Cover to the 1987 edition

In 1952, R. O. Blechman had just graduated from Oberlin College and sought work as an illustrator. "My portfolio at the time consisted mostly of work done at Oberlin: posters, cartoons from the newspaper, illustrations from the literary magazine, several neatly sewn booklets, and one picture story set in Rome called Titus," he explains in R. O. Blechman: Behind the Lines. A graphic designer of Blechman's acquaintance asked if he could show the picture story to a publisher. "I had never really thought of the book as publishable. It was done as a term paper for a workshop class (and received a B-)... Theodore Amussen, then editor-in-chief at Henry Holt, asked if I could do a similar book for him, but based on a holiday theme, 'preferably Christmas.'" Struggling for an angle, Blechman telephoned a friend who suggested "The Juggler of Our Lady." "Rereading the legend the next day, I realized that it was precisely what I wanted... I knew that this was an ideal story to adapt. I set to work immediately. Clearing the kitchen table of everything but the white paper, and Will Durant's Age of Faith as reference, I started the book that evening, and finished it the same night. In the morning I took it to Holt, and it was accepted for publication" (22 - 23)."

The juggler is Cantalbert, whose talent goes largely ignored by medieval society. Dismayed by violence, injustice and apathy, and disenchanted by his inability to affect — or even attract — an audience, Cantalbert becomes a monk. Unfortunately, he is an ineffectual monk. As Christmas approaches, the other monastics write poems, illuminate manuscripts, and execute various works of art in tribute to the Virgin Mary. All Cantalbert can do is juggle. The book appeared in 1953: a complete, self-contained graphic story, told in minimalist cartoon line-art and hand-scrawled captions, with sparing and judicious use of spot color throughout. The narrative style resembles the format Jules Feiffer would later develop for "Munro" and other longer strips¹. Blechman's anomalous hardcover was briefly noted in the New York Times' listing of new releases, filed under "Religion"². The book gained secular notice regardless, and in 1958 was adapted for animation by Gene Deitch and Terrytoons.

In his preface to the book's 1987 edition (adapted from his introduction to Behind the Lines), Maurice Sendak notes a relationship between Blechman's narrative style and cartoon animation: "The comic strip, animated cartoon, and silent-movie comedy are all lovingly part of Blechman's background and style," he writes. "The Juggler, in one giant step, pulled them all together." Sendak's statement is curious if one accepts the comic strip as a form distinct from others, one that is capable of — but not limited to — depictions of movement. To the extent that the book evokes the techniques of animation and film, it does so in its function as a graphic narrative, making use of the form's properties and conventions. There is a great deal of movement in Blechman's book, accomplished in a variety of ways, but the book remains a series of static, juxtaposed images.


Precisely because he does so much with, apparently, so little, it is worth examining the various techniques Blechman uses to evoke movement and to tell a story with his notation-like graphic handwriting. The juggler in action is the book's most commonly recurring image. The book's seven-page opening sequence reads like a series of instructions: not how to juggle, but rather how to read this image. A hand appears holding a ball; it tosses the ball into the air, with a dotted line indicating its path. The juggler's other hand appears, tossing another ball according to the schema previously indicated. The balls multiply to four, to six, and then to eight. Finally, beneath the title, we see the image of Cantalbert the juggler on his back, juggling a dozen balls that form an airborne circle, small motion lines around his feet indicating the process that keeps the cycle of alternatively red and grey balls aloft.


Most frequently, the balls are drawn as red and white (and sometimes red, grey and white). Beyond the cues provided in the opening "how-to" segment, the image implies movement for a variety of reasons. The first is the reader's previous knowledge of juggling, predicated on a knowledge of physics. The impossibility of the circle of balls hanging unsupported in the air (relative to one another, to the juggler, and to the implied ground, within the context of gravity) indicates that this can only be a snapshot — or symbol — of a continuing cycle of movement. The alternating colors enhance the illusion: the red and white pattern implies the alternating positions that red and white balls occupy in space over time, as successive balls change position over and over again. The regular pattern reinforces the idea of a repeating cycle. "Multiple images reveal repetition and change, pattern and surprise," Edward Tufte writes in Visual Explanations. "Multiples represent and narrate sequences of motion. Multiples amplify, intensify, and reinforce the meaning of images" (Tufte 105).

