“Astonishment Is Thinking”: Graphic Metaphor and Its Philosophical Consequence in Mahler’s Poèmes and Lemieux’s Stormy Night

“[O]ne of the worst snares of the study [of metaphor is] the assumption that if we cannot see how a metaphor works, it does not work.”

(I. A. Richards qtd. in Zwicky 65 RIGHT)¹

“Many have learnt the word ‘see’ and never made any such use of it.”

(Wittgenstein, Last Writings 4)

The force of a graphic metaphor can momentarily wipe one’s mind clean, leaving it blank for a fleeting instant before the import of what one is looking at comes rushing in to fill one’s head with sparks, flashes, or fireworks of ideas. This combination of loss or insensibility and amazement or wonder found in the meaning of the word astonishment may seem like a strange condition to equate with thinking. However, the notion of being stunned mentally as a means of initiating a thought process is a useful one because it draws our attention to the need for pause, evident in the familiar phrase, “it gave me pause for thought.” Michèle Lemieux’s Stormy Night (1999) and Nicolas Mahler’s Poèmes (2007) are deeply philosophical and unusual books that challenge our assumptions about picturebooks due to the astonishing juxtapositions of the verbal and the visual on their page openings. These juxtapositions spur philosophical thinking on existential matters. Metaphor rather than narrative is the driving force in these books. The metaphors are line drawings that present us with surprising images which, like good poetry, make us see the world and life anew. As Victor Shklovsky argues in “Art as Technique,” “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’” (20). Lemieux’s and Mahler’s books astonish us into thinking by defamiliarizing various aspects regarding the dominant, and thus nearly invisible, metaphor of the journey of life. The books, which are collections of aphorisms in the form of graphic metaphors, also defamiliarize our notion of story. In a point similar to Shklovsky’s regarding the power of poetic speech “to remove the automatism of perception” (27), Ludwig Wittgenstein notes that a common impediment to understanding is “the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see” (qtd. in Zwicky 115 RIGHT). Whereas Shklovsky claims that sometimes we are blind due to automatism, Wittgenstein suggests that sometimes we willfully misread the signs in front of us. Poèmes and Stormy Night surprise us out of our habitual modes of seeing not only through their graphic metaphors, but also through the absence of an overt plot. The books push us toward a new kind of reading, one in which the force of individual graphic metaphors or their combinations result in philosophical reflection and inquiry rather than story.

While Mahler’s and Lemieux’s books are stylistically and thematically similar, they are structurally distinct. Stormy Night is presented in the form and shape of a sketchbook and thus shares with Poèmes a similar ethos of page design. The page offers room for the eye to rest and for the mind to contemplate, encouraging a pause for thought at every turn. Page openings are designed to present a dialogue, be it between a word or sentence and an image, or just an image that adds to a previous spread. In both books the use of white space is integral to the force of their graphic metaphors, and the look of the page and its contents is integral to the experience of reading and meaning-making. Poèmes (La Pastèque, 2007) is a series of twenty-one “graphic poem” pairs that rely in some degree on conceptual binary opposition to convey their meaning, such as night and day, air and water, curiosity and stupidity, solitude and company. The collection is framed to suggest the course of a lifetime, beginning with the pairings birth and...