Without Fail: A Whale of a Tale

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” We’ve all heard it. We’ve all scoffed at its banality. Though when paralleled with Jonathan Harris’s work, it becomes his mantra. Two years ago, when I was first exposed to his work in Professor Sample’s recitation, I was naïve to this idea of transformative textuality. Pictures as a story held as much relevance to me as a two-year-old’s coloring book. However, Harris’s work colors outside the lines, transcending the boundaries of reading and celebrating the idea of experiencing. Writers like Peter Rabinowitz would not necessarily agree with that, though. Rabinowitz’s “Before Reading” stresses the hierarchy between reader and author, a hierarchy that does not afford the reader with much freedom for their own interpretation,

“…treat the reader’s attempt to read as the author intended, not as a search for the author’s private psyche, but rather as the joining of a particular social/interpretive community that is, the acceptance of the author’s invitation to read in a particular socially constituted way that is shared by the author and his or her expected readers” (22).

Isn’t reading supposed to be treated as an escape from everyday social conventions? A utopia that is not demarcated and monitored by the author’s spatial dimensions? Harris seems to think so, treating the audience of his The Whale Hunt as viewers and not as readers. By viewing his work, the audience can invest more time in the emotional significance of the hunt, connecting more with the ethos of the whale hunting community. He toys with a system of aesthetics that have a subjective authority and a three-dimensional form. Harris’s Hunt allows the viewer to create their own lexicon of emotion by allowing them to arrange the journey in their own particular way,

“Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience” (from Harris’s The Whale Hunt statement).

With this freedom of navigation, the viewer does not have the pressure of forcing an advancing chronology on the images. If he or she wants to go backwards, that can happen. If the viewers want to spin the images, they can do that. In most books where the reader is given a passive role in the development of the piece, Harris’s viewer is given an active role, or, the active role in progressing the story. Similar to the ergodic texture of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, the viewer has to make a decision where the plot begins and ends. The malleable relation of images allows the viewer an expansive potential for identification (even if they have never experienced a whale hunt). Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author notes that, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (147). Harris does not seem to be fazed by the finality of this hunt, as the experience will be treated like a domino effect, scattering itself to new eyes and minds all over cyberspace. The tendency for continuity will be its greatest asset. The future of the piece is not premeditated by the limitations of the author’s text. These various forms could very well reveal testimonies that Harris may not have even intended. In order for The Whale Hunt to speak for itself, Harris removes himself and the lets the kaleidoscope of moments and experiences interact with the viewers.

Harris trusts that his viewers are capable of their own representations. He hands The Whale Hunt to them without so much as a “Here you go” and leaves to continue working on his next project.