Nijigahara Nihilism

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph. Translated by Matt Thorn.

“If only the last dozen years were just a dream my younger self was having, how wonderful that would be.”

* * *

When the publicist for Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph suggests that the work has “Lynchian” qualities, he probably means to evoke David Foster Wallace’s definition of the word:

“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term ‘refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.’ But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is….ultimately definable only ostensibly— i.e. we know it when we see it.”

There is some of this in Asano’s manga but it never reaches that level of absurdity and distortion which we associate with the films of David Lynch. Far closer is the waking nightmare of a film like Mullholland Drive where the character played by Naomi Watts fantasizes about success and discovers her own dead body even as she festers and decays in a dark apartment.

The clues to the dream state in Nijigahara Holograph are the butterflies which flit around the panels of the manga, an evocation of Zhuangzi’s butterfly:

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, a veritable butterfly, enjoying itself to the full of its bent, and not knowing it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly I awoke, and came to myself, the veritable Chuang Chou. Now I do not know whether it was then I dreamt I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Between me and the butterfly there must be a difference. This is an instance of transformation.”

The manga begins with a collage of past events; a god’s eye view of humanity which will be inexplicable to the reader until several chapters in. It seems for all intents and purposes to be the day dream of one of the protagonists, a grown-up Amahiko, who stares fixedly into the distance and down into the open mouthed burbling of his dying, cancerous father. Moments later, he is seen talking about his waking dreams to a complete stranger:

“These days…I have dreams. It makes me wonder if what I’m seeing now isn’t really just a dream.”

The rest of this short prologue are disconnected vignettes of characters as yet unknown, sometimes barely perceived: a soon to be familiar man eating dinner in front of his television; a couple having sex (or is it rape); a set of notebooks; and a half-seen girl about to divulge her past to a disembodied psychiatrist-interrogator (or so it seems).

A hundred pages on and a teacher (Kyoko Sakaki) is waking from a dream; lying on her futon, staring motionlessly at the ceiling of her room.

“Recently I have had dreams. Dreams of my days as a teacher. I recall the happy memories and the painful memories.”

The chapters which have preceded this moments have concerned her past students and just those memories. The page before this shows a student diving into a swimming pool as the same teacher cheers him on—a lucid moment before waking; a past recalled imperfectly. As Novalis once said:

“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”

Kyoko Sakaki is about to awake to the traumas of her past. The question is whether she will disappear into them.

“I felt I could swim on forever. But I didn’t even know how to kick my legs or breathe properly.”

This is the essence of Asano’s dream narrative: a foreshadowing of events; a retelling of times past; a sequence of events which moves, without warning, between the past and the future—the induction of a hypnopompic state in the minds of his readers where we can barely distinguish between dream and reality.

Much of this comic will only make sense on rereading. Discrete scenes within the author’s framework only gain resonance when the manga is taken as a whole—an experience not uncommon to prose works but quite atypical of the manga industry where ease of reading is prized over much else.

Consider the moment when Kohta meets up with Maki at the latter’s café workplace. They are old schoolmates and Kohta is Maki’s childhood crush. They met the day before after a space of eleven years and have had impulsive but congenial sex. Their meeting in the cafe is intercut with moments from Kohta’s murder of his grocery store employer (a former teacher). His threat of violence to a co-worker (who he has known since childhood) is intercut with his cold, unfeeling embrace of Maki. She agrees to meet with him at the Nijigahara embankment, a place only shown but unnamed up to this point—the monster’s refuge of children’s legend; the place of sacrifice to defer the end of the world; the nexus of all the vicious activities of that school and small community. The entrance to the embankment is an uncovered drainage hole, large enough to fit a child—both Kohta and his friend Kimura Arie are thrown into it earlier in the manga. The exit from this cave is the gaping underbelly of a bridge which yawns open like Grendel’s lair.

As it happens, Maki was involved in the attempted murder of Arie back in her school days, the latter’s body dumped into the same embankment. She reveals this sometime later in a drunken state to an admirer (her employer, Makoto). This short episode of no more than seven relatively silent pages is a repository of all the tension Asano has presented up to this point—the unexplained murders, the sought for vengeance, the desperate love, and sexual deviation.

The bestiality is everywhere but fragmented and barely broached in buried panels: the elicit love of a father for his pre-pubescent daughter (Arie)…

…the marks of abuse on an otherwise happy child…

…a faceless mother (stepmother as revealed later in the book) telling her son (Amahiko) to just die…

… the corporal punishment meted out by one of the teachers (the future grocery store owner)…

…and a senseless act of sororicide…

This last incident where Narumi is murdered off stage by her brother, Makoto, is both strange and painful in its elliptical denouement. Narumi might be the only character in this tale without a trace of malice and her death is an extinguishing of hope.

In fact, most of these acts of savagery are silently inflicted off panel save for an instance of rape.

This latter incident recalling—by means of an upturned umbrella—the previously described murder of Kohta’s employer.

The manga posits a world of existential and moral nihilism. Only the languid pacing and quiet narration prevents these relentless moments of brutality from overwhelming the reader. They seem almost matter of fact—a mother threatening her children with murder becomes no more than a creeping disease, like a father’s erection at the sight of the back of his daughter’s head. Not for these is the distress and despair of common humanity when confronted with “original sin”—like the media circus surrounding the murder of James Bulger for instance.

The appeal to Zhuangzi over the course of the manga suggest a deeper, more metaphysical nihilism if traced to our modern world—the exaltation in meaninglessness. The “monster” of Asano’s tale claims to have lost “something” on the fields of the Nijigahara embankment—perhaps it his conception of any sense of metaphysical values or consequences. As Nietzsche states in On the Genealogy of Morals:

“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” . . . Well now, that was spiritual freedom. With that the very belief in truth was cancelled. . . Has a European, a Christian free spirit ever wandered by mistake into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Has he come to know the Minotaur of this cavern from his own experience?” [emphasis mine]

One proffered explanation for this nihilism (within the context of the manga) is that they are the product of Arie’s consumptive dreams. She has lain in a coma since being pushed into a hole in the Nijigahara embankment by her classmates. On visiting her incidentally in the hospital some ten years after her incident, one of her classmates wonders “what she’s been dreaming about all this time.”

Prior to her rape and attempted murder (these two events being only tangentially related), Arie had been telling and recording a “fantastic story of a world apart from this world”—a nocturnal land where a beautiful girl foretells a terrible future to seven villagers. Fearful of her, the villagers “cut off her head and [offer] her to the monster. ”It so happens, there are seven heads looking down into the hole where she has been cast right at the start of the manga.

On a final trip with her family to that embankment, Sakaki explains that the Nijigahara embankment was named for a legend about “Kudan”, a “cow with a human face” which is known to predict plagues and afflictions for a few days before dying.

“According to legend, whenever a Kudan was sent down the river, twin Kudans would be found at this spot. So “The Plain of Two Children” was its proper name. Someone later changed it to “The Plain of Rainbow.”

As must be obvious, Arie is the “Kudan” of Asano’s narrative. Or at least one of them, for she has a twin. And as Lafcadio Hearn explains in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan:

“…the Kudan always tells the truth.”

It is never made explicitly clear who the original Kudan of the narrative is—perhaps she is hidden in plain sight (see below) under an innocuous name like the illusory embankment of the manga’s title.

In her review of Nijigahara Holograph, Sarah Horrocks submits that it is this suppression of truth which explains all the anguish which follows. Sakaki’s dissolution into a myriad butterflies (see first image above) at the steps of the embankment suggests an inevitable (and symmetrical) recurrence of abandonment and death. The twins, Amahiko and Arie, are “abandoned” by the death of their mother, just as Sakiko’s twin children are abandoned by her grief and torment.

