Brainfarts

Illustration showing giant squid attack, p.275 from Jules Vernes, 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea', First English edition, 1870. F5715-004.

The semiotic relationship between the illustrations and the text in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires is interesting.

As Georges Borgeaud has described it: “It is not the text which defines the illustration, but the illustration which defines the text and which transports the reader beyond...it is a catalyst to dream."

Never fully revealed, text and image are weaved into a mental landscape with a third element: memories.

For a mental construction to be richer than as is, one should appeal to memories, elements of nostalgia, shared or personal.