Passionate Journey

AUTHOR: Masereel, Frans

ARTIST: Frans Masereel (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Dover

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION:Mon livre d’heures, 1919 (English translation, 1922)

Publication History

Frans Masereel was born in 1889 to an upper-middle-class family from Ghent, Belgium. He showed interest in drawing at an early age and studied at the Academy of Arts in Ghent in 1907 before traveling to Paris and Brittany. He started his career as a political cartoonist during World War I and developed a love of the woodcut, which he used in numerous book illustrations and more than fifty wordless books during his life. He coined the term roman in beelden (novels in pictures) to describe these imaginative and realistic stories told entirely without text. These stories also are referred to as “woodcut novels,” as they are told through black-and-white pictures printed from woodcuts.

Masereel self-published Passionate Journey in 1919 on credit from the printer, Albert Kundig, in Geneva. Passionate Journey was originally titled Mon livre d’heures: 167 images dessinées et gravées sur bois. It caught the attention of the German publisher Kurt Wolff and was published in 1920 as Mein Stundenbuch: 167 Holzschnitte. The German edition, which included an introduction by Thomas Mann, was a financial success. As a result of this attention, Kurt Wolff published four more books by Masereel that generated an interest in the wordless book throughout Europe. A limited English edition was first printed in 1922 under the title My Book of Hours.

This title was changed to Passionate Journey with the American edition, published by Lear in 1948. Two woodcuts were omitted from the Lear edition. One woodcut depicted the story’s protagonist having sexual intercourse, and the second displayed him urinating on pedestrians from the top of a tall building. Passionate Journey remained the title in subsequent American editions by Penguin, City Lights, and Dover. These American editions included the two woodcuts omitted from the Lear edition. Masereel’s most popular book, Passionate Journey has been reprinted in many languages and editions throughout the world.

Plot

Passionate Journey portrays the experiences of a man who arrives in a city. The man’s youthful innocence is displayed by his amazement and wonder at the industrial innovations in the city and his naïveté with women. With his youthful vigor and caring nature, he revels in the life around him, especially while playing with children or enjoying outdoor activities and sports. He never loses his childlike playfulness and gusto for life, despite his disillusionment with love. He develops an interest in the rights of workers and champions their need for a better life. He rescues a girl from her abusive father and raises her as his own daughter. She lives with him and brings happiness into his solitary life. A few years pass, and he is surprised when he sees her naked and discovers she has grown up to be a beautiful young woman. She unexpectedly falls ill and dies, leaving him stricken with grief.

After spending some time alone, the man decides to travel around the world and take his focus off his loss. On his return to his own country, he goes on a hedonistic spree, drinking, gambling, racing cars, and visiting prostitutes. He then turns his attention toward the hypocrisy around him and acts rebelliously, farting on a group of political dignitaries, offering a hungry family a table at a fancy restaurant, refusing to join the army, and ridiculing the military. A disgruntled crowd eventually chases him out of the city.

He travels through the countryside and eventually wanders off alone into the woods, where he raises his arms in celebration and marvels at the stars. With a peaceful expression, he lies down and dies. His skeleton then comes to life and stomps on his heart in a chaotic dance before skipping nonchalantly off into the universe, one hand in his pocket and the other raised in a friendly wave at the reader.

Characters

•A Man, the protagonist, is tall, clean-shaven, handsome, and white. He wears a white shirt and black suit coat throughout the story. The book opens and closes with a wave from the protagonist, first as a young man and then, after his death, as a skeleton skipping through the stars. The protagonist was based on a combination of Masereel, who was reserved and contemplative, and his friend Henri Guilbeaux, who was a biographer of Vladimir Ilich Lenin and possessed eccentricities that served as the model for the protagonist’s outrageous behavior.

•The Girl/Young Woman represents the one consistent relationship in the man’s life. The protagonist stops her father from beating her with a whip and takes her to his home to raise her in safety. She represents the one person he loves and who loves him unconditionally. After she dies of an illness, he is devastated and never recovers from his grief.

Artistic Style

During World War I, Masereel volunteered as a translator for the International Red Cross in Geneva. He also worked as a political cartoonist for the newspaper La Feuille from 1917 to 1920. This job demanded that Masereel create drawings related to the daily news. He used brush and ink to create bold black-and-white images that easily caught the eye of the reader. Such images were well suited for reproduction on the low-grade paper stock, as details and fine lines created using pen and ink did not reproduce well. Masereel later integrated this technique of unembellished black-and-white shapes into his woodcuts and established a distinct style that is immediately recognized as his trademark. This is evident in the figure of the protagonist and the white highlights inside his black figure, making him easily identifiable in the narrative.