[Spoilers Ahead]

Finding readerly joy in Asano’s manga is not especially difficult, but it is predicated to a certain extent on heavy reconstruction. More than most comics, Nijihgahara Holograph is a web of half-hidden, splintered relationships which need to be pieced together like a jigsaw. The tangled associations of the various characters seem like a kind of inbreeding of cruelty and conception. There is, for instance, the affable pedophile, Makoto, who befriends Arie, encourages her stories of monsters, then rapes her before being stopped by her teacher (Miss Sakaki) who is then assaulted with a cinder block for her pains. Miss Sakaki is seen from the start of the manga with an unexplained patch over her eye and she is the same person who nurses feelings of violence against her own children.

Makoto (the violent pedophile) also happens to be the owner of the café which Maki works at eleven years later, the same café which Sakaki walks into a decade after her initial attack. It is only in retrospect that we recognize a silent panel—with Sakaki shown with her gaze cast downwards—during that fateful meeting as one denoting recognition. On a first reading, the panel in question is entirely unremarkable.

It only through these short hints and interjections that we realize that Makoto is a psychopath—the “monster” of the play. It is never entirely clear if Arie’s Cassandra-like foretellings are the work of her own imagination or a translation of Makoto’s communications to her. At one point early in the manga, Makoto’s sister, Narumi, is observed in class by Amahiko (the framing character of the manga and Arie’s twin) and noted to be “always writing something in a notebook.” Do these notebooks foretell a similar fate and is Narumi the original solitary Kudan of our tale?

The fairy tale of the beautiful girl and the seven villagers is only ever revealed in full by Makoto himself. This uncertainty is brought to the fore when we find out that Makoto has burnt down his parent’s house and (possibly) killed his sister (Narumi) for having discovered his murderous diaries. This is but one instance of Asano’s careful seeding of narrative and memory; not so much an exercise in mysticism but a fastidiously planned look into the suppurating secrets of a backwater town.

Let us return for a moment to Zhuangzi’s butterfly. In an article at Philosophy Now, Raymond Tallis explains the “radical uncertainty” presented in that Daoist text:

“Wittgenstein…pointed out that

‘The argument ‘I may be dreaming’ is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well – and it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.’

Whether or not this is true, it is certainly the case that I must doubt that there is any audience for the words. Dreams are by definition solitary: they permit only the illusion of ‘we’. As Heraclitus said, “Only the waking share a common cosmos; each sleeps alone.” If there is no way out of the notion that the world is entirely my dream, there cannot be any way into it either, if only because there is an implicit ‘we’ in all language use, and even more so in conversation. I cannot truly share a sincere suspicion that I am at present dreaming…It reminds us that when we engage in philosophical inquiries fueled by radical doubt, we often overlook the very context that is necessary for the inquiry to take place, which has to be untouched by doubt. ” [emphasis mine]

There is no place (or need) for such contextual certainties in the encapsulated world of Asano’s manga which is driven entirely by fantasy. But there is everywhere considerable doubt as to the shared nature of Asano’s narrative of dreams—where do one character’s dreams end and another character’s nightmares begin? The closing passages of the manga both explicate and gently confuse the narrative coherency of everything that has preceded it.

The burst of disjointed imagery which opens the manga is as much a reflection of somnolent reverie as it is a statement of authorial intent; a blurring of reality and wish fulfillment; where past, present and future meet in a deliberate and calculated melding of form and content. The work as whole is a marvel of narrative needlework and one of the best comics to have been translated in recent years.

* * *

Further Reading

(1) Sarah Horrocks on Nijigahara Holograph (Parts 1 and 2)

“Violence is an important theme in Nijigahara, because one of the core aspects of the book is the constant repression by the community of prophecy, and the violent feeding of the monster who lives beneath that said community, in the tunnel at the Nijigahara embankment.”

“Life in Nijigahara Holograph is depicted through the management of trauma and memory. Adults become adults by what precious things they are stripped of as children, and how well they function as adults is down to just how well they can deny those memories….But in actuality, no one in Nijigahara forgets.”

(2) Matt Thorn on Inio Asano’s gender identity. No doubt someone out there has already linked Asano’s wish “that he could have a sex change” to the stories of the various twins in Nijigahara Holograph.

How Not To Make a Graphic Novel

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

Every once in a while I’ll get an email from someone who wants to know. “Whatever happened to that graphic novel you were working on? Did you ever finish?”

Discards. I worked on it for four years, completed more than three hundred pages while working full-time as a high school art teacher. And now it sits in a box in my closet, unread by all but a few friends, several of whom largely hated it.

What went wrong?

I’m still a teacher. I look at the pile of effort and time and in the right light I see something that might be useful to another cartoonist. I did after all make it that far. Hundreds of pages of finished comic art is in itself nothing to sneeze at. And there’s no doubt in my mind that those hundreds of pages, along with my high school teaching, brought me the skills that I have today, skills that employ me as a freelance illustrator, even if my cartooning itself isn’t in much demand these days.

I was twenty-six when I started, a high school teacher with an almost fevered desire to work, to make things, to bury myself in the aspects of my life I could control. For several years, making Discards provided me with the focus I needed to forget all the other things in my life that were making me miserable.

But somehow, of all the projects I’ve been involved in, this was the one I was unable to drag across the finish line. What went wrong?

But first —

What Went Right

There are reasons I got as far as I did, things I did that I would recommend to anyone pursing long-form comics. For one, I wrote a script — multiple drafts, in fact. The story started out as prose, a manuscript called The Three Thrift Kings. On second revision it lost its title along with most of the text, and became Discards.

The first draft was a loosely interconnected set of stories largely set at a thrift store in rural Florida. The protagonist Michael (I know, I know) has returned to his childhood home for unspecified reasons and takes a job as a janitor at a thrift store. It’s a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress, in a retail outlet, with drugs and lots of monologues about video games.

As a first draft, the story was a structural mess. I had written it as a receptacle for a series of autobiographical anecdotes about my time as a janitor, back-up man, and finally furniture-electrical pricer at a large thrift store in Casselberry Florida. The smaller nested anecdotes were stories I had refined over a long period of story-telling, but the central plot that linked them all together had been grafted on later in the process. (This too was a “found” element. After talking with a fellow teacher about all the strange things I had encountered working at the store, he told me about one of the strangest jobs he had ever worked — cleaning out evicted properties. His story of finding a stash of drugs, and the subsequent return of the owner of said drugs, would provide the missing through-line necessary to make a coherent story out of first draft.)

The second draft refined the physical environment of the story until it took place in essentially two locations– Michael’s house, the thrift store, and the walk between the two. It also strengthened the main events of the narrative by introducing those strands of plot earlier on. In short, it was structurally sound, something that would have been impossible to do had I tackled the pages graphically directly from the onset.

The setting for the story was visually rich as well, and I knew that my intimate knowledge of the minutia of the environments I would be describing would make for interesting comics.

After completing the second draft of the script, I made my second smart move – I drew layouts for the entire book.

Years of studying page mechanics, and the two or three hundred pages I had drawn in my life so far, meant that the layouts came easily, once I warmed to the task. After some initial slowness, I worked my way up to a speed of about 20 pages of layouts a day, working on sheets of discarded paper folded in half, mainly to discourage myself from feeling too precious about my drawing.

In fact, the faster I worked, the better things seemed to go. If I got bogged down on a page, trying to figure out the spacial mechanics of a scene or movement of the characters or placement of dialogue, I’d just crumple it up and continue on another sheet. After a few days of this my layouts were getting much stronger, even as my drawing itself got looser and looser. By the end of the month I had laid out the entire 400 page book.

