What is it about?
Is it possible to tell a complex story without using a single word? Yes! This paper analyses the wordless graphic novel Sens (2014) by French artist Marc-Antoine Mathieu. In Sens (232 pages), an anonymous traveler - a man in a long coat and wearing a hat - follows arrows that appear in many different forms: on walls, in footprints, as a raft, or even inside his own suitcase. Sometimes the arrows point in opposite directions, and often they seem to lead nowhere. Eventually, the man arrives at a field of arrow-shaped gravestones: a visual symbol of death.
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Why is it important?
Visuals communicate in a fundamentally different way than language does. In this paper, it is shown how we cannot analyse this visual story without understanding how (1) interpreting visuals interrelates with cognition; (2) stories work; (3) the medium of comics/graphic novels works; (4) the JOURNEY metaphorically structures both the QUEST and the STORY.
Perspectives
Hitherto the study of "communication" is still far too often considered to be synonymous with the study of "language." But in fact language is a subtype of communication. It is crucial that we study how other modes than language, such as visuals, can communicate information and tell stories. Something similar holds for the JOURNEY metaphor, which within Conceptual Metaphor Theory has hitherto mainly been studied in its exclusively verbal manifestations. But visuals communicate metaphors (just as anything else) in a completely different way than language does. Ultimately studying visual (and musical, and sonic ...) metaphors will therefore be indispensable for Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
Dr Charles Forceville
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The
JOURNEY
metaphor in Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s graphic novel → (
Sens
), Language and Literature International Journal of Stylistics, October 2025, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/09639470251381545.
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