The JOURNEY metaphor in Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s graphic novel → ( Sens )

Abstract

Language is not necessary to narrate even quite complex tales; indeed, stories can be narrated completely visually. This paper analyses Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s entirely wordless → – also known as Sens – published in 2014, to demonstrate that viewers understand this graphic novel by drawing on (1) their knowledge of story conventions; (2) their comprehension of the ways in which the medium of the graphic novel is able to narrate; (3) their embodied awareness of image schemas, specifically the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, FORCES, and BALANCE schemas that are at the root of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor; (4) familiarity with any other pertinent artistic texts and cultural knowledge they happen to be able to recruit. In this way, the paper aims to show the interrelation between visual communication and cognition; to contribute to the study of comics and graphic novels; and to pay tribute to Mathieu’s amazing work of art.

Introduction

Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s impressive graphic novel → is also known as Sens. According to its author this is an acronym signalling ‘Sens Et Non Sens’ (sense and the absence of sense), as reported in Nguyen (2016). → narrates an intriguing, complex story completely without words (although the complementary verbal title arguably makes it multimodal). The graphic novel is thus a good case study for charting how readers, or rather viewers, make sense (sic) of a story if they are not guided by language. Analysing → thereby contributes to the development of a theory of visual communication, a form of communication that has neither grammar nor vocabulary in the way language has (pace Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2021; Cohn, 2024, 2026). I will demonstrate that interpreting → requires, apart from experience of life in its broadest possible dimensions, recruiting knowledge relating to (1) the medium of the graphic novel, (2) the genre of narrative, and (3) the conceptual metaphor ACHIEVING A GOAL IS SELF-PROPELLED MOTION TOWARD A DESTINATION. Finally, appreciation of → can for individual viewers be enhanced if they are receptive to meaningful echoes of pertinent cultural ‘intertexts’.

→ has a simple format. Consisting of some 230 pages (which, as often in comics/graphic novels, are unnumbered), it is drawn exclusively in black and white. Each panel takes up one page – with one notable exception to which I will come back – and typically has a black border. On a literal, ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’ level, →’s narrative can be summarized as follows: a man sees an arrow, appearing in many different manifestations, but always as a variety of the same basic form: →. Sometimes no arrow is visible, and then the man tries to locate it. Whenever he sees the arrow, he moves in the direction in which it points.

The organization of the paper is as follows. Paragraph 2 briefly sketches pertinent aspects of the medium of the graphic novel and the story-genre. Paragraph 3 summarizes the Conceptual Metaphor Theory/CMT within which the JOURNEY metaphor was developed (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980a). This metaphor is outlined in more detail in paragraph 4. Paragraph 5 traces how the JOURNEY metaphor functions in → by focusing on essential components of its structure. In the concluding paragraph, I propose how an awareness of certain ‘intertexts’ may may further enhance enjoying →.

Medium and genre

While the medium of comics (including graphic novels) typically combines the modes of static visuals and written language, → has only visuals (it is to be noted that → has also been presented in an installation format, Nguyen [2016]). A characteristic of this medium is that it can only show isolated (usually: key) moments in the sequence of events and actions depicted in panels on a page. As Cohn elucidates, a comic page’s ‘default layout is most often considered to be the grid, which arranges panels into horizontal rows and vertical columns’ (2024: 76). This is not pertinent to →, in which, unusually, each page is itself one ‘panel’. But that does not change the situation that the viewer has to infer what happens between two panels/pages. This ‘material space visible between two juxtaposed panels’ is called the ‘gutter’ (Glaude, 2022: 142). It is the viewer’s job to supply the non-depicted information, which amounts to answering questions such as ‘what action took place?’ ‘how much time (zero time, a few seconds, minutes, hours, days …) has passed in the gutter between two adjacent panels?’ and ‘does the next panel show us the same or a different location than the preceding one?’ In mainstream comics, such as Hergé’s Tintin and Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix, making the right inferences is usually unproblematic, also because this process is often helped by dialogues between characters and by verbal narratorial texts (e.g., ‘Meanwhile …’, ‘The next day …’) – and indeed the average viewer is typically not even aware of doing mental work to understand the transition from one panel to the next. → is different. Very little ‘happens’ in this graphic novel, and the pleasure of appraising it resides to a considerable extent in figuring out what minimal development takes place in the gutter. For instance, in Figure 1 we see the protagonist from the back, climbing a wall. In Figure 2, which immediately follows it, we see him from the other side; the ‘camera’ has turned around 180°. But that is not the only thing that has changed in the gutter. If we watch carefully, we realize that the protagonist has repositioned his arms since the preceding page.

