page_title: Passionate Journey
section_title: Style and analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Passionate Journey / Style and analysis
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Getijdenboek van de Meester van Catharina van Kleef English: Hours of Catherine of Cleves
context_page_description: Passionate Journey, or My Book of Hours, is a wordless novel of 1919 by Flemish artist Frans Masereel. The story is told in 167 captionless prints, and is the longest and best-selling of the wordless novels Masereel made. It tells of the experiences of an early 20th-century everyman in a modern city.
  Masereel's medium is the woodcut, and the images are in an emotional, allegorical style inspired by Expressionism. The book followed Masereel's first wordless novel, 25 Images of a Man's Passion; both were published in Switzerland, where Masereel spent much of World War I. German publisher Kurt Wolff released an inexpensive "people's edition" of the book in Germany with an introduction by German novelist Thomas Mann, and the book went on to sell over 100,000 copies in Europe. Its success encouraged other publishers to print wordless novels, and the genre flourished in the interwar years.
  Masereel followed the book with dozens of others, beginning with The Sun later in 1919.
context_section_description: I believe that it contained the essence of what I wanted to say; I expressed my philosophy, and perhaps My Book of Hours with its 167 woodcuts contains everything I have created since, because I have developed a number of themes from it in my later work.
  — Frans Masereel, Interview with Pierre Vorms, 1967
  Masereel uses an emotional, Expressionistic style to create a narrative replete with allegory, satire, and social criticism—a visual style he continued with throughout his career.  He expresses a broad variety of emotions through understated, unexaggerated gestures.  Most characters are given simple, passive expressions, which provides emphatic contrast with characters expressing more explicit emotion—love, despair, ecstasy.  He considered Passionate Journey partly autobiographical, which he emphasized with a pair of self-portraits that open the book—in the first, Masereel sits at his desk with his woodcutting tools, and in the second appears the protagonist, dressed in identical fashion with the first.  Literature scholar Martin S. Cohen wrote that it expressed themes that were to become universal in the wordless novel genre.
  The original titles of Masereel's first two wordless novels allude to religious works: 25 Images of a Man's Passion to the Passion of Christ, and My Book of Hours to the mediaeval devotional book of hours.  These religious books made frequent use of allegory, also prominent in Masereel's works—though Masereel replaces the religious archetypes of mediaeval morality plays with those from socialist ideology.  The book derives some of its visual vocabulary—framing, sequencing, and viewpoints—from silent film.  Thomas Mann named the book his favourite film.
  Wordless novel scholar David Beronä saw the work as a catalogue of human activity, and in this regard compared it to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Allen Ginsberg's Howl.  Austrian writer Stefan Zweig remarked, "If everything were to perish, all the books, monuments, photographs and memoirs, and only the woodcuts that [Masereel] has executed in ten years were spared, our whole present-day world could be reconstructed from them."  Critic Chris Lanier attributes the protagonist's appeal to readers to Masereel's avoiding a preaching tone in the work; "rather", Lanier states, "he gives us a story as a device through which we can examine ourselves".  This openness in the images invites individual interpretation, according to Beronä.
  In contrast to the works of Masereel's imitators, the images do not form an unfolding sequence of actions but are rather like individual snapshots of events in the protagonist's life.  The book opens with a pair of literary quotations:
  Behold!  I do not give lectures, or a little charity: When I give, I give myself.
  — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855
  ... des plaisirs et des peines, des malices, facéties, expériences et folies, de la paille et du foin, des figues et du raisin, des fruits verts, des fruits doux, des roses et des gratte-culs, des choses vues, et lues, et sues, et eues, vécues!
  — Romain Rolland, Colas Breugnon, 1919
caption: The original title alludes to the mediaeval devotional book of hours.
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