Art Spiegelman: Lips
Interview by Harvey Blume
- H: One of the hot items in art today is the integration of text
and image. But as becomes obvious in Drawn to Text: Comix Artists as
Book Illustrators, a show you curated in New York City, comic book
artists have been doing it for a long time. R. Crumb does it
marvelously, for example, in his rendition of Kafka's The Hunger
Artist.
AS: The Crumb piece is the most like a regular comic as opposed to
an illustrated book. It's almost as if he goes directly to the
narrative, rather than to the words that made up that narrative. All
of the other pieces in that show use the language of the original
narrative.
How to interweave with the text was one of my main aesthetic
problems in The Wild Party. I chose to over-illustrate. By over-
illustrating, you acknowledge the presence of pictures as a kind of
jazz riff moving around the central melody. Over-illustration took
the form, for instance, of supplying blueprints. If you have the
words, "studio, bedroom, bath, kitchenette" you've got it all.
Showing it as well, giving it visual form in a blueprint, doesn't
take anything away from the text, it runs parallel to it.
The other example is, "He gave her wrist a twist," and there's
a picture of a hand with an arrow showing which direction he's
twisting her wrist. Over-illustrating allowed me to function as a
commentator, and also as a kind of improviser moving around and
through the text, decorating a book and allowing you to have that
book. This is a book that wouldn't have been published if I hadn't
wanted to draw it.
- H: You did pagination as well.
- AS: I designed page lay-out. This book has a good flip as they say
in the magazine business.
- H: There are times when you are very active as an over-illustrator
in The Wild Party and times when you back off.
- AS: Times when the imagery is parenthetical and even times where
there are no pictures across the spread by way of acknowledging
there wasn't much to illustrate on that page and that the book has a
rhythm of its own.
I want to point out that the Céline book on view in Drawn to
Text, which was done by Jaques Tardi, who is very well known in
France, had real impact. Tardi took on a writer whose position in
French culture is very dicey and gave him the deluxe treatment.
- H: Céline was a neo-fascist anti-Semite, a neo-fascist anti-
Semite, that is, who was a great writer.
- AS: So Tardi, who if anything is a gentleman of the left,
illustrates Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the
Installment Plan profusely and makes a coffee table book out of
Céline. It left people with their jaws hanging open. The book is a
huge success in France, selling over one hundred thousand copies. It
is a massive work, involving hundreds of pictures and called
attention to Céline in a way that forced a reassessment of him.
- H: So we have a left-wing illustrator dealing with a right-wing
writer and producing something that boggles everyone. That brings me
to MAUS, which is also just about unclassifiable. I've seen
bookstores stock it as a novel. But it's not a novel. It eludes all
the genre categories, including the division between high and low
culture. This elusiveness as to genre is not an incidental part of
its appeal.
- AS: The Wild Party is not going to find an easy place in the
bookstore either. It might get put in poetry but it won't be happy
there because it's as much a book I've worked with as it is a poem.
- H: In the introduction to The Wild Party you write: "In this
Postmodern moment we can see them all simultaneously-the austerity
of the '30s, the Genocide of the '40s, the platform shoes of the
70s-while we plummet into the millennium, as if we were drowning and
watching our past flash before us."
If someone asked me for a good example of postmodernism, I
might point to MAUS.
- AS: I didn't know what postmodernism was until I read an essay by
Todd Gitlin in the New York Times Book Review in which he cited MAUS
as a primary example of it. I hope I am not misquoting him when I
say he wrote MAUS was the primary example of postmodernism still
engaged with ethical concerns. His take is that postmodernism is an
unmooring from any kind of ethical concern and a move toward amoral
collage.
- H: Postmodernism also implies genre meltdown, so that it gets very
hard to classify things, including distinctions between fact and
fiction.
- AS: I had an entertaining moment with the New York Times Book
Review when MAUS was given a spot as a bestseller in the fiction
category. I wrote a letter saying that David Duke would be quite
happy to read that what happened to my father was fiction. I said I
realized MAUS presented problems in taxonomy but I thought it
belonged in the nonfiction list. They published the letter and moved
MAUS to nonfiction.