Figure 1.

On a left page, we see the protagonist from the back, climbing a wall, to the right of a porch. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

Figure 2.

On the adjacent right page, we see the protagonist climbing the wall from the other side, and thus now facing us. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

Viewers are enormously helped by their awareness that → belongs to the genre of stories. This means that they recruit their knowledge of story conventions, which could be summarized as follows. One or more characters experience events or undertake actions to achieve a goal of some sorts. Events and actions take place in specific locations and develop over time. In the pursuit of their goals, characters experience favourable as well as unfavourable circumstances. The end of the story offers some sort of positive or negative resolution that supposedly constitutes an aesthetically satisfactory ‘closure’, defined as ‘the degree to which the ending of a narrative […] reveals the effects of all the causal events and resolves (or “closes off”) all lines of action’ (Bordwell and Thompson, 1997: 477). All occurrences befalling, or undertaken by, characters are narrated from one or more specific perspectives, which necessarily steer the viewers’ (or readers’ or listeners’) interpretation. This perspective-taking combines narration and focalization (see Bal, 2017; Forceville, 2023).

Central ideas in conceptual metaphor theory

Before addressing the conceptual metaphor that governs →, it is necessary to say something about Conceptual Metaphor Theory in general. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980a, 1980b fundamentally changed the study of metaphor, although their views were anticipated by Ortony (1979). Defining metaphor as ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980a: 5), the authors’ first major insight is that metaphor is ‘primarily a matter of thought and action and only derivatively a matter of language’ (1980a: 153). Verbal metaphors thus are manifestations of conceptual metaphors. The authors’ second crucial claim is that human beings tend to conceive of abstract and/or complex phenomena in terms of concrete and/or better-known phenomena – and moreover do this systematically. Since concrete phenomena are accessed via sensory perception, Lakoff and Johnson’s theory also came to be known as the ‘embodied metaphor theory’. As Kövecses states, ‘the “embodiment” of meaning is perhaps the central idea of the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor’ (2010: 18, emphasis in original). A major subtype of conceptual metaphors are so-called ‘orientational metaphors’: humans draw on embodied knowledge of their spatial environment to metaphorically structure abstract and/or complex phenomena. Instances of such orientational metaphors are IMPORTANCE IS SIZE (‘she is the big chief’), GOOD IS UP/BAD IS DOWN (‘they are on cloud 9’, ‘he feels rather low these days’), GOOD IS LIGHT/BAD IS DARK (‘she beamed with happiness’, ‘this is a pitch-black scenario’). But Lakoff and Johnson also argue that an expression such as ‘she was in love’ exemplifies ‘in’ metaphorically: the literal use of ‘in’ pertains to ‘being located in a container’, as in ‘the milk is in the bottle’. Although most people will no longer recognize the metaphoricity of ‘in’, this leaves uncontested the fact that it functions as such (we are reminded of its metaphorical origin, for instance, in the lines ‘Oh, to be in love (and never get out again)’, from the eponymic song on Kate Bush’s debut album The Kick Inside, 1978). On a much larger scale, humans conceptualize events ‘via metaphor in terms of space, motion, and force’ (Lakoff, 1993: 220).

