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Studies in Comics

Volume 1 Number 1

© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.107/1

STIC 1 (1) pp. 107–125 Intellect Limited 2010

PAUL ATKINSONMonash University

The graphic novel as metafiction

Abstract

This article takes as its object of analysis the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass (1985) by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (2004). The adaptation serves as the ground upon which to analyse the differences between novels and graphic novels with respect to how they employ metafictional devices.

Metafiction involves the use of strategies, in most cases peculiar to the medium, which force the reader to reflect on the fictionality of the text and, consequently, the nature of writing. One of the main targets of such strategies is the reader’s perception of the unity of the narrative voice and its role in establishing a coherent ontology. One of the strengths of Auster’s novel is its capacity to establish and then subvert the narrative voice through a series of unexplained ontological shifts in the plot and repeated contraventions of the rules separating the author, character and narrator. The reader is continually seduced into thinking that the preci-sion of the narration will lead to a coherent account of the relationship between the various plot strands, but this assumption is repeatedly challenged, as is the reliability of the authorial voice. Karasik and Mazzucchelli endeavour to reproduce the ontological uncertainty of Auster’s text but they are presented with a difficulty that arises from the duality of narration in the graphic novel, as each thought, description and passage of dialogue is accompanied by a sequence of images. The structure of the graphic novel is such that the verbal

Keywords

graphic novelsmetafictionPaul AusterPaul Karasik and David Mazzucchelliadaptation

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narrative is always incorporated into the spatial field, which, I will argue, is accorded ontological priority. The visual narration includes details that are not present in Auster’s novel, and this sometimes confirms or supports a particular narrative thread that remains only a latent possibility in the novel. At the same time, the visual narration is imbued with a consistency not found in the shifting narrative voice of the novel.

The article will draw on theorists working within the various sub-disciplines (Philippe Marion (1993), Thierry Groensteen (2007) and Brian McHale (1987)). The theory of metafiction is used to develop some of the questions concerning adaptation and to explore further the role that the image plays in delineating the comic book’s fictional world.

The adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass – the first of The New York Trilogy – into a ‘graphic novel’ of the same name by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli raises a number of issues relating to the adaptation of prose forms into image-based sequential narratives – graphic novels, bande dessinées and comic books. Rather than proffer an evaluation of the particular adaptation, the focus of this article is on the narrative and formal properties of the texts. The problem with an evaluative approach is that it asserts a fundamental difference between the original and the copy, or between the thing-in-itself and a derivative. The adaptation, in this case the graphic novel, is always secondary and is judged according to what it contains or lacks; in the case of a well-received original, such as Auster’s City of Glass, it is easy to fall into a prejudgement that any adaptation will only ever be a diminution of the original. Instead, this analysis of the adaptation of City of Glass examines the metafictional aspects of the novel and how these are manifest in the graphic form, with emphasis on the way the text is read and how this is specific to each medium. It is common for metafiction to question the reader’s concep-tion of the relationship between the author, character and narrator, in particular the conception of a consistent story world and its separation from the world occupied by the author. In the graphic novel there should be a similar process of questioning but it is built on a different foundation that must take into account the structure of the page and a much more diffuse notion of an authorial voice.

The novel City of Glass (1985) is the first novel in the trilogy and shares with the other two texts, Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), a number of themes, names of characters, places and events, but unlike most trilogies it is difficult to plot a chronology or even a consistent field of action that links together the texts. It is, ostensibly, a detective novel insofar as the protagonist, Daniel Quinn, is employed to protect a man, Peter Stillman Jnr, from his father, Peter Stillman Snr, and this involves following and observing the latter. However, the role of the detective segues into that of a literary detective and much of the novel is a meditation on the relationship between writing and observation, which, by extension, questions the relationship between language and objects. This reflection on the nature of writing leads to many intertextual excursions, where the reader is asked to ponder the limits of the fictional world and its

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relationship to a non-fictional world occupied by the author. In doing so, the book has one of the key features of what Brian McHale calls postmodern fiction, and which also applies to metafiction: there is a questioning of fictional boundaries and the condensation into a single fictional text of ontologies that logically should not co-exist, or be allowed to interpenetrate (McHale 1987: 10). This is a feature of both film and literature. For example in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), the protagonists constantly move back and forwards through different layers of a virtual reality game such that the viewer finds it almost impossible to establish a frame of reference. In literature, there are also shifts in the frame of ref-erence, which are dependent on different functions of the narrative voice. In Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, a description of an encounter between two characters abruptly changes into a statement directly addressing the reader: ‘One thing is immediately clear to you: namely that this book has nothing in common with the one you had begun’ (Calvino 1981: 53), which brings the act of reading the book – something the narrator should have no knowledge of – into the book itself.