Not having a final length in mind led me to expand and contract sections at my own whim, and I brought an almost perverse joy to extending certain sequences that had in the script been only a sentence or two of description. Other scenes were recast dramatically, especially dialogue-heavy scenes, which often had added physical action as my “actors” took over from my writer.

And if this were a happy article about personal fulfillment and artistic success, this might be where I would end, with the satisfied artist and his stack of folded copy paper, a readable story in his hands mere months after first imagining.

But I’m afraid that’s not what happened.

What Went Wrong

What am I looking at, and why do I care? Discards, page 25

A. Millions of Tiny Little Lines/ Working Too Large

When I started Discards, I had some experience in pen and ink, with a wide variety of tools and textures at my command. But I had virtually no experience working for reproduction. By the time I had drawn my first 50 pages, it was clear two things were already very wrong.

For one, I was working at a scale much too large to be useful for me. Specifically, I was working with an active page area of 11” x 15”, i.e. double the size of my folded letter-paper layouts. Huge originals plus a mania for tiny little lines and an initial fear of bold application of blacks equaled pages that seemed anemic and washed-out, no matter how many layers of lines I added.

And all those little lines added precious time to each page. My work sessions took place every day after ten hours of teaching. I timed them. Each page was taking between 10 and 15 hours to complete, the majority of this time spent embellishing. “Well, you’re fearless, aren’t you?” cartoonist Jim Woodring told me once, staring at a page consisting of nothing but shopping carts in a darkened room. I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.

B. Shifting Designs

Even worse than the huge amounts of largely invisible effort was the waste caused by ineffective designs or “off-model” characters.

Somewhere, some when, some genius said it first. “In comics, style is way less important than consistency.” Whomever it was, I’d like to shake their hand, and then ask them to please build a time machine and head over to Seattle circa 2009 so that they can let me know in person.

My initial designs for my characters just weren’t very well-thought out. They weren’t easily distinguished from each other, not by body type, not by facial structure. And as a consequence of that initial failure, I just kept on tweaking even as I produced “finished” pages.

The result of this was a stylistic mishmash, where characters were sometimes only identifiable by the type of screen-tone applied to their hair. Had I applied some basic rules of design to differentiate them from each other at the start, it would have saved me a lot of grief.

This “design drift” was made even worse by the rudimentary nature of my cartooning. As an observational draftsman, I had some skills to draw upon at the start of the project, but as a cartoonist producing stylized forms from my imagination, I had a lot of work to do. And the better I got at these tasks, the more inadequate the previous pages seemed to my eye.

The crudity of the drawing was made worse by the surface polish of the inking and rendering.

Sylistic drift of this kind would have to be very dramatic to be visible over the time scale of, say, a ten page or even 25 page story. But a graphic novel is one contained unit. You can hold it in your hand, flip through it, stick your fingers between the pages. The first panel exists with the last in perfect simultaneity, no matter how much time passed in the process of creation.

This is not unlike the difficulty of assessing the work of, say, Dave Sim and Gerhard and their 26-year project Cerebus. The early issues of Cerebus, crude as they could be visually, still stood unified stylistically as they appeared, issue by issue. But as collections, the early work reads very differently. Much of this difference is undoubtedly due to this stylistic drift. What was an asset in the serial format (improvement of the artist over a prolonged period of time) becomes a liability when the format is changed.

Had I been publishing or otherwise making these portions of Discards publicly available as I worked, it’s possible that I would have been able to make peace with the early portions of the book. But as it was, unseen by anyone save my fellow Seattle cartoonists, the early pages shortly seemed unbearably crude to my eyes. And the more I developed, the wider the “awkward” phase of the book seemed to be.

“Be like a shark,” cartoonist Jon Morris tried to warn me. “A drawing shark. Don’t stop swimming. Just keep eating stuff.” And had I been working on a series of short stories, something where each unit could be its own contained unit, then I might have persuaded myself he was right. But this was a novel, dammit. Shouldn’t the first page look like the last?

C. Didn’t You Know What A Jerk You Used to Be?

The real end to all of this wasn’t my frustration with my drawing, or the labor of the large-format pages. I actually managed to correct course on both of these problems mid-way through the book, switching to a much smaller scale, working with more dramatic blacks and incorporating bold brush into some pages, and finally settling in to drawing the characters with an acceptable amount of consistency.

What finally sunk it was this – so much time had passed since the initial idea, I hated the whole story.

It was two cartoonist friends of mine, David Lasky and Helen America, that gave me the bad news that I was making a book about an asshole. He’s completely unlikable, they each told me over tea and cake. Why should we care about him at all?

This was a hard blow. I was, after all, in the process of making a story about someone who possessed many of my memories and experiences, if not always my actions or personality. How could they say something so harsh about him? About me?

And then, with their reactions in mind, I sat down and read what I had made.

I hated him.

Really, I hated me.

Here was a story about someone who is essentially a tourist in the lives of the people around him, who observes them from the comfortable distance of condescension. Several of the choices I made as a cartoonist reinforced these distances – the facial caricature, the dialect. Here, truly, was a book about a brash young man who is in fact an asshole. Who happened to have been based, at least partially, on myself.

I tried a few fixes, specifically, adding a sequence in the very beginning that gives the character some self-awareness of these deficiencies, letting the audience into his thought process a bit while introducing hints as to the events had shaped him into the person he was.

But it was too little too late. The project was definitively killed a month or two later, when I had my first taste of being paid to make things I was interested in. My labor was done, although Discards never would be.

What’s The Point Here, Anyway?

When I think about my brief time making comics for public consumption, I’m struck by the oddity of it all, that my most widely-read comic written and drawn in a single twenty-four hour period, was not labored over in any way at all. How different would my cartooning have been if I had used all the time I spent on Discards making other short, spontaneous comics instead? How many thousands of pages might I have now had I focused on content rather than the pursuit of some awkward perfection?

Of course, who knows what those comics that never were might have been like, and what kind of things they might have said about who I was at that time. Although the unfinished things in our lives can be painful, in some ways it’s the finished ones that are the worst, in that our failures are so clearly articulated by our own labors.

For me, finally, I’m happy for Discards to finally be what it is, a journeyman work in a box in a closet. A personal example of what can happen when you want too much and know too little. And, maybe, an example of how not to make a graphic novel.

Sean Michael Robinson is a writer, illustrator, and musician. You can contact him at LivingtheLine.com, or at seanmichaelrobinson at gmail dot com.

Walt Kelly and Me

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Brian Cremins

“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (English translation Harry Zohn; Illuminations p. 255)

Fig. 1: Clipping courtesy of the Bridgeport History Center at the Bridgeport, Connecticut Public Library

I wonder sometimes if I’m being followed. I can’t seem to escape from Walt Kelly. R. Fiore’s recent TCJ review of the new Hermes Press collection Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics Volume 1, compels me once again to consider the cartoonist, who died in 1973 and lived his formative years in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Park City is about thirty miles south of Oakville, my hometown, and Oakville is just outside of Waterbury, where the Eastern Color Printing Company began producing comic books in the 1930s. Of course, I’d heard of Kelly long before I’d read any of his work. He’s on a short list of Connecticut luminaries, along with Nathan Hale, Rosalind Russell, Paul Robeson, and Thurston Moore, but I didn’t read Kelly’s celebrated strip until I was in my mid-thirties. Several years ago, one of my students gave me copies of two of her late father’s beloved Pogo collections. I know you enjoy comics, she said, and you teach them, too, so I think you might like these: Pogo, the first Simon and Schuster collection from 1951, and The Pogo Papers, from 1953. Covers creased, paper tan and brittle, bindings cracked. Her dad, I know, loved these books, returned to them, left them behind for his daughter, for me. I thanked her for this kind gift, but even then, in the summer of 2007, I neglected them. A year later I was asked to contribute an essay to a collection on Southern comics and I remembered what my student had said: You might need these. I think that’s what she said. I’d like to think so, anyway.

