When David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik's adaptation of Paul Auster's
City of Glass,
the first novella in the
New York Triology, was published in 1994 as part of the Neon Lit
series by Avon Books, it received a review in
Newsweek, a brief mention in
The New York
Times Book Review, and no scholarly attention at all. By contrast, there are dozens of
articles on Paul Auster's prose original. The difference would appear to stem from an
automatic prejudice on the part of American critics who regard comics as a form of "low" art,
although this attitude is being challenged in some academic circles.
1 Sven Birkets,
who states that Auster's version of
City of Glass is to the graphic novel version as
Mozart is to "muzak," is characteristic of this dismissive stance. On the other hand,
Auster himself asserts that the adaptation goes beyond a "cinematic approach [into]
something that can only be done through drawing" (Birkerts, qtd in Placens 70). When I had the opportunity to
ask Auster what he thought of the Mazzucchelli/Karasik version several years ago,
Auster's reaction was unambiguously positive: he immediately knew what I was talking about,
visibly brightened, and said that he greatly admired the book.
Although Auster's
City of Glass resists summation due to the open-ended nature of the
narrative, a brief outline of the story is necessary in order to situate and understand
the graphic version. Daniel Quinn, a mystery writer who uses the penname "William Wilson,"
2
is plagued by mysterious phone calls from someone who asks for the help of the private detective
"Paul Auster." Quinn finds himself working for Peter Stillman, a man who was mentally wrecked by
his abusive father, Professor Peter Stillman. Professor Stillman locked his son in a closet for
years in order to see whether the child would rediscover the original language of human beings the
language of Eden before the fall. Stillman is eventually caught, judged to be insane, and imprisoned;
meanwhile the child, Peter Stillman junior by default, undergoes intensive speech therapy but never
fully recovers.
Quinn is brought onto the scene because Professor Stillman is about to be released from prison, and
the son fears that his father will try to kill him. Quinn shadows Professor Stillman, but the old man
is plotting something altogether different from the murder of his son. In a series of deliberate walks
around the city, Stillman traces the letters of the "Tower of Babel," a crucial Biblical reference in
his dissertation on language, through the streets of New York. Increasingly desperate and perplexed,
Quinn enlists the help of the "real" Paul Auster, who, as it happens, is not a detective at all but a
writer. Quinn stakes out Stillman's apartment, and gradually loses his grip on reality. In the end,
we discover that the entire narrative we have just read was contained in a red notebook that was
found by an unnamed narrator who is only identified as a friend of Paul Auster's. The novel is a
kind of an artichoke that sheds successive layers of meaning, each layer destabilizing the prior one,
without ever yielding a definitive answer to the mystery.
To analyze the graphic novel adaptation, we need a theoretical apparatus that can register and
decipher the complex interplay between text and image on the page. In the field of comics criticism,
there is no clear consensus on a semiotics of comics. Nonetheless, one name that consistently
emerges is Scott McCloud, whose groundbreaking work
Understanding Comics (coincidentally
published the same year as
City of Glass, 1994) is the standard against which all others are measured.
3
McCloud is the semiotician of the comics industry, and one of its most passionate advocates;
a contemporary Roland Barthes of the comic book, if you will.
Rather in the manner of Barthes' reading of Balzac in
S/Z, McCloud has codes and categories
for various facets of comics, which he defines as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in
deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response
in the viewer" (9). But the test of any theory is whether it is capable of adequately describing
the most sophisticated object of its study. And it is here that Karasik and Mazzucchelli's adaptation
may serve as a signpost for new directions in comics criticism.
