Gorey might not have been a fan of children, but his stylistic choices in terms of what he represents versus what he implies are prompts for imagination that draw on the reader’s childlike abilities to deny the need for logical connectivity. In The Sinking Spell, The West Wing, and The Curious Sofa, Gorey uses the rigid formality of the panels to create fertile inventive spaces. Though the stories are not exactly graphic novels, the “gutter” or blank spaces that fall outside of and typically divide the panels, features prominently in Gorey’s work. (Maybe this space could be called the para-image, a zone between image and non-image). For example, our only prompt to think of The Curious Sofa as pornography is the title itself; all the depictions of sex we would expect are completely absent. So too does Gorey hide the object of our interest in The Sinking Spell perpetually beyond the border of the image. These stories are all built on absence and calculated omissions instead of representations. In the absence of sight, we apply our imagination to what is essentially a sparsely-populated template.
Gorey’s artwork is certainly elaborate in its highly-textured inkings, but within the panels, nothing much ever seems to happen, giving them a quality of emptiness. The Curious Sofa is perhaps the best example, but in The West Wing as well, part of the eerieness comes from a singular point of disruption in an otherwise empty space. The thread of connectivity wears thin in all of the stories except perhaps The Sinking Spell, so our understanding of the stories comes not from logical order but from its abandonment; we accept the nonsense as nonsense and instead begin to construct our own subjective relationships between the images. This might also be why so much of Gorey’s work depends on rhymes and other formulaic structures, down to his use of anagrams: by providing us with a recognizable structure- children’s book rhymes, the alphabet, series of images- and unrecognizable connections, Edward Gorey is prompting us towards an acceptance of meaninglessness that is ultimately a freeing and imaginative act.
*Just as an aside, for those who might be looking for a little more humor in all Gorey’s grimness: the amazing comic artist Kate Beaton has done some excellent re-imaginings of book covers done by Gorey and expanded them into comic strips. It’s kind of a cool transference from the book to Gorey’s interpretation to Beaton’s.
Here are some links!:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
I completely agree with your view on the unseen images often being incredibly important to Gorey’s stories. Especially in The Curious Sofa, as almost every other panel alluded to illicit acts being performed within that gutter space, but no one can be exactly sure what those acts are because the readers can’t actually see them. The fact that readers aren’t privy to what is in fact going on adds a layer of closeness despite this distancing lack of information. Readers now need to create the storyline and fill in the blanks. What could be considered leaving readers without enough information, does in fact give them an opening to have fun immersing themselves into these bizarre stories even more.