But it turns out there was a debate among the editors. The
funniest line transmitted back to me was one editor saying, let's
ring Spiegelman's doorbell. If a giant mouse answers, we'll put MAUS
in nonfiction.
- H: You also weighed in on a debate over Schindler's List, I
gather, saying the movie misrepresents the way Jews looked during
the Holocaust-to which somebody responded, oh, does Spiegelman think
they looked like mice?
- AS: Yes. What happened was I had been lured into a roundtable
discussion for the Village Voice on Schindler's List. I tried to
wriggle out of it but eventually let it happen. I wanted to avoid
what befell Claude Lanzmann, who became obsessed with disclaiming
Schindler's List and was seen incorrectly, I believe, as somehow
mean-spiritedly trying to insist on the supremacy of his vision of
the genocide.
- H: As in who owns the Holocaust.
- AS: Yes, and I was not interested in saying if there is any
knowledge of the Holocaust it should come through MAUS and not
Schindler's List. On the other hand, the film was a failure for me
even if it was a big box office success. That had to do with it not
facing up to the problems of representation that come with the
territory. I don't think the traditional narrative cinematic mode
lends itself well to that issue. Seeing things through the eyes of
the protagonist, of a hero, is already dicey. And then there are
problems having to do with seeing through the eyes of a Righteous
Gentile while still attempting to maintain that this is but one
tributary story of the genocide, not to be mistaken for the central
drama.
And there's the usual S&M of Hollywood movies: every sexual
moment in the film is followed by a violent moment pertaining to
mass death. And there's a kind of ersatz, an attempt to create
verisimilitude that couldn't help but fail. It's stupid just to
complain the actors were too well-fed, but it's something one has to
contend with. An actor does not normally look like a skeleton. You
cannot starve actors for two years before letting them appear on the
screen, and yet it leads to problems.
The most effective moment for me was one of the weakest bits of
the film-the tail-end when the real survivors are walking next to
the actors.
- H: Right after they finish singing in Hebrew-as if all survivors
were taught Israeli songs at the very beginning of the Holocaust in
case it would come in handy later.
- AS: In the middle of this demented moment a different possibility
arose. If you'd had the actual survivors walk through the entire
movie with the actors showing how it was and how it should be done,
you would have had a Pirandello-like movie.
- H: You say the Hollywood narrative is inadequate for the
Holocaust. One of the sources cited for the breakdown of traditional
narrative is the Holocaust itself, which fractures traditional
styles and artistic conventions.
MAUS, for example, is both extremely serious and, despite it
all, delightful. And it is a comic book, so you actually look
forward to it, rather than bracing yourself for the emotional
wringer of genocide. And you effortlessly introduce meta-narrative;
you are writing MAUS and at the same time writing about writing it.
You keep doubling back, but it's not at all complicated or daunting.
It's engaging to see you worrying about the course of the book as
you write it. It all comes across naturally.
- AS: There's much more of what would later be called postmodernism
involved in my earlier comics than there was consciously while I was
making MAUS. Before MAUS I was much more involved in deconstructing
comics. In MAUS I actually made a decision counter to MAUS being
postmodern-and yet it is anyway.
The narrative I got from my father certainly wasn't conveyed in
chronological form. I had to make a choice early on whether to keep
the chain of thoughts as it came from him-the association of ideas
that would lead from an event in the 50s to another in the 30s, say-
or employ a 19th-century notion of continuity that allows for
chronology. I thought about doing it more directly from the
conversations we had and realized that, no, what I would be caught
in was another set of conventions and devices as artificial,
ultimately, as the chronological one-one that has already been
explored very well by Joyce, thank you, that had to with streams of
consciousness.
- H: MAUS has not only complex chronology but levels of commentary.
You as a character in MAUS are having a hard time with your father,
the kind of hard time sons have with fathers. At the same time, you
as a writer are portraying Vladek as a man who did extraordinary
things the reader can't help but admire.
