The Wordless Narrative

Symbols connect us. Letters string together, creating words that go on to become sentences. However, even letterform symbols, like the English Alphabet, aren’t rudimentary. They are abstractions and thus take time to learn. A Picture as a symbol is a more innate way of communicating than a letterform. Think about the first cave drawings. They date back 40,000 years ago. What about the first written documents? A short 5,000 years ago, and that’s quite a gap.

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan is a graphic narrative that uses pictures to tell a story as opposed to words, or words and pictures. The Arrival can tell a story without using words because it speaks on behalf of emotions and ideas that are universal. In other words, it’s simple. I don’t mean dull or stupid, but simple. An astute reader can funnel down the message of the story into one sentence. “Man leaves home to create a better future for his family.”

The use of pictures-only is amplified by the fact that the man in the story can’t speak or understand the language, so the reader and protagonist are attached in that fundamental way, which is being wordless to progress.  We share his burden, and ours is trivial in comparison.

As an ad major, I have to think about telling stories with pictures all the time, especially for global brands, whose end user might not speak English. From experience, I think the core message always has to be incredibly strong and reach an emotional milestone. “Is it funny? Did I cry? Am I inspired to change myself?” Hitting emotions is the best way to tell wordless stories. Which goes back to what I was saying earlier about keeping it simple. (Here’s how you can test to see if an ad is good —Watch it with the sound turned off. If it still made you laugh, chances are it’s a simple, brilliant ad. This doesn’t always work, but it’s a good starting point.)

Keeping it simple is the way to go. Not everyone speaks English. Sometimes the best way to tell a story is emotionally, through pictures. As Doug Larson, American Cartoonist, once said, “If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.”