This uncertainty as to who is speaking and from where they are speaking is central to metafiction, which, like ‘surfiction’, leads the reader to reflect upon the text’s artificiality and, in doing so, question the structure of referentiality and the boundary that separates fictional and non-fictional worlds. According to Patricia Waugh, metafiction ‘self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about fiction and reality’ (Waugh 1995: 40). To draw attention is not only to ask the reader to attend to one aspect of a text – in the case of the City of Glass, the architecture of reading – but also to draw attention away from an ostensibly transparent storyline. The metafictional text is only an artefact if the reader is able to step out of the story, that is, remove themselves from the flow of events in the story and recognize that the text (novel, poem, play, graphic novel) is an object of human construction. This is a re-cognition because the reader knows that it is a work of fiction before they read it but, unlike most novels, the metafictional reader is then constantly reminded of the fictional status of the text. What is of particular importance to this article is that the means of drawing attention depends on the medium itself, and that the comic book, with its reliance on the particularity of spatial organization, must utilize different metafictional techniques to prose-based texts.

There are two types of reading that are invoked by metafiction: the reading of the story as story, and the critical reflection on the nature of storytelling. The pleasure and/or the frustration of reading metafictional texts relates to the requirement that the reader maintain both stances. For Mark Currie, metafiction constantly invokes the critic in the act of telling the story and, in this juxtaposition of criti-cism and fiction, there is dissolution of many of the ‘illusions’ that sustain the story: in particular through ‘the dramatisation of the external communication between author and reader’ (Currie 1995: 4). This critical function stands above and outside for it places the text in relation to other texts – to a real world that is ontologically distinct from the fictional world, and to the various functions of writing that are not restricted to any one story. Metafiction, therefore, depends on the coexistence of a frame of reference that is both outside the story and yet is somehow invoked or referred to from inside the


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story, such that the boundary between inside and outside is blurred. In the City of Glass, the reader is asked to participate as a critic because the changes in narratorial and authorial position make it diffi-cult to locate a narrative field that logically contains all the other stories. The reader is given models for how the text should be read, including an elaborate explanation of the novel Don Quixote given by a writer called Paul Auster in the text. Auster (the character) argues that Quixote orchestrated his mad-ness in order to achieve literary notoriety and fame. In this version of the story, Sancho Panza becomes Quixote’s witness; although Sancho himself mistakenly believes that he is retelling Quixote’s story in order to cure the latter of his folly, in truth he is being manipulated by Quixote (Auster 1985: 99). The reader is later asked to associate Don Quixote with Daniel Quinn because, as Quinn himself notes, both share ‘the same initials’ (Auster 1985: 129) and with this as a link the minor story acts as a mirror to the main story and complicates the relationship between inside and outside.

In City of Glass this mirroring of one story within another is largely enacted through the use of the detective fiction format, where Quinn is not only a writer but also acts as a private investigator. Mark Currie states that one of the most important devices in metafiction is the foregrounding of nar-ration, where a narratee stands in for the reader and encourages the reader to critically reflect upon how they are addressed by the text. This can take the form of a detective who is essentially a ‘surro-gate reader’ and ‘whose role in the narrative is to make sense of unintelligible events or to grapple with a mystery’ (Currie 1995: 4). The figure of Daniel Quinn certainly fits this image for he not only acts as a detective, he also reflects upon his reading of detective fiction and his role as a crime writer. The capacity for the ‘reader to critically reflect’ is opened up through Quinn’s musing on the nature of fiction: for example, early in the novel Quinn describes his appreciation of the genre due to its ‘economy’ of expression:

What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mys-tery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so – which amounts to the same thing.

(Auster 1985: 8)

The reader is cautioned that they should attend to every detail because each could be a clue and, as such, has the potential to fundamentally change the direction of the plot (Auster 1985: 8). This soon becomes a spatial metaphor where, in the detective novel:

Everything becomes essence; the centre of the book shifts with each event that propels it for-ward. The centre, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to an end.

(Auster 1985: 8)



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It is only at the narrative’s end that the reader will have a coherent account of the whole. Until then the reader must follow the plot which ebbs and flows with each word and each event. The metafic-tional text also initiates this constant movement, where the reader searches for clues but, unlike the detective novel, there is no denouement or ‘circumference’ that will draw all the threads together; that is, there is no coherent ontology. In each of the novels of The New York Trilogy there is no denouement because the desired object disappears – in City of Glass, it is the disappearance of Stillman Snr – which leads to the protagonist’s loss of identity or purpose (Zilcosky 1998: 196). In removing this purpose, the book also raises metaphysical questions concerning the relativity of meaning due to the futility of the protagonists’ search for truth.

