On Comic Mental Imagery in Literature: The Case of Manolito Gafotas

On Comic Mental Imagery in Literature:The Case of Manolito Gafotas

Jeroen Vandaele1,2

Published online: 3 April 2015

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract This essay deals with comic mental imagery in literature, that is, the

aesthetic experience of reading a literary text and then suddenly finding yourself

laughing at an image produced by your mind’s eye. This common experience,

largely neglected by literary analysts, vividly illustrates what cognitive science calls

‘‘the embodied mind,’’ the human mind that turns symbols such as literary texts into

‘‘quasi-perceptual’’ mental imagery and responds emotionally to these quasi per-

cepts. My essay investigates the imagery (or quasi percepts) I found myself laughing

at while reading Elvira Lindo’s Manolito Gafotas—an enormous source of ‘‘ver-

bally visual’’ humor. The analysis agrees with Wolfgang Iser that the readerly mind

produces the images but that the text frames them on its own emotive terms: the

comedic text functionalizes the imagery, and the imagery materializes and elabo-

rates the emotion. Furthermore, the essay tentatively describes certain types of

comic imagery, and it signals that imagined faces of characters play an important

role in comic mental imagery—as is the case in plainly perceptual (audiovisual or

theatrical) comedy. More generally, the essay constitutes a reader-response exercise

that intends to awaken literary scholars to the topic of comic mental imagery in

literature. It suggests that classical literary phenomenology (e.g., Iser’s reader-re-

sponse approach) may inspire not only the more recent cognitive approaches to

literature, but also those recent strands of embodied cognitive science that accept

phenomenological analysis (methodical introspection) as an important component

of knowledge construction about the human mind.

& Jeroen Vandaele

[email protected]

1 Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, Campus Blindern, Niels Treschows Hus, 10th Floor,

Niels Henrik Abels vei 36, Oslo, Norway

2 University of Oslo, Postboks 1003 Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway

123

Neophilologus (2015) 99:351–370

DOI 10.1007/s11061-015-9435-7

Keywords Mental imagery � Humor � Gafotas � Lindo � Emotions � Comic

narrative

Mental imagery is notoriously infected with emotion. (Collins 1991, p. 30)

Hamlet: My father—methinks I see my father.

Horatio: O where, my lord?

Hamlet: In my mind’s eye, Horatio. (Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 2).

Introduction

My wife recently told me a story dating back to her time as an MA student in

Romance philology. Her professor of Spanish literature, a dedicated scholar and no-

nonsense teacher, was reading a longer excerpt from Don Quixote to the students,

but was suddenly unable to continue—for she had burst into laughter. For the next

few minutes, the only words she managed to produce, gasping for breath in between

fits of laughter, were, ‘‘Sorry, I just … I just see it before me … It’s so funny…’’

Unintentionally, the lecture had become a memorable event for the students, a

public demonstration of a reading experience that is usually quite private: the

experience of comic visual mental imagery.1 As common as this effect of comic

narrative on readers may be, not much attention has been given to it. One exception

is a 1989 paper by the experimental researchers Graesser, Long, and Mio, who

suggest that ‘‘mental imagery’’ is a humorous component of texts because ‘‘punch

lines with visually graphic episodes may intensify a humorous event’’ (Graessler

et al. 1989, p. 158). Graesser et al. merely graze this idea—possibly because their

study did not show the component to be statistically significant.

However, since mental imagery is an ‘‘ontologically subjective’’ phenomenon,

that is, one existing only in the consciousness or mental life of an individual,

imagery may be difficult (though not entirely impossible) to observe and assess in

the objectified manners that experimental psychologists would favor. Question-

naires (e.g., the VVIQ) and brain scans (see Xu Cui et al. 2007) may to some extent

bring out and measure the ‘‘vividness’’ of individual imagery, yet it is at least

equally important that subjects qualitatively report on their mental experiences, on

whether (or to what extent) they attribute special qualities, such as ‘‘humorousness,’’

to mental imagery. This is what I propose to do here regarding my own mental

experiences. From an experiential and introspective point of view, I credit Wyer and

Collins’s (1992) hypothesis that ‘‘cognitive elaboration’’ during text interpretation,

1 As defined by The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘‘mental imagery (varieties of which are

sometimes colloquially referred to as ‘visualizing,’ ‘seeing in the mind’s eye,’ ‘hearing in the head,’

‘imagining the feel of,’ etc.) is quasi-perceptual experience; it resembles perceptual experience, but

occurs in the absence of the appropriate external stimuli’’ (Thomas 2013). Quite often (as here) the

general term mental imagery is used to refer to visual mental imagery—seeing in the mind’s eye. All

visually non-impaired persons have visual mental imagery, although there are ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’

visualizers, as measurable by for example the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire or VVIQ (see

Marks 1973).

352 J. Vandaele

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which is a process that ‘‘might be not only propositional but also could involve

mental imagery,’’ is indeed a potential ‘‘factor’’ of humor (p. 676). Specifically, I

will attempt to analyze comic mental imagery as an elaboration of humor produced

by a literary text.

The causality of imagery producing comedy is suggested by the abovementioned

articles, by research that credits mental imagery for eliciting emotion in general,2 as

well as by anecdotal evidence regarding humor produced by imagery, such as my

wife’s Spanish professor, my own experiences of reading and listening, and the

statements made by a subject I interviewed after she had listened to excerpts from

the Spanish children’s novel Manolito Gafotas.3 When I asked her to tell me why

she laughed when she laughed, she often replied that she did so because of the

‘‘images’’ or the ‘‘scene’’ she mentally saw before her, although she was seemingly

unaware that I was interested in that kind of causality between imagery and comedy.

In a non-experimental, introspective manner, and without neglecting poetic

insights on humorous narrative, my paper wants to bring comic visual imagery back

to the attention of literary poetics. To that effect, I will analyze Manolito Gafotas

(Manolito Four-Eyes), the first book in Elvira Lindo’s humorous and immensely

popular Manolito series.4 Manolito, the autodiegetic narrator, is a charming Spanish

boy displaying a great sense of humor as he tells us about life in a working-class

suburb of Madrid. Here is how he introduces himself:

I like that they call me Four-Eyes. At my school—which is called Diego

Velazquez—anyone who’s a little important has a nickname. Before I had a

nickname, I used to cry plenty. When a bully started in on me at recess, he

always ended up calling me Four-Eyes or Fat Glasses. Since I’ve officially

become Manolito Four-Eyes, insulting me is a waste of time. (Lindo 2008,

pp. 3–5)5

2 Somewhat more has indeed been written on mental imagery as a cause of emotions in general.

Reviewing the academic literature, Holmes and Mathews (2010) summarize that ‘‘imagery can evoke

emotion in at least three ways: a direct influence on emotional systems in the brain that are responsive to

sensory signals; overlap between processes involved in mental imagery and perception which can lead to

responding ‘as if’ to real emotion-arousing events; and the capacity of images to make contact with

memories for emotional episodes in the past’’ (p. 350). Hogan (2011) goes so far as to claim that ‘‘the

eliciting conditions’’ of an emotion must be either ‘‘a perception, a concrete imagination (thus an

imagination that activates perceptual regions), or an emotional memory (which is also, ultimately,

perceptual)’’ (p. 46). I will take up Hogan’s claim at the end of my essay.3 I selected excerpts from Elvira Lindo’s Manolito Gafotas (Lindo 1994), asked Pilar Orero from the

Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona to perform them, and taped her 10-min performance as an audio file

to which my subject was made to listen. At the beginning and the end of an interview I asked my subject

what she thought I was investigating. She told me she assumed I was generally interested in what she

found funny and why. (The interview was carried out in 2012 at the Universidad Autonoma de

Barcelona.).4 After the first book was published in 1994, sales of the Manolito series on the Hispanic market reached

a million copies within 7 years (Oropesa 2003, p. 17).5 In Spanish: ‘‘A mı me gusta que me llamen Gafotas. En mi colegio, que es el ‘Diego Velazquez’, todo

el mundo que es un poco importante tiene un mote. Antes de tener un mote yo lloraba bastante. Cuando

un chulito se metıa conmigo en el recreo siempre acababa insultandome y llamandome cuatro-ojos o

gafotas. Desde que soy Manolito Gafotas insultarme es una perdida de tiempo.’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 8).

Comic Mental Imagery in Literature 353

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The Manolito books are funny in many ways but particularly, so it seems, because

they continuously produce mental imagery. According to the Spanish publisher

Alfaguara (2002), the ‘‘visual humor’’ is one of its main points of attraction (p. 3).

Grounding; or, the Importance of Imagery

Mental imagery analysis has not been a particularly appealing literary research topic

for decades, that is, ever since structuralism and poststructuralism came to the fore.6

Structuralism has long analyzed meaning in terms of words—words to analyze other

words and surrounding words—and poststructuralism has analyzed textual meaning

in terms of its relation to other texts. These are obviously valid approaches to

meaning and text, as long as the meaning of narrative fiction is not reduced to being

a web of words and texts, leaving no room for other aspects of interpretation. We

know, for instance, that the structuralist poetics of fiction had a ‘‘moratorium on

referential issues,’’ such as mental-world construction (Pavel 1989, p. 10), and in

1978 Chatman had to re-affirm the obvious fact that ‘‘the equation of characters with

‘mere words’ is wrong’’ (Chapman 1978, p. 118). In such paradigmatic circum-

stances, not many were inclined to insist on the importance of mental imagery.

One scholar who did stress the imagistic aspect of literary reading was the

phenomenology-oriented poetician Wolfgang Iser (1978, esp. chapters 6 and 7). In

his view, inspired by Roman Ingarden, mental imagery and inner speech are a

reader’s performances of the text: they determine, complete, or—to use Husserl’s

(translated) term—‘‘fulfill’’ the text’s meaning. Husserl’s notion of fulfillment

(Erfullung) is usefully explained by Peter Simons:

I may know a lot about someone and use that person’s proper name without

ever having met, heard, or seen the person. … If I meet the person, then what

had been a schematic or abstract way of considering them is filled out by all

kinds of perceptual detail. … [Such] fulfilment is therefore incidental, not

essential to meaning, though… there would be no meaningful use of language

in general were there not fulfilment. (Simons 1995, p. 110)

To use more recent, cognitive jargon: novelists have to ‘‘deground’’ their vividly

imagined story world into a web of abstract symbols (i.e., the text), but they do it in

a manner that enables readers to reground the text into specific imagery and the

speech of a well-furnished story world (see Deacon 1997, esp. chapter 14).

Cognitive scientists defending a ‘‘grounded’’ or ‘‘embodied’’ view on the mind (e.g.,

Lakoff 1987; Damasio 1994; Barsalou 1999, 2008) emphasize the role of imagery in

6 For a more complete history of the academic bias against imagery, see Collins 1991. According to

Collins (1991), imagery was ‘‘ostracized’’ by behaviorism ‘‘because it was a phenomenon of

consciousness’’ and by New Criticism as its ‘‘unlikely ally’’; next, in the 1960s, the New Critics ‘‘found

themselves uncomfortably allied with another science, that of linguistics,’’ that is, structuralism (pp.

44–46). Finally, ‘‘the debate between literary spatializers, for example, Jakobson and his structuralist

confreres, and temporalizers, for example, Derrida, Fish, and poststructuralists of every persuasion, has

not helped to clarify the nature of the image’’ (p. 99). As we will see, important clarifications would come

from Wolfgang Iser (inspired by the work of Roman Ingarden). On the academic bias against imagery,

see also Esrock 1994).

354 J. Vandaele

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mental life. To call the human mind ‘‘embodied’’ is to say that it turns symbols (e.g.,

literary texts) into ‘‘quasi-perceptual’’ mental imagery and responds emotionally to

these quasi percepts.7 In other words, embodied or grounded cognition theory

hypothesizes that cognition is largely modal, in the sense that the modalities (or

senses) make cognition what it is and offer the input for abstract thinking as well.

According to Barsalou (2008) ‘‘it is unlikely that the brain contains amodal

symbols; if it does, they work together with modal representations to create

cognition’’ (p. 625). Embodied cognitive science suggests that mental imagery is an

‘‘off-line’’ (quasi-perceptual) version of real, ‘‘online’’ perception. Both off-line and

online imagery are produced by our bodily systems of perception (our senses),

though only the online version relates to an external object of perception. This

implies that off-line cognition is taken to work with modal simulations: visual

imagery (or the so-called inner eye); inner ear phenomena; fictive action (movement

and proprioception)8; and introspection (mental states and emotions). The claim is,

in other words, that cognition is basically grounded in sensory experience. As part

of this claim, the concepts of embodiment and grounded cognition want to replace

disembodied and ungrounded—often computer-inspired—models of how we think.

Unlike computer processors, our brain is part of our body. Unlike computer

programs, our mind is a reflection of the embodied brain.

While much remains to be learned about and from its neurological underpin-

nings, the off-line system seems readily accessible to phenomenological introspec-

tion—we often see and hear what we dream, daydream, think, plan, respond in our

imagination, and so on. When this off-line system deals specifically with literature,

its object is not perceptual, but neither are its stimuli entirely self-induced (as

happens when we dream or daydream). In the act of reading, as Iser (1978)

observed, an alien text is strangely enough able to trigger our own inner eye (as well

as inner ear) experiences (p. 141). Although literary worlds may seem utterly

disembodied, our embodied cognitive system actually gives literary ontologies a

very real (or ‘‘lived’’ or ‘‘vivid’’) quality. Scarry (2001) does acknowledge that ‘‘the

sensory realm surpasses the imaginary realm on sensory ground’’ (p. 5) but remarks

with acuity that ‘‘this ordinary enfeeblement of images has a striking exception in

the verbal arts, where images somehow do acquire the vivacity of perceptual

objects’’ (p. 1). Our reader’s eye sets in motion our inner eye; our inner ear can

dramatizes mere print on paper; the words of literature can come with ersatz

proprioception and touch (see also, e.g., Paivio 1983; Scarry 1995, 2001; Jajdelska

et al. 2010).

7 In fact, as Wilson (2002) explains, the idea of embodied cognition includes a number of distinct claims:

‘‘(1) cognition is situated; (2) cognition is time-pressured; (3) we off-load cognitive work onto the

environment; (4) the environment is part of the cognitive system; (5) cognition is for action; (6) offline

cognition is body based’’ (p. 625). According to Wilson, the sixth claim—the one that concerns us here—

‘‘may in fact be the best documented and most powerful of the six claims’’ (p. 625).8 At the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, a blind-born person also volunteered to listen to the

abovementioned ten-minute excerpt from Manolito Gafotas. It took her little time and effort to guess that

I was interested in Manolito Gafotas’s imagery, especially the visual imagery. She told me that although

she could not experience visual imagery, she did have an imagistic experience of the narrative. She

explained that her images—what we could call her embodied understanding of scenes and figures—are

built by her other senses, including a sense of bodily positioning and movement.

Comic Mental Imagery in Literature 355

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The branch of literary theory dedicated to this interactive system of reading—

Iser’s branch—is known as reader-response theory.9 This paper will theorize my

personal reader response to the imagistic humor in Manolito Gafotas, a theorization

based on short notes I took during reading.10 I will first attempt to focus mainly on

the grounding aspects of my response, that is, I will attempt to describe the imagistic

properties that seemed to produce my mirthful responses. It will immediately

become clear, however, that the analysis cannot discuss comic grounding—

embodied or modal response—without comic narrative framing: comic imagery ties

in with and elaborates on broader comic and narrative mechanisms.11

The Image Unframed?

The mental images that I considered comedy-related seem to broadly fall into five

categories:

• ‘‘Support images’’; or, nonhumorous images that support non-imagistic humor

These included various forms of gestalts: scenes, action sequences, gestures, and

faces.

• ‘‘Mental caricatures’’; or, exaggerated images These images were comically

deformed or exaggerated (i.e., caricature-like) scenes, sequences, gestures, and

faces. As opposed to the support images, they elaborated (hence contributed to)

the humor.

• ‘‘Mental cubism’’; or, multifocalized scenes My mind’s eye sometimes saw one

comic, multiperspectival visual take on one scene, slightly reminiscent of the

painting technique characteristic of Cubism.

9 Collins (1991) rightly remarks, however, that the ‘‘response’’ of reader-response theorists ambiguously

referred to ‘‘either an internal and unspoken realization,’’ as in Iser, ‘‘or to an openly expressed reaction,’’

as in Norman Holland or Hans Robert Jauss (p. xix).10 In her book on mental imagery, Scarry (2001) intends her phenomenological descriptions ‘‘as an

invitation to the reader to stop and practice…[B]ut rather than precede each sentence with the explicit

invitation ‘Try this,’ I will simply describe what I am myself convinced takes place’’ (pp. 90–91).

Similarly, my descriptions of comic mental imagery should be seen as invitations to my readers to pay

attention to their own and compare them to mine. On the other hand, when I now reread my paper and the

excerpts quoted, I often do not experience the imagery I wrote down while I read the book—and neither is

the original comic affect still attached to those quotes. This goes to show that the imagery is an

elaboration of discourse, not a stand-alone comic feature—as my essay will now begin to argue (with

Iser).11 In fact, Jerry Fodor (1980) has made a similar point about the need for imagery to be framed by

language, though in an entirely different (truth-conditional) debate on imagery. His argument is nicely

summarized by Thomas (2013, emphases in original): ‘‘A mental image of John, who is a tall fat man,

might mean John, it might mean fat man (or John is a fat man), or tall man.… On the other hand it might

mean John in just the particular pose and situation in which he is imagined. After all, it resembles all

those things (and indefinitely many more). What an image means, according to Fodor, what it is an image

of, will necessarily remain radically indeterminate unless it is pinned down by an associated linguistic

description.’’ In my analysis, the (emotive) meaning of imagery will both depend on and elaborate the

ongoing (emotive) discourse framing, a statement that does not touch on the truth-conditional aspects of

imagery.

356 J. Vandaele

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• ‘‘Mental dirt’’; or figures comically out of place Some imagery was funny

because it set a bodily gestalt or ‘‘figure’’ in a ‘‘ground’’ where it did not belong,

as when intimate bodily behavior (concerning sex, hygiene, primitive pulses,

and repulsions) is not confined to the private space.

• ‘‘Encyclopedic images’’; or very specific images These images are not

archetypes or abstractions (e.g., a tower) but more particular images (e.g., the

Eiffel Tower). They are thus not dictionary images but encyclopedic ones—and

they can come with comic affect, as I will explain.

Before I start to illustrate these categories, I should repeat that each one is at best a

one-sided approach to comic mental imagery and that one of the purposes of my

essay is precisely to show in which way there is another side to it—the side of

narrative and comedic framing.

Support Images

The very beginning of Manolito Gafotas illustrates this first sort of mental imagery

that my mind’s eye produced—the sort that serves to visually ground stories in

general and here visualizes aspects of episodes that seem comic for nonvisual

reasons. Consider the very first words of our 8-year-old narrator12:

My name is Manolito Garcıa Moreno, but if you come into my neighborhood

and ask the first guy that passes by, ‘‘Excuse me, please, Manolito Garcıa

Moreno?’’—one of two things will happen. The guy will shrug, or he’ll mutter

something like: ‘‘Hey, beats me.’’ (Lindo 2008, p. 3)13

The question ‘‘Excuse me, please, Manolito Garcıa Moreno?’’ made me smile,

because the scene and the verbal build-up prompted me to expect the person to ask

for a building or a street rather than a person. However, the very imagery—the scene

of a person asking information in an unknown neighborhood—was not in itself

humorous. It did not obviously elaborate and enhance the non-imagistic comedy of

the scene. Quite often, indeed, the imagery of Manolito Gafotas merely materializes

and animates a story world that is comic for other reasons. Instead of dwelling on

this support function of imagery, I will move on to discuss the mental images that

did contribute to the comedy—starting with caricatures.

12 It is on page 44 of Manolito Gafotas that we learn he is eight years old, when he imagines that people

think he is eighteen instead of eight (and therefore not at school). On page 9 of the second volume, Pobre

Manolito (Lindo 2001), he is still eight, if his math is right—since he hopes to live a hundred years, which

in his calculation means he would have ninety-two years to go.13 I read the text in the Spanish original, which goes as follows (Lindo 1994): ‘‘Me llamo Manolito

Garcıa Moreno, pero si tu entras a mi barrio y le preguntas al primer tıo que pase:

–Oiga, por favor >Manolito Garcıa Moreno?

El tıo, una de dos, o se encoge de hombros o te suelta

–Oiga, y a mi que me cuenta.’’ (p. 7)

I quote the published American translation by Lindo and Moriarty wherever it is compatible with my

reader-response to the original. However, since that translation is not always equivalent to the original

(that is, equivalent for the purpose of illustrating my imagistic reader-response to the original), I will often

propose my own translation.

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‘‘Mental Caricatures’’; or, Exaggerated Images

Manolito Gafotas is replete with verbal cues that induced caricatures in my mind’s

eye. As in perception, the caricatures in the mind’s eye add exaggeration to

recognizability. They present bodily actions and properties of characters in a

recognizable way yet with some salient traits deformed by exaggeration.14

In a first example, Hangman’s Tree Park, where Manolito and his friends often

play together, offers a minimal setting for the narration of action and the production

of imagery:

[T]he other day I was chilling out in Hangman’s Tree Park…I was with Big

Ears Lopez playing spinning tops when cocky old Yihad turns up out of the

blue, puts one foot on mine—on the spinning top, not on my foot—and says to

me, ‘‘Now we’re gonna play that I’m Captain America.’’ And after giving that

emphatic order, he goes and points at Big Ears and says, ‘‘He’s the girl, and

Manolito, you’re the filthy traitor’’.15

I visualize a scene with figures here. I see an open-air space with a tree; and two kids

on their knees playing, intent on the spinning tops; and next the arrival at the

(mental) scene of an aggressive, dominant boy who comes and spoils the game. His

arrival is an appearance, a superposition, not a movement of a figure into the

existing image of the other boys. Once there, the dominant boy is much bigger—not

just taller—than the other kids. A huge creature has rushed in, has his powerful foot

on everything, and shouts with an exaggeratedly big mouth (which remains open).

The exaggerated shape of the boy—almost a giant among the other kids—somehow

materializes both his aggressive and funnily incongruous nature, which is an

elaboration of my emotional reaction to that story line. Next, I also see the

incredulous and fearful faces of the other boys. Indeed, when Yihad starts

commanding that Big Ears will be a girl and Manolito a nasty traitor, with all due

consequences, my response is a mix of mirth and indignation. And as I now realize,

while writing this, that I would not find this very scene equally funny in a different

context (e.g., when reconsidering it within the context of this essay) nor a similar

14 Cf. the OED’s definition of caricature: ‘‘A picture, description, or imitation of a person in which

certain striking characteristics are exaggerated in order to create a comic or grotesque effect.’’15 In Spanish, Yihad expresses his command through the imperfecto ludico (era), the imperfect tense

used by Spanish children to establish a fictional world (a game) and to assign roles in that world. ‘‘[E]l

otro dıa estoy tan tranquilo en el parque del Arbol del Ahorcado … y estaba con el Orejones Lopez

jugando a la trompa carnicera cuando va y llega sin previo aviso el chulito de Yihad, me pone un pie en la

trompa—en la trompa carnicera, no en la mıa–y me dice: —Ahora vamos a jugar a que yo era el capitan

America—despues de esta orden tajante senalo al Orejones y dijo tambien: —Este era la chica y

Manolito, el traidor asqueroso’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 36). In fact, translating this excerpt is complicated due to

subtle wordplay on trompa. The expression jugar a la trompa activates jugar al trompo (to play spinning

tops), yet other meanings of trompa are also activated: ‘‘elephant’s trunk,’’ hence, metaphorically,

Manolito’s nose, face, or even penis. The latter senses are particularly activated by ponerme pie en la

trompa [to put a foot on my face (or penis)] and no en la mıa (not on mine). However, since my attention

concerns other aspects of the translation, I have not attempted to transpose the wordplay with all its

associations. One additional reason why I have not used the published American translation here is the

change of the original character name ‘‘Yihad’’ into ‘‘Ozzy the Bully.’’ On the alleged racism and sexism

of Manolito Gafotas, see Vandaele (2014).

358 J. Vandaele

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scene even mildly funny in an entirely serious context, it dawns on me that comedic

framing—the comedy and Manolito’s antihero quality—here turns aggressive

superiority into funny superiority, and that the imagery allows me to prolong and

enhance (i.e., elaborate) both my mirth and indignation. As Iser (1978) says, the

imagery is mine, but ‘‘the text uses the reader’s individual experiences on its own

terms’’ (pp. 143–144).

In another scene, caricature does not take the shape of an oversized body and

mouth but of exaggeratedly helpless movement—of eyes staring in the void, arms

groping, and bodies trying to find their way. Since Yihad has broken Manolito’s

glasses, Manolito’s father steps in and teaches his son how to fight back. A good

apprentice, Manolito manages to break his father’s glasses in his very first exercise,

so

[t]he next day my dad and I went to the optometrist. Since neither one of us

could see very well, we took a taxi. (Lindo 2008, p. 45).16

I here saw two figures about to climb into the back seat of a taxi. My focus was on

their exaggeratedly pinched eyes, and on their stretched-out arms as they tried to get

from the sidewalk into the taxi. The image is static—they stay in between sidewalk

and taxi, their arms extended and frozen—yet it is vivid and has comic quality.

Again, since I can obviously think of unfunny images of people blindly groping, of

people climbing into a taxi, and of people on their way to an optometrist, this

imagery made me laugh thanks to its comedic frame, which injects humor into the

scene. The imagery seemed to elaborate and enhance a comic affect that was

already in place.

In my third and final example, two caricature-like images follow one another—

and here the static nature of the images happened to be truly functional in both

cases. When Manolito and his grandfather are being robbed in the streets of their

neighborhood, it is Manolito who carries the money. As he tells us,

I started pulling out coin after coin. My mom gives me coins so she can get rid

of the change in her purse and, of course, the thief started to have a coronary.17

In the first frozen image I visualized the kid taking out his money, in an

exaggeratedly slow manner—a slowness epitomized by the static image. Manolito

had his thumb and index on a coin, and there he stood, frozen by fear and in

imagery. In my second tableau vivant, I saw the robber’s exaggeratedly hysterical

and incredulous face as he received a coin in his open hand—an image

foregrounded by the last part of the excerpt (‘‘the thief started to have a coronary’’).

This caricature came as a visual punch line to me, an image similar to the grotesque

faces of disbelief and outrage pulled by characters in TV or film comedies. (Note,

once again, the importance of framing here: the same scene could be most

unpleasant outside comedy.)

16 ‘‘Al dıa siguiente mi padre y yo fuimos al oculista. Como ninguno de los dos veıamos muy bien,

cogimos un taxi’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 44).17 ‘‘Empece a sacar moneda tras moneda. Mi madre me lo da en monedas para que le quite a ella lo suelto

de la cartera, y claro, el atracador se empezo a poner cardiaco.’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 53, my translation).

Comic Mental Imagery in Literature 359

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‘‘Mental Cubism’’; or, Multifocalized Scenes

Manolito and his classmates go on a trip to the Prado Museum, where by sheer

coincidence the same robber happens to be at work. As Manolito recognizes him,

the kid starts yelling like a madman. His teacher, Miss Asuncion—in Manolito’s

account the terror of the school kids—alerts the guards and, when all is safe again,

gives Manolito a kiss and invites him to sit next to her on the bus trip back to school.

As Manolito complains,

My teach took the opportunity to show me all the monuments we were passing

on our way back.18

The autobus scene is funny to me because of the contrast between a bored child and

an enthusiastic teacher. A dense, almost Cubist image materialized the contrast

before my mind’s eye—an image that at once depicted the bus from the inside, the

monuments on the outside, the teacher’s extremely enthusiastic pointing, and

Manolito’s face expressing boredom and a sense of entrapment. Although the clash

between the action logics of the two characters is a crucial part of the comedy,19 I

felt that the accompanying imagery was also instrumental to the humor. The image

materialized—repeated and condensed in images, hence elaborated—the alternative

construals of the bus situation, which together produce humor. The comic collision

of logics—one assumedly inferior, the other assumedly superior—found expression

and elaboration in a perspectivally dense image. While the comedy functionalized

the imagery, the imagery materialized the emotion.

My reference to Cubism intends to convey that one single agent (the cubist

Picasso, say, or the narrator Manolito, here) produces perspectival multiplicity in a

single image. On the one hand, my inner eye seemed to objectify Manolito’s

subjective take on the situation—or at least make it multiply subjective by including

the teacher’s perspective. In other words, despite the univocal nature of Manolito’s

narration, I could visualize the action perspectives of two highly dissimilar

characters. On the other hand, Manolito’s narration—his dominant voice—did get

me to prefer the protagonist’s action logic to the teacher’s, and to find his

perspective congruous/superior and his teacher’s enthusiasm incongruous/inferior

(that is, over enthusiastic).

Note, finally, that a counter-evaluation (the immature Manolito vs. the mature

teacher) remains available and is arguably intended by the implied author Elvira

Lindo—for we cannot take Manolito too seriously when he narrates. His discourse

is a child’s: it is entirely paratactic, goes logically in many directions, contains many

exclamations, and is openly evaluative, biased, and hyperemotional. We know he is

a young kid conjured up by Elvira Lindo, and—quite apart from his vocabulary,

mentality, and logics—the features of his discourse constantly remind us of his

young mental age. While Manolito frames the other characters, we also frame

18 ‘‘Mi senorita aprovecho para ensenarme todos los monumentos que nos ıbamos encontrando a nuestro

paso’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 59, my translation).19 In general, explains David Herman (2002), ‘‘[u]nderstanding a narrative depends crucially on framing

and updating inferences about participant roles and relations’’ (p. 164).

360 J. Vandaele

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Manolito as Lindo’s invention. Even this abstract perspectival mechanism—the

reader hypothesizing that the implied author frames a narrator in a certain way—has

its bearings on the interpretation of imagery. It helps turn Manolito’s sense of

entrapment, as materialized by the face he pulls, into a harmless and entertaining

kind of victimhood.

‘‘Mental Dirt’’; or Figures Comically out of Place

Mary Douglas (2002) famously defined ‘‘dirt’’ as ‘‘matter out of place,’’ by which she

meant that ‘‘dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter,

in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements’’ (p. 44). Since images

are ‘‘materializations’’ of the symbolic text (they are quasi percepts of matter, one

might say), it is to be expected that some images will be considered out of place by

some readers. Take the scene in which Manolito and his friend Big Ears Lopez try to

make Manolito’s grandfather eat a cockroach in his favorite hang-out, Bar Stumbles:

Big Ears and I switched a black olive for a cockroach in Stumbles. We speared

it with a toothpick and everything; it could’ve passed for an olive, but my

grandpa suspected that he wasn’t dealing with an everyday olive when he saw

its legs moving. (Lindo 2008, p. 135)20

It is not hard to picture an olive as a Spanish tapa, a cockroach on a toothpick as a

fake tapa, and the moving legs of the cockroach tapa. Neither is it difficult to see

that the cockroach is matter out of place—especially if you imagine that the grandpa

actually might have eaten it.

On another occasion, Manolito illustrates the young lot’s propensity for dirty

behavior by means of his classmate Yihad. During an exam,

Yihad pulled his cheat sheet out of his nose. He furls it up into a tiny roll and

sticks it in his nose, and that’s even after his mum once had to rush him to

hospital because the roll had climbed up his nostrils and was about to destroy

his brain. … He only got a six. Yihad says it’s because he couldn’t read the

writing for snot.21

Yihad’s life-threatening cheat sheets and annoying boogers are matter inconve-

niently out of place—not just for him or during examination.

Or take the scene in which Manolito gets caught up in a street protest in Madrid.

His grandfather, who accompanies him, asks a man if he can carry Manolito on his

shoulders so that the kid can see what is happening. Manolito then realizes that the

man has dandruff:

20 ‘‘Aquel dıa que el Orejones y yo le cambiamos una aceituna negra por una cucaracha en el Tropezon.

La atravesamos con un palillo de dientes y todo; la verdad es que daba el pego, pero mi abuelo sospecho

que no se trataba de una aceituna como las demas cuando vio que a la aceituna se le movıan las patas’’

(Lindo 1994, pp. 125–26).21 ‘‘Yihad se saco la chuleta de la nariz. Se la mete ahı hecho un rollo diminuto, y eso que una vez le tuvo

que llevar su madre a urgencias, porque las chuletas habıan ido trepando por las fosas nasales y estaban a

punto de destrozarle el celebro. … [S]olo saco un seis, dice Yihad que los mocos no le dejaron ver las

letras’’ (Lindo 1994, pp. 83–84, my translation).

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I noticed that the guy had dandruff, so I decided to brush it off a little. I asked

him why he didn’t buy one of those shampoos they advertise on TV that gets

rid of dandruff (and if you don’t watch out, gets you a girlfriend, too). The guy

put me down on the ground, all in a huff.22

Note that the published American translation (Lindo 2008, p. 16) left out the

potentially funny ‘‘brushing off’’ or ‘‘cleaning’’ part, which is my translation of the

original limpiar:

I noticed that the guy had dandruff. I asked him why he didn’t buy one of

those shampoos they advertise on TV that gets rid of dandruff (and if you

don’t watch out, gets you a girlfriend, too). The guy put me down on the

ground, all in a huff [...].

