take certain forms, while in the fourth type these blank forms are not random, they carry a reference to the meaning of the text (or its parts), and they actually reveal parts of the meaning of the text. The third and the fourth types of devices of artistically altered graphic layout will be the most important for the further analysis of Bowering’s short text, namely, the analysis of the meaning of the circular blank and textual fields in the body of the text.

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