Comment: Beyond The City Limits

With the comics adaptation of Paul Auster's CITY OF GLASS finally back in print, Chris Ekman uncovers what makes it such an extraordinary work - and proposes an alternative avenue for Art Spiegelman's aborted comics lit experiments.
13 September 2004

JUST LIKE A REAL BOOK WITHOUT PICTURES IN IT, ONLY WITH PICTURES IN IT

It started, as these things so often do, with Art Spiegelman. With MAUS, he had created something hardly anybody thought possible - a comic with real literary merit. The problem was that MAUS, by itself, could be dismissed as a fluke. For the comics medium to win lasting cultural credibility, MAUS needed to have, as Spiegelman liked to put it, "company on the bookshelf", graphic novels that would be novelistic in more than just name. And so he hatched a scheme: he would rope top prose novelists into writing graphic novels.

This was a noble effort, but it was plainly doomed from the outset. Spiegelman later admitted as much in a Comics Journal interview: "It's actually an awesome task to learn to write for comics... [and] if you're going to move yourself into a situation where you're going to have to rely on a collaborator and where you're not really going to be in control of the results the way you are with your word processor, typewriter or notepad, then you might as well be making a movie script, because the recompense is far greater."

But the idea didn't die; it just mutated. By 1994, it had turned into Neon Lit, a line of graphic novels founded by Spiegelman and Bob Callahan for prose publisher Avon. Rather than soliciting new stories, Neon Lit would adapt existing novels to comics form. The novels chosen would be acclaimed, but they would also be noir or noir-flavored, to preserve the air of disreputability that Spiegelman cherishes, and also to put as much distance as possible between the line and its most obvious predecessor, the ham-handed and faux-edifying old comics series CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED.

The first product of Neon Lit was CITY OF GLASS, an adaptation of the 1985 novel by Paul Auster, laid out in large part by Paul Karasik and drawn by David Mazzucchelli. It got a good press, and was even hailed by some of the comics cognoscenti as a landmark achievement for the medium. But something went wrong with Spiegelman's grand scheme. Neon Lit put out just one more book, PERDITA DURANGO, a sequel of sorts to Barry Gifford's WILD AT HEART; Scott Gillis' grotesque scratchboard art was impressive, but the storytelling lacked the spark that made CITY OF GLASS special. The line then dwindled away. The planned third book, underground legend Spain Rodriguez's adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's NIGHTMARE ALLEY, didn't straggle its way into print until last year. And CITY OF GLASS fell out of print for years, only being republished just last month.

BREAKING DOWN IN THE CITY

In order to discuss CITY OF GLASS, it's necessary to outline the plot. Spoilers will abound, naturally, although it would be impossible to give away the ending, because, in the conventional sense, there isn't one. (I'll explain later.)

The protagonist is Daniel Quinn, a writer, formerly with literary ambitions but now content to churn out a series of detective novels under a pseudonym. He is reclusive; he lost his wife and young child in a car accident a few years before we meet him, and still has not recovered. The story begins when he receives a mysterious phone call from somebody mistaking him for an actual detective named Paul Auster, seeking to hire him. The caller is persistent, and Quinn, on a whim, takes the job.

The client turns out to be a pale, stunted man-child named Peter Stillman. His father, also named Peter Stillman, was a brilliant academic who became obsessed with the idea of restoring the original, prelapsarian language of God to mankind, and thereby also restoring paradise. To that end, he locked his son away from all human contact starting at the age of two, in order to keep him uncorrupted by earthly language. After nine years, Stillman the elder was found out and institutionalized. Now, old Stillman is due to be released, and young Peter, at the urging of his wife and caretaker Virginia, has sought out 'Auster's' services for protection.

Quinn throws himself into the role, methodically trailing Stillman the elder and plying him for information. But Quinn never deciphers Stillman's intentions, and eventually loses his trail. In desperation, Quinn seeks the counsel of the real Paul Auster, but he turns out to be just another writer like himself. With that, Quinn snaps, and all he can think to do is to stake out young Peter's apartment, which he does for months on end, living on the street and sleeping as little as he can manage. When he finally gives up, he discovers that Peter and Virginia have disappeared without a trace, and that the reason he lost the trail of Stillman is because the old man had jumped off a bridge, his mad plans unfulfilled.