Meanwhile, small motion lines indicate the movement of the feet "pedaling" or "running" in the air to keep the balls aloft. These motion lines enhance the idea of a constant process that is most strongly implied by the balls in the air. The juggler's balls, in their impossible position, enable the legs to move, and minimize the need for additional graphic devices: The two techniques activate one another in inverse proportion to physical reality. Additionally, the two different devices, each passable on their own, and each indicating a non-specific moment within a continuous process, gain strength through simultaneity on the static page.³ The motion lines initially function to confirm the meaning of the juggler's pose, but are used less frequently as the book progresses. The balls and the posed feet become a functional pictogram within the book's visual syntax.


An early sequence instructs the reader to interpret another recurring device: Cantalbert the juggler is introduced by name and profession and walks to town, as he does daily, to perform on the streets. After walking up and downhill, greeting people and ducks along the way, he enters the town gate, a trailing foot visible within the frame of the gothic arch. The arch will recur in many guises, to represent every door and window in the book; so will the trailing foot, using the frame of the door as an interior panel border to indicate motion just occurred and still occurring. The device is repeated and manipulated. Operating in reverse, Cantalbert is literally kicked out from several successive monastic chambers. Sound effects issue from beyond other arches, implying activity within. In one sequence, Cantalbert must take a duck to the "Butcher Shoppe" to be slaughtered. He is effectively "off panel," behind the door, pulling at a string tied around the duck's neck. A few slight motion lines indicate the duck's halting progress as he resists the unseen, implied tugging taking place within (and further implied by the taught string). Again, one motion device activates another.


Blechman wrings variety from the physical page, his basic graphic unit. Some pages contain stacked images, many contain only one panel. The image area and the scale of the image varies, with some drawings more elliptical than others: Blechman may only draw upper torsos, or feet, or mouths. The variable and frequently generous whitespace between his image area and page border functions as a kind of non-specific melding of frame and gutter: an allusive halo around each image. The sequences that most strongly imply the techniques of cartoon animation only occur occasionally, when an image maintains a fixed position from page to page (in the manner of a flip-book). In the longest such sequence, Cantalbert becomes despondent at his inability to fashion a sufficiently elaborate gift for the Virgin Mary and wanders away, becoming smaller and more distant over four consecutive pages. However, within the book's graphic context the increasing space around Cantalbert is as significant as the illusionistically receding figure. Because nothing else is implied by the drawing, the "nothing" around Cantalbert expands to the edge of the page while the juggler's figure is increasingly minimized.


The efficacy of Blechman's graphic notation system is most powerfully expressed when Cantalbert sneaks into the cathedral in the dead of the night to perform his juggling act: Giant gothic arches of the kind seen before fill a two-page spread to the very edges, dwarfing the familiar icon of the juggling Cantalbert. This is the largest image in the book, and the contrast of the two previously established graphic devices — the arches and the juggler — functionally imply a sense of enormity that derives from the book's larger graphic context. The slightest bit of perspective within the giant windows enhances the effect. The drawing is simple, but the effect is dramatic. Symbols combine again at the book's end, as the brothers emulate Cantalbert from within their cells.


It may be surprising to discover that such a well-executed work was accomplished, by Blechman's account, at short notice, in a single night. But the book's development of simple but effective visual language is based upon the focused, forward momentum of basic picture writing. Blechman defines an image and then uses, and even abbreviates, that image to convey a meaning; the impulse is to proceed rather than to re-embellish. Blechman's graphic intelligence comes through in the manipulation and combination of pictograms to create new and different scenarios that surprise the reader without betraying their context; as the drawings become symbols, the book's graphic vocabulary expands. The book makes cunning use of basic narrative devices stripped, like Blechman's style, down to their essentials. Behind the humorous "sort-of Christmas story," these are the devices that make the Juggler work. In the simplest possible way, Blechman, like Cantalbert, is showing us his best tricks. 

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Footnotes
1 Collected in 1959 as Passionella and Other Stories. Return...

2 "Among the Other Books of the Week," September 29, 1953 Return...

3 This sense of internal movement is occasionally enhanced further by the addition of a hoop spinning around the juggler's leg. Paradoxically, the smaller movement of the hoop occasions a more significant notation than the elaborate system of balls, or the "running" legs. This may be because less can be reasonably inferred: a hoop about a foot may be on the point of coming to rest, while a cycle of balls can only reasonably be understood to represent a continuous pattern of movement. The larger motion lines inscribe the hoop's tight circle of movement and imply accelerated speed, emphasizing the increased difficulty of the juggler's trick. Return...