In the use of a spatial metaphor, the novel compares writing to creating a map, where in the ini-tial stages there is a degree of uncertainty but eventually the various threads will be brought together to create a coherent whole. This is also a ground upon which to analyse the differences between novels and graphic novels, in particular, when it comes to metafiction. How does writing as a move-ment, with the potential to take any direction, compare to writing in a comic book? In an early pas-sage in the novel, one which is reproduced on the back cover of Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel adaptation, the protagonist reflects on what it means to walk randomly through the city, in a manner reminiscent of the French situationists of the 1960s:

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 neighbourhoods 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 […] By wander-ing aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

(Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 4)1

In Quinn’s walks through the city ‘All places become equal’ because there is no pre-given organ-izing principle or formal cause that can contain the whole. Likewise, readers of fiction can find themselves lost at any point because a single sentence has the capacity to completely transform the field of action. This is possible because the content of a subsequent passage or sentence is not foreseeable unless this is somehow prefigured in the existing text – in what is being read or has been read. When we glance at the page we are about to read, there is no clear indication of what will happen as the content of the succeeding sentence is not visible. In a novel, the text remains mute until it is read and this allows metafictional texts to continually dumbfound the reader with sudden shifts in mode or context – like following a meandering melody line in a jazz

1. The graphic novel quotes accurately from the novel except that, in most extended passages such as this one, some phrases and sentences are omitted to accommodate the structure of the page. The graphic novel must not overburden the image with too much text as this does not allow sufficient room for the eye to move across the image, and this can often also give the impression that the movement of the characters is severely restricted.


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2. This pre-visualization of the narrative can also be related to a conceit in the novel where Quinn traces the daily walks of Stillman Snr on paper in search of an explanation for his actions. He realizes that each walk corresponds to a letter and from this discerns the phrase ‘The Tower of Babel’ (Auster 1985: 66–69; Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 62–64). This overall explanation mimics the reader’s own search for a meta-narrative, which is, in essence, a word from the author or God. In the text, however, the meta-narrative is never confirmed. The phrase is another false lead that ultimately does not provide the reader with an explanation that can reconcile character action with narrative structure. In other words, this detective novel has no object to be discovered.

piece, where each note has the capacity to begin a new riff. The narrative voice of the novel is coincident with the present time of reading, with the future unforeseeable and the past con-structed retroactively.

In the comic book, however, there is a sense in which the past, present and future coexist. Benoit Peeters states in his book on how to read the bande dessinée, that there is an opportunity in the bande dessinée, unlike cinema, for the viewer to preview the whole page and, as such, no image, except for those at the turn of a page, are ‘inattendu’ (Peeters 1991: 34) or unexpected. The reader can look ahead because any object on the page can be glimpsed before it is read and this also applies to the compositional whole of the page, which serves as a formal cause that coordinates all the utterances that are contained within it. For example, in Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s adaptation, this above quoted passage from Auster’s text is reproduced on the back page, where we see an image of Quinn walking against the backdrop of the New York skyline at night. The page is further divided by a series of gut-ters in waffle format that regulate and frame the reading of the text. The image of the city as a whole is invoked through the metonym of the skyline and is conceptualized prior to the act of walking. In other words, there is a centralized and visualizable conception of New York, before the act of walk-ing.2 In the graphic novel, the character’s desire to be ‘nowhere’ is rendered impossible by the visual structure that frames his action. A similar structure is adopted on page 101 where Quinn walks across a map of New York, which is used to represent the uncertainty of his movement across the city, but again the panel borders contain the movement – the movement is never seen independently of a visual context.

The notion of spatial containment is one of the primary conditions of the comic book, and in the adaptation of a novel it serves as an empty stage that limits and shapes those words and events that are taken from the original. Thierry Groensteen, in The System of Comics, argues that it is possible to imagine a comic book without speech balloons, narrative serialization, etc., but it will always have what he calls ‘iconic solidarity’, referring to the situation where the images form part of a series, where each image is part of a structural logic; they are connected and yet remain separated (Groensteen 2007: 18). This organization also presumes that the comic book involves the reader ‘travers[ing]’ the page (Groensteen 2007: 19) as a means of assuring the images’ interdependence. In producing a comic book, it is not primarily the narrative that drives the separation and organization of images:

From the moment of sketching the first panel of a comic, the author has already taken […] some large strategic options (evidently modifiable by what follows), which concern the distri-bution of spaces and the occupation of places.

(Groensteen 2007: 21)



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The most important aspect of the discourse of comic books is the spatio-topical organization of the panels and, to a lesser degree, the linear sequence of the narrative (Groensteen 2007: 22). Each image must conform to the ‘geometric’ whole of the comic book, for this serves as the ‘physical support’ for any narrative articulation (Groensteen 2007: 25). To understand what a comic book is, we have to imagine it as a ‘multi-frame’ – note that Groensteen abstains from using the word ‘page’ because the word multi-frame can refer to a greater number of cases of panel organization including newspaper comic strips – is imagined before the act of organizing the narrative. This can be seen in many self-reflexive comics, where the blank page is already separated into panels (Groensteen 2007: 28).