Basically, CITY OF GLASS is a novel of ideas masquerading as a detective story. That in itself wasn't new; Umberto Eco had had phenomenal success with the same ploy in THE NAME OF THE ROSE, which had been translated into English a couple years before. Auster's twist was that his mystery had no solution. We don't get to find out what the elder Stillman's plans were, or why he killed himself, or what happened to young Peter or Virginia, or even what ultimately happens to Daniel Quinn. Nor is there any explanation for the compound case of mistaken identity that set the plot in motion.

THE CASE OF THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

Auster was not just employing the detective story form but trying to subvert it. The mystery genre is predicated on the reassuring assumptions that everything happens for a reason, and that it's possible to figure out what those reasons are if you look hard enough. But in the absurd universe of CITY OF GLASS, to place one's faith in detection and deduction is a form of madness. (Odd, come to think of it, that it should be titled CITY OF GLASS - Auster's city couldn't be more opaque.)

Auster gives the game away early on: no sooner does Quinn embark on the case than do the gods start playing pranks on him. He sets out to intercept Stillman when he disembarks from his train on the day of his release, but once at the station, Quinn finds himself confronted by two identical Stillmans, one prosperous-looking and one bedraggled, and can't guess which is genuine. The narrator pronounces Quinn's sentence: "There was nothing Quinn could do now that would not be a mistake... there was no way to know: not this, not anything."

Savvy readers will immediately recognize this statement, that 'True Knowledge Is Impossible', as a central tenet of the postmodern creed. Nor does Auster neglect the other tenets. Right from the beginning, the account of the satisfaction Daniel Quinn takes in hiding behind his fictional creation and his authorial pseudonym signals that he's in for a harsh lesson in how Identity Is A Construct.

Sure enough, as the case wears on, Quinn submerges his personality in his "Auster" persona so completely that he ultimately finds he can't get it back and doesn't much care. The sections on old Stillman's theories demonstrate that 'Language Is A Construct', one that shapes and obscures reality as much as it illuminates it. There are reminders throughout the book, most blatantly in a shoehorned-in discourse on DON QUIXOTE, that 'All Texts Are Unreliable'.

After that, all that's left for an encore is to show that 'Reality Itself Is A Construct'. Quinn begins the case by trying to record what he observes, in as much detail as possible, in his pleasingly official-looking red notebook. By the end, Quinn has lost all interest in the real world, and writing in the notebook has become an end in itself for him - he does it every waking moment until he runs out of pages, at which point he suffers an existential crisis, and nothing more is heard from him.

It's all very clever, and though it's not at all as mechanical as I've made it sound above, the book really could serve as a primer on the postmodern sensibility. But that's not entirely to the book's advantage. Postmodernism, whatever its accomplishments, is a little dated now, and certainly no longer radical. These days, to argue that 'True Knowledge is Impossible' is to sound less like a young literary turk than a White House spokesman. And the word games that Auster loves and that postmodern discourse privileges (oh, hell, I'm even lapsing into the jargon) aren't always that fun or interesting or profound.

It's telling that the allegedly brilliant professor Stillman, when Quinn engages him in conversation, turns out to be full of drivel, clichés and easy puns. In one encounter, Stillman reveals that his theories on language are based on Humpty Dumpty, and ends by pointing out that the moon sometimes resembles an egg.

The New York Times called CITY OF GLASS (and its two companion books in what Auster called The New York Trilogy) "a work of manifest originality, if not genius." I don't normally go around gainsaying the New York Times, but I would not go so far as to call CITY OF GLASS a work of manifest originality. The book's manner is strongly reminiscent of Beckett, and the premise has more than a whiff of Borges. And for all its ingenuity, I wouldn't call it a work of genius either.

TRANSITIONS

However, I might call the comics version of CITY OF GLASS a work of genius. I think it's one of those rare adaptations that improve on the original. Just the shift in mediums was a change for the better. One of Auster's themes was the limitations of language, but he had only language with which to convey it. Add pictures and pictograms to the mix, and things get interesting. Auster, through Professor Stillman, posits an original, universal language in which there was no distance between words and the things they describe. What better medium to express this idea in than comics, with its roots in the hieroglyphic languages of early man, in which words and pictures were one and the same?

It's impossible to imagine anybody other than David Mazzucchelli pulling this off. Mazzucchelli's impressionistic, deceptively simple art style allowed him, with a minimum of effort, to switch back and forth between representational and iconic modes. If it weren't for that flexibility, the book wouldn't work. It was essential that the physical world be invested with only slightly more substance than the world of ideas and symbols.

