“From in the light I touched the light”

• Main Author: Anne-Laure Tissut
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte" 2016-12-01
• Series: Sillages Critiques
• Subjects: Francis Bacon; Blake Butler; Derek White; image; mutation; representation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4716

In the collaborative graphic novel Ever, writer Blake Butler and visual artist and writer Derek White explore the various forms of interaction between text and image to open out the possibilities of meaning and representation. Indeed text and image carry each other beyond their own limitations through a fertile dynamics of mutations, aptly reflecting what happens in the story. As the protagonist gropes her way through the ceaselessly shifting volumes of a prison-house, her body undergoes ceaseless transformations and distortions, bringing to mind Francis Bacon’s works. Gilles Deleuze’s analyses of the figure in Francis Bacon — and of its interactions with the background — are used to shed light on what happens to language in its relation to images in Butler’s Ever. While the reader is drawn towards a sensory form of reading, Blake Butler’s writing of obsession allows an exploration of the text as a medium and calls for a questioning of the very conditions of the possibility of writing.