Reading through Une Semaine de Bonte in class was very useful to my understanding of the book. Describing it as a wordless novel made me consider the book in a way I hadn’t when I had looked through it before class that day. I had seen the different sections as collections of images with similar themes and characters portrayed in them. After looking at the pages in class, I understood they could be read as having a connected narrative, with one page moving to the next as a cohesive story. I especially liked the two images of the woman in the bed, and considering whether it was meant as a single image from two angles or as two separate instances. I am also amazed that he was able to complete this book in such a short period of time, and find all the images he needed to make the pages as they are. The variety of images and his ability to give them a cohesive feel is very impressive. While there were some places where the different elements could be seen added together, overall the pages looked complete. His talent is clearly seen by his ability to make the images so seamless.
3 thoughts on “Une Semaine de Bonte”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
While I question the congruity of the book as a whole, I agree that the sections have an element of continuity that binds the individual pages together in a way that word-filled novel would. One thing I found interesting to consider is the use of cut out images from the same source. There are a handful of pages which clearly have figures or landscapes drawn in the same fashion, indicating that they originated in the same encyclopedia or book that Max Ernst made use of. One such example is the two-page section that you mentioned, the divergent perspectives of the woman lying on the bed amidst the waves. She appears nearly identical – whether it was the exact same cut-out or simply a comparable one in the same volume, I am uncertain, but the fact remains that Ernst’s ability to use images from the same source lends power to the cohesiveness of the “wordless novel”.
I agree with this post. While the images in “Une Semaine de Bonté” could work as standalone pieces, they gain greater meaning through Ernst’s usage of the narrative in this wordless novel. I also agree with you about the two pages that contain a woman in a bed with water around her. While the two images can be interpreted as being part of the same scene, they work individually just as any collage from Ernst’s worlds novel can hold its own weight even without being contained in the novel. There is enough material in each collage to find meaning.
One point that I thought was really cool about the book was the idea of the images all being connected in a narrative. I think it’s a really cool concept considering how little context we actually have for each image. Like the panels of a comic, the images themselves have meaning, but so does the gutter (the space between the images). In comics, there is often a sense of movement within the gutter in which we fill in the time gaps between each panel. I feel similarly toward this book. Though there is clearly not the same sense of continuity as in a comic or graphic novel, this book allows the reader to fill in the space between the images with his/her own imagination. Like a painting, no two individuals will create the exact same narrative, but the narrative is still there.