Lakoff and Johnson (1980a) introduced the term ‘target’ to label the conceptual domain whose verbal manifestation is in earlier theories called the metaphor’s ‘topic’ or ‘tenor’, and the term ‘source’ for the conceptual domain whose verbal manifestation is in older theories known as its ‘vehicle’. A verbal metaphor, the authors claim, can always be traced back to an underlying, conceptual TARGET A IS SOURCE B formula. Interpreting a metaphor amounts to deciding which feature(s), connotation(s), emotion(s), attitude(s) that pertain to the source can, in the context within which the metaphor occurs, be ‘mapped’ onto the target. Crucially, any metaphor always allows for only a selection of features from the source to be mapped onto the target; clearly, if all features etc. were mappable, the target and the source would be completely synonymous – and we would have a tautology, not a metaphor. By definition, the features that are not (supposed to be) mapped from the source domain onto the target domain are downplayed. Lakoff and Johnson label these two dimensions of metaphor ‘highlighting’ and ‘hiding’ (1980a: 10–13).

Here are two examples: FOOTBALL IS WAR and FOOTBALL IS A GAME OF CHESS. The metaphors present the target domain FOOTBALL in terms of the source domains WAR and GAME OF CHESS, respectively. The former (credited to legendary Dutch football coach Rinus Michels) emphasizes such features as the need to be ruthless, the inevitability of injuries and sacrifices etc. The latter emphasizes, among other things, strategic thinking and rational planning. The two metaphors arguably highlight and hide complementary aspects of the FOOTBALL domain. This example, incidentally, also demonstrates the ideological and moral dimensions of metaphorizing. As Black observes about the metaphor MARRIAGE IS A ZERO-SUM GAME, such a matrimony ‘is not the kind made in heaven’ (1979: 30).

The JOURNEY metaphor

A technical formulation of the JOURNEY metaphor is ACHIEVING A GOAL IS SELF-PROPELLED MOTION TOWARD A DESTINATION. Some studies have analysed this conceptual metaphor via its verbal manifestations (e.g., Katz and Taylor, 2008; Ritchie, 2008; Deignan, 2017 also discusses it in some images). The JOURNEY domain may well be the single most important source domain to metaphorize ACHIEVING A GOAL. Indeed, Gibbs mentions it to demonstrate that entrenched metaphorical concepts have the power to ‘automatically elicit metaphorical interpretations when no overt verbal metaphors are encountered’ (2023: 9).

But as McLuhan (1964) emphasizes, the medium is the message: content inevitably changes when the medium in which this content is presented changes. Therefore zooming in on a work of art whose interpretation is guided exclusively by visual manifestations of the JOURNEY metaphor will shed further light on this crucial conceptual metaphor (see also Forceville, 2006, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2017; Forceville and Jeulink, 2011; Kromhout and Forceville, 2013; Forceville and Paling, 2021; Zhang and Forceville, 2020; Gebraad and Forceville, 2024).

An indispensable source for guiding analyses of the JOURNEY metaphor in other media is Johnson (1987), which elaborates on the embodied aspect of metaphor developed in Lakoff and Johnson, 1980a, 1980b. Johnson discusses among other things the metaphorical potential of ‘gestalts for FORCE’ (1987: 42). He presents the following literal forces that play a role in helping or hindering movement: compulsion, blockage, counterforce, diversion, removal of restraint, enablement, and attraction (1987: 45–48). ‘Compulsion’ is a force that pushes an agent forward, for instance when a cyclist has the wind in her back; ‘blockage’ prevents an agent from progressing because of some barrier, for instance a broken-up road; ‘counterforce’ applies if, say, a cyclist faces strong wind, slowing down progress; ‘diversion’ exemplifies the need to choose a different, usually less convenient path because the main path cannot be used; ‘removal of restraint’ pertains to the elimination of a barrier, for instance by opening a door; ‘enablement’ concerns help the agent receives to make, or resume, progress, for instance by being lent a vehicle; and ‘attraction’ captures the idea of a magnet drawing an agent toward it. Often these forces are combined. Another pertinent embodied element in the JOURNEY metaphor discussed by Johnson is BALANCE (1987: 74–76 et passim). Only when an agent can keep his/her/+’s balance, after all, is forward movement possible. The rationale of discussing these various dimensions of embodied features is that they are often used metaphorically: ‘forceful bodily experiences give rise to image-schematic structures of meaning that can be transformed, extended, and elaborated into domains of meaning that are not strictly tied to the body (such as social interactions, rational argument, and moral deliberation)’ (Johnson, 1987: 44–45).