This bringing together and separation of images that comprises the ‘multi-frame’ of all comic books guides the adaptation. This can be seen most clearly in those sections of City of Glass where the narrative is composed of direct speech. When Quinn first meets Peter Stillman Jnr, who has employed him to find and watch his father, the latter presents a long monologue describing his rela-tionship to his father and how he suffered as a child due to his father’s unusual ideas about child rearing and the acquisition of language. This is a very important speech because it provides the con-text for Quinn’s employment as a detective, and brings into question the relationship between lan-guage and objects, a theme of the novel. Consequently it cannot be omitted in the adaptation, but it does pose a problem insofar as the long monologue does not sit easily with the ‘multi-frame’ struc-ture of the comic book, and consideration must be given as to whether the speech should be distrib-uted across a number of panels or restricted to a single panel. Each solution has its own problems: a long monologue cannot fit into a single panel, as this would leave no room for the image. If it is dis-tributed, the question then turns to what visual content should fill the panels. In this particular exam-ple, Peter Stillman does not move from his chair as he delivers the speech: the question then is should the artist, to be faithful to the original, simply show repeated images of Peter speaking in speech balloons across a number of pages? However, here the repetition of the image would actually serve as a distraction from the monologue, because such a repetition is uncommon in comic books. In most comic books the images are visually distinct and if they do not change, then the viewer would look for minor differences between the panels.

The solution posed by Mazzucchelli and Karasik is quite ingenious. The monologue begins with an image of Stillman speaking and in the successive panels, which are all of equal size and presented in a 3X3 format, the shot distance decreases in a comic book equivalent of a zoom (figure 1). At the end of the page, all the reader can see is a mouth with a speech balloon issuing from it (Mazzucchelli, Karasik and Auster 2004: 15). The eye follows the tail of the speech balloon into the mouth of Stillman and metaphorically into the interiority of the subject (and possibly Stillman’s visual subconscious). In the subsequent pages, the speech balloon issues from a range of other subjects (the panel organiza-tion remains the same), which do not seem to bear any relationship to the spoken words (figure 2). This solution is interesting in that it incorporates a notion of identity, in the form of the character


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Figure 1: City of Glass, Mazzucchelli and Karasik, p. 15.



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3. Oulipo is an abbrevia-tion of Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, a largely French movement that arose in the 1960s and which used language games in the production of literature. These games include generative chess moves and others that allowed the reader to recombine sentences to create an almost infinite number of new works.

speaking, and of difference, in the change of the object speaking in each panel. It also confirms Groensteen’s point that the comic book is not driven strictly by the narrative, but rather by the requirement that there must be a division of the spatial field at the same time that the medium’s identity is established as a series.

This raises another question, to what degree is the ‘iconic solidarity’ of the multi-frame structure coincident with the speaking voice of the novel? If it is not coincident, then many of the metafictional devices used in the novel cannot be translated directly into the comic book. It is impossible to com-pletely separate writing from voice, whether in the form of dialogue, various levels and types of nar-ration or indeed the authorial voice. It is this notion of an authorial voice that exists as one of the conditions of writing, for it is difficult to rid oneself of the idea of a speaker while reading a text. Even if there are multiple authors or even if the text is automatically generated – one need only think of the various language generators used by members of Oulipo3 – the reader still imagines an overall guiding voice, an ‘implied author’ who, as Wayne Booth argues, is an axis through which the reader can conceptualize the ‘total form’ of the text (Booth 1961: 74). The voice of the author is understood to encompass all other voices in the text and serves as a limit point for any speculation about the meaning of the text.

Auster’s novel is, however, written after, and mindful of, the highly influential essay ‘The Death of the Author’ ([1967] 1977) by Roland Barthes and toys with the reader’s expectation as to the role the author plays in the production of meaning in the text. This includes the appearance in the diegesis of a character called Paul Auster who is also an author, which works to circumvent the accepted boundary in fictional texts separating the process of writing a text from the world that is contained in the text (Zilcosky 1998: 196). The only way to kill the author is to create a fictional double in the text, which undermines the author’s position as an invisible, guiding principle for the text as a whole. How can the author speak both from within the text as a character and yet fail to acknowledge this at the level of narration? It is in this gap between the different voices that the reader’s concept of a sta-ble authorial voice is undermined. The death of the author, however, is not an absolute as the reader continually shifts their attention between narrator, empirical Auster and the character Auster.