I want to return to the point when Quinn is researching Stillman's theory of language, because this
episode dramatizes the crucial difference between literary criticism and comics criticism. Professor
Stillman delves into the mythological origins of language to imagine a time when words were
unproblematically linked to the objects they designated that is, a time when signs were motivated,
and signifiers were neatly paired with signifieds. According to Stillman's Biblical interpretation,
this idyllic state existed in Eden, but ended catastrophically with the Fall. Based on the
lectures of Ferdinand de Saussure, students of literary criticism usually begin with the premise
that the signifier and signified have long since parted ways, leaving only an arbitrary link
between the one and the other. Karasik and Mazzucchelli's version ingeniously illustrates this
moment of separation through the graphic pun of the shadow that is both the word and the thing it
describes. The traumatic break between word and meaning, here playfully represented as the ground
literally crumbling beneath the feet of Adam such that the word "shadow"
4 is absurdly
stranded, appears to function as a warning that words (and pictures!) are not transparently tied to
one signified.
Unstable signifiers and the shifting ground of representation are especially apt visual interpretations
of the narrative uncertainty and linguistic ambiguity in
City of Glass. Literary critics frequently
cite the novel as an example of deconstruction and/or postmodernism because the narrative frustrates
our expectations for a transcendental signified.
5 Instead of solving the Stillman case,
connecting the crime (signifier) with the motive (signified), Quinn descends into his own delusional
world that is ultimately undermined by yet a third narrator at the novel's conclusion. In the end,
there is neither a crime nor a motive. The panels that represent Quinn's point of view as he reads
Stillman's thesis on the fall of language and the arbitrary nature of the sign function as a self-reflexive
comment on the central conundrum of a detective story that has no solution.
McCloud, on the other hand, approaches the relation between language and pictures from the entirely opposite
direction by raising the fusion of signifier and signified to the status of a desired ideal.
Like Professor Stillman, he is nostalgic for an imaginary hieroglyphics radiant with meaning:
This is an exciting time to be making comics, and in many ways I feel very lucky to have been born
when I was. Still, I do feel a certain vague longing for that time over 50 centuries ago, when to
tell was to show... and to show was to tell. (161)
In effect, McCloud is searching for the motivated sign,
6 and thinks that comics might
be the answer.
7 This may account for the overly referential bias of McCloud's
categories pictures either illustrate words ("word specific"), or words explain images ("picture specific"),
or the two are locked into a harmonious balance ("duo specific," or "interdependent") (153).
8
To be fair, he also invents two other categories that are less obvious parallel constructions,
"in which words and pictures seem to follow very different courses without intersecting" and
"montage" "where words are treated as integral parts of the picture"
9 (154), both of
which are relevant for Karasik and Mazzucchelli's work. The problem with these categories, and with the
"motivated sign," is that a sign or an image may have multiple valences literal and metaphorical.
10
Although McCloud has the best possible intentions, his presentation may, in fact,
paradoxically coincide with common negative perceptions of comics. In the most complex examples of
the genre, the object is not to tell a story in an efficient and easily digestible form, but rather to
draw attention to the visual dimensions of a narrative that the creators discover and invent.
To develop analytical tools for the discussion of the graphic novel, it is necessary to employ
aesthetic criteria that would differentiate comics from other word/picture combinations (an
illustrated instruction manual, for instance), and for this purpose it is useful to turn once again
to literary criticism for guidance. According to Roman Jakobson's definition, the poetic function
"focus[es] on the message for its own sake" (1263). That is to say, poetic language not only conveys a
message, but contains other features meter, alliteration, and rhyme, for instance that
heighten the reader's awareness of the choices that led to a particular form. Thus, Ogden Nash's
"Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker" is catchier than "I prefer alcoholic beverages to sweets."
Jakobson describes the production of metaphorical language as a dynamic mechanism:
The selection is produced on the basis of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymy and
antimony, while the combination, the build up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic
function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. (1265)
In the example previously cited, the selection of words that are related through alliteration
and assonance (equivalence) is projected into the combination that forms a grammatically logical
sentence of Nash's one-liner. Jakobson's examples are drawn from foreign languages, but there
is no reason why his theory would preclude visual examples. As he emphasizes, "[M]any poetic
features belong not only to the science of language but to the whole theory of signs, that is,
to general semiotics" (1258).
11 Poetic features are manifested in Karasik and
Mazzucchelli's adaptation in a number of different ways: in transitions from panel to panel,
in the introduction of various visual motifs, and in the structure of page layout, such that
form and content are inseparable. These devices are predicated upon a form of visual poetics
that effectively slips through McCloud's categories.