Clearly, FORCES play a key role in literal movement from one location to another. Unsurprisingly, given that able-bodied people constantly move from one place to another, and usually do so because they pursue a small-scale or life-structuring goal, the metaphor that can be rendered as ACHIEVING A GOAL IS SELF-PROPELLED MOVEMENT TOWARD A DESTINATION or, more pithily formulated, LIFE IS A JOURNEY, is ubiquitous in human conceptualizing. Of course, the JOURNEY concept does not pertain merely to the embodied dimension of progressing physically from one place to another: ‘journeying’ also has many cultural dimensions. But the most basic, physical aspect of a journey is ‘relocation’.

The JOURNEY metaphor, in turn, is rooted in the so-called SOURCE-PATH-GOAL (SPG) schema. The literal level of the SPG schema specifies that each physical journey has a beginning (‘source’), a trajectory (‘path’) and a destination (‘goal’). Striving to reach the destination the traveller needs to negotiate all kinds of literal FORCES. Literal movement moreover necessarily takes time. The progress of TIME, too, can be captured in the SPG schema: time progresses from the past (‘source’), through the present (‘path’) to the future (‘goal’). This yields the conceptual metaphor TIME IS MOVEMENT. It is by virtue of this metaphor that we can routinely say things such as ‘our childhood days lie far behind us’, ‘spring is approaching’, ‘because of summer time, the clock will jump forward by 1 h tonight’.

It is on the level of ACHIEVING A GOAL IS SELF-PROPELLED MOVEMENT TOWARD A DESTINATION that the SPG schema and the FORCE and BALANCE schemas operate more emphatically in a metaphoric way: the agent begins with a problem, a lack, a trauma, an unfulfilled desire (‘source’), undertakes action to resolve this issue (‘path’) and (hopefully) succeeds (‘goal’). This can be labelled the QUEST level. But there is yet a fourth level on which the SPG schema operates, and that is the narrating of the QUEST – as each story has a beginning (‘source’), a middle (‘path’) and an end (‘goal’). The RELOCATION, TIME, QUEST, and STORY levels all play a role in any tale focusing on a protagonist who undertakes a literal journey (as for instance in ‘road movies’), and these four levels all exemplify the SPG structure (for more discussion, see Forceville and Jeulink, 2011). Table 1 shows the basic correspondences.

Table 1.

Manifestations of the SPG schema on the relocation, time, quest, and story levels.

	Relocation	Time	Quest	Story
SOURCE	Starting point	Past	Problem, lack, trauma, dream …	Beginning
PATH	Trajectory	Present	Actions to solve problem, redeem lack, come to terms with trauma, fulfil dream …	Middle
GOAL	Destination	Future	Resolution, solution, completeness …	End

We can fill in more details for RELOCATION, QUEST, and STORY (though not for TIME), as in Table 2 – although it is to be realized that the words in each cell are mere approximations of concepts; other words could have been chosen.

Table 2.

The SPG schema: more detailed correspondences between the relocation, quest, and story levels.

Relocation	Quest	Story
Traveller	Person	Character
Laps	Stages	Chapters
Progressing	Approaching goal	Developing
Fellow-travellers	Family/friends	Helpers
Dangerous people	Adversaries	Antagonists
Meeting new people	Meeting new people	Introducing new characters
Change in destination	Change in purpose	Plot twist
Pleasant incidents	Achievements, happy events	Advancement of plot
Obstacles, delays	Misfortunes	Setbacks in plot
Intermediate destinations	Intermediate goals	?
Means of transport	?	?

The generic story-convention of one or more characters pursuing a more or less precisely defined goal is in stories that portray a character’s journey more specifically governed by the circumstance that pursuing the goal entails ‘travelling toward a physical destination’. Whereas the travel toward that destination involves literally overcoming all kinds of obstacles and resistance by adversaries, these events metaphorically help structure ACHIEVING A GOAL. Narrating this quest-through-relocation-in-time, in turn, draws on the SPG schema to impose structure on the level of the STORY.

