Major Project Report

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Introduction

What you have started to read now is the introduction to my Major Project report. The point of the project is to use material means, typographic possibilities, to proliferate meaning within a text. Mostly it is a project about what is real and what seems real, but it is not. Ultimately this is a project about you, Reader. Central to this major project is the notion that graphic devices communicate; graphic images and typography can supplement verbal arguments, but they can also be powerful persuasive and argumentative tools in themselves. My project aims at exploring ways in which typographic interventions could be used as an instrument to physically engage with the reader, conveying a sense of amusement and interaction by means of a playful treatment of the text.

The project primarily aims at the broad audience of average readers with no distinction of gender, age or social background. In my view, readers would ideally benefit from my work by experiencing a different way in which they can approach the written fiction narration. Another purpose is trying to highlight the hidden messages and themes within the book in order to create a new knowledge. Research in the humanities involves dealing with complexity and ambiguity in texts as well as in interpretation. Creating a model of knowledge can be difficult when modelling complex and ambiguous phenomena; doing so requires a subjective stance. Johanna Drucker subscribes to a theory of knowledge as partial, subjective, and situated. Subjectivity in this context has two components: a point of view inscribed in the possible interpretations of a work, and “inflection, the marked presence of affect and specificity, registered as the trace of difference, that inheres in material expressions.” To Drucker, subjectivity of knowledge is evident in the fact that interpretation occurs in modelling, encoding, processing, and accessing knowledge.

Context: The Baron in the trees

Choosing the right type of text to work on was not an easy task. First of all, the impossibility of participating in the creation process in collaboration with an author necessarily means that I am reserving to myself the role of interpreter, or better yet performer of the story, in a similar way that a stage director would do when picking a text to adjust to theatre.

The story needed to be compelling, to have a strong theme and various keys of reading, in order to make it possible for me to unveil the invisible layers of meaning through graphic interventions.

After considering different alternatives of short stories, I came across with one of the first fictions written by Calvino. The Baron in the trees was the first part of Calvino’s trilogy “I nostri antenati” (1960), consisting of “Il visconte dimezzato” (1952), “Il barone rampante” (1957) and “Il cavaliere inesistente” (1959). The three novels, like all Calvino’s fictions published in his lifetime, were published by Enaudi, for whom Calvino worked for many years as an editor.

This story of an Italian nobleman who chose to live in the trees as a boy and who never came down, but nevertheless corresponded with Voltaire, joined the Freemasons and met Napoleon, was a great critical success.

The baron’s ideas are allegedly stimulated by his readings of eighteenth-century French literature and philosophy. Calvino was fascinated by this historical time, which he knew well thanks to his personal ties to intellectuals and historians of the Enlightenment, many of whom were scholars associated with the Einaudi publishing house in Turin. He was particularly interested in exploring the nuances and apparent contradictions within the eighteenth-century culture. Therefore, it should not come as too much of a surprise that the Enlightenment represented in The Baron cannot be reduced to the monolithic, hyper-rational, technocratic, and ultimately destructive philosophical project so often described in twentieth-century histories of this period.

The Baron evokes studies on the ‘harmonies’ of nature, as it speaks of the symbiotic connections that unite the natural world in a continuous and vital chain of being. Cosimo is said to establish nurturing ‘friendship’ with his woods; he becomes one with the figs or other trees, listening to them, understanding and instinctively supporting their characteristic needs.

The Baron in the Trees is frequently read as a reflection on the ideal role of the scholar in the contemporary society. However, the novel also illustrates in fantastic form the deforestation that took place along the northern Mediterranean coast of Italy. It offers both a literary response to the excesses of urban development that characterised the post-war period and a critical reflection on a longer history of human intervention on the Italian Riviera. The text is in fact written with such botanical precision and inter-textually refers to works of such environmental importance that it begs its readers to consider the literal significance of Calvino’s trees, and to recognise the long-standing literary and philosophical tradition upon which the author’s ecological ethics were founded.

The book is carefully set at the turn of the nineteenth century, at a particularly important turning point in Ligurian history: just before, during, and after the French take-over of the Republic of Genoa under Napoleon — that is, at the beginning of a period of intense deforestation. The wealth and precision of Calvino’s arboreal details leave no doubt about the importance of trees in his narrative; it seems impossible to dismiss the represented landscape as a purely decorative or symbolic backdrop. Moreover, the vegetation is clearly identifiable as Ligurian.