I begin with what is probably more than you need to know about me and Walt Kelly because, like Fiore, I, too admire the artist, and, in the years since my student handed me her father’s Pogo books, I’ve written about his work twice: first, in an essay on Bumbazine for Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted’s collection Comics and the U.S. South (UP of Mississippi, 2012) and again last year for a paper presented at the Festival of Cartoon Art at the Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. In the first essay, which Tom Andrae cites in his introduction to the new Dell Comics collection, I discuss the two scenes Fiore addresses in his review— the watermelon panel from “Albert Takes the Cake” (Animal Comics #1, dated Dec. 1942-Jan. 1943) and the railroad sequence from “Albert the Alligator” (Animal Comics #5, dated Oct.-Nov. 1943). You can read that 2012 essay, “Bumbazine, Blackness, and the Myth of the Redemptive South in Walt Kelly’s Pogo” here or from your local library; the Google Books version does not include the illustrations.

Fiore takes issue with Andrae’s analysis of the black characters who appear in “Albert the Alligator.” While he begins with the suggestion that “Andrae is on firmer ground in denouncing the characterizations in the story from Animal Comics #5,” Fiore then asks that we consider other readings of the narrative:

Once again, however, [Andrae] is sloppy in characterizing [the characters] as “derisive minstrelsy stereotypes.” The conventions of the minstrel show were as formalized as the Harlequinade, and the characters in the story at hand don’t fit them. Further, I believe a more sophisticated and context-conscious reading would come to a different conclusion.

As I read these remarks, I began to wonder, what would a “context-conscious reading” of this sequence look like? And is Fiore correct? Would it reach a different conclusion than the one in Andrae’s introduction?

I attempted just that sort of contextual reading in my Bumbazine essay, in which I trace the impact not only of minstrelsy but also of the rhetoric of the South as redeemer, a concept Kelly inherited from the Southern Agrarians. But any reading that hopes to place Kelly in historical context must take into account the tensions and fractures that exist in his body of work. Kelly is a significant cartoonist not because he was more progressive than other artists working in the 1940s but because he records for us the contradictions in his own thinking and practice.

Fig. 2: Pogo takes on one of the Kluck Klams in a story from The Pogo Poop Book, 1966

Kelly, the child of working-class parents, a left-leaning, often progressive autodidact who, later in his career, would challenge Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, demands our attention because he forces us to ask another question: given his reputation as a cartoonist beloved by students and liberal intellectuals of the 1950s and early 1960s, how could he also have produced works such as “Albert the Alligator,” stories that clearly owe a debt to the conventions of the minstrel stage, and that traffic in derogatory stereotypes? To answer this question, I believe we need to understand Kelly’s nostalgia for his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut. One of the flaws in some of Kelly’s early work was his inability or unwillingness to interrogate the images and ideas he’d inherited from childhood artifacts such as, for example, Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. As Andrae reminds us in the introduction to the Dell Comics collection, Kelly’s father enjoyed readings those stories to his son.

Fig. 3: Image of Bridgeport from Andrew Pehanick, Bridgeport 1900-1960, p. 124

What effect does nostalgia have on us, as writers, as artists, as critics—as fans? When I speak about Kelly, I find it difficult to separate my nostalgia for home from Kelly’s fondness for the Bridgeport of the late teens and 1920s. When I read Kelly now, I am reminded of my childhood in Connecticut, not because Kelly’s comics played any role in it, but because the setting he describes in his essays, for example—the industrial landscape of the Northeast—is also the world of my imagination. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, however, the brass and munitions manufacturers that had attracted so many immigrants from Europe and migrants from the South were fading. The only traces that remained were signs with names like Anaconda American Brass on redbrick walls of abandoned factory buildings. And the stories, of course, of the men and women who, like Kelly’s father, like my grandparents and great grandparents, worked in those mills.

Fig. 4: My grandmother, Patricia Budris Stango, second from left, at work in 1941 at the United States Rubber Company, later called Uniroyal, in Naugatuck, Connecticut

As I argue in my essay on Bumbazine, Kelly did not write about the U.S. South. Rather, he told stories in a setting that, for all its southern trappings, looked and felt more like New England. The city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was, in the early twentieth century, as Kelly describes it, “as new as a freshly minted dollar, but not quite as shiny. The East Bridgeport Development Company had rooted out trees and damned up streams, drained marshes, and otherwise destroyed the quiet life of buttercups and goldfinches in order to make a section where people like the Kellys could live.” In this essay from 1962, Kelly might be describing Pogo’s Okefenokee Swamp: “Surrounding us was a fairly rural and wooded piece of Connecticut filled with snakes, rabbits, frogs, rats, turtles, bugs, berries, ghosts, and legends” (Kelly, Five Boyhoods, 89).

Fig. 5: Clipping from the Bridgeport Post, January 14, 1951. Courtesy of the Bridgeport History Center.

Kelly scholars from Walter Ong to Betsy Curtis to R.C. Harvey to Kerry Soper and Tom Andrae have since the 1950s been looking closely at some of these legends. In his essay “The Comic Strip Pogo and the Issue of Race”—along with Soper’s We Go Pogo (UP of Mississippi, 2012), one of the best academic analyses we have of Kelly’s strip—scholar Eric Jarvis points out that Kelly often referred to “his elementary school principal in Bridgeport as a rather nostalgic model of how society should approach these issues with ‘gentility’” (Jarvis 85). Jarvis then includes passages from Kelly’s introduction to the 1959 collection Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo in which the artist again remembers the Bridgeport of his childhood and that principal, Miss Blackham: “Somehow, by another sainted piece of wizardry, she sent us off to high school feeling neither superior nor inferior. We saw our first Negro children in class there, and believe it or not, none of us was impressed one way or another, which is as it should be. Jimmy Thomas became a good friend and the young lady was pretty enough to remember even today” (Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years, 6).

As Kelly biographer Steve Thompson reminded us at the OSU conference, however, in other interviews Kelly describes the racism and ethnic tensions in the Bridgeport of the 1920s. So, like Jarvis, I am fascinated by the role nostalgia plays in Kelly’s art and in his essays because, after all, as Svetlana Boym reminds us, nostalgia is a utopian impulse, a desire not so much to recover the past as it was lived but to recall the life we wish we’d lived, in a world that never was. But, if it had existed, what would that world have looked like? “Nostlagia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing),” Boym writes, “is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sense of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (Boym XIII).

When Brannon Costello asked if I’d contribute an essay to Comics and the U.S. South, I hesitated. My first thought was to write an article on Howard Cruse and Stuck Rubber Baby. Already taken, Brannon told me. Then I asked, What about Pogo? You can’t publish a book on comics and the South without Pogo. A friend later remarked, Why would you write about the South? You lived there for less than a year, and the whole time all you talked about was New England. That’s not exactly what she said. What she said was something closer to this: You hated it there. But, more recently, when I told my friend that I’ve now written two essays about Kelly and the South, she smiled and said, Of course. The more we resist something, the more we are drawn to it. The more I resisted Kelly’s comics, the more I found myself drawn to them and to the South and to the myths of Kelly’s youth—my youth—that I had ignored

So, in reading R. Fiore’s review of the new Pogo collection, I again find myself face to face with Walt Kelly. And I keep returning to Walt Kelly’s early comics not because they transcend discourses of race; rather, I return to them because they include these stock figures and because I believe these early stories, like my student’s gift, offer an opportunity to think and to reflect on how these discourses—how these racist stereotypes—have shaped my life, my thinking, my conduct in the world. I am writing about Kelly because, to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, he and I were “form’d from this soil, this air,” and I turn to him because he invites me to dig through that soil, to breath the air again, to remember.

