Recalled To Life

I'm gratified that Kip Manley says he'd sort of like to read A Tale of Two Cities now. Yes, the style of the 'needles and the damage done' scene with Pross and Defarge is addictive. Dickens is at his best when he is minding his knitting; one sort of yarn he knits well is the stuff of childish imaginings. Two samples.

The first from Two Cities, the scene in which Jerry Cruncher, Jr. first sees his father at his trade - the resurrection business.

They were still fishing perseveringly, when he peeped in at the gate for the second time; but, now they seemed to have got a bite. There was a screwing and complaining sound down below, and their bent figures were strained, as if by a weight. By slow degrees the weight broke away the earth upon it, and came to the surface. Young Jerry very well knew what it would be; but, when he saw it, and saw his honoured parent about to wrench it open, he was so frightened, being new to the sight, that he made off again, and never stopped until he had run a mile or more.

He would not have stopped then for anything less necessary than breath, it being a spectral sort of race that he ran, and one highly desirable to get to the end of. He had a strong idea that the coffin he had seen was running after him; and, pictured as hopping on behind him, bolt upright, upon its narrow end, always on the point of overtaking him and hopping on at his side - perhaps taking his arm - it was a pursuer to shun. It was an inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them like a dropsical boy's Kite without tail and wings. It hid in doorways too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up to its ears, as if it were laughing. It got into shadows on the road, and lay cunningly on its back to trip him up. All this time it was incessantly hopping on behind and gaining on him, so that when the boy got to his own door lie had reason for being half dead. And even then it would not leave him, but followed him upstairs with a bump on every Stair, scrambled into bed with him, and bumped down, dead and heavy, on his breast when he fell asleep.

You could never get it right on film because a spooky coffin hopping and bumping along behind you like a kite would just look funny, like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. (The coffin could wear sneakers like the monster.) To film this sequence without having it look like an Ed Wood production you'd have to move up to something a bit more artful. Solemn standing coffins, revealed around corners - lots of expressionistic oblique angles; not bendy bumpy antic stuff. But I submit to you that Dickens' version is manifestly truer to the workings of the childish mind. Best of all is the effect this nightmare vision has on Jerry, Jr., when he talks to dad in the morning. But you'll have to read the novel to find out, Kip.

Another example - again with the graves - is from Great Expectations. (Orwell quotes this one, and it was rereading his essay that I was reminded.) Pip knows his family only by their headstones, in an oddly synaesthetic way.

The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "ALSO GEORGIANA, WIFE OF THE ABOVE", I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine ... I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.

Sometimes Dickens isn't credited with any capacity for psychological realism because he trades in sentiment and comic grotesques, is hardly forthcoming about sex, and generally trails a cloud of rosy wishfulness wherever he goes. But children he knows. Since the child is father to the man, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, he knows a lot.

Oddly enough, it occurs to me - what think you, Kip? - that there are comics and graphic novels that can keep up the synaesthetic pace, where a film would falter. Chris Ware, for example, could do a sort of Jimmy Corrigan-dismal Pip at the grave. Draw five little lozenge-like brothers, laid out like sad quint Tweedlees with hands in trouser pockets and eyes closed. But you couldn't possibly film it right.

Comments

[Kip Manley]

(One feels one must point out one isn't a total illiterate: the Calvert School put me through Great Expectations and David Copperfield, of course, and I went on a Nicholas Nickleby tear as a kid after becoming enamored of the PBS broadcast of the stage version with Roger Rees. But aside from that.)

As for comics, and prose, and film: comics has the advantage of walking the borderland where representational image and allusive inscription get all tangled up; it takes just a nudge to tip the signifier over into sign and back again. —I'd plump for both Los Bros. Hernandez: Beto, for the obvious Dickensian qualities, not just in the melodrama but also in the caricatures and grotesqueries he draws; Jaime for the very synaesthetic qualities you're digging at: "Flies on the Ceiling" is a fucking masterpiece.

It's an issue (in part) of control: who's got it, and how much. And film, weirdly, has the short end of a lot of sticks. The "authors" are at the mercy of so many contingencies: each other, technology, the setting, the light; the "readers," in turn, must give up total control to the strictly linear reading experience: fast forward and rewind and slomo and freezeframe allow a limited form of lingering, but it's hardly the same thing.

With prose—words, rather—the author to a certain extent is at the reader's mercy. You (the author) won't be able to dictate the precise plums conjured up in the reader's mind: how cold, how sweet, what the icebox looked like, where it stood in what kitchen. But you can be sure that some plums and an icebox are conjured up (so long as the reader has had some experience with plums, and an icebox, yes); because they are so slippery, those things can easily become something else, and with a little help you can guide that: though not so far as to make the plums some girl's virginity, I don't think.

But if you film it, you've got these plums and that icebox, and the only things those can become, really, have time and space to become, are what you can allow them in the movie itself, and that's why maybe film succeeds best as spectacle or as long-form serial storytelling, in which you can remember how in the second season they were in that orchard where they stole the plums, and now she's in the middle of the night pulling a plate of plums out of the fridge and eating them alone at the table, it's just a throwaway shot, but think what it must mean—!

But I'm going on too long to state the obvious. —With comics you get not the best of both worlds but some of the strengths of each: the author (can I not scare-quote it now?) gets to say this icebox, those plums; the reader gets to skip ahead and around like Nabokov if they like, lingering to take in this splash, thrilling over that intricate mosaic of overlapping, cascading panels. And with great power, yadda yadda: the wise cartoonist will take that into account, and Chris Ware will start to play maddening formal games with panel transitions and memory, and Herge will draw flat simple characters—easy caricatures to identify and identify with—in intricately worked-out backgrounds—beautiful, precise jewel-box worlds to explore—which leads to Scott McCloud's masking theory. The reader has the control; the wise cartoonist gives them something to do with it.

Maybe not. —I'm reminded of an illustration from Frederick L. Schodt's Manga! Manga! He's talking about why maybe comics are so popular in Japan, and he points out how natural it is to express yourself in comics when (one of) your written language(s) is ideogrammic: he uses a panel from Tezuka, in which the characters all strike poses similar to and bouncing off the shapes of the various words they're bellowing. I've often wondered not what the pun ends up being, but what it feels like to read it at a glance, on all the different levels that are there.

[jholbo]

Yes, didn't mean to make it sound like it is my appointed task to polish up your literary culture - my dear, dear boy. (Good point about the manga. I, too, wish I could know what it is like to be able to make puns like that without actually having a whole line of cheerleaders just spelling out the words.