There are other correlations between the real-life Auster and the Auster doubles, Quinn and Fanshawe as well as the character Auster, in the City of Glass. Both Quinn and Fanshawe are writers (Zilcosky 1998: 200). Fanshawe and the empirical Auster ‘are exactly the same age’ (Zilcosky 1998: en 9) while Quinn once worked as a translator, as did the real-life Auster. To further destabilize the link between the voice of the author and narrator, the character Auster is even accused (by an unknown narrator in the last section of the novel) of failing to assist Quinn in his attempt to protect the Stillmans (Auster 1985: 131). The fact that another narrator is posited in counterpose to a char-acter called Auster displaces the narrative voice and further weakens the reader’s assumptions con-cerning the authorial voice’s capacity to always contain all other narrative voices. Zilcosky suggests



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4. This is of particular importance in autobiographies and autobiographical novels where the reader assumes that the author is speaking autobio-graphically even when the name of the author is not mentioned in the text, and especially if the story contains details that are commensurate with those in the author’s life. Philippe Lejeune examines this issue in his On Autobiography and argues that the autobiography differs from other ‘literary’ works in that there is an autobiographical pact that assumes some degree of fidelity on the part of the author (Lejeune 1988: 12–13).

that this act erases the reader’s image of the empirical author as the voice of the text, with Auster displaced into the position of an ‘implied author’ (Auster 1985: 199). All this serves to denaturalize the relationship between narration and authorship and, in doing so, highlight the artificiality of the text and turn the focus to writing itself.

In the graphic novel adaptation of City of Glass, these metafictional games with the readers’ expectations concerning authorship are complicated by the narrative conventions of the graphic novel. In the novel, the voice of the narrator is present even without any explicit indication of who is speaking, as is the case in most third-person narration, and such a voice can always be aligned by the reader to a speaker including the novelist (whether rightly or wrongly). In the absence of an explicit statement in the text to identify the narrator, this voice tends to devolve to the author or implied author.4 In other words, the author is the external limit of the text, the point of enunciation, until other voices are specified, that is, other limits to the voice (narrators) are posited. However, in the graphic novel, the multi-frame structure and the coexistence of text and image temper those metafic-tional shifts that are dependent on the consistency of the authorial voice.

The voice in literature serves as a form of limit to the text, defining the border between inside and outside the text. In literature the upper limit is the implied authorial voice within which many other voices – of characters, narrators, indirect speech, etc. – are heard. The implied authorial voice can be conceived as a container with no outside or the outermost boundary of enunciation. In other words, there is no point at which the reader can stand outside this voice while reading the text. In the graphic novel, however, another container always frames the voice: that of the panel and page, which are visible borders limiting both the image and text. For example in Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo’s Enigma, the reader discovers on the final page of the graphic novel that the whole story is told from the perspective of a sentient lizard when the lizard addresses the reader directly: ‘Look, let me start again. And try to concentrate this time … You could say it all started in Arizona. … Twenty-five years ago on a farm’ (Milligan and Fegredo 1995). This act of making the reader aware of the fictionality of the story – for the story suddenly becomes one retelling among many retellings – does not disrupt the narrative structure of the whole because the voice at the point of revelation is thoroughly contained within the visual structure of the page, panel, and cap-tion. It is a voice that is in the story world and the multi-frame structure that underpins it, rather than one that stands as a limit of the text, as does the implied authorial voice in literature. The reader does not identify with the disembodied voice of the author in a graphic novel, because this voice is subordinate to the visual structure. There is always a conceptualization of the whole before an examination of the particular. It could be argued that the page of the novel has a similar function – it is viewed before the first word is read – but the page of a novel does not structurally underpin the reader’s understanding of the narrative, it is simply a vehicle for the text, and in the process of reading it is largely ignored: the internal limits are attended to but the external form is


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5. The image (panel, page) is always a plenitude and asserts itself before the examination of its detail. The voice in a novel, by comparison, is always, to some degree, an abstraction: a deictic sign that coordinates the text and, in the case of autobiography, one that is gradually filled with each enunciation.

disregarded. This is confirmed by the fact that a novel could easily be repaginated without any change in the narration.

The New York Trilogy repeatedly attests to its own fictionality and is governed by the maxim that there is nothing outside or before the text – there are multiple stories about books and how they relate to other books and to authors masquerading as other authors. The metafictional text is capable of playing with the limits of its fictional world and can undermine its narrative scaffolding in a single word. In City of Glass, a single word, usually a name, can refer to one of many objects that exist at different metafictional levels. For example, in investigating the literary philosophical life of Peter Stillman Snr, Quinn notes a coincidence between the date when Henry Dark’s pamphlet was released (1690) and the year ‘that Stillman had locked up his son’, (1960) (Auster 1985: 49). This coincidence is contained within the story world occupied by Quinn, but in the City of Glass there is always the possibility that coincidences will extend to the level of narration and, a page later, it is noteworthy that Quinn considers going to the Stillman house on 69th Street (Auster 1985: 50). Here the reader is alerted to the possibility that the text itself is a fabrication and that a game is being played on the level of the authorial voice. This is possible in the novel because there is no overall fictional structure that contains and acts as a ground for the ontological shifts; at any moment the narrator can speak directly to the reader and disrupt the neutrality of the third-person voice. The adaptation of the novel to the graphic novel is hampered by the impossibility of retaining the metafictional framework of the original text, which is built around the narrative voice. It is only when the graphic novel explores its own structural possibilities outside of the notion of a narrative speaking voice that the ontology of the narrative can be fractured. There has to be some type of breaking of the frame and the status of the image, if there is to be a metafictional undermining of ontological differences akin to that of a disruption to the authorial voice.

