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ABSTRACT
Asaf Hanuka’s autobiographical comic strips collected into one album, The Realist, chronicle everyday episodes in the life of a young Israeli family. The silent nature of many of the panels brings forth the gap between the idea and the praxis. We investigate silence in relation to both genre and Israeliness in order to examine what silence promotes and to what extent it serves the narrative better than sound or words when generating criticism, displaying helplessness, coping with traumatic events, etc. Our six case studies are conducted in the framework of both silence theories and multimodal discourse theories.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Asaf Hanuka for his kindness in granting us the rights for publication of the included panels. Rights for the Illustrations’ publication: Asaf Hanuka and Pardes Publishing House.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The award-winning comic strips first appeared in 2010, in the Israeli daily business newspaper Calcalist. The English version was published in 2015 (Archaia Press). We work on the Hebrew version (Pardes Publishing House, 2017).
2. Bruneau, “Communicative Silences.”
3. Jensen, “Communicative Functions of Silence.”
4. Saville-Troike, “The Place of Silence.”
5. Kurzon, Discourse of Silence.
6. See note 2 above.
7. Jaworski, The Power of Silence.
8. Kurzon, “Towards a Typology of Silence.”
9. Ephratt, “Linguistic.”
10. See also Ephratt’s ‘eloquent silences’ (“The Functions of Silence”), linguistically replacing speech and having the status of a symbol.
11. Ephratt, When Silence Speaks.
12. Saville-Troike, “Silence.”
13. Ephratt, “The Silence Address.”
14. Pauwels, “Taking the Visual Turn.”
15. Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age.
16. Kress and Van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse.
17. See Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images; Iedema, “Multimodality, Resemiotization”; Jewitt, “Multimodality”; Hiipalla, “The Interface Between Rhetoric”; Liu, “Visual Images.”
18. Pym, “Double Presentation”.
19. See McCloud Understanding Comics, 24–59 on the vocabulary of comics and different text-image combinations.
20. Kaindl, “Multimodality and Translation.”
21. Stöckl, “In Between Modes.”
22. See Adler, “Silent and Semi-Silent Arguments”, on silent and semi-silent arguments in the graphic novel. For various aspects of Israeliness, refer to the case studies.
23. See note 11 above.
24. Weizman, “Interpretative Support.”
25. Brown, “Two Minutes of Silence.”
26. See note 12 above.
27. Ephratt, “The Silence Address,” 204.
28. The gutter is the space between panels in comics. In its simplest form, the gutter is a blank space that separates two panels. This blank space creates a transition from one moment to the next within a story. As comic book scholar Scott McCloud explains in Understanding Comics, 66, the gutter is used to ‘take two separate images and transform them into a single idea’.
29. Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images.
30. See note 12 above.
31. According to the Gricean cooperation principle in ‘Logic and conversation’, it would be the irrelevance of the helmet in the scene which invites the reader to seek for implicature. Moreover, despite the camouflage colours, the helmet stands out by its position (the middle), and by its seeming irrelevance to the setting.
32. According to Connell (Masculinities,165), there is rarely just one mode of masculinity. Hanuka clearly represents here different models of masculinity, contrary to the more traditional Israeli macho stereotype.
33. In the English version, the title is Sleep tight corporal Shalit. To Israelis, there is no need to explain who Shalit is, and to assert that he is a soldier of the IDF forces. Shalit became an icon and many Israelis remember him as a visual symbol.
34. Kohn, “Iconic Situations.”
35. According to modern colour theory, blue and yellow are complementary. According to the RYB model, yellow contrasts with purple, and orange contrasts with blue.
36. Although the vast majority of Israelis were in favour of the prisoner swap deal – Shalit’s release negotiations included the release of over 1000 Hamas and Palestinian prisoners – others did not accept conceding to Hamas’s extortion and warned that such a deal signifies victory for terrorism, increasing Palestinian motivation to kidnap many more soldiers in the near future.
37. Due to space limits, not all the panels mentioned here were analysed in the present paper.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Silvia Adler
Silvia Adler is a professor of linguistics in the Department of French Culture at Bar-Ilan University
Ayelet Kohn
Ayelet Kohn is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication at David Yellin Academic College in Jerusalem.