One of the reasons why trees play such a central role in the novel may have to do with the fact that Calvino’s father Mario was an internationally recognised agricultural scientist and his mother Eva a similarly successful botanist.

Cosimo’s alternative lifestyle answers this call for civil engagement. All in all, Calvino’s text reminds us that, in the eighteenth century, the study of natural history included socio-ethical and philosophical considerations. Cosimo not only wants to explore and understand the natural world but he also gradually feels the need to connect more deeply to his natural environment.

Cosimo’s readings are similarly made to speak to the eighteenth century’s interests in protecting nature and in naturalising social contracts. Not surprisingly, some of his favourite articles from Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie are ‘Arbre’, ‘Bois’, and ‘Jardin’. These are logical selections insofar as they address technical issues of immediate value to the baron. Yet Diderot’s essay ‘Bois’ also underscores the primary importance of wood in all cultures, registering ongoing fears of deforestation, and therefore calling upon the good citizen’s duty to resolve this crisis.

Journey

When I started this journey my first research question reflected my initial broad interest in hybrid forms of storytelling. The first step was to collect a visual audit of existing experimental publishing and to build a typology based upon the type of intervention used: typography, photography, illustration, ephemera, layout and infographics. This first classification allowed me to have an overview upon the different graphic devices adopted, and to detect which are the most recurrent. The second, natural step was to gain full understanding of the Baron, through personal text analysis and Calvino’s critique. This helped me to unveil patterns and schemes within the structure of the text.

Meanwhile, my research question had underwent a re-definition into what seemed a more appropriate shape: How can graphic elements be used to perform a fiction text in order to enhance the reader’s experience?

At this stage, the early experimentations were heavily influenced by all the visual audit I had gathered so far. The Baron contained so many graphic inputs and references to the material aspects of books or newspapers that provided a perfect ground for such experiments, and I couldn’t help but being tempted to try to perform each and one of them quite literally.

After testing my former ideas on a particularly significant chapter, I realised that perhaps I was going in the wrong direction. The amount of interventions I planned to undertake was massive, time-consuming, and eventually did not carry that innovative feeling I was looking for.

In the meantime, I had started to explore more in depth the structure of the book and the use of typography in the historical period when the Baron was set. This led me to take a turning-point decision: abandon the myriad newspaper setting, the small page-to-page interventions and concentrate on what is, at the end of the day, the leitmotif of the Baron itself: its historical flavour.

It was only natural at this point to reshape again my research question into a more suitable one: How can I evaluate the book as a cultural object? And how can I evaluate the cultural content within it?

I started undertaking some more courageous experiments upon the book as an object itself, reflecting on the possible ways I could enhance the blurring between fiction and reality, considering its interaction with the reader.

Typography

Calvino’s fiction, The Baron in the trees, strives to create verisimilitude – a believable world for readers to enter. In a speech to the British Typographers Guild in 1932, Beatrice Warde built a self- proclaimed “long-winded and fragrant” metaphor comparing ideal typography to a crystal goblet. She argued that a connoisseur of wine would choose to drink from a simple crystal goblet over an exquisitely wrought gold goblet because “everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.” A typographic device is any piece of typesetting that deviates from the conventions of book design. Unconventional typography, like footnotes and side-notes interrupts the reading experience by breaking the ‘crystal goblet’.

In my version of Calvino’s The Baron in the trees, in addition to the rectangular grid composed by justified lines of text - which is such a familiar convention that it becomes so essentially invisible, that enables readers to entirely lose themselves in a fictional world - I inserted some “disturbs” such as annotations and graphic devices. I believe that readers must consider why they have been drawn back to the printed page, back to the material reality of the book. The text is set in Bodoni, first designed by Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) in the late eighteenth century and frequently revived since. Some digital versions of Bodoni are said to be hard to read due to "dazzle" caused by the alternating thick and thin strokes, particularly as the thin strokes are very thin at small point sizes. This is very common when optical sizes of font intended for use at display sizes are printed at text size, at which point the hairline strokes can recede to being hard to see. In order to give the right feeling to the reader I used three different versions of Bodoni ITC cut for 12 points, for 6 points and 72 points. The hairline serifs and fine strokes reflected a high quality of casting. The textured finish of the paper I used allows fine details to be retained on the surface. I also took care of the composition of my printing, using hierarchy and borders to create an appearance of elegance. Moreover, the range of type sizes allows flexibility in the composition. The fact that one of the most eminent Italian typefaces is being used for one of the most eminent Italian author is just the icing on the cake.