The JOURNEY metaphor in →

In this paragraph I will examine → through the lens of the JOURNEY metaphor by zooming in on how elements in the literal relocation domain are used to structure QUEST and STORY – aided by an awareness of story conventions.

The protagonist

The protagonist who sets out on the journey of → is a middle-aged, white man; let’s call him the Traveller. He wears a trench coat and a trilby hat and, at least initially, he carries a suitcase, thereby looking like a stereotypical businessman. Arguably, he also looks a bit like a detective in a Film Noir. Often we see him, always alone, entirely or partly from the back (Figure 3), but even if we don’t, the brim of his hat hides his eyes (Figure 4). The unremarkable clothes and lack of individualizing facial traits turn the man into an average person. Indeed, his commonness presents the Traveller as a person we as viewers can presumably identify with – he is an ‘Everyman’.

Figure 3.

Front cover of → with a square in ‘relief’, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

Figure 4.

The Traveller realizes that the door behind him has closed with a wham: he cannot go back. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

During most of his journey, the Traveller moves forward only via the energy his own body provides – by walking. Sometimes he has to use his arms and hands to climb a wall (Figures 1 and 2) or dig in the ground to reveal the contours of the arrow, which is hidden under sand. Whenever he moves unintentionally, this happens due to forces outside his control: he falls, is floating on an arrow-shaped raft, or is transported on a wildly whirling flying-carpet-arrow. Falling and floating in mid-air, of course, jeopardize his BALANCE.

The ‘props’ that help characterize him are limited to his coat, his hat, and his suitcase. As for the suitcase, for a long time we do not know what is in it, but embarking on his challenging journey, the Traveller presumably took only the things that are very important and dear to him. At 1/6th of his journey we are suddenly made aware that the suitcase is not, after all, a normal one, as it has, at the front end, the shape of an arrow – something that comes as a surprise, since the front part of the suitcase had up till that moment not been visible. Clearly, his suitcase-arrow does not provide any external guidance, since it inevitably points forward, regardless of the direction the Traveller chooses. When, following the sign of a black arrow on a wall, he tries to squeeze himself into a narrow alley, the suitcase gets stuck (precisely because of its arrow-shape), breaks open, and reveals a large number of compasses in them, all of them needleless (!) – with the exception of one, whose needle has, predictably, the shape of an arrow. The compass needle, supposedly indicating North, actually points to the Traveller, irrespective of his position, then points in the opposite direction of the black arrow on the wall … and finally readjusts itself oddly to point in the same direction as the black arrow (Figure 5). This is one of many subtle hints signalling the unreliability and fickleness of the arrow signs.

Figure 5.

The Traveller’s suitcase turns out to have an arrow-form. When it bursts open, it shows needleless compasses – with one exception. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

While the Traveller here leaves behind his suitcase, his hat remains with him until the very end. The hat is important. Apart from helping to characterize the protagonist as an unremarkable businessman or detective, it hides, or casts a shadow on, his eyes, which we never see – with one exception, to which I will come back. Moreover, the hat helps convey movement and space when it is swept off by the wind, thereby visualizing the (metaphoric) FORCES afflicting the Traveller.

The source and the path

The first few pages of the book are completely black. In the next pages we spot a small dot that turns out to be a white, upward-pointing arrow – doubling as the keyhole of a door. We then see the contours of a man, who opens the door, and goes through it. He enters a white landscape. When he looks back, the door turns out to be in the middle of nowhere. Thanks to the impact lines around the door it is clear that it has closed with a wham, suggesting there is no going back through it (Figure 4). That is, the ‘journey’ is one-way only – always in the direction of the (or ‘an’) arrow. Often, there is more than one arrow, confusing the Traveller as to the direction he should choose. How the arrow manifests itself moreover changes continually. It may constitute a sign on a wall or a signpost or appear on the ground; it may be his own footsteps that, after his undecisive walking, have turned into an arrow; or he ends up on a raft with an arrow-contour that transports him through a narrow water with high white walls. In one case the Traveller comes across a signpost with various arrows pointing in different directions, and it is only when one of them falls off the pole that a direction is shown – and he decides to follow suit. When he is swept around on the flying-carpet arrow, the position of his coat suggests the changing directions of the wind, which proves the arrow is moving in a criss-cross way. Similarly, when he climbs a mountain-full-of-arrows, the one he chooses to follow appears to be a random one (Figure 6). In short, often the arrow that the Traveller chooses to be guided by suggests the direction he takes is a highly arbitrary one.