However different the reactions—laughter in my case, apparent censorship in the

American translator’s case—they both indicate that Manolito’s hands brushing the

dandruff out of a stranger’s hair is inappropriate, a case of matter out of place

(Manolito’s hands in a stranger’s hair and a stranger’s dandruff in Manolito’s

hands). Whether found funnily incongruous (for me) or socially intolerable (for the

translator and/or publisher), the affect (comedy and/or aversion) is likely to increase

when we visualize—mentally materialize—that scene.

The American translation also cleans the mental dirt in another place—and the

cleaning operation is unlikely to be caused by cultural references that are hard to

understand. Manolito admits he is not 100 % hygienic (here in my translation):

My grandpa came to pick me up from karate because my dad says I walk like a

Chinaman and I have to correct that because I look pathetic walking around all

day like Fu Manchu, but without those long nails of his. Mine are black, not

long, just for the record.23

The American translation reads as follows:

One daymygrandpa came to pickme up fromkarate. I take karate because Iwalk

like a penguin, and my dad says karate can fix this; it has to be fixed because it

looks pathetic to walk around all day like a penguin, unless you are a penguin.

(My feet are filthy, but not webbed, just to set the record straight.) (Lindo 2008,

p. 62)24

The image of black nails (or long black nails)25 looks dirtier to me than the one of

filthy feet—an impression that may be related to an underlying system, as Mary

22 ‘‘Me di cuenta de que tenıa caspa y se lo empece a limpiar un poquillo. Le dije que por que no se

compraba un champu que anuncian en la tele que te quita la caspa y te consigue una novia como te

descuides. El tıo me solto en el suelo como mosqueado’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 18, my translation).23 ‘‘Resulta que vino mi abuelo a buscarme a karate, porque dice mi padre que ando como un chino y eso

hay que corregırmelo porque da pena verme todo el dıa andando como Fumanchu, pero sin esas unas tan

largas que tiene Fumanchu. Yo las tengo negras, pero no largas, que conste’’ (Lindo 1994, 61, my

translation).24 Note also that the original chino and Fumanchu have been changed into ‘‘penguin.’’25 Negation (here ‘‘without’’) does not avoid the formation of imagery. As Lakoff et al. (2004) have

pointed out, when you tell people ‘‘Don’t think of an elephant,’’ they will think of an elephant. This may

362 J. Vandaele

123

Douglas might have pointed out. When kids are barefooted, as in karate, I see no

way to avoid filthy feet; yet kids only get permanent black nails when they do not

regularly wash their hands and cut their nails, which is a matter of choice for

Manolito’s family. The different imagery represents for me the distinction between

occasional and accumulated dirt. Thus, in a scene where Manolito openly admits—

and even boasts of—his uncleanliness, the image of Manolito’s permanently black

nails is more powerful (more out of place, more incongruous) than the image of his

dirty karate feet, hence potentially funnier.

Of course, these cases of mental dirt (black nails, fingers in a stranger’s dandruff,

a cockroach as an appetizer, snot on paper, cheat sheets in the nasal cavity) are not

just funny because of the imagery. They are funny because they are socially

incongruous yet framed as comedy. The frames of comedy and comic character

work as a safety mechanism so that readers would (also) laugh instead of being

(merely) disgusted—even if this mechanism did not seem to work for the American

translator or publisher. At the same time, however, the images are arguably

important elaborations—materializations—of the comedy (or disgust) at hand.

‘‘Encyclopedic’’ Images

The already mentioned Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (or VVIQ),

devised and developed by Marks (1973) and other experimental psychologists, is

an elaborate instruction for people to close their eyes, visualize items, and rate

the vividness of the imagery they are instructed to bring before their mind’s eye.

However useful and elaborate, the VVIQ does contain one important element of

confusion for the people subjected to the questionnaire: its instructions

confusingly mix general expressions without specific referent (such as ‘‘visualize

a house’’) and particularizing expressions with a clear referent (‘‘visualize your

house’’). Several subjects I interviewed with the questionnaire pointed out that

the questionnaire’s phrasing at times blurred this distinction and that it was

obviously easier for them to vividly imagine well-known specific items than

generic ones.

General and particular expressions obviously instruct subjects in very different

ways, and in literature there is similarly a difference between imagining ‘‘a tower’’

and ‘‘the Eiffel Tower.’’ There are, indeed, what I might call ‘‘dictionary images’’

(very general images) as well as ‘‘encyclopedic images’’ (images more tied to

specific objects and scenes). I see these categories as poles of a continuum ranging

from the very particular to the very general image. Moreover, I contend that images

closer to the encyclopedic pole have a sui generis comic potential: they are

potentially comic because they are allusive; and allusion is a well-known device in

much humor.

Footnote 25 continued

perhaps be explained by the fact that pictures, as opposed to discourse, cannot express negatives (see

references in Prince 1993, p. 20). Thus, to negate the existence of a (quasi-)percept (‘‘without those long

nails’’) is to evoke the quasi-percept (‘‘long nails’’) and negate its existence.

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The comic potential of allusion finds an explanation in humor’s dependence on

superiority feelings (Vandaele 2002). Much humor poses a challenge, a cognitive

difficulty that has to be solved, which is not always a straightforward task since the

solution often depends on specific knowledge. Thus, solving humor sometimes

involves recognizing in-group allusive references, and the more particular these

references, the more pleased those who understand them will be to find themselves

among what they may think of as ‘‘the happy few.’’ Regarding comedy in film and

literature, it does not matter that those happy few actually run in the millions: as

long as audiences feel that they are insiders, part of a select community that properly

understands what is meant by a communicator, as long as they perceive themselves

to be persons with a cognitive advantage over outsiders, we can expect humor’s

superiority mechanism to work.

Thus, when Elvira Lindo and Manolito Gafotas instruct readers to imagine that

Manolito’s apartment in the Carabanchel district in Madrid has ‘‘a terrace with

exposed aluminum’’ (Lindo 2008, p. 6),26 those readers who know Carabanchel and/

or other lower-class suburbs in Spain also know perfectly well how to visualize such

a 1960s or 1970s apartment with its balcony turned into an aluminum veranda (so as

to make the apartment bigger). This image is not incongruous but rather wholly

congruous—a stereotype for insiders, one that heightens their self-esteem, makes

them feel part of an in-crowd (Vandaele 2002, pp. 241–245). This is probably why I

laughed when I read the expression and next visualized the typical terrace as I

remembered it from my walks in Madrid’s popular suburbs. Quite often, humor’s

foremost social aspect is that it makes us conscious of our knowledge—and of the

social situatedness of this knowledge, of the embodied human mind. And this shows

once more that images are not just images. Once more, these visual products of

encyclopedic cognition are already interpreted with reference to social and textual

frames.