Photograph

... Once inside the book, inside the story, the Reader comes across ten different sub-narrations, loose sheets, photographs, book within the book, letters, engravings. To re-enhance this blurring between reality and its representation, the book contains simulacra of the media that the story is speaking about. The photographs help to convey the tridimensionality of the object and bewilder the reader on what is real and what is not. Photographs, maps, letters, engravings and double spread book are discussed together here, because they are used to achieve similar affects: breaking the fiction and bring the reader to the reality of the facts. Every medium I decided to use has a precise purpose.

Maps should help the reader to have a clear idea about spaces and this contributes to his imagination. The letter that Calvino wrote to his editor while he was writing the book make a better understanding about every character: Why Cosimo needed this alternative lifestyle? Why the family almoner was named Fauchelefleur? Why some chapters are written in first person by Cosimo and others by his brother?

The double spread book cover that interrupt the reading have different purposes such as supporting the credibility of the type setting as well as the reliability of the novel. Not all the books that the protagonist is reading are well known, therefore having a facsimile of a double page of that book helps the reader to distinguish what is real and what is fiction.

By breaking the convention of the text grid those facsimiles have immediate visual impact. When we turn the page, the presentation is unexpected, and amplifies the moment for us, reflecting the experience of the characters.

Similar work is made by engravings, paintings and documents that are loose or printed in the book.

It could be argued that some of the photographs are not significant enough to be called integral to the novel – removing it would not alter the plot. However, a small but important distinction should be made between a narrative device, and a literary device. These photographs may not be narrative devices, in that they do not progress the narrative (storyline) directly, but they are literary devices, because they confer an intangible, literary value to the novel. Again, I can relate the plot of a novel to you, but the art of the novel lies in its use of literary devices. The fact that there are multiple photographs of battles, people, books and painting means that they develop as a visual theme, linking to people and events and actions in the story...

Conclusion

During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I’ve had these moments of ‘knowing’ one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. ... Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. ...The fact is, the real experience can’t be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old- fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle, perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words.

— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook —

When I started this journey almost nine months ago, I only had a vague idea of my destination. I had a few landmarks and a shining north star, that was my interest in editorial and information design. I explored the territory of visual writing end ended up in the realms of fiction, the place where you loose track of reality.

The truth is, I spent about 70% of my journey wandering in theories, reading around and thinking through the muddy distinction between design practice and design research, and reading about totally foreign fields like philosophy, semiotic, art and history. Sometimes I got lost and sometimes I got directed towards the next move by the tutor and my classmates - they really helped me to get the better output! - What I gained from that is the invaluable amount of new knowledge and discipline I would have never obtained otherwise.

The success of this project must be seen in light of the many limitations it faced. The key challenge was the necessity (in my opinion) for the project to work with different types of graphic intervention, such as photographs, letters, paintings, other books and different typography. And the real challenge for me was to keep the facsimile layout of the eighteenth century book and at the same time break it in such a way that the reader could jump into the story, to feel like he was actually reading this book in the historical period it speaks about. One of the few landmarks I mentioned above was the intention of creating something purposeful, that could actually enhance the reading experience.

Slowly, the raison d’être of my project shifted from merely entertaining my Reader to actually challenge him intellectually, leading him to pose questions about the book as an artefact in the same way in which Calvino does by exposing the structures of a fictional text.

Too much time was spent managing the project and too little given to the actual design. I seriously underestimated the time and effort it would take to build the entire book. The only thing that I regret most is not being able to make the whole book, but I believe that the difference between the initial chapters, the finals and the two in between is quiet visible and is doing the right job. It shows an excellent progression from its early stages towards a piece which is well considered.

Given these limitations, I am confident in what I have managed to achieve with this project. First, according to my “good eye” I used graphic devices in innovative ways. Second, I managed to include more than one type of graphic device, for different literary purposes – I understood the potential for graphic devices to produce diverse literary affects. Third, the novel was the subject of extensive and varied critical discussion, providing rich contextual material for analysis. Finally, all the graphic devices are integral to the novel.

In relation to the goals set out at the beginning of this project, I believe my work clearly illustrates an alternative approach to the word-image relation, engaging the reader and making him aware about what it is real and what it is not.