Narrative Negative Space: How What’s Not There Says as Much as What Is

Today I’m going to talk negative space, and how the concept for negative space relates to Supernatural. Specifically, I’m going to look at how the narrative is setting up for canon romantic relationship between Dean and Castiel through strategic employment of negative space. I’m going to describe what I mean by negative space, first through a discussion of its use in visual art. Though I am a linguist, I have studied visual art and art history for most of my life, in high school, college and on my own, and it is one of my major passions. Then, I’m going to discuss it from a discourse and linguistic and narrative point of view, and how this visual art concept translates to a narrative.

But first, I’m going to start with this:

This, if you don’t know, is a screenshot from Disney’s Mulan (from the opening bars of A Girl Worth Fighting For, which has a ton of shots like these). The art directors and layout people and cinematographers framed the shot this way intentionally; it is meant to evoke classic Chinese art, as seen in the work by Wu Yuan-chih below (twelfth century):

In both this piece and the Mulan screenshot, there are itty-bitty figures in the bottom center, dwarfed by the enormous ethereal landscape behind them. 

Chinese art is noted for this style, this use of negative space. In visual media, negative space is “space around and between the subject(s) of an image” (x). Ask any artist or photographer and they’ll tell you that negative space is a key component in a balanced composition.

Negative space is often thought of as empty space, like the empty space in the Wu Yuan-chih piece, or this Ingres painting:

But this is not necessarily so. In the painting by Vermeer below, the negative space is made up of a map and a tiled floor and a bunch of random junk.

Or this Renoir painting, with a whole bunch of people and buildings and chandeliers in the negative space:

But, for the purposes of this meta, I will turn to Japanese ikebana, or fancy floral arrangements. In ikebana, the space around and between the foliage is just as (if not more so) important than the flowers and twigs and foliage that make up the positive space, as seen in this arrangement (x):

The actual meat of the arrangement, the branch and flowers, is very sparse, and as the eye is guided along the twists of the branch, the negative space demands to be paid attention to. The arranger isn’t trying to stuff the space full of plants, instead, s/he is trying to create a harmonious balance of space. This negative space in Japanese art is called ma; it is also important in Japanese visual art, as evidenced by this diptych by Hasegawa Tōhaku:

Ma is defined as:

the Japanese spatial concept [that is] experienced progressively through intervals of spatial designation … It is best described as a consciousness of place, not in the sense of an enclosed three-dimensional entity, but rather the simultaneous awareness of form and non-form deriving from an intensification of vision.

Ma is not something that is created by compositional elements; it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements. Therefore ma can be defined as experiential place understood with emphasis on interval. (x)

Using the concept of ma as a way to flesh out the definition, we have two defining characteristics for negative space:

1. It is not accidental: the space around and between the subject(s) is deliberate and serves a purpose
2. The purpose is not strictly compositional: the negative space forces us to actively engage with the work, using our imaginations and filling in the blanks.

Therefore, negative space is not the product of chance, it is purposeful, and it is not seen, it is experienced.

So, how is this concept relevant to Supernatural and/or Destiel?

To not overwhelm myself (and you), I’m going to limit my discussion, focusing on a few major examples, but this concept is super crazy important for all of the Carver era, so this is not a exhaustive list.

Now, lets start on the visual end, like with our paintings, and example from Mulan, above. This example I’m using has been talked about frequently, and is fairly obvious, so we’ll use Dean on his bed in 9x14 as our major visual example (x):

As Cass so eloquently put it:

Dean is at his lowest point so far… Dean, though, is laying back with his headphones on and his eyes closed. He is essentially blinding himself to all of it.

The other side of the room is light—both in tone and in symbolism.

It is lit by a lamp that has been added (along with the night stand it rests on) since we last saw his room, and the only other items in the space are a couple of books, a cross, and a fan—the only large item on the shelf.

The shot was framed in such a way that the lack of symmetry was impossible to miss. But in case you didn’t notice the biggest gap, they literally shone a flashing light on the empty space beside Dean. (x)

The way the shot is framed and the props placed in it doesn’t (and shouldn’t, thank you Jerry Wanek) provide you with a simple, superficial answer for why half of the bed is empty. In fact, the emptiness is aggressive; you don’t have to be a meta writer, or even a keen watcher, to see that it already fits the #1 criterion of negative space: it is not an accident.

So what about the second criterion? What does it add if it is not purely for compositional balance? It sparks the imagination of the viewer and makes the viewer question why the space is empty. 

jeremycarversweaterfetish talks about “gaps” (what I’m talking about as narrative negative space) in the Carver era as a function of SPN as a postmodern text. She argues:

You’re meant to fill in that gap.

But how do you know what goes there? How do you know you have the correct answer?

The Hermeneutic circle, and your own cultural understanding of the text in relation to every other text you’ve read and film you’ve watched. (x)

We want to fill that space with something, and our expectations gleaned from cultural norms and standards of visual media are that there should be another body on that bed. And not just any old body, the body of they type of person to share a bed, a lover or a partner or a spouse.

And that’s what Cass’ meta (and anyone else who has tackled this scene) argues: Dean is getting a love interest. Cass goes into more detail about why exactly Dean’s future love interest has to be Cas, but the framing of the shot alone is both extremely informative about Dean’s current state of mind and what his future holds, as well as extremely and deliberately uninformative. The empty space on the bed, the negative space, is designed to engage the viewer and make the viewer ask questions and find his/her own answers.

But Supernatural doesn’t just do this visually*, it also does it narratively. And what I mean by that is that the show asks questions (as in, character A asks a question to character B) that create negative space, by either having character B answer the question, but just barely or the answer is not a full, satisfactory answer, or by having character B not answer the question at all.