Fig. 6: The final Pogo collection Kelly published in his lifetime (1972)

It is perhaps too easy to say that these early comics are a record of their time. They are, of course; they demand that we investigate and reconstruct the discourses of the era that produced them. But to deny the hurtful and derogatory nature of the images in Kelly’s early work, I believe, is also to deny his power as an artist. The images in these early issues of Animal Comics are ugly, but there is something in them that will not be ignored. In his mature work—read, for example, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, or The Pogo Poop Book, or Kelly’s final collection, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us—Kelly breaks with these conventions. And the image he leaves behind is this one: P.T. Bridgeport, the circus bear, the character who was, in many ways, the real soul of Pogo, now old, tired, but more real and true as he stares at his beloved swamp and sees not a pristine wilderness but a wasteland of junk. But even here we find a possibility of hope and renewal:

Fig. 7 and Fig. 8: From the last two pages of the title story of Kelly’s We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us (1972) (pages 41-42)

I started this post with a quotation from Walter Benjamin (translated into English by Harry Zohn) not for you but for me, as a way to remind myself of the value of interrogating images like the one of Pogo and Bumbazine sharing the slice of watermelon. If we fail to recognize images from the past as part of our “own concerns,” Benjamin argues, we run the risk of losing them, and their meaning, entirely. But here again I have left something out. Benjamin adds this final parenthetical statement to his fifth thesis: “(The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)”

So, a paradox: we must look carefully, search for these “flashes,” but we also risk negating them and their meaning when we speak or write about them. But to remain in watchful silence offers no real alternative. We must speak of these things, although, as we do so, we are not speaking about the past, not really. We are instead addressing the pain of what it is to live here, now, with each other and with these discourses that continue to blind and disorient us.

Fig. 9: Two gifts.

References

Andrae, Thomas. “Pogo and the American South” in Walt Kelly, Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics Volume 1. Neshannock: Hermes Press, 2014. Print.

Andrae, Thomas and Carsten Laqua. Walt Kelly: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo. Neshannock: Hermes Press, 2012. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 1968. Print.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Print.

Curtis, Betsy. “Nibble, a Walt Kelly Mouse” in The Golden Age of Comics. No. 1 (December 1982). 30-70. Print.

Fiore, R. “Sometimes a Watermelon Is Just a Watermelon.” The Comics Journal. April 3, 2014. Web Link.

Jarvis, Eric. “The Comic Strip Pogo and the Issue of Race.” Studies in American Culture. XXI:2 (1998): 85-94. Print.

Kelly, Walt. The Pogo Poop Book. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Print.

Kelly, Walt. Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. Print.

—. “1920’s.” Five Boyhoods. Ed. Martin Levin. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962. 79-116. Print.

Pehanick, Andrew. Bridgeport 1900-1960. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. Print.

Soper, Kerry D. We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. Print.

Thanks to Mary Witkowski and Robert Jefferies at the Bridgeport History Center for their assistance in locating materials included here from the Center’s Walt Kelly clipping file. Also, I talk a little more about the Walt Kelly panel a November’s OSU conference here.

Wandering Hands

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Ariel Schrag

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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On Service in The Grand Budapest Hotel

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Forgive me for thinking that all of Wes Anderson’s movies are about aristocrats. His characters seem rather taken care of, living in manicured homes, and setting forth on boyish adventures that each new film believes in a little bit more than the last. Yet his stories don’t really talk about class, or the tension between classes. It’s a diagetic abandon I’ve loved, perhaps indulgently. No one scurries about trying to hang the mirror just right, before the lord of the house enters. His heroes are inventive and not a little cultured, implying that they may have decorated the house themselves- or maybe that they are really just a extensions of the interior design.

Anderson’s most recent film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is the first that permits the alternative, and chances a glimpse of a world outside the parlor rooms. More remarkably, it centers on the exploits of two characters responsible for the upkeep of a luxury hotel in Eastern Europe, threatened by a sort of World War II. Which means that the film is partly about service, and the workers who construct the clean, rosy fetishes that have become synonymous with Wes Anderson, but have remained backgrounded or backstage in his previous films.

The Grand Budapest is an explicitly contemporary fantasy, commenting more about our nostalgizing of pre-War (and wartime) Europe than those periods themselves. It stars an impetuous hotel concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and “his lobby boy,” Zero, (Tony Revolori) who resist the tides of modernization through the enforcement of an almost chivalric code of service and taste, and fundamentally, nostalgia too. Their reluctant admission– that the Anderson dream is a façade, is played for nostalgia but comes off as restive, a sensation only compounded by the film’s enervating slew of deaths and dismemberments. Still, M. Gustave and Zero nobly go down with their ship, and Anderson’s vision of human decency in tow. Yet while Grand Budapest romanticizes service, the film is subliminally contemptuous of the reality of service– and service workers– in America today. Sure, the film is set in a make-believe country, bordering other make-believe countries, threatened by make-believe Nazis. On paper, it has no responsibility to representing contemporary maids, bakers, valets and servers. But then where does M. Gustav’s bilious, racist slandering of immigrant workers come from? Why is it excused? Why does it serve as an opportunity for him and Zero, a supposed immigrant, to connect? And why does the silhouette of Mexico float around the movie screen, imprinted as a birthmark on the heroine’s face?

Many will find connecting these two things far fetched, and I do not mean to reduce Grand Budapest to a reading about labor relations. Neither is this an attack on Wes Anderson: this is coming from the girl who spent the last term of high school dressing up as Margo Tenenbaum (at least, as much as I could manage, only having one off-brand polo dress.) Grand Budapest progressively casts a non-white protagonist, and lightly subverts the conventions of white-hero and colored-sidekick in a humorous way. Zero comes up with the majority of the plans. He drives the sled and motorcycle, while M. Gustave babbles on behind him. It’s a little like Wooster and Jeeves if they were both butlers. Or perhaps more awkwardly, Crusoe and Friday. Grand Budapest hotel is a grown-up boy’s adventure story after all, and both Friday and Zero are named for the circumstances of their arrival in ‘society,’ whether rescued on a Friday or coming with zero experiences, money and connections. Both Friday and Zero also escape death in their native communities, cannibalism and a firing squad respectively. It’s worth noting that the terms of their escape are both sensational, rather stereotyped threats from their communities. Friday is an indigenous American, so of course he risks being eaten by other Indians. Zero is Middle Eastern, so according to adventure story logic, its no shocker that his entire family was killed in a war.

Still, this information is revealed as a twist, rather than initial background. For the first half the movie, Zero is addressed as “a bloody immigrant.” The exchange that reveals Zero’s true history is greatly disappointing, and beneath a director whose humanity locked step with dead-pan humor and whimsy throughout his entire career. After Zero assists M. Gustave break out of prison, they reunite, but Zero has forgotten to bring M. Gustave’s signature eau de toilette. As it appears in the script:

M GUSTAVE

(escalating)

“Precisely. I suppose this is to be expected back in Aq Salim al-Jabat where one’s prized possessions are a stack of filthy carpets and a starving goat, and one sleeps behind a tent-flap and survives on wild dates and scarabs – but it’s not how I trained you. What on God’s earth possessed you to leave the homeland where you very obviously belong and travel unspeakable distances to become a penniless immigrant in a refined, highly cultivated society that, quite frankly, could’ve gotten along very well without you?”