12
Visual Metaphor
The opening section of the graphic novel is a condensation of the first chapter of Auster's text
in which we are introduced to the main character, Peter Quinn. Thirteen pages of prose are
converted into eleven pages of the graphic novel.
13 Some sentences are taken directly
from the Auster narrative and are included as captions (text placed at the top or bottom of a panel),
"word balloons" (monologue, dialogue), and "thought balloons" (internal monologue). But there are
many instances when Auster uses an omniscient third person narrator to offer more abstract insights
into Quinn's character. In this passage, Auster describes Quinn's relation to New York City:
New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked,
no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the
feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a
walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of
the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and
this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within.
The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made
it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of
putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body.
By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks,
he was able to feel that he was nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and
he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again.
The artists retain the metaphor of the labyrinth, but add visual analogies not present in the
prose version. Lines from the original text accompany a series of nine panels that segue from
Quinn's view of buildings outside his apartment window, to a field of lines that loosen and
gradually reform into a maze, and then focus on a single fingerprint (p.4). The perspective
pulls back from a close up of the fingerprint to show the window with the original view of
buildings, now marred by the fingerprint smudge. In the last panel on page, Quinn raises his
foot to suggest that he is stepping out of the frame. Motion, loss, and solitude are suggested
by the visual transitions from the buildings, to the maze, to the fingerprint, and back.
These similarities in form function as "equivalences" in a "visual metaphor" that connect
the separate stages of Quinn's reverie.
14 This sequence is repeated later in the novel, with an
additional variation, to represent Quinn's confusion when he appears to have reached a "dead end"
in the case: at the end of the maze, we see a locked door (p. 85).
Visual Motifs
As we have seen in the previous example, visual correspondences are present not only at the
level of panel to panel transitions, but also inform the structure of the graphic novel as a whole.
When searching for a suitable format, Karasik was inspired by one of his mentors at the School of
Visual Arts, Harvey Kurtzman, who is famous for his cinematic style in his comic "Frontline Combat"
and his nine-panel comic strip "Hey Look" (113). Karasik explains how the nine-panel grid
became the inspiration for the page layout:
[It] looks like a jail cell door. That's it! We'll use this grid in all sorts of ways in the first
half of the book to reinforce this rigid structure that Quinn has locked himself into. Bit by
bit we're going to break down the grid in subtle ways. As his sanity leaves, the drawing itself
will start going off-kilter. (141)
This design serves as the framework for the nine-panel schema for the book, the window of Quinn's
apartment, and a cell door. One pattern is echoed in another at the conclusion of Peter Stillman's
(Jr) monologue when the "gutters" between the panels are suddenly rendered three dimensional by
the switch from negative to positive space, dramatically transforming the entire page into a cell
door (22). In another striking juxtaposition, we see Quinn at his desk with the window before him,
while on the facing page we appear to be looking through this window from an exterior point of view
that encompasses all nine panels (36-37). At this point in the story, Quinn has started to keep a
diary to make sense of the Stillman case, but confusion and uncertainty plague him at every turn;
here the window also doubles as an echo of the cell door to represent Quinn's psychological imprisonment.
By the end, the nine-panel structure disintegrates into squares that are skewed across the page,
which both signals Quinn's mental breakdown and exposes its artifice as a narrative device (129-131).
The accumulation of these details and similarities over the course of the novel creates the uncanny
feeling of familiarity, much in the same way that a motif in a novel functions. In effect,
Karasik and Mazzucchelli employ a form of "visual motif" that powerfully unifies the form and
content of
City of Glass.