Figure 6.

Often the direction the Traveller chooses seems arbitrary due to the presence of multiple arrows, each pointing in a different direction. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

The goal

The goal, that is, the destination the man is heading for, is unclear throughout →, just as it remains an enigma who/what, if any, agent (God? Fate?) is responsible for the arrow-signs. Undoubtedly this is unimportant, since the movement toward a destination matters more than the goal itself. That said, it is significant that it remains mysterious to what extent the path the Traveller chooses is already there, waiting to be discovered and taken, and to what extent it is he himself who consciously or subconsciously projects a path because he wants there to be one. In any case, ‘chance’ plays a crucial role in his direction-taking.

Time

Time is a key factor in →’s narrative. The Traveller moves, moving costs time, and hence time passes. The viewer is made aware subtly of the progress of time through the shadows that are cast by, presumably, the sun, as well as by the footsteps behind the Traveller. When in two subsequent pages the man’s shadow has considerably lengthened, we have to infer that hours have passed in the ‘gutter’. More dramatically the progress of time transpires when the Traveller’s ageing becomes visible in some wrinkles, and at the very end due to his grey, and then white, hair. A little later, when his hat has – again – been blown off, we see he now has a bald spot. It is telling that the Traveller’s ageing is covered in relatively few pages. This suggests time is suddenly ‘going faster’ when he gets older: Moreover, these signs of his ageing makes us realize, retrospectively, that the Traveller’s journey must have taken not days or weeks, but years.

Story

The viewer’s experience of → is not only governed by the JOURNEY metaphor, but also by the fact it is a story. Two of Sternberg’s (1978) three narrative motors keep the viewer motivated to go on following the story: ‘curiosity’ (e.g., where and how will the Traveller find the next arrow that shows him in which direction to go? What obstacles will he encounter? Will he meet other people?) and ‘surprise’ (e.g., unexpectedly an arrow-formed door opens in what previously seemed a solid wall; thick ropes turn out, upon the Traveller touching them, to be made of sand; the man he appears to meet is himself – seen in a mirror). It is no coincidence that Sternberg’s third narrative motor, ‘suspense’, plays no role: after all, viewers have no idea about the nature of the Traveller’s quest, which makes it difficult to decide what kind of circumstances might facilitate or jeopardize its success.

Almost all the time we share the visual point of view of the Traveller, seeing what he sees, often via an ‘over the shoulder’ shot (Figures 1, 3, and 11), and if not we are still spatially ‘with him’ (Figures 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14); Smith (1994) would say we remain ‘aligned’ with him. So focalization rests consistently with the Traveller. But of course there is an external narrative agent that governs our Traveller-oriented focalization/alignment, and reminds us that the Traveller travels, and that shows the Traveller travelling. While Bal refers to such an external narrative agent as the ‘external narrator’ (2017: 13), Groensteen proposes that in comics and graphic novels it is useful to conceive of the external narrator (which he calls the ‘fundamental narrator’, 2013: 95) as fulfilling two roles: the ‘reciter’ (2013: 88) is responsible for all verbal information provided, while the ‘monstrator’ (2013: 86) is responsible for all visual information provided. Since → only has visuals, there is no reciter, and hence in this graphic novel the ‘fundamental narrator’ and the ‘monstrator’ completely coincide.

We are made aware how the monstrator steers our interpretation of events befalling the Traveller because of the mental effort we have to invest to infer what happens in the gutter. Given the extreme minimalism of the landscape through which the Traveller moves, viewers are often as confused as the Traveller about how to orient themselves spatially. The monstrator challenges the viewers by constantly changing the distance of the ‘camera’ vis-à-vis the Traveller-in-the-landscape as well as its angle. It thus often takes considerable effort to understand the minimal change that has taken place from one page to the next. That is, on the STORY level, the form adopted to structure the Traveller’s QUEST comes into play. Here the affordances of the medium of the graphic novel are crucial, as viewers need to draw conclusions on the basis of exclusively visual information provided in the pages. It would be unthinkable to narrate this story in language.

