ABSTRACT
Graham Rawle made a name for himself with his early work Lost Consonants. The “text and image word play series”, as Rawle's own website describes it (www.grahamrawle.com), appeared in the Weekend Guardian newspaper for a lengthy period of fifteen years, and was later published as a series of books. Woman's World (2005) is Rawle's second novel, and was constructed through a painstaking cut-and-paste process, that is to say the novel is composed of collected words and phrases from 1960s British women's magazines. As such, it is part of a small tradition of collage and/or treated novels, alongside writer-artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi (1966) and Tom Phillips (1970). While the first hardback edition of Woman's World features the subtitle ‘A Novel’, the paperback emphasises the multimodal nature of the book referring to it as ‘A Graphic Novel’. Indeed, the text and image combination of Woman's World has resulted in it being described as “a virtuoso piece of old-fashioned paste-up” (Poynor 2005) and as looking like “an epic ransom note” (Loeb and Girl, Interrupting 2008). However, the magazine heritage is illustrated by the text both visually and linguistically, a phrase which seeks to dispel the idea that multimodality and/or the inclusion of visuality in literature is a ‘low-culture gimmick’, as opposed to a serious literary contribution (such comments, for instance, were made by critics about Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, as discussed in section 6.3.9 of the previous chapter). Interestingly, responding to this very subject in interview, Rawle revealed, “That's the thing that concerned me the most, that people would look at it as a novelty rather than a novel. For me, if the story doesn’t work then it's quite a spectacular waste of time” (Doig 2008). Rawle's words, which display his flair for linguistic tomfoolery (‘novelty rather than a novel’), typical of his work, are in line with the characterisation of multimodal printed literature taken in this book: the various modal forms of the text work in synthesis, not with one mode seeming ineffectual in comparison to others.
