Father and Son

By SEAN LUO
June 27, 2003

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics look like pictures, but there is really nothing particularly pictorial about them.  The shapes of the letters did represent some objects at the time the script was invented, but the language developed and in the end the characters represented sound units rather than cognitive units.  For instance, two leftward daggers stand for the short 'i' sound and a curvy walking cane represents the 's' sound.  A dagger, a bird and a small cat spell out 'miw', the actual, phonetic word for cat.  To the layman, however, every word on the stone sarcophagus seems to tell an indecipherable story, and that is the essential beauty of the hieroglyphics.

Ancient Chinese Oracle scripts, initially carved on the shells of tortoises and shoulder bones of bulls, are quite different.  These scripts use symbols that looked somewhat like the actual object.  For instance, the word for sun is a dot inside a circle and that for water is three wavy lines.  They never look like pictures but they are much more appropriately described as pictorial representations compared to the hieroglyphics.  Their shapes, however, say nothing about how they sound.

Pictures and words have a long-standing love-hate link.  The pictorially representative language is making a comeback with the popular emoticons of :-) and :-( but one only has to look at some of Braque's fragmented paintings with newspaper headlines to see that in nearly all artistic media, words and pictures always had an intimate, if not slightly competitive, relationship.

The best art form to connect the two is serial art, more commonly known as comics.  It seems to be an art attracting universal lambaste for grade school kids everywhere in the world.  Luckily, in contrast to my general geeky tendencies, I did not read many comic books as a boy.  I, as most of my generation, preferred the moving, colorful TV cartoons.  One of the only comic books that I have read, though, made quite a noticeable impact on my childhood existence.  It is an almost wordless collection called Vater und Sohn (Father and Son), illustrated by a German artist named Erich Ohser.  It is centralized on the relationship between a studious, stogy yet clearly cantankerous father and his lovable, smart and precocious son.  It is meant to be funny for the most part. 

One set of panels goes like this: the son broke the mirror. To avoid the eminent thrashing, he came up with the bright idea of painting his father's figure on the wall, where the mirror was.  His father came in and admired his gorgeous reflection, only to soon realize that while he himself was wearing a proper tie, his reflection was wearing a funny looking bowtie.  Obviously it's not a narration of the real world.  Its existence and charm are akin to that of The Simpsons or the seven dwarfs.  Other stories are authentically emotional: once the father was playing soccer with his son and the ball fell into a gutter.  The father went down to retrieve it, hitting his head on his way up.  He yelled and cursed, fumbling out of the gutter, telling his boy that he's gotta go get the ball himself next time.  The boy saw the big bump on his father's head, felt horrible and wept heartily with his hands covering his face.  The father was shocked and didn't know what to do.  Soon he consoled the boy and picked him up on his shoulder and they marched away with smiles on both of their faces.  Ohser's simplicity in storytelling and precision in pictorial expression makes the reader feel intimately what is being felt by the characters.  It erects a warm, sketched effigy that defies any description of language.  I often wonder whether my relationship with my father can be drawn out in such a fashion, whether my life could be told with a pencil.  Regardless, it wouldn't be the same anyway because the real, Dickonsonian life is never as charmed and convivial.

I recently had the opportunity to find out more about Ohser.  It turns out that he was quite an interesting character.  Using his pseudonym E. O. Plauen, he was one of the more preeminent caricaturists in Germany right before World War II.  He did quite a bit of political comics and was for a while ostentatiously anti-Nazi.   He then worked, semi-willingly or coerced, as an illustrator for the Nazi government until he was apprehended by the Gestapo and subsequently committed suicide in 1944.  Wielhelm Museum in Hanover dedicated an exhibit to him in 1962 but he was quickly forgotten in much of the western art history.  There were no more than five English sites on the internet that had anything to say about him.  And as to how his works got disseminated widely and popularly in mainland China, that is a question even someone as erudite as yours truly could not find a way to even begin the investigation for.

The Internet is a magical thing.  After this article was published on the Web, I recieved an E-mail from one of Ohser's offsprings, saying that he is in the process of trying to get a collection published again.  He thanked me for my website, which he found through a search.  

The last panels of the eight part work depict our protagonists posting a good-bye note, walking away into the distance, and gradually higher into the sky, eventually becoming a smiling moon with a mustachio and a bright star next to it.  I still remember the first time seeing these pictures, and feeling that slightly lugubrious disappointment.  It's like an ending of Hans Andersen's Little Mermaid (and for those of you who are only familiar with the Disney version, I recommend a quick read of the original).  There is no happily ever after, of course, only spiritual guardianship.  In a way, Ohser is like his characters, walking away quietly.  Millenniums from now we may only see Ohser's pictures as a collection of enigmatic pictorial words, but his good willed drawings will always be there to protect us, if only symbolically.