Would you like some abstraction with that abstraction?

On page 128, McCloud talks about symbols being the basis of language. This got me to thinking about what a symbol is. Fundamentally I think it's a representation of a thing or idea by something that is either completely unconnected to that idea (the word 'tree' and an actual tree) or only very distantly connected to that idea (a simplified skull representing death). This 'simple thing standing in for a more complicated thing' was fascinating for me because it got me thinking about purpose.

We hear all the time that language is made of symbols / abstractions. But we less often talk about why it's abstracted. I think the answer is efficiency in physical space. For example, like symbols (or because it's made of symbols...) language is a form of compaction. Look no further for example than maps. Maps are, at their most basic, compressions of reality. If you were to shrink city block down to the size of a tabletop diorama, there would inevitably be some loss of detail — bushes or trees would be not placed quite right, or perhaps the buildings wouldn't have interior furniture or the cars would be parked in different locations. But for a lot of purposes the diorama is more useful than a real city block because even though it's not as 'accurate', it's much, much smaller. In this way, paper maps are a way of compressing reality even further. You can stack a whole city, a whole country, into an atlas, and because of this incredible compactness, it is very very useful for a very many things. But in order to make it that compact, you have to abstract it a really long way from any kind of reality.

Like maps, like words. The actual "things" that make up ideas and values and stories are hugely complex — both on the scale of an individual and in the larger, more communal context. If we were to try to fully define even one such value (i.e. 'love'), it would take untold amounts of all kinds of texts to do so. Some modernists (like me) would argue no amount of representations would ever equate with the authentic reality of  people's actual experiences that, due to a sad lack of Vulcan mind-melding, none of us will ever know. But perhaps words are to ideas what maps are to cities: You can abstract something down to near unrecognizability and let our brains do the expanding. This is the importance of the 'gutters' McCloud talks about, or what we writers call up with a spacebar. We take chunks of words in with our eyes and, as if under pressure, they blow up with colors, smells, moods and textures after being consumed.



   It seems to me like the more something is abstracted, the more it engages all our senses. Maps that represent a city block are purely visual/spatial, for example, while all but the driest written language requires more than just one sense's participation. Like McCloud describes, the symbolic methods of storytelling use one sense to engage all the senses, either through the projection of ourselves into them or our taking them in and connecting them as our own inner constituents, depending on how you look at it.

We can see there's a sweet spot here depending on what your need is. In some cases, more abstract/compact is better (We used mathematical representations of reality instead of sculptural ones to get us to the moon, for example). In other cases, more realistic/less compact is better (written directions are often less helpful than a map that contains representations of real-life landmarks). 

Things get messy here though, because with abstraction comes subjectivity. Take the zoo of different line-types that McCloud showcases on page 125. He labels them with the feelings they impart to him, but without his direction I would probably only guess the same emotion as he would 25% of the time. I agree completely that no line — and no abstraction — is without implication. Fonts, word order, word choice, color, layout — all these things impart meaning to readers. But the readers construct the meaning from their own experiences, which means that despite an author's best intention, there's no hard-and-fast consistency about what anything will actually impart to another.