Close Reading the Wordless Novel: A Review

 By Daniel Worden, Rochester Institute of Technology

Grant F. Scott. Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937: Visual Narrative, Cultural Politics, Homoeroticism. Routledge, 2022. 244 pp. $170.00 hardcover; $48.95 e-book.

The woodcut artist Lynd Ward has become a fixture of modern comics history. Ward is one of the major practitioners of a “path not taken” in the multidisciplinary practice of comics art in the twentieth century. The artist created and published 6 woodcut novels between 1929 and 1937, a flurry of artistic activity that fizzled out quickly. As Grant F. Scott notes, “Ward’s novels were soon forgotten and remained out of print and largely unknown until the late 1960s,” which means that Ward’s early graphic novels (to use an anachronism that nonetheless describes Ward’s novels quite well) began to recirculate just as American comics artists such as Art Spiegelman were beginning to reevaluate the aesthetics of the medium (2). Writing in the introduction to the 2010 Library of America edition of Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels, Spiegelman recalls that “it was Ward’s audacity and confidence in wrestling with a new narrative language that won my serious admiration as a young cartoonist” (Spiegelman xiii). 

While Ward’s wordless, single-image-per-page woodcut novels do not look or read like contemporary comics, they register as an aesthetically ambitious precedent for the visual narratives now classified as comics and/or graphic novels. Influenced by European artists like Frans Masereel and Otto Nückel, whose woodcut novels he encountered while studying graphic arts in Leipzig, Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels have long been appreciated, though mainly as anomalies that are not quite literature, not quite fine art, not quite illustration, but some hybrid form evolving out of all three. In Scott’s summation, Ward “stands before the tradition of the graphic novel as a public statue that everyone admires but no one looks at very carefully” (2). 

Scott’s Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937 is the first book-length study devoted to the artist and his visual narratives. In it, Scott develops careful and contextual close readings of Ward’s woodcut narratives, most of which are collected in the Library of America edition of Ward’s novels. Indeed, Scott’s book could even serve as a critical companion to the Library of America’s Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcut (2010); this could be an exceptionally generative pairing for a graduate seminar on comics history or modernism. Scott’s book is organized into an introductory chapter about Ward’s biography and critical reception, chapters about each of Ward’s 6 complete woodcut novels as well as the unfinished Hymn for the Night, and an epilogue about another unfinished work, published in a small edition in 2001 as Dance of the Hours; or, Lynd Ward’s Last Unfinished Wordless Novel. 

Each chapter’s title signals the themes identified in each work, moving from the first biographical chapter into formal considerations, historical commentary, racial and sexual imagery, allegorical interpretation, and symbolic structures. Scott’s prose is scholarly and grounded in Ward’s texts, so much so that I was compelled to re-read each of Ward’s woodcut novels after reading its respective chapter in Scott’s book. His close attention to visual detail made Ward’s works so much richer and full of meanings than I had ever stopped to consider before. Scott’s study is valuable not just for its clear analysis and contextualization of Ward’s woodcut novels, but also because it is a reminder of what close attention to a text can accomplish. It is a comfort to read Ward’s woodcut novels slowly, which Scott’s book encouraged me to do. 

The book’s introduction provides a concise yet nuanced account of Lynd Ward’s life, as well as the major aesthetic and historical contexts that informed his work. Scott draws from Ward’s own published writings for this material—especially the collection Storyteller Without Words: The Wood Engravings of Lynd Ward (1974)—as well as archival materials from a range of libraries and art museums. Drawing on this wealth of material, Scott accounts for Ward’s aesthetic and political ideas, as well as how those ideas inform race, gender, and sexuality in Ward’s novels. Ward’s writings about woodcutting emphasize how important the tactile act of cutting into the wood is to his artwork, and with that interest in physicality and feeling, he developed a political sense of what woodcut novels could achieve as “a new kind of proletarian fiction, a handmade book for the masses” (9). 

Ward’s first book-length work, Gods’ Man (1929) tells the story of an artist’s Faustian bargain with modernity, and Scott’s analysis situates this narrative within rich artistic contexts. Linking the text’s narrative and visual style to silent film and Romantic portraiture, respectively, Scott explicates “the kinetic ambition of Gods’ Man, its desire to transcend the medial slowness and perceived anachronism of the woodcut form and represent the dynamism of the modern” (42). Scott illuminates the wordless images in Ward’s novel, making it clear how a page that depicts the novel’s artist-hero journeying to the city in Figure 1 “represents a turning point in his life, the moment of transition between the slow time of the portrait and the rapid time of the cinema, between a Romantic and a Modern form of consciousness” (44). 

Figure 1. Lynd Ward, Gods’ Man, Chapter 1, page 6.
Courtesy of the Library of America.