However, there are several moments the monstrator makes its presence emphatically felt. One such moment is the page immediately following a page that is somewhat similar to the book’s cover (Figure 3): Figure 7. Here the arrow does not appear in the landscape traversed by the Traveller, but on a page that is borderless. By this subtle cue the monstrator briefly ‘breaks the fourth wall’, sketching not only the conundrum of the Traveller which way to choose but also directly addressing the viewers, visually communicating that the Traveller’s dilemma resonates with viewers’ own questions about what goals to pursue goals in life, and how.

Figure 7.

A borderless (!) page immediately following a page similar to the book's cover (figure 3) shows an →, but also smaller arrows and symbols. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

A second departure from realism, and thus a breaking of the fourth wall, occurs when the monstrator shows the fascinating ‘folding open’ of, first, the Traveller’s head (Figure 8) – this is the only time we see his eyes, or rather one of them, but it is closed – and, subsequently, of his body (Figure 9), both revealing inside of them are arrow-landscapes. This interior landscape transforms in the adjacent page into the very same landscape on which the Traveller is lying (Figure 10). Given our expectation that artists present whatever they want to convey in an optimally relevant way (Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Forceville, 2020; see also Rohan et al., 2021), we must find a motivation for these enigmatic pages. Presumably the monstrator here visualizes the Traveller’s obsession or confusion with regard to his quest, and suggests how his inner reasoning and bodily experience is inextricably related to the ‘landscape’ through which he travels.

Figure 8.

The ‘monstrator’ shows viewers the Traveller’s obsession by ‘folding open’ his head to reveal numerous arrows … © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

Figure 9.

… which in the next page turns out to hold for his whole body … © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

Figure 10.

… while in the following page the arrow-pattern has shifted to the ground on which the Traveller lies. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

It is intriguing, and surely similarly significant, that the only time we see one of the Traveller’s eyes it is closed. How can we account for this? Perhaps not seeing the Traveller’s eyes de-individualizes him, contributing to his portrayal as an ‘Everyman’. Or, given the highly metaphorical nature of the Traveller’s ‘quest’, and its tragic arbitrariness, it could be appropriate to invoke the conceptual metaphor (NOT) KNOWING IS (NOT) SEEING (Sweetser, 1990). Whether or not Mathieu expected his envisaged audience to infer either, neither, or both of these meanings, they are commensurate with the narrative as a whole.

A third significant moment occurs when the Traveller picks up a book from a table, opens it, and finds that, apart from arrows in the corners by way of page numbers, its pages are completely white … and then comes across a page which can be folded open (Figure 11). On the adjacent right-hand page, viewers of → come across this very same foldout page which, when folded open to 12 times its size, turns out to be completely white, with the exception of a few teasing arrow-like symbols similar to those in Figure 7. Clearly, this exceptional page also breaks the fourth wall and invites viewers to realize that they themselves are travellers, too.

Figure 11.

In a book he has found, the Traveller comes across a page in which a page can be folded open. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

A fourth moment is presumably construable only retrospectively. Inspection of the front cover (Figure 3) reveals the Traveller looking up at the → above him. However, in this case, the → is the book’s title, and thus not part of the story-world. Moreover, the Traveller looking up appears in a square that is made more salient because it appears in relief. These two elements indicate that on the front cover the Traveller and → appear in different ontologies. Subtly, that is, the monstrator reminds us that although we as viewers indeed focalize the journey of → consistently via the Traveller, we are in a different universe: the Traveller is on a quest for an unspecified goal – and we are the viewers of the story of this quest. (The back cover intriguingly also has the square in relief, but without the Traveller and with the light/dark areas reversed.)