Karasik and Mazzucchelli explore the impossibility of positing an ultimate point of reference in City of Glass but they are beset by a fundamental difficulty: the visual whole of the page always func-tions as an ontological ground.5 There is no point at which the story is ‘nowhere’ because every image is always framed by a level of narration that can never be breached – the organization of the panels as an interdependent visual form. One solution proffered in the opening section of the graphic novel is an attempted erasure of the image and the panel. Rather than the customary division of the page into panels, the reader is presented with a black rectangle on which is printed in white text: ‘It was a wrong number that started it’ (Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 1). The image is not strictly a panel because there is no definite gutter and, unlike the subsequent pages, no drawn bor-der. It is posited as a space before the story and resembles the opening page of Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jnr’s Amazing Spider-Man #36, which is totally black except for the following mes-sage printed in its centre: ‘We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you the following Special Bulletin’ (Straczynski and Romita 2001: 1). In Spider-Man, the device serves as a prelude to an



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image of the still-smouldering Ground Zero in New York and, in so doing, attests to the singularity of the event. In City of Glass, by comparison, the black page isolates the voice of the narrator from the series of images that are to follow and is a means of crossing out or barring the image – the image must appear first before it can be disavowed. Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s projection of the non-referential image is only imagined against the structural form of the graphic novel as a whole, and consequently the blackness is never neutral. It describes a space that must be filled and on the following page the pure black image is transformed, through a process analogous to a cinematic zoom- out, into the shape of a telephone. The black image is only erased with regard to what the reader expects should fill a comic book frame. It performs an action similar to Magritte’s injunction ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ in La Trahison des images – this is not a pipe but a representation – where it is the text, rather than the expected structure of the medium, which allows the image and its object, to be present and not present at the same time. A similar attempt at erasing the medium’s ‘voice’ is used by Jessica Abel in an untitled short graphic story about 9/11, where we see a group of friends chatting on a city street corner in a series of panels that are eventually consumed by flames (Abel 2002: 13–14). The burning of the fictional apparatus signals the probable fate of those chatting in the diegesis and as such the story world is transformed into a physical image; that is, an object that can be consumed. However, even in an example such as this, the structure of the graphic whole still asserts itself as the ground for representation, regardless of any shift in the status of the images; they still exist as objects to be presented on the multi-frame. The burning images are still presented on the page like photographs on a table.

In the penultimate section of the book, Quinn is writing in his notebook in an attempt to make sense of the Stillman case; a task that is ultimately futile. To visually describe this narrative trajectory, Karasik and Mazzucchelli gradually widen the gutters and change the position of the panels, which up until this point have had a waffle format. This process increases until pages 130–131, where there is a splash page that has the images spread out against the backdrop of a rocky chasm to indicate the futility of Quinn’s task as he searches for an absolute reference point. In the novel there is uncer-tainty as to how we should respond to Quinn’s musings and there is no clear indication as to whether the state of growing darkness is metaphorical or actual (Auster 1985: 130). In the graphic novel, how-ever, Quinn’s perception of the world is overdetermined by the visual structure of the whole, which, in this scene, takes the form of a chasm that frames the panels, the voice of the narrator and indi-rectly Quinn’s voice (figure 3). There is a prerogative in the construction of the page to fill all the spaces that are created by the gradual expansion of the panels. This is a function of comic-book dis-course and an acknowledgement that empty spaces have the capacity to signify if they extend beyond commonly used gutter sizes.

The requirement that a graphic novel contains a sequence of images means that there is often a doubling of the narration, which has the effect of confirming Quinn’s numerous observations. For


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6. This claim that the comic book is founded upon visual organization should not be confused with the separation of text and image that reduces the image to a largely denotative function. In this article visuality includes the abstract organization of the whole that surrounds and coordinates specific images and panels. In doing so, it accepts Charles Hatfield’s argument that the comic book, from the interplay of panels to the organization of text and image, has a complexity that undermines the many pedagogical evaluations of the medium that assume the ‘reading’ of images is facile and should be reserved for the semi-literate (Hatfield 2005: 34–37).

example, when he sees two Stillmans leave the train station, the images attest to their similarity and this is further confirmed by the use of the photograph – a tripling of the relationship of identity (Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 53). The text itself does not confirm this because to state that two things look alike is different to providing an actual comparison. Generally in graphic novels the image is marked by a plenitude of detail, which means that it often confirms identity even if this is left unstated in the text. In City of Glass for example, the author-character Auster actually physically resembles the real-world author in the text (Auster 1985: 88–92). The graphic narration cannot construct a possible visual resemblance between objects – unless of course it has recourse to words – unless there is an actual resemblance. The result is that the graphic novel is forced to close down the ontological instabil-ity in the novel by confirming the visual resemblance between characters.

