Visual Puns

 
Visual puns, like verbal puns, can be crass, foolish, trivialising; but they can also be expressive. In language, puns can be groan-provoking jokes, daftness, but they can also be Joyce's Finnegans Wake: expressing by creative superposition a complex rather than a simple signification. In the visual arts, the visual pun emerged as an element in European Mannerist art of the later 16th- and early 17th-century, Mannerism being a reaction against the High Renaissance aesthetic of harmony, proportion, balance and idealised beauty. Mannerist figures were creatively distorted, elongated, perspective was foreshortened, compositions were often crowded with serpentinely interacting figures, compositions in which arms could be legs, or vice versa. In twentieth-century Surrealism, itself a descendent of Mannerism, these visual ambiguities and juxtapositions are emphasised to bring out a dream logic, sometimes, as with the work of Max Ernst or Salvador Dalí, in complex compositions whose visual doublings are interactive; sometimes, as with the paintings of René Magritte, a more direct focus on a single visual pun: a domestic fireplace that is also a train-tunnel, raindrops that are also besuited men, an eye that contains the sky. In ‘Le râpé’ (1945) Magritte paints a woman's naked torso and surrounds it with a head of hair, such that the woman's breasts resemble eyes, her navel a nose and her pubic hair a mouth. As a visual pun it is striking, unnerving, and its eloquence is focused by its title. Magritte's visual punning can be playful and throwaway, or it can, as here, be penetrating and arresting.

Science-fiction cover-art often draws on surrealist logics, as in this cover for New English Library's 1974 paperback issue of Asimov's Rings of Saturn (1958) by British artist Bruce Pennington (born 1944). Saturn, identifiable by its rings, is melded with an angled human skull. At the top, the coloured bands are Saturnian, coming down to the gigantic eye socket, which is styled as a planetary crater (not that Saturn, which lacks a solid surface, could ever furnish such a feature) and the nasal gaps which could be jagged valleys. In the bottom half the huge teeth have no planetary analogue, and can only be skull. But the visual pun is worked expertly, and its effect is powerful: frightening, a momento mori on a cosmic scale.

The cover is rather more disturbingly powerful than the book it illustrates, in fact. The Rings of Saturn  (originally published as Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn, under the pseudonym Paul French) is one of Asimov's juveniles, what we would nowadays call Young Adult fiction: a bouncy action-adventure in space, in which our hero, David ‘Lucky’ Starr, explores Saturnian moons, stows away on an enemy space-ship and averts war between Earth and the Sirians. There's nothing in the book as creepily Gothic, as nightmarishly spooky, as Pennington's cover art. The first edition's cover captures the vibe of Asimov's tale more closely: