The little picture books of the apocalypse that beguiled our afternoons

Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! contains mostly autobiographical musings, but there are significant stretches of phenomenological reflection, if you will.

Since I am writing about reading - e.g. what is it like to read literature, as opposed to appreciating visual culture in its variously dominant forms? - it is rather interesting to reflect on the modes of reception characteristic of this noble hybrid: sequential visual art with little talk and thought bubbles. Here are the passages I marked, plus hasty marginalia.

From Aimee Bender, "Flat and Glad". Discussion of Chester Brown and the power of minimalism - what Scott McCloud calls the plain face: circle two dots and a line. With squiggle hair.

Nice quote from Maxim Gorky: "You understand it at once when I say, 'the man sat on the grass': you understand it because it is clear and makes no demands on the attention. On the other hand, it is not easily understood, and it is difficult for the mind if I write, 'a tall narrow-chested, middle-sized man, with a red beard, sat on the green grass, already trampled by pedestrians, sat silently, shyly, and timidly looked about him.' That is not immediately grasped by the mind, whereas good writing should be grasped at once - in a second."

Comments Bender: "There's an immediacy to iconic words and pictures, and like Chester Brown's scruffy hair, the plain word allows the reader to digest an image with a different part of the mind; when we read that swiftly, we sidestep the ultra-aware reader, jumping more directly from image to unconscious."

That seems reasonable. But consider the following, which is supposed to amplify but seems potentially to undercut: "Words like "robber", or "swamp," or "beast," or "plate," or "bone," evoke landscapes of flat characters, moving through symbolic forests meeting animals who can speak. It is the world of my childhood reading, where the images ran straight into a formative memory bank, and where reading was all about stirring and nourishing the imagination." [Today I was listening to Lemon Jelly, "Elements", a good case in point. Childish keyboards and recitation: 'ash, metal, water, wood ... and fire.' Soothing.] The thing that's maybe paradoxical is deciding whether the point is that reading should ideally be easy or that it should be hard. One often hears that literary reading is superior to, say, glotzing TV, because the latter is totally passive, leaving no work for the imagination. You absorb the stuff osmotically, effortlessly. Reading, we are assured, requires active use of imagination. But Bender is indicating a model of the imagination as a passive straight-shot conduit to the subconscious, a short-circuit of effortful mental activity, as per Gorky. And what she says seems right. But good minimalism is not easy like TV is easy. (The varieties of easy reading experience.)

Another nice passage from Bender. Let me say that this next bit is interesting to me because I'm sort of vaguely - profoundly vaguely - thinking about whether the literary reading experience is linear. To what extent is reading a story like being on a train clamped to the tracks, moving ineluctably forward - maybe slowing down or speeding up a little. The contrary view: Nabokov says you can't read, only reread, because he thinks of the object of appreciation, when you read a novel, as rather like a puzzle box world you get to know in all its three-dimensionality. Hence his peculiar insistence on drawing maps, as per his "Lectures on Literature". So, line by line, you uncover this world structure. But you only see it properly after you have cleared away all those lines you had to read. The line by line tracing, necessary to reveal the structure, is in a sense conceived as burdensome in its linearity. Practically essential but somewhat at odds with the product, which is non-linear. On the other hand, my old Shakespeare prof Stephen Booth used to say you couldn't reread a book, only read it. Literature is like music that must be performed, one word after another, in the proper order. There's truth in that, too. Which do you think it is? Where was I?

Comics also seem to be acknowledging, overtly, the visual pleasure in reading that happens with text, too, but doesn't seem to be talked about enough. I love "oo" words - moon, broom, stoop, baloon, crook - but admitting that makes me sound like some kind of flake. [No, Nabokov would agree, bless his synaesthetic heart.] But the visual experience is so crucial to reading, and it's why books-on-tape just don't cling to my mind in the same way. [True, or false?] For example, when reading, how often does your eye drift to the line below, only to replace a noun with one that occurs in the next sentence? How often, when reading a mystery or encountering suspense, does the eye float to the bottom of the page, take in new information, return to the initial paragraph and then read forward? ... We are always making a rubber band pin-art with the page, moving words around, creating a visual scheme. Comics take this reading experience to a more primal level - we graze from a picture, down, to the side, up the diagonal, merging imagerly and words effortlessly.

The Nabokov connection is interesting because, in a sense he too seems obsessed with features that are rubber band pin-art-like. Odd synaesthetic linkages that have no real semantic logic, ergo that are no linear function of the tracks of syntax. This is the opposite pole to his puzzle-box world obsessions, also non-linear. Neither feature of literature that interests Nabokov seems to require any sort of linear unfolding, like a train advancing on its rails down the long rows of sentences. What do you think? Is literature more like a tune you play or a puzzle-box you turn every which way?

Next, an essay by John Wray, "This world, that world, and the invisible hinge: the words and pictures of Jim Woodring". [You sort of have to see the accompanying illustration of the girl-thing to get it. Sorry, no Amazon search-inside available.] Wray - like Bender - is interested in a kind of minimalism. Or, rather, why the artist should adopt such a 'clean', funny animal book sort of drawing style, then write lines like: "Dear Supreme Altruist, Thanks very much for placing within me the bomb that never stops exploding." You might think: he's being ironic. But that's not quite the whole story.

"The Stairs" finally helped me to understand Woodring's choice of a style. In representing his human charactgers (especially himself) in an unremarkable, almost generic style lifted from newspaper strips, a style every reader is familiar with from childhood, Woodring renders the presence of the fantastic when it arrives (either in images or in a text) as jarringly and unsettlingly as possible. And when Woodring shifts gears to a stule more suitable to drawing the stuff of nightmares, his pictures have all the more power for still harboring traces - in brutally mutated form - of all the vocabulary of Saturday morning TV. If Mickey Mouse's intestines were given their own comic book, the result might look something like Woodring's recurring visitors. But this again is only one of many modes: the girl-thing in "The Stairs," for example, has an understated horror all her own. In fact, Woodring makes use of the built in limitations of comic art to make her image even more disturbing: Her long bony face might be the result of a childhood burn, or advanced old age, or something outside the realm of human experience altogether. She might not even be a "female" thing at all. Her voice is left up to our imagination; so is the color of her skin. No film or photograph, or even text alone, could equal "The Stairs" for mystery.

That point complement Bender's. The Gorky point, rather, about the effectiveness of omission. But I'm not sure how to put it. We're back to hard or easy again. The phrase 'left up to our imagination' is tricky, because we sort of think it means that our imagination will soon be rolling up its sleeves and hard at work filling in the details. Somehow we think this healthy exercise is part of the explanation of what makes literature great. But actually our imagination doesn't do anything of the sort. It lets the holes be. That's what makes literature great. What makes the girl-thing eerie is her indefinite status. Plump for an interpretation and she becomes plain old one way, when the work necessitates that she remain indefinite. Getting back to novels vs. TV, it is tempting to say that the latter 'does all the work for you'. But that seems to suggest that, in novels, we do the work TV does. That is, we turn novels into TV shows in our heads? But that's absurd; it's surely the unbridgeable difference between the experience of reading a novel and the experience of watching a TV show that makes the former seem peculiarly valuable. The 'exercise your imagination' theory seems notably lacking, since the 'let your imagination slack off' theory seems equally warranted.

Jeffrey O'Brien on "Nick Fury's Dream", a somewhat strained attempt to argue that the enjoyment of Marvel Comics was 'purely formal' - about "nothing but the frame, the juxtaposition of frames, the suggestion of infinite depth and constant violent motion." Makes it sound a bit more like the Italian futurists that the Mighty Marvel Bullpen really made it, no? But there's something not too far off about this next bit, which again speaks to the linearity question:

What is hard to recapture is the trancelike absorption with which these comics were read, a wide-awake dreaming in which disbelief was entirely suspended and the world consisted of nothing more than the frame-to-frame evolution of Jack Kirby's storyboarding ... That state of mind, somewhere between profound stupor and meditative acuity, encouraged allegorical readings.

It's true that it can be pleasant to pick up a treasured comic and just browse - rubber-band pin-art-wise - turning pages back and forth. Image. Image. Image. This truly is the original, bovine sense of 'browsing'. But there is something meditative about it. It can be pleasant to chew the cud of poetry that way, too. Line. Line. Line. But not usually novels. You don't just read a sentence here, a sentence there. But maybe a section here, a section there? Not me, usually. But maybe people are different.

Finally, Myla Goldberg on "The Exquisite Strangeness and Estrangement of Renée French and Chris Ware". She makes the interesting argument that French does things a novelist simply cannot, and that Ware manages to do things that normally only novelists can. I don't know French's stuff, so I'll skip to the comments on Ware. (The argument about French is much like the argument about Woodring, above.) Here again against linearity

A typical Chris Ware page teems with panels ranging in size from postage stamp to postcard. The pure desnity of information can be off-putting, especially to a reader unaccustomed to reading comics [plus he tortures his poor characters something awful.] The non-comics reader is, at best, prepared for an orderly page, one that contains perhaps six panels of equal size, divided into three neat rows that can be read from left to right. While this experience is qualitatively different from reading text, it bears enough of a resemblance to be comforting. Ware's pages rarely afford his reader such comfort [plus all that torturing of the characters], instead challenging our most basic assumptions about how to read. Panel groupings confine the eye to the left quadrant of the page before moving the gaze to the right, or force the eye to describe a counterclockwise path around a page's perimeter, the smaller peripheral panels amplifying or deepening a larger central image. Rather than assume in advance how a page is to be parsed, the reader is forced to pay attention to the page's overall composition for reading cues, a deepended level of collaboration that provides Ware another way to impact our reading experience.

I completely agree - so does everyone else who has read it, of course - that Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth is a stunning work of supreme literary genius. Plus the sheer athleticism of producing all those panels and images. (Like if Kafka had painted the Sistine Chapel or something.) Goldberg goes on to try out comparisons with Calvino, Barth, Dos Passos: literary artists pushing the form past previous boundaries. I don't quite buy any of those comparisons (although they are no worse than 'think Kafka meets Michaelangelo', admittedly.) There is something right about saying that Ware is novelistic in the effects he gets. I can't quite say why. Maybe it's because Ware does an unusual thing for a comic: takes up the classically novelistic theme of succeeding generation of a family, repeating themselves. Buddenbrooks in pictures. Sons are different than their fathers but the same. Motifs playing over and over. Theme and variations. You can do that with pictures as well as words. Family resemblances.

Goldberg is right about one thing. Ware has the gift of freezing time. He does this to the reader, outside the story. "By varying the size of his panels and grouping them in such challenging ways, Ware achieves rare control over the pace and focus of the reading experience."

And inside his stories. Sequential comic art that evokes stillness, suspension is a fine thing (the very opposite of Mighty Marvel Mobile Mania.) Obviously it's all those games with frames and how you read them that allows you to get hung up to good effect. It's something that's harder to do in film, I should think. Goldberg discusses the wasp in the dying grandmother's room scene - maybe you remember - where we see the same moments over from different points of view. From inside the room. Then through the window from the outside. A tentative tap on the glass that seems it must be taking an eternity.

This post has been an experiment in high-speed thinking, to see whether this is productive for me and interesting for the reader. I'm a fast typist so it's really no trouble getting these long quotes down in short order, in case you are curious. (I come from a family of high accuracy, high-speed typists. My dad got a medal for accuracy in the army.)

My title is taken from a line in O'Brien's essay: "The little picture books of the apocalypse that beguiled our afternoons described a ripping asunder that was as harmless as music."

Comments

[ben wolfson]

Here's a quotation from Rasselas that the first third or so of the post reminded me of (plus I just read it this morning):

"The business of a poet", said Imlac, "is to examine not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest; he is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features as recall the original to every mind, and must neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked and another have neglected, for those characteristics which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness."

[bob mcmanus]

Art Renewal Center doesn't appear to accept hotlinks, or I am doing something wrong. So you have to cut and paste. I know nothing about graphic novels, but these seemed relevant to a discussion of the presentation of visual information. Was looking for a particular neat vision, Reni or Perugino or somebody but I could not find it. Raphael and Rubens are also sometimes, umm, busy.

http://www.artrenewal.org/images/artists/l/lotto_lorenzo/large/Lotto_Lorenzo_Stories_of_St_Barbara_1524.jpg
....
http://www.artrenewal.org/images/artists/m/memling_hans/large/Memling_Hans_Advent_and_Triumph_of_Christ_1480.jpg

As far as literature, as a Joyce fan, he played all these games of commission and omission on every page:puzzles, over and under description, the informing and misleading visual and sculptural presentation of words on the page. Hypertextually questioning what writing and reading are. After Finnegans Wake, I no longer even understand what thing a damn "word" is. Except a subvocalisation with an emotional resonance.

[bob mcmanus]

http://www.artrenewal.org/images/artists/m/memling_hans/large/

Memling_Hans_Advent_and_Triumph_of_Christ_1480.jpg

http://www.artrenewal.org/images/artists/l/lotto_lorenzo/large/

Lotto_Lorenzo_Stories_of_St_Barbara_1524.jpg

[Mitch Mills]

I come from a family of high accuracy, high-speed typists. My dad got a medal for accuracy in the army.

Odd that you haven't been drafted into the 101st Fighting Keyboarders then.

[Keith]

I've met Jim Woodring and talked to him about his work (in a seminar at my undergrad, where I recieved a degree in Comic Books. Another story) He really is just a big fan of weird for the sake of weird. And his artwork isn't nearly as simple as it looks. All those squiggly lines that add texture to the sky in a lot of the 'Frank' stories aren't just squiggly lines. They are elaborate sentences-- actual words, scribbled in the sky. It's easier to see this in the original art, at full size than the shrunk down printed version but it's still there. Amazingly stuff that is compex and simple at the same time. A Lot like Nabakov, actally.

[Ray Davis]

Assuming I can take you at fast-typing word ('cause god knows [and will damn me for it] the faster I talk the less I remember the promises I made or implied): "What do you think? Is literature more like a tune you play or a puzzle-box you turn every which way?"

There's been some wonderful research done over the decades on reading patterns, and science (like experience) bears Nabokov out: we do not read linearly. We skip, hop, pirouette, glom, spit, and rub purringly across the text.

BUT: that makes text neither necessarily a play or a puzzle box. It makes text capable of either or both together. (And makes hypertext's "you must make a decision before we will again allow you to dart freely" approach much more fascistic than any text could possibly be.)

My own favorite Ware remains the serial lyric of the cat-head comix. Woodring and French are both great. I'm typing fast too, for whatever that information's worth.

[Melanie Stephan]

Hi John and Belle, This is an important News Update for you, please read and pass it along. God has made contact. The message is about Revelation. The message is from God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost respectively. It was sent in the Spring of 2006. It is about the meaning of First is Last and Last is First . The message is this: In the morning I go to Heaven. In the afternoon I live my life. In the evening I die, death. What does this mean? In other words this means Birth is Last and Last is Birth. To understand this don’t think from point A to point B. Think of this as a continous circle of life. Birth is First, Life, Death, Birth is Last, completing the circle. God also said that Judgment will be before Birth in Heaven. As birth on Earth is painful so will birth in Heaven. It is possible that this message was delivered by one of God’s Angels in the Spring of 2006. Yes, God has made contact and he sent a messenger. Spread this message along, just like a chain letter. Tell two people. OH, one more thing of interest. Did you know that Mike Douglas died on his birthday. Melanie Stephan

[Ameda]

Talking of fast typing I don't think there would be any match of my hubby, he's incredibly fast!