The visual primacy of the graphic novel is such that any text is always framed either by the page, a speech balloon or, in the case of a caption, a separate border attached to the panel.6 One cannot attend to the voice as the utmost limit of discourse but it is always placed in relation to the sequence of images and the page. Jan Baetens argues that this separation and contestation of text and image is a defining feature of bande dessinée narration, which is always a ‘média mixte’ (Baetens 2004: para 18). Baetens states that recognizing this basic difference between verbal and visual narration in bande dessinée, and particularly in autobiography, serves to direct the critical faculties of the reader away from the story (récit) to the formal properties of the medium (Baetens 2004: para 20). This is an inter-esting argument for it seems to suggest that the bande dessinée or comic book automatically involves a critical awareness of the medium’s structure, and one could then say that it is better suited to the examination of metafictional themes. However, the opposite is probably true for many of the most successful metafictional turns in novels, those that clearly unsettle the reader, occur because the reader is suddenly drawn to the fictional apparatus, and this means that for the most part the atten-tion is commanded by the story (récit). The reader of a comic book is less likely to be surprised by a metafictional device because the récit shares equal space on the page with the organizational ele-ments, such as the gutter and various apparatuses for spatially arranging the text, the speech bal-loons and captions. Of course, the written page also employs conventional forms such as letters, words, and the separation of sentences and paragraphs, but written language is so familiar that we tend to ignore the symbols in reading it and this is what underpins the illusion of transparency.

For the greater part of City of Glass, a narrator (who is not given a name and as such is not dif-ferentiated from the authorial voice) tells the story in the third person. However, at the beginning of Chapter 12, the neutral voice of the implied author gives way to an internal narrator, that is, to a nar-rator who participates in the story:

A LONG TIME PASSED. Exactly how long it is impossible to say. Weeks certainly, but per-haps even months. The account of this period is less full than the author would have liked. But


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information is scarce, and he has preferred to pass over in silence what could not be definitely confirmed. Since this story is based entirely on facts, the author feels it is his duty not to over-step the bounds of the verifiable, to resist at all costs the perils of invention.

(Auster 1985: 113)

The reader is suddenly asked to accept that the story up until this point was actually narrated by a per-son who occupied the same story world as Quinn and who could have met Quinn, if the circumstances were favourable. This is not strictly logical because many of the events occurred before Quinn was recording his activities in the red notebook. The issue is further complicated by the anonymous author’s claim that he has spoken to Paul Auster about Daniel Quinn, which means that the expected author, Auster, is barred from occupying the position of the anonymous author.

In the graphic novel, the narrator’s voice, except for those sections containing reported speech, is generally found in captions that are similar in many respects to the cinematic voice-over. The captions are essentially added to the panel borders and mediate the reader’s relationship to the image but as an addition they remain separate to the image. So even when there is a fundamental change in voice, as is indicated by the paragraph above cited from Chapter 12, the images could continue to tell the story such that the change in authorial voice would not present a significant shift in the narrative. In the novel the narrative structure is undermined by simply stating that ‘[t]he account of this period is less full than the author would have liked’. In the graphic novel a change of visual style is required to give effect to the textual claim. Consequently Karasik and Mazzucchelli thoroughly change the style of the final pages with watercolour-shaded images and soft-edged panels without drawn borders that are in marked contrast with the heavy inking of the main story, whose style suits the detective, film noir, story. Furthermore, the first image is of a typewriter (figure 4) – an image that metonymically invokes the writer – containing a single sheet of paper on which is written in courier font: ‘At this point the information has run out’ (Karasik, Mazzucchelli and Auster 2004: 136). The subsequent panels also contain non-bordered captions in courier font, continuing the association of the written text with an internal narrator, who also happens to work as an author. Of course, the image of the author is not given. What is interesting about this section is that the metafictional shift in narration must be indicated by a change in all aspects of the page, and not the simple addition of the direct references to Auster and the mysterious author. This seems to confirm Philippe Marion’s argument, in Traces en cases, that we should consider the style of the comic book (bande dessinée) as a whole, its ‘singulière impulsion graph-ique’, when examining authorship in comic books (Marion 1993: 9). The voice in comic books is not directly comparable to speech or writing but should be considered rather as a graphical ‘grain’ or tenor which cannot be reduced to what is shown or said (Marion 1993: 33). The text itself should be treated in terms of its visual style and Marion notes that most comic books use drawn lettering in order to create a visual balance between text and image (Marion 1993: 86). In other words, it is not the style