The Image Fully Framed

As we read a narrative, we understand that each character has its perspective or

action logic in the narrated world. These logics are to some extent explained,

exposed, and evaluated by the narrator, who has his or her own agenda and

preferences, yet readers may put (and may think the author wants us to put) the

narrator’s perspective into perspective. Furthermore, we never forget that we are

reading a little book of comic fiction—which is a double framing device ascribable

to the author. Nothing can be said about funny mental imagery unless it is placed

back in these frames; the imagery materializes and elaborates the emotion but the

comedic text also frames and functionalizes the imagery. Therefore, I will end my

discussion of the examples from Manolito Gafotas with a focus on the framing of

imagery. I will explain how framing mechanisms activated by the text—opposite

action logics, narratorial irony, and authorial irony—turn the imagery toward

comedy, so as to show that the imagery is no more (and no less) than the elaboration

26 In Spanish, a ‘‘terraza cerrada con aluminio visto’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 9).

364 J. Vandaele

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of comedy already in place. I will discuss four examples of imagery framing, the

first focusing on action-logical framing, the second on the narrator as a framing

device, and the third and fourth on the implied author.27

The first excerpt is again about Yihad and Manolito on a school trip to the Prado

Museum. They are still on the bus to the museum when Manolito is getting hungry,

but fortunately Manolito’s mother has prepared ‘‘a potato omelette, some breaded

steaks and pastry for dessert’’28:

When I pulled it out on the bus, Yihad said I was a tacky little boy and that it

looked like I was going camping to Miraflores de la Sierra and not to the Prado

Museum. It pissed me off so much that I said, ‘‘Want some?’’ And the dude

goes and eats up half the omelette.29

Before I move on to discuss the importance and intricacy of comedic framing, let

me mention the images that crossed my mind as I read this sequence. I first pictured

Yihad next to Manolito on the bus, then Manolito having an enormous quantity of

undefined food on his lap, then Yihad’s obsessed look, and finally Yihad devouring

the food. And I found the last three images irresistibly funny. Ultimately, however,

they are only funny thanks to comedic framing, or better, thanks to comic contrasts

between several framings of one situation.

More specifically, in terms of story-world action logic, the character Manolito is

a comic loser, while as a narrator he manages to create a more ambivalent situation,

in which Yihad is just being jealous and he himself a prudent coward, if a coward at

all. Indeed, we understand ‘‘Want some?’’ despite its apparent absurdity within one

or two frames: it is an absurd reply if we think that Yihad has just criticized the

food, yet it is logical if we think that the antihero Manolito understands that Yihad is

just acting out his jealousy; then it is illogical again when we know that Yihad

drives Manolito mad, yet it is logical if we remember that Manolito always prefers

flight to fight. Thus, the images are hung up in several narrative frames—and while

the images make the perspectives more vivid (Yihad next to Manolito, Manolito

with all the food, Yihad’s fixation on the food, Yihad eating like a madman), they

remain largely affectless out of perspective, as Iser suggested. And the same holds

true for the other episodes cited above: the destruction of the spinning top, the blind

father and son groping for the taxi, the coin-by-coin street mugging, the

overenthusiastic teacher and her monuments. Though the images do not create

the comedy, they enhance it—and very strongly.

One important way in which comic imagery materializes comically conflictive

action logic is when we picture a facial expression that indicates the attitude of a

given character, often a target or a witness of a humorous event. This happens when

the narrator Manolito targets—as he often does—other characters. ‘‘Can I smoke in

27 In a double essay (Vandaele 2010, 2012), I investigate how the interplay between narrative’s various

intentional perspectives (characters, narrators, and implied authors) is the framing mechanism of narrative

humor. On the implied author in Manolito Gafotas, see Vandaele (2014).28 ‘‘Una tortilla de patatas, unos filetes empanados y un bollicao de postre’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 55).29 ‘‘Cuando lo saque en el autobus, Yihad me dijo que yo era un pedazo de hortera y que parecıa que en

vez de ir al Museo del Prado me iba de acampada a Miraflores de la Sierra. Me dio tanta rabia que le dije:

«>Quieres?» Y el tıo se me comio media tortilla.’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 55, my translation).

Comic Mental Imagery in Literature 365

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here?’’ he asks his school psychologist at the beginning of his first session, aimed at

curing him of logorrhea (Lindo 1994, p. 29):

That women looked at me as if she’d suddenly seen a freak of nature, and she

told me that kids don’t smoke. Very clever. I had to tell her that it was one of

my little jokes.30

My visualization of the psychologist’s face almost brought me on scene, so to speak.

The narrator made me see how baffled the teacher was. Similar faces of amazement

or entrapment have crossed my mind elsewhere: Manolito’s face when Yihad

arrives at the park; the robber’s look of disbelief when Manolito takes out coin after

coin; Manolito’s face as the teacher shows the monuments; his grandpa’s

incredulous look as the olive starts to move its legs; the stranger’s expression as

Manolito starts to brush off his dandruff; Manolito’s amazement as Yihad devours

the food. My most frequent imagistic materialization, then, seems to be a character’s

facial reaction to actions or speech acts (of other characters) as comically framed by

the narrator and/or implied author.

My final two examples of the importance of framing turn to the implied author. I

have already said that Manolito can be a victim of humor or irony that he himself

cannot—or may not—have meant to produce. One way to make sense of such irony

or humor is by referring to the implied author (see Vandaele 2010 and references

there), as when Manolito and his father return from the optometrist. His father had

taken the whole day off and had no plans to work in the afternoon.

My granddad took me to school, as every afternoon, and my parents stayed

home to have a siesta. What a nerve!31

As I understand this scene, Manolito is outraged because he has to go to school

while his parents can just sleep during the day; yet for grown-up readers in Spain his

exclamation (‘‘What a nerve!’’) may also activate a sexual reading of having a

siesta, if it was not already activated before the exclamation. While this sexual

reading is probably not intended by Manolito, it can be attributed to the frame called

Elvira Lindo, the implied author. The comic effect of the exclamation is again

related to humor’s mechanism of superiority. The reader infers that the implied

author communicates about the character and narrator—above his head, so to speak.

Thus, the frames of character, narrator, and implied author emotionally color my

mental image of his parents retiring to their room and Manolito’s facial response to

it. As in the following example, there is a pleasure in understanding, combining, and

pondering the various conflicting and hierarchically positioned framings of one

situation.

Indeed, imagistic authorial comedy—visual humor communicated via an

unwitting narrator—is also present in an episode from drawing class. When

Manolito and the other kids were asked to draw their parents,

30 ‘‘Me miro con cara de haber visto de repente a un monstruo de la creacion, y me dijo la tıa que los

ninos no fuman. Que lista. Le tuve que decir que habıa sido una bromita de las mıas’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 29,

my translation).31 ‘‘Mi abuelo me llevo al colegio, como todas las tardes, y mis padres se quedaron a echar la siesta. Que

morro.’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 45, my translation).