- AS: Somewhere along the line-the 20th century has a way of doing
this to 19th-century conventions-it was just impossible to stay with
a straightforward narrative but the goal was to tell the story
cleanly.
- H: In the piece you did earlier about your mother, which is
incorporated into MAUS, the art is quite different, more worked,
more mannered. By comparison, the look of MAUS itself is relatively
simple.
- AS: I did the strip about my mother's suicide in 1972 and started
working on MAUS in 1978. There were different needs. The earlier
work, Prisoner on the Hell Planet, used the visual conventions of
German expressionism for the kind of heightened emotionality that
seemed organically connected to my dealing with my mother's suicide,
an experience I was assimilating even as I was telling it. MAUS had
different requirements. I was getting a transmission I was
transmitting further, and that required, all else aside, a greater
degree of neutrality on the visual surface than Prisoner on the Hell
Planet.
- H: The text that came with the Drawn to Text exhibit made an
interesting point about how in Europe the distinctions between high
and low culture were less fixed. Comics start out as more of an
outcast form in America.
- AS: It was less stratified in Europe, more permeable. People known
as painters worked as graphics artists as well.
- H: In some ways that freed comics here, freed them from having to
be art.
- AS: That's true.
- H: You alluded to MAUS being an instance of postmodernism that has
not yet eschewed morality. There's a kind of morality to The Wild
Party as well. I think about The Wild Party as the libido unchained.
And then, as Joseph Moncure March would have it, "The door sprang
open/And the cops rushed in." Morality frames the book.
- AS: It's a moral description of an amoral milieu. I think Joseph
Moncure March was a pretty good journalist. He's describing people
he was able to observe, not people he necessarily identified with.
I've thought a lot about the problem of the moralistic aspect of The
Wild Party-OK, here's one more time when sex is punishable by death,
which is a dominant strand in American fiction. But it doesn't
really apply to The Wild Party. Here's an entire cast of sexually
active lowlife, none of whom are punished for their way of living.
The only punishment is meted out to one person who is genuinely a
bad character-beats women, nasty, just a mean man. He gets killed.
The other person who really suffers is Black. Black suffers not
for having sex with Queenie but for being naive. This is the
punishment of innocence. It has a lot to do with what the lost
generation was all about. The Wild Party came out around the time
when the potboiler was being invented and Black Mask was getting
going with Dashiell Hammett.
It seems to me something interesting was going on. I haven't
articulated it fully yet; I'm at the beginning of the book tour
rather than at the end.
- H: You'll know more at the end than at the beginning?
- AS: I've seen it happen before. There's a focusing of thought.
After that it becomes painful to be on the book tour but up until
then it's interesting.
There's a sensibility just being invented in the '20s that has
to do with loss of innocence. You can see it clearly in Chandler and
Hammett, Hemingway, and Joseph Moncure March. They're not
necessarily comparing notes but they're all trying to formulate
something. It has to do with the world being shattered by WWI, and
having to find a stance that allows one to live where it's clear the
center isn't holding anymore. That stance is a kind of cynicism, a
kind of worldliness that allows you to be non-judgmental and at the
same time superior to actions around you that you won't let suck you
in. That's the emotional pitch of books ranging from Fitzgerald to
Joseph Moncure March. After these writers you arrive at a point
where you don't know what that stance covers up any more; you don't
know what it's masking.
What's attractive to me in The Wild Party is the genuine joy in
discovering the debased possibilities of drunken parties. Hot jazz
is the closest possible analog. March was quite knowledgeable about
poetry. He creates echoing, flexible, syncopated rhymes. As in hot
jazz there's a kind of sensuality and innocence and cynicism all
mixed together, a real worldliness, a heightened presence that I
love in the jazz I listen to and in the graphics I see from the
'20s.
- H: What about this moment of the loss of innocence draws you?
- AS: It's always what interests me; it's what exists between
categories. It is when something is at the point of meeting
something else but hasn't melted into it. The example I keep going
back to is Seurat. I always like Seurat's paintings. Depending on
where you stand you see either dots or people in a park. But it's
not just a field of dots and it's not just people in a park. It's a
point of discovery because there are no easy categories.
