Tag Archives: Travel

Mystery Train

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This first appeared on Comixology
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I first learned about Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel — a wordless chronicle of a train journey — through a preview in the Comics Journal. The sample pages reproduced looked wonderful. An elongated rectangular image of a train racing in front of a waterfall particularly stuck in my head. The stark vertical of the fall was centered behind the stark vertical of the train, and both were contrasted with the diagonal slashes of rock in the moutainside, with half-circles of foam, and with the kinetic splatter of water striking water at the bottom of the page.

The elegance of the composition, the inspired simplicity of the stylization, the silent drama of the scene — it could almost be a Hiroshige or Hokusai print, if either of them had lived another century or so and adopted geometric constructivist modernism. So a whole book of that shit? Sign. me. up.

Probably I set my expectations too high. In any event, reading through the whole book for the first time ended up being something of a disappointment. I had hoped for page after page of stunning landscapes. Instead, the first quarter of the book is given over, not to spacious vistas, but to narrow, cramped interiors. The three anonymous protagonists begin their journey by walking in step through what seems to be the longest train on earth. It’s like being suspended in a Kafka dream; you go on and on, towards some indeterminate, unreachable destination. And just to make the suspended tedium more disorientingly intolerable, random details leap out at you, weighted with heavy symbolic importance.

Here’s a panel devoted to a row of chairs. Here’s one of a passenger with oddly patterned clothes, even more oddly coiffed hair, and a face from which the ruthlessly angular, schematic stylization has removed any lingering trace of emotion. Much of the time I couldn’t even tell what was happening. A group of uniformed men sit in rows in an upper-berth; a camp-fire is lit; a space-station floats overhead — is this all happening in the train?

Even when our peripatetic protagonists do finally sit down and open the window shade, allowing us to see what’s happening outdoors, there often seems to be some key missing. Why are those white hexagons spread across the panel? Are those two men painting a sign — and if so, why is the sign entirely black? What are we looking at, and from what perspective? Even though there were no words, I felt like I needed a translator. If I were Japanese, presumably, all these references and odd in-jokes would make sense. What I needed, it was clear, was an extensive set of foot-notes.

And sure enough…I reached the conclusion, was duly befuddled by the end (are they at the seaside there?), turned the page — and ta-dah! Brief end-notes are provided keyed to just about every single page! Yay! Now all will be explained!

Well…yes and no. Yokoyama’s annotations do occasionally provide some straightforward logistical help: for instance, it turns out that the campfire was on a television screen in the train, rather than on the train itself. In most cases, though, the author seems as baffled as I was. He writes for example, that the uniformed men on the second level of the train are “tourists…dressed like soldiers. The symbol on their helmet is unlike those belonging to any currently known nations.”

In other words, they’re not mysterious because I’m from a different culture and don’t know what’s going on. They’re mysterious because they make no sense. What are they doing there? Why are they dressed like that? Why, later, do they all get off at a train station in the middle of nowhere? Yokoyama doesn’t know either. It’s just one of those things.

Yokoyama had wrong-footed me. I was looking for realism, and so I found the epistemological uncertainty frustrating. But the book isn’t realism — or not exactly. It’s pomo; Yokoyama’s tongue is in his cheek the entire time. Take the scene of ducks flying over the plane as hunters shoot at them. The footnote points out that the hunters all miss, and indeed, you can see the ducks traveling in a perfect V, not even disturbed by the shells exploding in pristine, regimented bursts all around them. The demands of narrative (somebody shoots, somebody hits) are sacrificed, with a wink, to the exigencies of layout. It’s as if the hunters and the ducks are not adversaries at all, but part of some single great mechanism, controlled by one guiding hand. As, of course, they are.

The book, in other words, actually revels not in realism, but in artificiality. It’s virtuoso performance. The motion lines throughout, for instance, are emphatic and solid, drawing attention to themselves as elements of the design. As a result, every movement is like an explosion; the two page sequence depicting one of the travelers taking out and lighting a cigarette is choreographed with all the delicate finesse of a Jack Kirby Thing-vs.-Hulk encounter.