Metanarrative
Literary critics often comment upon how Auster manipulates the relation between the narrator and
the concept of authorship,
15 but even in this instance, the graphic novel presents ingenious
interpretations of conflicting levels of reality. Layers of subterfuge proliferate: Daniel Quinn uses
the pseudonym William Wilson, a reference to the Poe story by the same name, for his mystery novels
about the adventures of Max Work, a hardboiled detective. Quinn assumes the name "Paul Auster," who
is supposedly a detective, and later meets the "real" Auster, who is not. Quinn and Auster discuss
the authorship of Don Quixote, another work in which authorship is problematic, since Cervantes does
not claim to be the writer, but merely the editor of a text written in Arabic by Cid Hamete
Benengeli (Auster 117). The plot takes a final turn when a third narrator claims to have pieced
together the entire story from conversations with Auster and notes from the red notebook (Auster 135).
Auster's elaborate narrative pyrotechnics would not seem ideal for visual representation, but if
we compare fictional frames to panels in a graphic novel, it is not as improbable as it might
initially appear. Between chapters ten and twelve of the text, the narrative gradually slips
from Quinn's point of view to the perspective of an outside narrator who is reconstructing the
story after the fact. Mazzucchelli and Karasik's version introduces this element of doubt by
including a panel that simply shows a typewriter with text on the paper; the status of this text
is clearly different from that of the writing in the surrounding panels. The confusion of levels of
reality and fiction are compounded by the representation of Auster, since the drawing actually
resembles the living Auster, an effect that could only be achieved in the graphic novel adaptation.
Eventually we understand that the typewriter represents the interventions of a reliable narrator,
while the panels that follow Quinn's increasingly inscrutable actions are progressively shaken
loose from the nine-panel grid and transformed into pieces of paper that tumble and spiral through space.
Just as we have learned to accept the convention of the panels as a narrative device,
this artifice is yanked away, leaving only the emptiness of the surrounding black page; there
are not even any page numbers to anchor the text in some recognizable or reassuring frame of
reference. By the novel's end, the style of the drawing changes to a pen-and-ink wash free of any
panel delineations.
Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli's graphic novel
version of Paul Auster's
City of Glass is not merely an illustration, or an oversimplified
version of a superior original that a lazy reader did not want to read. Instead,
the graphic novel adds a visual dimension to Auster's metaphysical detective
story that constitutes an artistic contribution worthy of analysis on its own merits.
Auster's novella poses questions about referentiallity, metatextuality, and
the limits of language. Karasik and Mazzucchelli's version cleverly exploits these semantic
ambiguities, and adds its own unique form of visual poetics, a hybrid form of text and graphics
that enacts philosophical mediations upon language and the limits of expression in ways that
are unavailable in the original novella due to the limitations of its textual medium.
Epilogue
When I first began to work on Karasik and Mazzucchelli's
City of Glass, I was much chagrined to
discover that it was out of print because I wanted to use the book for one of my courses. And
therefore I was delighted to hear that Picador is republishing it. While I have outlined a few of
the remarkable features of this graphic novel, there is still much to explore, discover, and enjoy
in its pages. I know that professors and students will find it a fascinating text from many points
of view as a graphic novel, as a variation and continuation of Auster's prose work, as a graphic
display of semiotics in action, and as a work of art. I also would like to thank David Mazzucchelli
and Paul Karasik for their generous help and suggestions.
Endnotes
1 In Europe, particularly in France, the situation is quite different. As Mila Bongco explains,
"comics as a distinct discipline was institutionally introduced by the Institut d'Art et d'Archeology as
early as 1972 and a special subject, 'l'Histoire et L'Esthetique de la bande dessinιe,' has been taught
by one of the leading figures in comics analysis, Francis Lacassin" (13). According to Rogers Sabin, the
graphic novel came into its own in the 1980s with the publication of the following three books:
The
Watchmen (Alan Moore and David Gibbons 1987),
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller 1986),
and
Maus (Art Spiegelman 1987) (see Sabin, "Comics grow up! : dawn of the graphic novel," 87 - 95).
The award of the Pulitzer Prize to Spiegelman in 1992 was one of the defining moments for the artistic
legitimacy of this genre.
2 William Wilson, the title of an Edgar Allan Poe story, functions as Auster's intertextual nod to the
inventor of the detective story.
