Navigating the Text of Important Artifacts

The pairing of Drucker’s “Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation” with Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry makes it impossible for me to not look for the graphic devices in Shapton’s text. Drucker spends some time discussing the text-level graphic devices that we often take for granted when reading a text. She writes, “the contrast between size and layout of body text and that of chapter titles… also carries a narrative implication… they are elements that often pass unnoticed, rendered invisible by familiarity” (123). This is certainly a way that I never thought to look at text before—as graphic elements. It’s interesting to think in this context while navigating Shapton’s archive because I instinctively was prepared to examine the visual elements of the text. When I read Drucker’s title I thought that was the direction she was going, but I’m pleasantly intrigued by the direction that she went instead. In ways, it reminds me of the ways I sometimes describe punctuation in the writing center as signals that guide the reader unknowingly through a passage. Often I’m pointing out to students the way that the wrong punctuation can visually impede the reader (such as the way a period at the end of a sentence fragment is like tripping over a rock and falling on your face).
In Important Artifacts there is very little text to go off of—the text being dominantly photographs. But, when text appears, it is often more important than the photographs, at least in my mind. I’m thinking here of all of the letters written to or by the couple that expose more meaningful aspects of their relationship that the photographs due. On page 35, a letter from Doolan to Ann Doolan depicts one of the first serious breaks in Doolan and Morris’ relationship that I say: “Hal didn’t speak to me the whole flight home… things haven’t been the same… I love him so much, but it’s like we don’t have room for each other. It was bad. I am worried we’re going to break up” (35). Judging by the pictures surrounding this letter, the reader would never know that there were any issues in Milan. To the left are pictures of the happy couple eating together, and the pictures in later pages still depict the couple in good standings. In some ways, the narrative of Doolan and Morris’ relationship can’t be navigated without text because the purely graphic elements are too deceiving.