Wordless Literature. Seeing the Narrative in Silent Books

Abstract

The wordless book is, by nature, a rather singular narrative device: telling a story without the use of words, but only through illustrations, it is an “open work” (Eco 1962) not only to high polysemy, but also to very different, transgenerational, transnational audiences. The silent book shows obvious kinship links with art, painting, photography, silent cinema, addressing readers who are also “watchers”: this is how this visual narrative also ends up contributing to a broader definition of what literature is, children’s literature specifically. Yet: how does one describe without words an object, a feeling, an individual? Literature is also that which does not resort to verbality, although it must necessarily resort to verbalizing the iconic component. In this essay we intend to investigate precisely the ability of the image in wordless books to make itself word and literature through a skillful use of graphic description, which in turn traces the attempts of so much literature (even limiting ourselves to Italian) of the second half of the twentieth century to make itself image through verbal description. A few significant examples read in the light of visual studies will be examined, which have so much to do with a living world «under an uninterrupted rain of images» (Calvino 2010, 46), what writer Daniele Del Giudice calls the «Epoch [...] of the widest visibility there has ever been» (2023), meaning by visibility precisely our visual-oriented “objects”, including books. Do we still read images in a historical moment of high visual saturation? The “illustrauthors” of silent books help us on this path of recovering a visual literacy as urgent as ever for us reader-watchers.