ZERO

(shrugs)

The war.

M GUSTAVE

(pause)

Say again?

Zero speaks softly and struggles deliberately to hold back his emotions as he says, staring at the ground:

ZERO

Well, you see, my father was murdered, and the rest of my family were executed by firing squad. Our village was burned to the ground. Those who managed to survive were forced to flee. I left—because of the war.

M GUSTAVE

(back peddling)

Ah, I see. So you’re actually really more of a refugee, in that sense.

ZERO

(reserved)

Truly.

M GUSTAVE

(ashamed)

Well, I suppose I’d better take back everything I just said. What a bloody idiot I am. Pathetic fool. Goddamn selfish bastard. This is disgraceful – and it’s beneath the standards of the Grand Budapest.

While M Gustave tearfully apologizes for wrongly categorizing Zero, his vitriol against immigrant workers is left unaddressed. It is an ugly statement, yet decked out in the same fanciful loquaciousness as about every other piece of dialogue. Neither does Zero rebut it. The script elsewhere makes plain that M Gustave and Zero share the same values and allegiance to the Grand Budapest, and that their status as service workers is synonymous with their understanding of basic human decency. After this exchange, Zero declares them brothers, which does little to slow the swirling currents of family, class and citizenship going on in this conversation. M Gustave, the rogueish, valiant dandy and Zero’s hero, despises Middle Eastern people for their poverty, indulging in a slew of anciently racist imagery. He wrongly believes that a society of decadence can exist without foreign laborers. As long as Zero conforms to the current-day cliche, that the Middle East is a viper’s nest of ethnic violence, he is excused, because it is M. Gustave and Europe’s responsibility to watch over and deliver him. Anderson explicitly and unreflectively reveals a post-9/11 id, and perhaps demonstrates that his imperialistic leanings go a little deeper than the Scalamandre brand wallpaper.

One could reply that Grand Budapest is about as political as little boys playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’—then again, that’s exactly the point. The mission to keep up The Grand Budapest Hotel is cast as quixotic. The backdrops, speeding trains and establishing shots are deliciously faked. The actors speak in stilted, deadpan stage-talk, in their native, incongruous accents. Zero is played by an actor of Guatemalan descent, and grows up into F. Murray Abraham. Little effort was made to match the two, and while Abraham is actually of Syrian/Italian descent, it sort of looks like Zero transforms into a Jewish grandfather by 1965.

Even the film is nested in time—the story is framed as a contemporary girl reading a book written in the eighties by an author who interviewed Zero in the sixties about events that happened in the thirties. The film is an American fantasy of Europe, and America’s own fixation of Europe ‘having been lost forever’ in World War II. So, treading back to M. Gustave’s speech above, it’s not unfair to read contemporary immigrant workers into the meaning of the story. A contemporary film, speaking through the limitations of an anachronistic character, ventures to say something quite disgusting and untrue about immigrants. Whether this outburst is being used to ‘deepen’ or ‘complicate’ M. Gustave, or actually expresses a frustration with real immigrants, the film doesn’t do much to criticize M. Gustave’s opinions. He seems tasteful if snobbish, broad-minded if eccentric, in about every other circumstance. It’s as if the film casts his perfume-dependence as a greater weakness than his prejudice against other human beings, including Zero.

This only becomes more problematic, as plenty of critics have noticed that M. Gustave is a transparent stand-in for Wes Anderson himself, taking “extra special care of every little-bit” of his story worlds. I am not accusing Wes Anderson of racism, only this strange and forgivable slip. The issue is that the slip opens up a new line of inquiry. Why are almost all the hotel staff male and white? Why are there so few maids to be seen? Why is the one maid untrustworthy, (played by my favorite, Lea Seydoux?) Was light chauvinism part of the nostalgia? The humor? Grand Budapest is a peculiar fantasy of the authority of service. M. Gustave knows everyone and everything about the hotel. He’s a connoisseur of wine, food, perfume, art, partly for his own amusement, mostly because he can better assist his guests. Once the caper begins, M Gustave can pull favors from about anyone, in places high and low, because of the impression he left as an impeccable helper. He befriended a lonely little boy that grows up into an influential police chief. In prison, he wheels around a gruel cart with a wink and a smile, he wins access into an escape plan. He and Zero are rescued by a league of extraordinary concierges (all white men, except for ‘Dino,’ an Indian man in an orange turban.) His Bernie-esque companionship to an aged women (one of many he carries on with,) gains him a huge fortune, a masterpiece, and the hotel itself. When he is killed by a ‘Nazi’ firing squad off camera, Zero inherits the hotel in his stead. M. Gustave willed all of his possesions to Zero in exchange for his steadfast service to him.

Service is a tangled conundrum. The people who come to know our things best are often those who do not own them. The people at Tri-Valley Cobbler understand my shoes better than I do, and when I worked in a wine store, we knew more about the expensive bottles than most people who bought them. A maid perceives the corners of a house that its inhabitants are blind to, and a cook fathoms the interlocking steps and ingredients of a recipe. A complex economic chain separates authority from possession and enjoyment. M. Gustave instructs Zero “A lobby boy is completely invisible, yet always in sight.” Hospitality is sometimes a performance of equal parts competence, flair and subordination, but many times it is simply inconspicuous. Luxury hotels have greater disposal to hide its staff—maids and waiters ride separate elevators, and their uniforms look more like costumes. They are disguised so as not to suggest their independence of the hotel, and its setting.

Grand Budapest solves the issue of inheritance—both M. Gustave and Zero inherit the hotel, uniting authority, possession and recognition in two fell swoops, the rightful kings restored. Much later, Communism threatens to nationalize the hotel, and Zero trades his fortune for it. Then the hotel goes bust and he presumably dies. So rather than grant the worker a life separate from the institution, M. Gustave and Zero meld themselves into it. For M. Gustave, he merges out of love of a lost era. For Zero, he holds on out of love for his deceased wife Agatha (Saoirse Ronan).

Which returns us to the giant Mexican birthmark. The birth-mark is specifically a ‘port-wine stain,’ a large, irregular mark on the face whose name Wes Anderson would love. Agatha is a kind, quiet and hardworking “pastry-girl.” She exists as sophisticated eye candy, biking with a heavy load of pastry boxes in slow motion, smiling wisely at her fiancé and M. Gustave’s banter. She also speaks with a cute Irish brogue, but she’s barely given anything to say. Agatha falls short of about every other female character in Wes Anderson’s films, but shines compared to the other women here: a trio of insipid fat villainesses, a beleaguered peasant, the treacherous lady’s maid and the numerous elderly ladies M. Gustave companions as part of his impeccable service. Zero always narrates over her scenes. Unlike Margo or Mrs. Fox, she can’t see through the boyish adventuring. She just gazes adoringly at Zero, at M. Gustave, at the camera, while the men joke-fight about flirting with her. (It’s like Wes Anderson forgot how to see through himself.) The most characteristic thing about Agatha is her Mexican shaped birthmark.

The birthmark makes sense on a comic, absurd level. Mexico is an easily identifiable and perfectly random country to appear on her face. Its gentle curve is aesthetic as well, drawing attention to her rosy cheeks and lips. Other countries would have looked like a random blotch—but why a country in the first place? Especially since all the other countries are imaginary. It resonates strongly inside a film about war and lost statehood, whether Lutz, Zebrowka, or the Grand Budapest itself, even when the nations are imaginary, and the fascist forces oh so vague. And why a birthmark? My guess is that birthmarks are simply nostalgic, being pre-laser removal and all, but they do dredge up associations. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, the hero Alymer kills his wife in an attempt to remove her birthmark, convinced it is infernally possessed, and in cahoots with her hidden, feminine darkness. According to folklore, birthmarks are caused by the unsatisfied wishes of a pregnant mother, or past-life traumas. They are the inherited psychic turmoil of generations past, suppressed before and now spilling forth like a stain, or a brand. In this case, in the shape of Mexico —in a film by an obscurely Texan director.