While Gods’ Man seems to be directly inspired by silent film and the European aesthetics that Ward encountered as an art student, his next work Madman’s Drum (1930) “aspires to the verbal density of a novel by Conrad or Faulkner” (62). In the book’s second chapter, focused on Madman’s Drum, Scott’s reading of the colonialist and racial imagery in this work acknowledges how Ward’s own political consciousness shifts alongside his aesthetic ambitions. And in Chapter 3, Scott develops these themes further by reading Wild Pilgrimage (1932) as an extension of Ward’s key themes into the context of the Great Depression and the labor struggle. In Wild Pilgrimage, lynching and exploitation under capitalism are linked, in Scott’s analysis, though the work is ultimately concerned with “a crisis of masculinity brought on by the brutish and robotic conditions of factory work” (117). 

In Chapter 4, Scott turns to Ward’s shortest woodcut novel, Prelude to a Million Years (1933), a loosely structured set of images that the critic reads in relation to William Blake’s illustrated poems. Scott also considers Ward’s illustrations for a 1934 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as further evidence of the artist’s interest in monstrous or violent masculinity. Chapter 5 shifts to Ward’s Song Without Words (1936) and, briefly, his unfinished Hymn for the Night (ca. 1940), wherein Ward depicts a female protagonist struggling to escape the allegorical meanings and social norms that surround her. 

Scott’s final full-length chapter interprets Vertigo (1937), Ward’s long and conceptually ambitious novel about the Great Depression. A wordless novel that nonetheless features much more language in its images than Ward’s earlier works, Vertigo “far surpasses any of his other woodcut novels. We might think of it as Ward’s project for the Works Progress Administration, equivalent to the photographic studies of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, his own bold attempt to represent and document the effects of the Great Depression” (188).  

In the study’s epilogue, Scott closes with a reading of Ward’s unfinished work Dance of the Hours, published in 2001 in a small edition of 125 copies by Rutgers University Libraries. This small edition publication is in keeping with Ward’s own interest in fine art bookbinding and his struggle to balance the mass potential of print with its more elite and expensive milieu in twentieth-century fine art. The epilogue provides many reasons for Ward’s move away from the woodcut novel form after 1937. Ward worked on both WPA and war-related projects in the 1930s and 1940s that took up much of his professional life, and the market for woodcut novels also seemed to vanish after the Great Depression and never recover. Comic books, film, and television turned woodcut novels into “quaint anachronisms” (216). 

Yet as Scott notes in his closing paragraph, Ward’s woodcut novels continue to inspire readers and to promise something of a “liberating and spiritual narrative journey” (224). This sense of self-discovery and self-exploration runs as a theme throughout Ward’s woodcut novels, and it seemed to inform not just his own images but also his larger arts practice, from woodcut illustration to artisanal printing. As Ward noted in an essay about his Equinox Press, there were aesthetic, political, and spiritual meanings to his practice, “a reaffirmation of handiwork, a somewhat mystical belief that to touch directly the materials and processes of the making of a book would result in a better book. It was, in a sense, an extension into the twentieth century of that ancient Greek myth wherein the giant Antæus defeated all opponents because every time he touched the earth he gained fresh strength” (Ward 646). 

The Library of Congress holds some of Ward’s engraving tools in its collection, like the spatula in Figure 2. Ward’s interest in tactility and materiality and his commitment to an anachronistic art form that nonetheless can open up new ways of telling stories and visualizing struggles makes him a compelling artist for both artists and teachers alike today, evidence of how older technologies persist as fine art media. 

Figure 2. Lynd Ward, Wood Engraving Tool, Spatula. Between 1927 and 1965.
Photograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/item/2005677298.

Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937 is a valuable contribution to the growing scholarly interest in Lynd Ward. Scott’s close reading approach relies on many tools common to literary studies, and the author’s close attention to imagery, narrative, and symbol develops illuminating connections within Ward’s works. Ward’s woodcut novels exist both as narrative texts and as art objects in and of themselves, therefore meaning something as material forms as well as texts. As comics studies scholar David M. Ball argues, “Ward’s novels in woodcuts illuminate for us the intersections between comics and literary and art historical modernism, affording us an angle for more thorough and thoughtful study than the critical tradition has yet provided” (Ball 129). Scott’s book is a welcome development in this critical tradition. It offers sustained close readings of Ward’s early graphic novels and a timely critical assessment of the work’s lasting importance. 

Works Cited

Ball, David M. “Lynd Ward’s Modernist ‘Novels in Woodcuts’: Graphic Narratives Lost Between Art History and Literature.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 39, no. 2, Winter 2016, pp. 126-43.

Spiegelman, Art. “Reading Pictures.” Lynd Ward: God’s Man, Madman’s Drum, Wild Pilgrimage. Edited by Art Spiegelman. Library of America, 2010, pp. ix-xxv.

Ward, Lynd. “The Equinox Idea.” Lynd Ward: Prelude to Million Years, Song Without Words, Vertigo. Edited by Art Spiegelman. Library of America, 2010, pp. 645-47. 

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Daniel Worden (dxwind@rit.edu) is an associate professor of art at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches comics, print, and visual culture. He is the author of Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z (2020), the editor of The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum (2021), and the co-editor with Jesse W. Schwartz of New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture (2022). Worden is currently at work on a book about American comics and fossil fuels.