Or, as another example, there’s one page which opens with an extreme close-up of a toothed maw. In the next panel we pull back dramatically to see that the mouth belongs to a wild dog, now only a tiny silhouette on top of a towering rocky outcrop, howling as the train races by beneath it. Then, in the next panel, we’re looking at the train through the gigantic horns of a moose…and then we pull back again to the perspective of the train itself, and watch the moose passing by far below. The movement from close-up to way down to close-up to high above is not natural or intuitive, but insistently self-conscious.

The thing is, there is a sense in which, when traveling, insistent self-consciousness is natural. When taking a trip , I, at least, sometimes have this sense of alienation, of hyper-sensitivity. When you’re knocked out of your routine, it’s hard to tell what matters and what doesn’t, and so everything — the man opening a book, the light flickering off a pen, the patter of water on the roof — becomes the most important thing in the world, equally vital and equally mysterious. It’s an experience analogous to Emerson’s description of the “transparent eyeball” — a humorous, grotesque, and sublime sensitivity, which feels, in its otherworldliness, almost inhuman.

Emerson’s philosophy was influenced by Buddhism. His all-seeing, all-receptive eye is similar to the roving eye of the Japanese woodblock prints, where landscapes are viewed sometimes from a mouse-level vantage, looking past a horse’s foot, and sometimes from far up in the sky, behind a bird’s wing. This perspective, which is everywhere and nowhere and which finds beauty in all things is, at least by implication, divine.

In Yokoyama’s work, too, the viewpoint swoops and swerves, now with a skier on a high mountain pass, now underneath the train. There is certainly a celebratory, joking tinge to Yokoyama’s impossibly mobile camera. But there is also something ominous. In one sequence from the book, our protagonists’ train passes another going in the opposite direction. A whole page is devoted to the faces on the other train. They are shown in four tiers of three blocks each; all are streaked with violent motion lines; all are the same shade of grey as the window frame, all stare intently outward at the viewer. The scene is oddly disturbing; the repetition of the faces, the repetition of the expressions; the lines going through them, the grid — it’s dehumanizing, as if the faces are not people at all, but manikins, or masks. Yokoyama’s note to the image reads:

“All of the passengers in the passing train are looking this way. Whether the naked eye could actually instantaneously register these individual faces is questionable, but this scene may not represent a human perspective at all.”

If it’s not a human perspective, then what is it? And is it beneficent or not? The ukiyo-e artists created individual images; magical windows that captured an instant. What’s vibrant about a Hokusai print is that it captures a moment; there’s a sense of time stretching before and after which energizes the image, giving it power and grace. By showing a sequence, on the other hand, Yokoyama’s world is less vibrant, more dead. To see as God does, for a moment, is exhilarating; to have that vision extended becomes oppressive. Yokoyama’s geometries, his angular series of iterated, impossible scenes, suggest a kind of literal deus ex machina — a deity made out of clockwork.

In the last pages of the book, the three travelers march again, moving in eerie unison out of the station, across a field, and to the shore. There they stand in their aggressively patterned shirts before a sea so turbulent it can be apprehended itself only as surface patterns of spray against rocks, the depths barely visible as smaller splashes of design which suggest a fathomless and unperceivable distance. Space flattens out, until inside and outside, interior and landscape, become one. Self-consciousness is the consciousness that the self slips through your fingers; it is nowhere, or everywhere, part of a design that moves forward and backward through time. The image of man and universe in eternal synchronization is both devotional and sinister. Read and re-read, Travel seems less like a journey than like a single, unyielding now.

The Travelogue as Masturbation

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In her article on Graphic Journalism, Erin Polgreen states that:

“[Travelogues] are often meditative explorations of a foreign landscape in which the reader unpacks their cultural baggage with the author, exploring a strange land with them. The key here is in viewer identification: The comics creator has a strong voice leading the narrative, and we trust them to impart facts and dissect stereotypes for us. Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less is a near flawless example of the travelogue. Glidden isn’t going for an objective non-fiction work here, which can seem counter-intuitive to journalists. Rather, she’s looking to use her experiences as a lens for dissecting her own cultural (mis)perceptions and takes the reader along for the ride.” [Emphasis mine]

There are many words which come to mind when I think of Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, but “flawless” doesn’t even come close to capturing the essence of any of them.