366 J. Vandaele

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Yihad drew his mom with a moustache and his father with horns; our teach

doesn’t like mothers to be in drawings without shaving first. We thought it was

very, very, very funny…but our teach, who always has to ruin the best Nescafe

moments, took the picture away from him.32

The images (a classroom, the drawings, the collective hilarity, the teacher’s face of

despair) materialize what is in part authorial comedy, since we ascribe the sexual

undertones to Lindo, not Manolito.

How Does Imagery Contribute to Comic Emotion?

As I read Manolito Gafotas, comic mental images came and went, seemingly at

random. They popped up all the time before my mind’s eye, and considered out of

their frame, they are no more than a loose bunch of isolated images—a bunch that

needs to be glued into frames for them to make sense. Out of their frame, they seem

epiphenomena of the mind, devoid of narrative meaning, filmic continuity and even

comic sense. Yet they are not epiphenomena because they are framed and produce

meaning within these frames. Within their narrative frames, Iser (1978) argues,

mental images do receive their function, and in my reading of Manolito Gafotas

they felt like affect-enhancing elements: they seemed elaborations in the sense that

they materialized the action world on which affect—especially mirth—could be

further projected (p. 177). Such projections allowed me to further enjoy the comedy

of the text; they felt like a miniscule slowing down of the reading for more intensity,

allowing me to further taste the text’s comedic flavor.

We may wonder how such comic imagistic elaboration comes about. According

to one hypothesis, it could be that two relatively autonomous interpretive

mechanisms and outcomes (visualization and comedy perception) work in parallel

during reading and happen to interact from time to time: whenever the text happens

to appeal to our visual imagination, the imagistic outcome will be deemed comic if

it happens to occur in a moment of mirth; and the imagistic outcome then offers

itself to the mind in mirth as a further object of mirth. In that scenario, our mind in

mirth would not actively ‘‘steer’’ the production of imagery ‘‘on demand’’ (that is,

for its own comic purpose) but would merely ‘‘welcome’’ any imagery that happens

to occur simultaneously, happily allowing the imagery to visualize (and so enhance)

comic aspects of the text (incongruity and superiority). Such an explanation seems

in line with the fact that the imagery pops up rather randomly (that is, only now and

again) and is clearly not a necessary or sufficient condition for comedy in verbal

texts. In this scenario, the imagery production could for instance be dependent on

linguistic descriptions that have especially strong sensorimotor connections, and it

would be comedy-external in the sense that it runs parallel to the comedy although it

can be captured by the mirthful mind for the purpose of comic elaboration. The

32 ‘‘Yihad dibujo a su madre con bigote y a su padre con cuernos, y a mi sita no le gusta que las madres

salgan en los dibujos sin haberse depilado. A nosotros nos hizo mucha gracia, mucha, mucha. … Pero la

sita, que siempre tiene que jorobar los mejores momentos Nescafe, le quito el dibujo’’ (Lindo 1994, p. 27,

my translation).

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random-though-welcome elaboration model is how we could call this explanation of

comic mental imagery.

On the other hand, the randomness does not seem total. There may at least be

some systematicness—which suggests a second, competing hypothesis. For

instance, it is striking that so many of my images are faces, even though very

few faces are explicitly described in the excerpts I quoted. One might therefore

wonder whether the mind does not in fact systematically produce the faces as a

support for the ongoing comedy, even when the text offers no explicit cues for

visualization. To be sure, the school psychologist ‘‘looked’’ at Manolito ‘‘as if she’d

suddenly seen a freak of nature’’ (in the ‘‘Can I smoke?’’ joke), yet none of the other

episodes contains explicit visual descriptions of faces. Indeed, if there are any cues,

they are very indirect: in the park, Yihad gave ‘‘an emphatic order’’ to the other kids

(hence the image of his big mouth?); in the taxi scene, neither Manolito nor his

father ‘‘could see very well’’ (hence the pinching eyes?); as Manolito pulled out the

coins, the thief ‘‘started to have a coronary’’ (hence the face of hysterical disbelief?);

on the bus, the teacher ‘‘took the opportunity to show all the monuments’’ (hence

Manolito’s face of outrage?); Manolito’s grandpa ‘‘suspected that he wasn’t dealing

with an everyday olive when he saw its legs moving’’ (hence his face of

amazement?); the dandruff guy ‘‘put [Manolito] down on the ground, all in a huff’’

(hence his annoyed face?); and Yihad ‘‘ate up half the omelette’’ (hence Manolito’s

amazement?). Despite the absence of directly visual linguistic descriptions,

visualization happened in all these cases—it took my mind little effort to put a

(comic) face on the reactions of characters. As Iser (1978) notes, mental images do

not depend on detailed description and ‘‘even if we are given a detailed description

of a character’s appearance, we tend not to regard it as pure description, but try and

conceive what is actually to be communicated through it’’ (p. 177). Perhaps, then,

minds already in mirth tend to produce images as an elaboration of the ongoing

comedy. In this elaboration-on-demand model of comic mental imagery, enactive

minds in mirth do more than capture some images randomly or depending on

directly visual linguistic descriptions. Rather, minds would often produce images

when they are emotionally engaged, as when they have fun—and are looking for

more fun.

A third hypothesis, finally, does away with the idea of imagery as elaboration.

Following Hogan, mental images are not elaborations that add emotion to an already

emotive framing and reading, but are rather the very source of emotions—for

example, my mirth as I read Manolito Gafotas. According to Hogan (2011), modern

theories of emotion ‘‘accept perceptual experiences, concrete imaginations, and

emotional memories as initiating the activation of emotion circuits [i.e., in the

brain]’’ (p. 46). In other words, emotions are elicited by percepts, be it through

perception, imagination (quasi perception), or emotional memory, ‘‘which is also,

ultimately, perceptual’’ (Hogan 2011, p. 46). Though Hogan’s stress on (quasi)

perceptual sources of emotion is important, my introspective exercise suggests that

he overstates the case, since I also felt emotions—that is, humorous ones—when

comic imagery was nowhere to be seen. Remember, for instance, my reading of

Manolito Gafotas’s comic, but not visually comic, opening scene (‘‘Excuse me,

please, Manolito Garcıa Moreno?’’). Mental imagery, or quasi perception, seems to

368 J. Vandaele

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be a possible cause of laughter, not a necessary one. Even though such imagery

certainly offers comic elaboration and clearly is a major source of comedy in

Manolito Gafotas and other ‘‘verbally visual’’ humor, it is probably not a strictly

essential source of comedy in general.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jessica Milner Davis, Gregory M. Pell, and Cecilia Alvstad for

stimulating comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank Pilar Orero’s team at

the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona for a small-scale reader-response experiment related to this

investigation. This research received funding from the project ‘‘Voices of Translation’’ (the Research

Council of Norway and the University of Oslo; project 213246).

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