Once again, we’ll start with an easy example from 8x17 (x):

DEAN
Well, w-what broke the connection?

CASTIEL
I don’t know. 

In this example, Dean is not just asking Cas “what broke the connection?”; the show is also asking us, the viewers, to answer the question. So, how does this fit the criteria for negative space as established above?

First of all, it is deliberate. The information we need in that scene is that Cas is no longer brainwashed and he feels compelled to protect the tablet. This question and answer is extraneous to the plot, but we have it anyway. The scene, and the rest of the season, wouldn’t have been textually any different if those lines had been cut, but they weren’t cut and they weren’t cut for a reason.

Second of all, asking a question begs an answer (and it’s this logic that holds for the following examples as well). Dean asked Cas, but that doesn’t stop our brains from filling in the answer. We see the empty space, the negative space, created by this question or any question, and our brains want to explore the possibilities and fill that space. 

A quick sidestep into linguistics: the compositional semantic structure of questions is a constant topic of debate. Questions can’t be true or false on their own merits, so they lack truth values. Questions also don’t have a single proposition, and instead actually pose an infinite number of possible propositions in an infinite number of accessible worlds. This makes their meaning super slippery as far as semanticists are concerned, but it brings us to an interesting possible analysis: questions don’t have inherent meaning and only gain meaning through their answer.

Now, back to Supernatural. If we apply this little bit of semantic knowledge to our scene from Goodbye Stranger, then it becomes clear that the question itself is meaningless; it is the answer, or in this case, the lack of a substantial** answer, the negative space, that gives this question, and this scene, meaning.

In this question from Goodbye Stranger, we are given a deliberate gap created by a question with purposefully vague answer, and we want to fill that empty space, and give that question meaning.

So how do viewers fill this gap to give this question meaning? Anecdotal evidence from a variety of tumblr posts suggests that many viewers did answer the question, and the answer wasn’t “I don’t know”; it was “you.”

Another example of negative space created by an answered question comes from from 8x22:

DEAN
Dude, if anybody else – I mean anybody – pulled that kind of crap, I would stab them in their neck on principle. Why should I give him a free pass?

SAM
Because it’s Cas. 

The answer “Because it’s Cas” is yet still another instance of negative space, even though the question is completely answered (at least, to Dean’s satisfaction, i.e. there are no follow up questions), because Cas himself in this instance is negative space.

This answer only works because the audience fills in a palpable empty space; the audience knows a certain amount of information about Castiel, and about his relationship with Dean, that makes Sam’s utterance a felicitous answer. To make this complete answer, we have to know whyDean would make an exception for Cas, and in the show, this why is just understood between Dean and Sam. But viewers are not part of this shared knowledge; instead, we have to answer whyon our own, and the answer we come up with is “because Cas is special/because Dean loves him/etc.”

Like with the example from Goodbye Stranger, this example from Clip Show doesn’t really add any plot information. What it adds instead is more negative space, more room for interpretation, and more room for the viewer to figure out the text on his/her own, to fill in the space, and to experience and engage, to act on the show rather than letting it act on you.

A third sort of question, and perhaps the most potent, is one that has no answer at all, like this one from 8x17:

SAM
I don’t know, Dean. If he’s so sketchy, then why were you praying to him?

And this one from 9x14:

CASTIEL
And I’m free to go?

BARTHOLOMEW
Of course. Though, I don’t know why you would. What’s out there for you, Castiel? (x)

After both questions are asked, the conversation shifts suddenly, leaving the questions hanging without any textual answer. These give us the best examples of narrative negative space, since they are literally empty holes in the text. The questions, as discussed above, have no meaning without their answer, and these have none. 

They fit both criteria perfectly: they are deliberately left unanswered, creating that purposeful empty space, and they force the viewer to answer the question in order to fill the space. The viewer can spin out a million different possible scenarios, per Hamblin Semantics of Questions, but there are only a few answers that fit in the story as it’s been presented thus far. There are only a handful of viable reasons why Dean would be praying to Cas despite his misgivings about Cas’ sanity, and the same is true of what Castiel has out there in the world to live for. While “Dean just wanted his brother to be taken care of” and “angel ducklings” are possible answers respectively, and how some viewers have chosen to answer those questions, Occam’s Razor suggests that there are simpler answers: Dean and Cas are love each other, in whatever capacity of your choosing, and they want to be together.

This interpretation just keeps showing up the negative spaces. As I’ve argued above, it’s there visually and narratively. It’s even there structurally. As crossroadscastiel points out here and here, Dean’s stops mentioning Cas in the back half of s9, and this noticeable change is deliberate. This is a big pointy arrow to the lack of concern, the negative space left by Cas’ absence, that gives us room to interpret Dean’s current emotional status, his distinct low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness. This allows us to move into this roomy negative space and see Dean’s loneliness (another sort of negative space, lacking a partner), but also his own feelings that he doesn’t deserve to have a partner because he’s poison, etc.

Finally, Robbie Thompson in 9x18 basically told us that interpreting SPN, getting into that negative space and answering the questions asked by the composition and the narrative, is not only a valid way to enjoy the show, but the show actually gains meaning from doing so:

METATRON
What makes a story work? Is it the plot, the characters, the text? The subtext? And who gives a story meaning? Is the writer? Or you?

Tonight, I thought I would tell you a little story and let you decide. (x)

*Though it does, a lot. See The Weight of the World is Love and look for mentions of light between Dean and Cas, because the light is the negative space, the space between the subjects.

**I argue that this answer is not substantial, because this is not a good enough answer for the viewing audience, and it’s not a good enough answer for Dean, as evidenced by his confused face and Cas’ quick change of subject.