The Politics behind the Wordless Novel (Day Forty-One)

Given today's featured article on Wikipedia, we should reevaluate the narrowness of how we define the "novel".

For example, the wordless novel is "a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using woodcut and other relief printing techniques, the terms woodcut novel or novel in woodcuts are also used. The genre flourished primarily in the 1920s and 1930s and was most popular in Germany."

The wordless novel has its origin in the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century. The typically socialist work drew inspiration from medieval woodcuts and used the awkward look of that medium to express angst and frustration at social injustice.... Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity, the genre waned in the face of competition from sound films and anti-socialist censorship in Nazi Germany and the US.

Two aspects of this art form I want to address:

First, the "socialist themes of struggle against capitalism are common; scholar Perry Willett calls these themes 'a unifying element of the genre's aesthetic.'" As well, "[t]he storytelling tends to be melodramatic, and the stories tend to focus on struggles against social oppression in which characters are silenced by economic, political, and other social forces. The characters are clearly delineated as good or evil—the good drawn sympathetically and the evil with the contempt of the artist's moral indignation."

Second, "wordless novels used relief printing techniques such as woodcuts, wood engraving, metalcuts, or linocuts. One of the oldest printing techniques, relief printing has its origins in 8th-century China and was introduced to Europe in the 15th century.... Relief printing is an inexpensive but labour-intensive printing technique; it was accessible to socially conscious artists who wanted to tell wordless stories of the working classes."

Of the first, I ponder, why should an artistic medium be shackled to the dominate political ideology of its origins? Following the case made by French critical theorist Roland Barthes, art basically belongs the era of the reader, not so much that of the writer.

Of the second, the irony in that the socialists choose a "labour-intensive" technique, instead of a more efficient capital one.