SPACE AND SEQUENCE: A TOPOGRAPHY OF HERE

Abstract

Richard McGuire’s Here, an “artist book disguised as a graphic novel”, follows a single viewpoint over a multimillennial timespan. Pursuing potential storylines on several apparently incompatible levels (gestural, historical, evolutionary, cosmic), this ostensibly simple concept provides a broad template for exploring non-linear narrative capacities of printed media: it could be examined as a non-anthropocentric visualization of a chronotope (Bakhtin), an SF staging of espacement (Derrida), an exemplary ergodic text (Aarseth), an exercise in tactile multimodality or collage fiction (Gibbons). The common ground of these perspectives is the material framework of a codex: the corner of a room depicted in the majority of Here’s pages structurally limits the potentially endless diversity of content, while also metonymically playing upon its own iso-morphic relation to the book as a three-dimensional object. This disrupts the temporality of reading and storytelling in a variety of ways, and the article focuses on Here’s ambivalent position regarding the factors of sequence and simultaneity, narrative and spatiality.