When you glance onscreen and see Zero, do you see a Central American or a Middle Eastern man? Hero or sidekick? Immigrant or refuge, with all the modern connotations of those terms? The answer always seems to be an intermixture. In a film about service, Anderson obscures service’s troubling anonymity and its powerlessness with, well, le air de panache. He repaints it as a thing that young white boys do, a sort of elaborate game and secret society, and then ignores and kicks dirt on the people who work service jobs because they need to. Not all fantasies require this. Fairy tales do rather well with balancing vulnerable protagonists with valiant quests. But fairy tales are about girls, and this is a boy’s adventure story, where our hero must swagger from the start, and his challenge is more mischievous than difficult. Anderson lets us see the man behind the curtain, M. Gustave, master of the dream world. Do not worry—its not like there’s some underclass or anything, pasting up the wallpaper, building the submarine, and making all of those perfect animal costumes. M. Gustave and his crew of youths handle it themselves.

And this is the fantasy behind the class and luxury of Wes Anderson’s world, which refuses to connect with stories about class and luxury in our own. It’s usually not a problem. A movie shouldn’t be anything it isn’t. The difference is that here, the ghost of what Anderson doesn’t mention insists on itself, and starts beating like a heart under the floorboards, a part of his creation. Anderson ignores it, muffles it, then shrieks at it, and finally, it materializes upon the face of the film.

The Athenaeum of David B.

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

A Review of Incidents in the Night Volume 1 by David B.
Comic translated by Brian and Sarah Evenson

“Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”

David B.’s Incidents in the Night begins with a record of a dream he had on April 11th, 1993.

In that dream, B. finds himself scouring a book shop where he finds the second, third and then 112th volume of Émile Travers’ Incidents in the Night. When B. awakes, he sets off in search of the physical manifestations of those spectral books, soon finding himself in the capacious literary establishment of a certain Mr. Lhôm. B. is in search of the barely glimpsed record of his nocturnal adventures, a magazine transcribing not only his personal unconscious but the collective unconscious—a MacGuffin; the key to his reveries; his very own “catalog of catalogs.”

In his afterword to the comic, Brian Evenson, evokes the labyrinthine depths of Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel when he considers the existence (or lack thereof) of the many books B. has drawn and enumerated. Lhôm’s library would seem to be yet another repository of all possible books, but it also remains distinct from its illustrious predecessor.

Where Borges’ Library of Babel “is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable,” Lhôm’s cache of illusory knowledge doesn’t have a particularly edifying shape or any semblance of symmetry. It is a place dank and dark with the decaying leaves of thousands of books, enlivened periodically by phantoms. The cavernous space B. traverses is filled with mountains of miscellanea to be conquered. Any discoveries are pleasantly shared among fellow explorers met incidentally among the piles of musty tomes.

At times, the owner-librarian dons the costume of a mythical beast and sets his “wild” dogs on his patrons—the better to excite them. This is a guileless depiction of the romance of reading; each adventurer bound to an elevated conception of Romanticism as epitomized by Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog; each hiding a reality much more mundane and disappointing.

B.’s library is no longer “the handiwork of a god” (Borges) but the invention and province of humans. The comic itself is buttressed by tangents sustained by the slightest suggestion.

Right at the start, there is the hint of common interest between B. and the keeper of this literary mountain range—the latter’s favorite work is Rene Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes, a book detailing the histories of the Huns, Turks, and Mongols. With a guide at his side, B. begins a slow trek through the codices of Arabia and hence to South Asia; a purely literary tourist with all the unreliable, second hand knowledge this entails. Among the books unearthed from the “geologic strata” of this region is one bearing a Swastika (sometimes taken as a representation of eternity), the limbs of this symbol prefiguring the four forms the author finds himself split into later in the comic—human, shadow, paper, and skeletal.

These forms are conjoined to a Dharmacakra, an eight-spoked dharmic wheel representing the eightfold path to enlightenment. What the four forms represent is anyone’s guess but they easily play into a number of fourfold concepts in Buddhism: the 4 noble truths; the 4 right exertions; the 4 stages of enlightenment; the division of life into human, heavenly, animal, and demonic forms.

Thus, in the course of a few pages and with the barest of intimations, we have migrated from France to the steppes of Asia and hence to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas; there encountering a legendary creature in its foothills before assimilating an ancient religion of the land. All this without leaving the confines of the author’s apartment, the second hand book shop and France. B. is confined in time and space even as he negotiates the threads of history and geography.

This rendering of the superfluous nature of travel is also found and parodied in the person of a misguided poet by the name of Carlos Argentino Daneri in Borges’ story, “The Aleph.” In that story, the narrator (perhaps Borges) meets the strangely deluded Daneri who haplessly recites his vision of “modern man”, “surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs….motion picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins…”; all this rendering the act of traveling “superogatory.” In the same way, the protagonist of B.’s comic, while periodically enunciating his concerns with death, seems perturbed only in so far as physical annihilation would put a damper on his ability to read more books.

The rabbi from whom B. seeks advice is also confined to his room, negotiating every evening with the Angel of Death; as is the sociopathic instigator of B.’s adventures, the editor of Incidents in the Night (Émile Travers) who escapes death by a Kabbalistic “fusion with the letter” N.

That letter is of course a reference to the Aleph, the first letter in the Kabbalistic alphabet. This, when rotated, takes on the form of that aforementioned symbol of eternity, the Swastika….

…a theme which B. returns to throughout this first volume of Incidents of the Night.

From his drawing board and bed, B. surveys the entirety of time and space—from the Babylonian flood myths to the futile dreams of a Bonapartist (Travers). A similar theme might be found in Borges’ Aleph—

“…the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle coexist.”

In explanation of this, Borges opens his story, with a quote from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, (an excerpt from the philosopher’s exposure of false doctrine):

“For the meaning of eternity, they will not have it to be an endless succession of time; for then they should not be able to render a reason how God’s will and pre-ordaining of things to come should not be before His prescience of the same, as the efficient cause before the effect, or agent before the action; nor of many other their bold opinions concerning the incomprehensible nature of God. But they will teach us that eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc-stans [the eternal Now], as the Schools call it; which neither they nor any else understand, no more than they would a hic-stans for an infinite greatness of place.”

For B., Émile Travers’ multi-volume Incidents in the Night (a symbol for B.’s dream life) is the Aleph. This might be taken for a simple metaphor but Brian Evenson (in his afterword) ladles on an existential (almost mystical) compact between readers and their books:

“David B. understands that subconsciously we search books for magics that will help us avoid being confronted by our own mortality, and he has made this the conscious subject of Incidents in the Night…We will not find these magics—rationally we know this. But we might still find the promise of them, even as we see within them the reflection of our own future corpse.”

Yet the sideways connection with Borges’ Aleph also suggests something altogether more mundane—a study of influence. If “The Aleph” is in part a tribute to (or parody of) the works of Dante then we might see in David B.’s journey an endless search for influence and precursors. As Borges writes in “Kafka and his Precursors“:

“In the critic’s vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

It is a theme which B. applies to the oldest recorded “genocide”—the universal flood destroying all on earth save for the family and animals of Outanapishtim—and also the human wrought extinction of “nearly thirty-five species of mammals belonging to the megafauna” from Paleothic times. In so doing, B. uses a term coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to modify our perception of historical events.