The end

At the end of his journey the Traveller, now an old man, enters an area with evenly spread out upturned arrows, which strongly suggest tombstones (Figure 12). The conclusion of his journey is movingly, and brilliantly, captured in a visual ‘blend’ (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) which fuses three ‘gestalts’: the Traveller’s shadow turns into an arrow. When this shadow-arrow transforms into a grave, the Traveller tries to run away from it, but of course he can escape death no more than he can escape his shadow (Figure 13) and after some hesitation he decides to descend into his final ‘destination’ (Figure 14). The next page is white, but the last one is black. The story of the Traveller’s quest has achieved ‘closure’: the cycle of his life has come full circle, from black to black.

Figure 12.

Toward the end of his journey, the Traveller traverses an area with arrow-shaped tombstones. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

Figure 13.

The Traveller tries to run away from his arrow-plus-shadow-plus-grave. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

Figure 14.

The Traveller accepts his fate and descends into his grave. © Éditions Delcourt, 2014.

Concluding remarks

This paper has attempted to demonstrate how →, a story that is exclusively narrated via the visual mode, is interpretable. To successfully do so, viewer-interpreters need to be able to recruit their knowledge of (1) embodied, and hence universal, image schemas, specifically the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema, drawing on the FORCES and BALANCE schemas but also involving schemas such as UP-DOWN and DARK-LIGHT; (2) the medium of comics/graphic novels, particularly conventions related to the gutter and the ‘framing’ of panels/pages; and (3) the genre of narrative, specifically expectations of curiosity and surprise pertaining to a protagonist’s experiences over time, and to closure.

But great art allows (or even encourages) each individual in its envisaged audience to enrich interpretations by resonances of certain intertexts and other extratextual ideas. Since no two viewers are the same, this will be different for each of them. A first topos that, for me, contributes to the universality of the Traveller’s journey is the (latent) presence of the ‘four elements’: Earth, Air, Water, Fire. Most of the time the Traveller travels over earth, sometimes digs in it, and toward the end has arrow-sand flowing through his hands (‘Ashes to ashes’?); at one moment he soars through the air on an ‘arrow-carpet’; at another he floats on a raft on water. And although no fire in the strict sense is present, the Traveller’s shadows remind us of the presence of, presumably, the sun, while at one stage an arrow-stone is hit by lightning.

Apart from this, I was reminded of other narrative works of art that for me enhance the existential nature of the Traveller’s journey. The first of these is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a medieval allegory that narrates the life-journey of ‘Christian’, from his hometown, the ‘City of Destruction’, to the ‘Celestial City’. During this journey Christian meets allegorical characters such as ‘Obstinate’, ‘Sloth’, and ‘Faithful’, and passes places such as the ‘Slough of Despond’, the ‘Hill of Difficulty’, and the ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’.

Secondly, the many arrows in → that provide contradictory information are strong hints that the Traveller’s seemingly ‘guided’ journey is in the last resort actually completely arbitrary, leading only to his death – and brought to mind Macbeth’s ‘Life’s but a walking shadow,/a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more./It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing’.

Finally, I could not help thinking of Waiting for Godot, because in Samuel Beckett’s play, too, the central issue is the unanswered and possibly unanswerable question what makes life worth living. A telling difference is that the protagonists in Beckett’s play remain in one location and hope that ‘salvation’ – in whatever form – will come to them. By contrast, the protagonist in → himself moves toward salvation – in whatever form. Of course the medium of theatre (where events happen on a static stage) favours Beckett’s choice, whereas the medium of comics (which propels a story via viewers’ flipping of pages) favours Mathieu’s.

In Waiting for Godot, at least, Vladimir and Estragon can share their bewilderment and despair with each other, while the Traveller in → is, throughout his journey, alone. Combining embodied image schemas, the affordances of the medium, and genre-knowledge with the possibility to see in it echoes of canonical intertexts (which for viewers in other cultures will undoubtedly be different ones) makes → a truly magnificent graphic novel with universal appeal – but also an overwhelmingly tragic one: Man is born, pursues, utterly alone, arbitrary or illusive goals, and not having achieved anything apart from finding cues spurring him on, discovers that all signs he has decided to be guided by lead, ironically, to the one, inevitable, destination that all of us will eventually share: the grave.