3 In their introduction to
The Language of Comics (2001), Robin Varnum and Christina Gibbons
acknolwledge McCloud as "the most quoted writer in the present volume. Understanding Comics has great
heuristic value and may have prompted more scholarly discussion on comics than any other book in the English
language" (xiii).
4 Karasik explains that Casteliani, an artist featured in
Raw (Art Spiegelman's compilation of
alternative comics) had used the device of constructing shadows out of the word "shadow."
5 Critics who write about the prose version of "City of Glass" commonly make the connection between the
futility of Peter Stillman's pre-Saussurian language theory and the futility of the postmodern
detective plot. "Auster's complex investment in 'nothing' signals a deconstructive investigation into
the repressive effects of any claim to be able to account for everything, to arrive at the truth..." (Little 134).
"Stillman's project also calls into question the activity of the traditional detective, in his attempts to
penetrate to the truth or essence behind appearances... The detective works to restore order and truth, to
establish the correspondence between people's actions and motivations, between the outward sign and its
hidden or disguised signified" (Sorapure 82). "In detective fiction, then, motivation and truth are thus shown
to be highly problematic. Signifiers have begun to become detached from signifieds; within the sign there is
misrepresentation, slipage, displacement, noise" (Malmgren 188).
6 See Dylan Horrock's insightful critique of McCloud in "Inventing Comics: Scott McCloud Defines the Form
in
Understanding Comics" in
The Comics Journal, issue 234. 29 - 39.
7 Evidently the US Department of Defense agrees of the various genres available, comics were chosen as
the most effficient method of conveying information (Sabin 8).
8 Technically speaking, he also has an "additive" category, in which words or images "amplify" each other,
but this seems to be a variation on his existing categories.
9 Gene Kannenberg, Jr., explains how this principle functions in the work of Chris Ware, one of the most
inventive artists working today, in "The Comics of Chris Ware: Text, Image and Visual Narrative Strategies"
in
The Language of Comics (174 - 197).
10 Even Robin Varnum and Christina Gibbons, stuanch supporters of McCloud, concede that his system omits
more complicated relations between word and image: "McCloud does not say so, but words and pictures
can also stand in ironic juxtaposition to one another. Pictures can belie words. They provide context for
words. They also provide subtexts, thereby complicating verbal messages" (xiv).
11 it's interesting to note that Jakobson specifically mentions comics as an example of a medium with
the potential to experiment with poetic and narrative conventions: "However ludicrous the idea of the
Iliad and the
Odyssey in comics may seem, certain structural features of their plot
are preserved despite the disappearance of their verbal shape" (1258).
12 To be fair, in his most recent book,
Reinventing Comics, McCloud praises
City of Glass
and
Maus for using "visual metaphors:" "The mere use of visual metaphors doesn't automatically draw
out subtext in fiction, but when these symbols echo one another and relate directly to the story's central
themes, the results can be mesmerizing" (34). But he does not define what a visual metaphor is. The mention
of "symbols" that "echo one another" is also significant. The purpose of this paper is to expand and develop
these two observations.
13 Karasik used extraordinary care in planning the architecture of the graphic novel: "I took the whole
book and created a ratio between the number of pages in each chapter of the original text and the number
of pages available to convey the same information in the comics version. Many comics adaptations do not
do this, tey simply tell the 'story' without any regard for the structure that the author has created"
(interview with Dan Nadel, 141).
14 One can also find "visual metaphors" in Art Spiegelman's
Maus. To cite just one famous example,
there is the unforgettable image of Spiegelman (wearing a mouse-mask, an ongoing metaphor throughout the
comic), slumped over his drawing table, with the rotting bodies of concentration camp victims undernetah.
In this case, the drawing eloquently illustrates the author's feelings of guilt for profiting from a holocaust
story.
15 See, for instance, Madeleine Sorapure: "Like other reflexive or self-conscious novels,
City of
Glass incorporates a formal and thematic questioning of authorship and authority, analyzing what Michel
Fouclault, in 'What is an Author?,' has described as the 'author-function,' the particular position the
author occupies within a discourse and the particular kinds of knowledge made available by the author's
position and activity" (72).
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