Paul Karasik did a bravura job as well. For starters, he was able to hold the page count to less than that of the original novel, and yet it hardly feels as if he cut anything. (Because Auster's prose style is fairly spare, not much had to be lost in the translation, but nonetheless, Karasik deserves credit for zeroing in on the essentials. I notice little things he did cut that I think the book is better off without, like much of Stillman's drivel to Quinn, or the occasional mentions of dreams Quinn had and never remembered, which the narrator, who's supposedly relying on Quinn's own notes, shouldn't know about.)

But more important than that is Karasik's attention to structure. The book is full of recurring motifs that repay careful re-readings. And the use of nine-panel grid, WATCHMEN-style, was a masterstroke. Karasik described his inspiration to a magazine called The Ganzfeld; after drawing a page that turned the grid into prison bars, he said to himself, "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 the grid down in very subtle ways. As his sanity leaves, the drawing itself will start to disintegrate and the grid will start going off-kilter."

It's a distinct relief when, in the last few pages of the book, once Quinn has finally disappeared, the layouts become more organic and shades of grey soften the artwork - which goes to show how effective the preceding 120-odd pages of strict gridwork were. Karasik and Mazzucchelli thus manage to get across one of the central messages of Auster's novel - that pure rationality can be a trap - almost entirely by means of rhythm. That's damned impressive.

FOOTLIGHT LIT

With a debut as good as CITY OF GLASS, why did Neon Lit fail? It's hard to know. It seems likely that the market just wasn't ready. However, the market today is as ready as it's ever likely to get, and if Mr Spiegelman or some similarly well-connected person is reading, I have a proposal. This time, instead of trying to get novelists involved with comics, why not approach playwrights?

Remember why Spiegelman said the novelists turned him down when asked for original work: they weren't sure they could master the grammar of the medium, and they weren't used to collaborating with anybody. But plays resemble comic scripts a lot more closely than prose books do. And playwrights are used to collaboration. Their work is ever at the mercy of directors, actors and actresses, designers, and technicians. It would no doubt be a breeze for them to deal with just a single person, the cartoonist, who could fill all those roles and more.

And, believe it or not, there is a kinship between the two art forms. Ben Katchor, the McArthur-grant-winning cartoonist best known for his alt-weekly strip JULIUS KNIPL: REAL ESTATE PHOTOGRAPHER, is working on a musical, and while talking to the Philadelphia Inquirer about it last Friday, he explained: "The early, early comic strips from the 16th century were an attempt to graphically record what happened in the theater. Theater is pictures of people talking. How do you represent that graphically? You write it, you don't get the picture. You draw it, you don't get the words. So that's how comics started." It's a distant and slightly tenuous link, but it suits my purposes and therefore I'm running with it.

What can the comics medium offer to playwrights? Exposure. Theater, at least in America, is far from the cultural force it was a generation or two ago. More and more, Broadway has had to swipe from other media in order to grab attention; last season, the big new trend was making shows out of old cult movies (THE PRODUCERS, HAIRSPRAY, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, etc, with MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL yet to come), and this season, the big new trend - borrowed from London's West End - is building shows around the hits of old pop groups, (Abba, Queen, Billy Joel, etc).

Of course, there's still plenty of innovation happening off-Broadway, and lately there's been a surge of imaginative political dissent as well. But in the commercial mainstream, theatre is showing some of the same symptoms of waning relevance as classical music did: graying audiences; prohibitively high ticket prices; and many major venues performing the old warhorses of the repertory to the exclusion of new work, except for dubious attempts at crossover into popular fields. Without aggressive promotion and outreach, it's easy to imagine theatre becoming, like classical music, a field that educated people no longer feel obliged to keep up with.

Of course, adapting plays to comics probably wouldn't get them a huge audience. But it could get them a new audience, made up of people who wouldn't ordinarily think to go to the theatre (or who can't easily go because they don't live near an arts-friendly city). A graphic novel version could be the next best thing to a recording of a performance: you don't get sound or motion, true, but neither do you get budgetary constraints or editorial meddling, as you would in TV or film. And a collaboration between comics and theatre would help keep both in the cultural conversation. Now that comics have built up a little hipster cred, a marriage like this becomes eminently thinkable.

All that would be needed is somebody with enough clout in the arts world to make the necessary connections. It could easily be Spiegelman, who has at least a toehold in theatre - his big project prior to 9/11 was a musical about the early days of comic book publishing called DRAWN TO DEATH. But he's not the only one who could make it happen. I hope somebody gives it a try. After all, even if such a project were to sputter out as Neon Lit did, if it produced one book on a par with CITY OF GLASS, it would be well worth it.

Chris Ekman is a political cartoonist.

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