Masereel was unaware of the expressionist artists’ interest in the revival of the woodcut form. He discovered this craft on his own and immediately found his medium of choice. Masereel’s skill is particularly evident in his ability to display movement and human emotion within small, flat black-and-white images that have clear, solid lines and do not incorporate cross-hatching. The small woodcuts in Passionate Journey, which measure 3.5 inches by 2.75 inches, provide an intimacy between Masereel and the reader.

The woodcut is the oldest printing process and requires simple materials: a block of wood and a knife. In the front of Passionate Journey, a woodcut displays Masereel sitting at a table with simple carving tools and blocks of wood. For Masereel, who was suspicious of a growing industrial culture, the woodcut offered a direct link to nature and a simpler way of life. In the skilled hands of Masereel, the woodcut was transformed into a means of storytelling that anyone could read, regardless of language or level of literacy. Writer Stefan Zweig, a friend of Masereel, wrote, “Should everything perish, all the books, the photographs, and the documents, and we were left only with the woodcuts Masereel has created, through them alone we could reconstruct our contemporary world.”

Unlike traditional comics, which typically progress from panel to panel, the woodcut novel offers one woodcut per page in scene-to-scene transitions. Many readers find the closure between these transitions difficult to read, in contrast to less demanding progressions of action such as moment-to-moment or action-to-action.

Themes

The major theme is a young man’s quest for love that ends in disillusionment and grief. The protagonist has various love affairs, but they all end with him being ridiculed or rejected. The only loving relationship that he experiences is with a girl he raises. After her death and a period of travel, his hopes and desires change to cynicism. He no longer seeks love and chooses a reckless manner of living.

A secondary theme involves the man’s search for his place in society. Despite his initial curiosity about modern life, he finds little substance to sustain his interest. The protagonist is not a person who can fit, like a mechanical part, into a machine. He questions authority, fights against injustice and abuse, and suffers heartache and loss. During his travels, he finds a simpler relationship with others, regardless of religion, culture, or race. He also connects with animals such as monkeys, a camel, and an elephant. He is more comfortable in preindustrial cultures than in a cold metropolis. With the knowledge from his travels, he lampoons and criticizes hypocritical individuals and organizations upon returning to the city.

After being chased from the city for his impetuous and scandalous behavior, he finally finds his place in nature. In these final scenes, Masereel depicts the lush flora with white space, curves, and diagonal lines, in contrast to the ominous black vertical lines of the tall buildings in the city. The man moves more easily in the woods, though his isolation is apparent. As he ponders the stars at night, the moon sheds tears over his solitary figure. However, in the next scene, the man humbles himself in a kneeling position, raises his arms to the heavens, and, with a smile on his face, accepts his place in the world and the experiences that have brought him to this one affirming moment.

One final theme is the integral relationship between humans and nature. Masereel suggests that humanity’s place is in a preindustrial culture and in nature, rather than in a commercialized environment.

Impact

Many comics artists, including Will Eisner, have acknowledged the importance of Masereel in the development of the graphic novel. Modern graphic novels owe a great debt to Masereel’s woodcut novels, especially Passionate Journey, with its wordless narrative and focus on day-to-day eventsand adult themes. In addition to shaping the genre, Masereel’s works have influenced the artistic styles and thematic concerns of comics creators such as Eric Drooker, whose wordless book Flood! A Novel in Pictures (1994) examines the inequities of capitalism in contemporary culture. Drooker uses scratchboard, which imitates wood engraving with its fine black-and-white lines, to create his images. Another artist, Neil Bousfield, uses his skill as a wood engraver in Walking Shadows: A Novel Without Words (2010), which examines the bitter realities experienced by families caught in a cycle of menial work without hope for escape.

Further Reading

Bousfield, Neil. Walking Shadows: A Novel Without Words (2010).

Drooker, Eric. Flood! A Novel in Pictures (1994).

Masereel, Frans. “The Sun,” “The Idea,” and “Story Without Words”: Three Graphic Novels by Frans Masereel (2009).

Bibliography

Avermate, Roger. Frans Masereel. New York: Ritzzoli International, 1977.

Beronä, David A. Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels. New York: Abrams, 2008.

Willett, Perry. “The Cutting Edge of German Expressionism: The Woodcut Novel of Frans Masereel and Its Influences.” In A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, edited by Neil H. Donahue. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005.