 

An overwhelming emptiness developed in my gut as I was reading this slim volume of tightly arranged panels depicting a young woman’s frankly insipid account of her first trip to Israel on a “Birthright Israel” tour. Glidden’s comic condenses the “promised land” into a  series of flat, non-descript images and dialog sequences. Hence Masada becomes a mound of amorphous light brown soil, its history and controversies distilled to a shallow recital comparing the works of Josephus to her guide’s Zionist spiel. Would that she had read better books and developed a better mind for such analysis.

Where Matisse once suggested that “one square centimeter of any blue is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue,” Glidden proposes that a systematic dabbing of color will do the trick. Her vistas are almost infallibly debased to non-entities. Here a village landscape becomes only a momentary pause — an empty space —  and quite secondary to the dialog preceding it.

The following montage of a street parade has much the same problem, passing fleetingly before our eyes like a colleague’s holiday slideshow.

Only close to the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock do we see a some recourse to the establishment of atmosphere and place, though still to somewhat hollow effect.

Once free of the strictures of the tour (and in the final chapter of the book), the cartooning which was once crudely serviceable begins to display a bit more polish, a dividend from weeks of practice and, perhaps, a process of trial and error. A more skillful practitioner might have used variations on the nine panel grid to engineer some points of conjunction and disjunction between text and image, but Glidden uses this device largely to preserve the steady voice of the storyteller and hence an effortless flow in her account. This is a hallmark of the plain narration advocated by autobiographical stalwarts like Harvey Pekar and his ilk. As such, Glidden’s authorial voice resides largely in her simple drawings and not in whatever talent she has for narrative or language.

What follows is a summation of Glidden’s entire experience (and conclusions) in the form of a series of conversations between the author and various people: citizens, both young and old, who have made Aliyah; a progressive rabbi delivering a message of reconciliation and calling for a striking of archaic laws from the Talmud; and, finally, an Israeli with whom she finds the peace to disagree. Those who have a place in their hearts for Glidden’s comic will undoubtedly point to these exchanges as the basis for their affection; the author’s heart always on her sleeve, her emotions ever on tap, her youthful idealism and barely formed intellect crushing all before her. This is a vision of comics journalism as a mediator for those who have little interest in reading.

I was about three quarters of the way through this comic before I realized that there was a fatal flaw in my approach to this comic. I was half expecting a travelogue in the tradition of Theroux if not Levi-Strauss. But the potential reader will need to reorient herself to the requirements of this cartoon journal for the best results. It is altogether more pleasing if one sees it as a self-lacerating memoir impaling the author’s younger and more foolish self  (of course, Glidden recently celebrated the revolution in Egypt with all the superficiality of a 10 word Twitter missive, but I suppose that too could be seen as self-satire.)

Nowhere is this more evident than in Glidden’s visit to Yad Vashem. The author is justifiably irritated by one of the more prevalent experiences you might find on a package tour — the headlong rush through a famous museum in order to get to a meal (or some shopping). Yad Vashem is quite naturally reduced to that complaint, probably a purposeful disclosure of her rather mean spirit at that point in time.

The guide’s voice becomes a consistent drone, and the sights and sounds of the Holocaust distilled into an understated bitching session.

When all is over and she is given some time to herself, a moment of tranquility in the Hall of Names; Glidden’s tribute to what the Holocaust experience is all about:

What lies beneath this is of course much more insidious and encapsulated in the following sequence of panels:

Here Glidden yearns for the “true” Holocaust experience; to connect and emote with the inhumanity dealt to some 6 million Jews  — she wants to be that crying child in the group in front of her. Perhaps she wanted to be struck with awe at the incalculable evil and misery; to feel deep in her heart of hearts the tragedy of it all.

Like a friend who once told me eagerly about his tour of Auschwtiz, this is Yad Vashem as an amusement park ride; that all too familiar cry of, “What can I get out of it,” from cattle on a drive through unfamiliar territory. More damning than the reams of sexposès or masturbatory fantasies in the indy comics of the early 90s, for here Glidden reveals herself as a tourist and travel writer with absolutely nothing to say. That dullness captured in the ironic title of her book — How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less — for the creator knows full well that the country of her visitation is impossible to capture in that period of time. Glidden’s comic is a work of self-condemnation; a “warts and all” cautionary to all those who would seek to traffic in their trifling insights, for therein lies undistinguished banality. It is the rotting carcass of the autobiographical genre in comics.

Hooded Polyp: Earthy Anecdotes

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In Caro’s recent post she argues that Asterios Polyp fails to deliver a kind of literary complexity.

The result is the reiteration – on the level of performance if not assertion – of a hierarchical division between “the literary” and the “graphical”: a dichotomy that is aggressive and dismissive in precisely the same way as Asterios’ treatment of Hana. It is completely uninformed about how literary fiction works. It creates a destructive incoherence at the center of the book.

I’ve probably bashed Asterios Polyp enough for one lifetime at this point. But I thought it might be interesting to look at a couple of examples of works that I think demonstrate the kind of literariness Caro is looking for.

I’ve been rereading Wallace Stevens recently, and I’m quite taken with this poem, the first in his first collection:

Earthy Anecdote
Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

As with a lot of Stevens’ poetry, nobody seems all that certain what the fuck this means. I’ve seen various efforts to parse it as some sort of allegory (the firecat means “change” was one particularly painful example.) But none of them are very convincing. Even the relation of title to poem seems maddeningly obscure. How is this earthy? Is there some sort of bizarre sexual double entendre known only to Stevens? That seems fairly unlikely — and yet, no other explanation presents itself.

The confusion here is, I think, on one hand simply a result of looking too deeply, or of coming at the poem from the wrong perspective. A lot of Stevens’ writing seems to me to be inspired not by abstruse epistemological theories or Romanticism, but by children’s poetry. “Earthy Anecdote” makes most sense if read not as allegory or complicated symbol, but as nonsense verse. Dr. Seuss’ battling tweetle beetles aren’t symbols of the futility of martial endeavor. They’re just goofy fun for kids. Similarly, the clattering bucks and the firecat are entertaining images. It’s fun to say “bucks went clattering over Oklahoma.” (Go ahead, try it. I’ll wait.)

At the same time…Stevens was also, and undoubtedly, inspired by abstruse epistemology and Romanticism. And he was writing verse for adults, not kids. Starting his first volume of poetry off with a bit of extravagant silliness is a fairly dramatic line in the sand — even if the line is curved. It’s a certain kind of statement; an elliptical declaration of love for the earthy, clattering bucks rushing about in glorious, purposeless panic — metaphors in frantic search for a meaning. In that vein, perhaps you can see the firecat as Stevens himself, leaping here and there to goad his images (and perhaps his readers) into a lather, before closing his bright eyes in self-satisfied pleasure. Or, alternately, Stevens might be the bucks, thrashing this way and that in an effort to avoid a meaning which is always leaping to thwart them — and which, in lazy triumph, curls around the poem at the end despite every horse’s best efforts.

None of these explanations are “right”, I don’t think. Rather, the point of the poem is the pleasurable possibilities of the point of the poem. That’s how the modernist puzzle works; the poem is playing with its own interpretation. Form and content (buck and firecat?) aren’t separated, or even separable; the content of the poem is its own metaphors. The reader doesn’t so much understand the poem, as shuttle about inside it. It’s a joke where the punchline is that the form of the joke is the punchline.

There are not a ton of comics that play these kinds of shell games with meaning, form, and content. But one example that does spring to mind for me is Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel. In my review on Comixology I wrote:

Yokoyama had wrong-footed me. I was looking for realism, and so I found the epistemological uncertainty frustrating. But the book isn’t realism — or not exactly. It’s pomo; Yokoyama’s tongue is in his cheek the entire time. Take the scene of ducks flying over the plane as hunters shoot at them. The footnote points out that the hunters all miss, and indeed, you can see the ducks traveling in a perfect V, not even disturbed by the shells exploding in pristine, regimented bursts all around them. The demands of narrative (somebody shoots, somebody hits) are sacrificed, with a wink, to the exigencies of layout. It’s as if the hunters and the ducks are not adversaries at all, but part of some single great mechanism, controlled by one guiding hand. As, of course, they are.

In Travel, as in Stevens, the sleight-of-hand manipulation of the tropes of the medium, the formal elements of the work, are themselves the content. As a result, modernist works like this are like two facing mirrors; absolutely flat surfaces leading into infinite depths.

I’m not saying that this is the only kind of worthwhile art by any means. I don’t want all art to be playful modernist puzzles anymore than I want all art to be slasher films or shojo. Still, Stevens and Yokoyama are great, and I wouldn’t at all mind seeing more comics that followed in their hoofprints.