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7. Coincidently Marion argues that typewriter fonts carry with them the authority and ‘objectivité’ that is often associated with the instrument (Marion 1993: 44). In the final section of the graphic novel, the courier font invokes this authority and, in doing so, puts into question all that had occurred before.

of the writing so much as the visual style that defines authorship in comic books: for this reason, he argues that we should call the implied authorial voice of a comic book a graphiateur (graphic author) (Marion 1993: 36). In the final pages of the adaptation of City of Glass, there is a new overall visual style that corresponds to the shift in perceived authorship and this is evident at all levels of enunciation.7

The adaptation into graphic novel form of Auster’s City of Glass is instructive about the different kinds of devices available to the novel and the graphic novel for drawing attention to its fictional status and the limits of its fictional world and, in particular, the role played by the structure of the page and by the authorial or narrative voice. In the novel, the page offers a compositional whole that allows the future to remain unforeseen until the words are read. The narrative voice of the novel is coincident with the present time of reading, with the future unforeseeable and the past constructed retroactively, which also allows for sudden changes in the narrative. In contrast, the multi-frame structure of the graphic novel spatially contains all the narrative elements – a character or a sentence is always placed within a large visual whole – and allows the reader to look forward such that there is a sense in which the past, present and future coexist. To understand metafictional and authorial shifts in the graphic novel, it is important to recognize the different qualities of the authorial voice, if indeed this term can be used, and look how this is linked to an overall graphic form. Further studies of visuality and metafiction would prove useful in understanding the fictional limits of the graphic novel because fiction is grounded in the reader’s expectation, and metafiction provides a means of rupturing that expectation.

References

Abel, J. (2002), ‘Untitled’, in J. Mason (ed.), 9–11: Emergency Relief, Gainesville, Fl.: Alternative Comics, pp. 13–14.

Auster, P. (1985), The New York Trilogy, London: Faber and Faber.

Baetens, J. (2004), ‘Autobiographies et Bandes Dessinées’, Belphégor: Littérature populaire et culture médiatique, 4:1.

Barthes, R. ([1967] 1977), ‘The Death of the Author’, in R. Williams (ed.), Image, Music, Text, William Collins, Glasgow, pp. 142–48.

Booth, W. C. (1961), The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Currie, M. (1995), ‘Introduction’, in M. Currie (ed.), Metafiction, Harlow: Longman, pp. 1–18.

Calvino, I. (1981), If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, London: Minerva.

Cronenberg, D. (1999), eXistenZ, Ontario: Alliance Atlantis Communications.

Groensteen, T. (2007), The System of Comics (trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen), Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.



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Hatfield, C. (2005), Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Karasik, P., Mazzucchelli, D. and Auster, P. (2004), City of Glass, New York: Picador/Henry Holt.

Lejeune, P. (1988), On Autobiography, ‘Theory and History of Literature’ volume 52, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Marion, P. (1993), Traces en cases: Travail graphique, figuration narrative et participation du lecteur: Essai sur la bande dessinée, Academia: Université Catholique de Louvain.

McHale, B. (1987), Postmodernist Fiction, London: Routledge.

Milligan, P., Fegredo, D., van Valkenburgh, S. and Costanza, J. (1995), Enigma, New York: DC Comics.

Peeters, B. (1991), Case, planche, récit: Comment lire une bande dessinée, Paris: Casterman.

Straczynski, J. M. and Romita Jnr, J. (2001), ‘Stand Tall’, Amazing Spider-Man #36, New York: Marvel Comics.

Waugh, P. (1995), ‘What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?’, in M. Currie (ed.), Metafiction, Harlow: Longman, pp. 39–54.

Zilcosky, J. (1998), ‘The revenge of the Author: Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 39:3, pp. 195–206.

Suggested citation

Atkinson, P. (2010), ‘The graphic novel as metafiction’, Studies in Comics 1: 1, pp. 107–125, doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.107/1

Contributor details

Paul Atkinson lectures for the Communications and Writing programme at Monash University. His research is broadly informed by the work of the fin-de-siècle French philosopher Henri Bergson and his writings on movement and time. Published articles explore a range of topics including Bergson’s vitalism, comic books after 9/11, movement and recognition, time in superhero comics, affect theory and temporal aesthetics. He is currently working on a series of articles that explore the relationship between processual theories of time, aesthetics and narrative.

Contact: Paul Atkinson, School of Humanities, Communications & Social Sciences, Monash University, Gippsland Campus, Churchill, VIC 3842, Australia.E-mail: [email protected]


atkinson, paul-the graphic novel as met a fiction

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