In “The Aleph”, Borges echoes Dante in his acknowledgement of the limitations of words and their (in)ability to convey the transcendent:

“I come now to the ineffable center of my tale…How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?”

If we find David B.’s comic at once familiar and slippery, it might be the result of a preoccupation he shares with those authors—the interrogation of the inexpressible; in this instance, the basis of creativity. The author and his guide (like Dante and Virgil) wade through an avalanche of books (and afflatus) as they would a sea of corpses; a library of infinite letters and words in the form of a series of hand drawn images—an incomplete transcription of the limits of human language.

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Further Reading

See Daniel Kalder’s review of Incidents in the Night for a detailed synopsis of the comic.

The second volume of Incidents in the Night in French.

Tits & Clits

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Samantha Meier

Note: Quotes from Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chvli are from interviews with the post’s author.

While Wimmen’s Comix can be linked to the feminist newspaper movement of the early 1970s through It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, its arrival was foreshadowed by another all-women underground comic out of Laguna Beach. The first issue of Tits & Clits, by Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli, was published just weeks before the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix in 1972. Lyn Chevli had first learned about underground comix through the bookstore Fahrenheit 451, which she owned with her husband. Chevli said, “I took one look at one and it blew my mind. I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is incredible.’ And it just stirred in me, for maybe two weeks, and then I came up with this thought, ‘If I ever sell the store, I’m going to do an underground comic.'” When Chevli parted ways with her husband, the store was about $20,000 in debt, so she decided the time was ripe to start her comic.

Accounts of the anthology’s founding differ between its founders. Chevli said,

I put a little sign in the store, in the window, saying “artists wanted.” And Joyce [Farmer] worked right next door to us [and she] showed up and said, “I’m answering the ad for an artist.”So I said, “Ok, fine, let’s get together and show me some of your work, and let’s see what happens.” She had never seen an underground comic before. She came over to my apartment and I said, “Draw me some stuff,” and she did. And I said, “Ok, draw me something dirty.” Eventually she drew me a woman sitting down on the floor with her legs spread and a rat nibbling at her vulva. And that did it. I said, “That’s perfect. I love it.”…So we got together and we started to work…we had to invent ourselves. We were two nice little girls, college graduates and everything, and here we were getting into the sleaze pit.

Joyce Farmer remembers the meeting a little differently, saying that the comic was Chevli’s idea and that they were put in touch by a mutual friend.

The actual idea for the comic book occurred spontaneously while they were working on the first issue. Chevli said, “One day we were sitting there, drawing, and she shouted it out, ‘Tits & Clits!’ and I just about fell off my stool. I knew it was perfect. I hated her guts for that, but I knew it was a very good idea.” The name was a play on the phrase “tits and ass” often used in men’s magazines. Farmer and Chevli, as well as many of the women who later submitted to Tits & Clits, viewed female sexuality as fertile grounds (pun intended) for the expression of radical sentiments.

From its inception, Tits & Clits was a fundamentally different anthology than Wimmen’s Comix. Not only was it more single-minded thematically, it completely lacked the collective structure and underlying democratic ideology of Wimmen’s Comix. Whereas Wimmen’s Comix at its inception was a collaborative effort aiming to unite all of the women currently in the underground comix world (and to bring in even more women), Tits & Clits began as a partnership between Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli, who created all of the material for Tits & Clits #1 and #2, Pandora’s Box, and Abortion Eve by themselves. (Farmer and Chevli produced seven issues of Tits & Clits between 1972 and 1987.)

Their location in Laguna Beach, removed from the hubbub of San Francisco, meant that they were initially isolated from the other artists in the underground. Farmer recalled, “The weird thing was that we just decided independently to do a comic book and we didn’t discuss it with anybody in San Francisco.” The two artists worked in close conjunction, often trading the work of drawing and writing the stories. Only having two artists doing the work meant that only about one issue was published a year, if that. Chevli and Farmer did eventually bring in other artists from Wimmen’s Comix in order to get their comics published more frequently, but the decision was possibly more practically than ideologically motivated. Chevli preferred not to draw and stopped drawing when they had other artists to do the stories. Tits & Clits tended to feature the same roster of artists rather than purposefully working to include new artists, although Farmer noted that they were open to submissions by new artists.

Chevli and Farmer define Tits & Clits as one of the first (if not the first) self-published underground comic by women. Since they both understood the way in which underground comix worked from reading them — 32 pages of black-and-white content (“guts”), and a front and back cover in color — they simply mimicked the form. Chevli and Farmer self-published their early works (including Pandora’s Box, Abortion Eve, and Tits & Clits #1) as Nanny Goat Productions before ultimately partnering with Ron Turner of Last Gasp for Tits & Clits #2-7 to improve the anthology’s distribution and circulation.

At the outset, Nanny Goat was able to get their work into circulation through Chevli’s bookstore connections. Chevli knew one of the underground comix publishers in Los Angeles, and the artists figured that if they produced their own comic, they could distribute it through that publisher. Chevli commented, however, that other publishers were initially hesitant to be involved in Tits & Clits.

I went to Bob Rita [at the Print Mint] who was a big publisher [and] showed him the book. He looked through it very slowly and very seriously. He said at the end, “Why do you think any woman in her right mind would buy something like this?” I said “Well, because I’m a woman.” He said, “I’m sorry.” He pushed the copy I had given him back to me and said, “I can’t print this. It’s too bad. It’s horrible.” Later on, we were invited to a huge party that he gave, at his home, and he was blushing. He was sorry that he said that. But he didn’t want to show the magazine to anyone else, to any woman. “No, heavens, we have to protect our girls.” That kind of thing. But everybody understood eventually.

For Farmer and Chevli, publishing a book that was so objectionable was a radical act of defiance against what women were supposed to be doing at the time, particularly college-educated women with children. Despite (or because of) its controversial nature, Tits & Clits sold fairly well when it could get distributed, according to the artists. Chevli said, “Our first edition we sold out in 8 months, I think it was. We produced 9 books in ten years and caused all kinds of ruckuses in the county and elsewhere. We sold over 100,000 comics during the 9 years and were relatively successful.” Farmer agreed, “Tits & Clits sold like wildfire when we could get distributed.” Both artists note that they never made very much money off Tits & Clits, however, since each issue only sold for $0.75 to $1.50.

Tits & Clits, as a sex comic produced by women, provoked a great deal of uproar within and beyond the comix community. According to Farmer, Tits & Clits made people uncomfortable and therefore was not widely read or distributed. Even just the name of the anthology was often considered obscene; the book was often left out of magazines or newsletters as it simply could not be put into print. Farmer said,

[It was controversial because it was] sex from a woman’s point of view, a woman’s body from a woman’s point of view. Hustler didn’t even come out until 1973 or so, so we were saying things about women and women’s bodies that had just not been said in print…Women have been considered dirty for so many centuries that we were just breaking into that and saying, “Yeah, we’re dirty, ha ha, here, have some.”

Chevli added, “What could be worse than telling the truth about female sexuality, and how men treat women … In that age, it was not considered nice for women to do [that]. And that’s what exactly we wanted to pull out and show and exhibit and push in people’s faces.” The confrontation of Tits & Clits was not only that it talked about women’s sex lives truthfully, but that it did so from a woman’s viewpoint. Tits & Clits, in significantly eroding the private/public boundary, delved deep into the realm of the personal, so deep that it went well beyond mainstream feminist thought at the time, at least according to Farmer and Chevli.

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