It's true for Seurat, and it's true for this particular moment
of the zeitgeist that takes place in the '20s, and it's true for
comics becoming literature as they lose their central function as
things that sell newspapers, let's say.
- H: So breakdown of genre is the moment of possible discovery.
- AS: It's not just a breakdown of genre; very often it's a breakdown
of values. Genre is just the superficial manifestation.
- H: People get used to looking at genre for guarantees. Fiction is
fiction; nonfiction is nonfiction. When those sorts of distinctions
weaken, it can be unnerving.
- AS: And that's the terrifying moment that can lead to revelation.
Nonfiction associates itself with the exterior world and fiction
presumably deals with sensibility. There's a point where those
things do and must meet.
In Seurat, you have a post-Impressionist moment where the
question is what is a picture? Is the rectangle a window or is it a
canvas? Different values, different world views are implied in each
answer. Not just a matter of style, not just a matter of craft. And
there's a move eventually through Seurat to a certain kind of field
abstraction. Whatever value I find in totally non-representational
painting or in totally representational painting, the moment of
collision is the one where I get the biggest charge.
It's also true at the end of the '20s, before the '30s set in.
That particular curdled innocence of the '20s is still central to
me; and if there's a place where The Wild Party still remains
relevant in today's world it has to do with something I can't fully
articulate; it has to do with that particular collision, the
collision between the world that rhymes and the world that doesn't.
- H: This sheds a new light on your controversial 1993 Valentine's
Day New Yorker cover in which, during the conflict between Hasidim
and African Americans in Brooklyn, you portray a Hasidic man and a
black woman embracing. Values and worlds colliding, meeting.
- AS: It didn't come as a shock to me that this got people to sit up
and take notice. I'm interested in visual signs; and that's
certainly an aspect of the New Yorker cover and, in a very different
way, part of The Wild Party project.
- H: How does that apply to the New Yorker cover?
- AS: The signs are highly recognizable. The sign for Hasid is clear
and unavoidable, without the usual anti-Semitic physiognomy that
goes with it. The sign for African-American woman is equally
unavoidable, without entering into Aunt Jemima stereotypes or
anything of the kind. Then there's this other sign that has to do
with the Valentine's Card-the kiss, the field of red with the lacy
decoration around it, all of it weaving together separate meanings.
The irony is you have these two groups that are at each other's
throats at each other's lips instead. That's supposed to conjure up
carnality and yet Valentine's Day, the image of Valentine's Day,
isn't about carnality but a kind of benign romantic love. All those
things course through this image and the impossibility of it is
what's so entertaining for me.
What got people most upset that week was not other magazines
with the usual S&M imagery-chains and whips, leather and hurt-but
something quite benign on the surface, playing with signs. Reverend
Dougherty, a representative of the black community in Crown Heights,
was very upset I used a black woman: one more time, he said, a white
man was oppressing a black woman. Why didn't I have a black man and
a Hasidic woman, he asked on the radio. Maybe he's a good reverend,
I don't know, but he's a rotten art director. A Hasidic man is a lot
easier to recognize than a woman with a handkerchief on her head. In
terms of visual signs you've got one thing that works and one thing
that doesn't. Even more important, I answered him, if I had used a
black man and Hasidic woman, you'd be complaining I was once again
showing the black man as a rapist and defiler of white woman. This
shows me the problem has nothing to do with the signs being shown
but the reverberation of those signs in people's heads.
The same thing happened in op-ed articles. There was an op-ed
in the New York Times in which a woman who was very upset about the
New Yorker cover writes about the Jew's lascivious lips. Another
person, equally upset in the Washington Post, described the Jew's
prim lips. Now you know I can't draw lips that are simultaneously
lascivious and prim; I'm limited.
- H: Sure you can.
- AS: I did. I just drew lips.
Harvey Blume is a Contributing Editor of the Boston Book Review.
©1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.
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