No Exit: Peeters and Lévy’s Sandcastle (SelfMadeHero)
“None of us can leave.”
The wonderful independent British comic book publisher SelfMadeHero has just released the English edition of Sandcastle, a graphic novel written by Pierrer Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters, winner of the Utopiales Best Science Fiction Graphic Novel 2011 prize. The original French edition, from 2010, was originally published in French by Atrabile, and was nominated for the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival 2011.
It is not an easy read, and this is precisely what makes it an enjoyable graphic novel. For starters, it is hard to locate its genre. “Psychological drama” would be a possibility, but (as proven by its Nantes award) science fiction and mystery fans will also recognise familiar plot structures. I am inclined to describe it as psychological drama because of its dialogic narrative, the clearly circumscribed setting (a secluded beach surrounded by green cliffs) and the focus on a specific set of characters (a dozen holidaymakers and an Arab immigrant man on the run). The story’s premise is simple: a young woman’s body is found floating in the waters, and the thirteen characters are left face to face with mystery.
Peeters’s black and white inks play with varying degrees of light/shadow balance, going from clear and delicate lines to baroque, clustered shadings and blocks of black. As the story progresses, white spaces recede, giving place to a darker, silhouetted reality. My first reaction to the way the story evolves was very physical, not unlike a truly uncanny feeling. After I finished it two names came to mind: Camus and Sartre.
(Peeters and Lévy, Sandcastle, page 29)
I tried reading L’Être et le néant (1943) when I was perhaps too young to understand it. I was 15, and having read L’Etranger (1942) and having made the connection with The Cure’s “Killing an Arab”, I became interested in the term “existentialism.” La Nausée (1938) was a title that had puzzled me for a long time, but I would not read Sartre in school until perhaps ten years later, in university. Not much later I would teach Qu’est-ce que la litérature? (1947) and L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946) in my own lectures.
The phrase “Hell is other people” was known to me first of all because my father quoted it constantly; later I would read it quoted all over the place. Huis Clos (published in English as “In Camera”) means literally “closed door”, probably “Without Exit”, or, perhaps, “Dead End” but this last option would have serious interpretive implications) is a short play from 1944, with only four characters, taking place in only one scene, “a drawing room in Second Empire style”, where there are three sofas of different colours. There are no windows, one single door, a “massive bronze group” on a mantelpiece, a pen-knife and an interior doorbell that not always works to contact the exterior. The main characters are two women and a man. The fourth character is a “valet” that introduces one by one each character into the room. It is of this play that Sandcastle reminded me of.
Stuart Gilbert’s English translation of “In Camera” suggests different things to the contemporary reader, and it can orient different interpretations. It is interesting that the words “camera” and “chamber” (as in “torture chamber”) are indeed related. It will be no spoiler to say that Sartre’s play is about three characters, already dead, facing purgatory. They soon realize there are no torture instruments in this drawing room except the other people they were put together with for eternity. Even the opportunity to escape the room provides no exit, and voluntarily they choose to remain together…
Sartre must have known of course of the surveillance techniques of totalitarian regimes, but the technological developments of his day had not yet allowed the baudrillardian “totalscreen-ness” of the world we live in today. “In Camera” reads like an antecedent of reality shows, especially Big Brother, where strangers are put together in a room and are not allowed to leave. As we all know, the Other in the reality show ethos plays the role of the torturer or at least always-potential punisher.
What makes the situation in that chamber that is Sartre’s stage hellish is the constant observation and judgement of the other characters. It’s not only that the presence of the Other is annoying, but that the Other keeps talking, and not only talking but passing judgement. And, of course, the set-up of two women and only one man makes the situation more than tricky. Somehow the fact that none of them were “innocent,” that the three of them had a reason to be “punished,” guarantees the non-existence of any moral superiority. In other words, judges and judged are all guilty and equally amoral and each of them play both roles. From a contemporary perspective the play suggests that in a perfect totalitarian state of continuous observation there is no need for torturers or judges any more. The ones that will imprison and condemn us will be our neighbours, our lovers, our fellow human beings, and finally our own selves.
“Hell… is other people” sums up this state of total surveillance where the judgement of those nearer to us is permanent and merciless. Furthermore, there is no escape from it, even when there may be a slight possibility for it we may not know what to do with it or how to go about it.
Lars von Trier’s film Dogville (2003) also comes to mind, set in a stage that is nothing but representation and make-believe, a town without walls (“pueblo chico infierno grande” -”small town, big hell”- goes the saying in Spanish). In some way, the roads of “Cyburbia” are potentially not less hellish than Sartre’s drawing room, where nothing goes unnoticed, and where we willingly expose ourselves to our harshest judges, our fellow men and women.
(Peeters and Lévy, Sand Castle, page 65)
Sandcastle belongs, in my view, to this same literary and philosophical tradition. Like Huis Clos (but unlike Dogville), Sandcastle is a narrative based on dialogue and purely graphic narration (in other words, there is no “narrator”, at least not in words). The narrative depends, as in many other comics, on the sequence of still drawn images and the speech balloons containing the characters’ dialogues (rarely do the characters stop talking). The enclosed scene (the beach) works like a stage, where the men and women are merely players (“Why not pretend that all of this is happening in a book that you’re writing right now?!” asks a character in the seventh panel of page 59).
In Sandcastle Peeters and Lévy offer a truly unsettling and profoundly moving experiment in psychological dramatic graphic narrative, and as such it is a book which (if I’m allowed a stereotype) reads as eminently European. The sense of uncanniness and eroticism developed through its exploration of the physical nature of the naked, fragile, ageing human body within a seaside setting is not without echoes to Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954) or even Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967).
In the end, Sandcastle is both an exploration of the medium of comics to convey time and narrative and a reflection on time passing. It is also the staging, in graphic narrative form, of the dialectics between Eros and Thanatos, family and society, freedom and destiny. In Sandcastle hell is other people, and the only way to discover if there’s an exit one has to read the book.
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The following independent stores have limited stock of Sandcastle, which include a limited edition art print created especially for SelfMadeHero by Fredrik Peeters:
Gosh! Comics, Soho
Mega City Comics, Camden
Orbital Comics, Charing Cross
Forbidden Planet Megastore, London
Travelling Man, Leeds & Manchester
OK Comics, Leeds
Plan B Books, Glasgow
Dave’s Comics, Brighton
Heart of Darkness: A Tonality of its Own
“Do you see the story?”
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1917
Artwork by Catherine Anyango, courtesy of Self Made Hero
In his ‘Author’s Note’ from 1917, Joseph Conrad said of Heart of Darkness:
‘Heart of Darkness’ is experience […] but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck.
As most readers of Heart of Darkness can attest, Conrad achieved his purpose. The novel dwells in the ear; resonates “in the minds and the bosoms” of readers even years after it was read for the first time. “The horror! the horror!” may be the most-remembered phrase of the novel, but what remains is the different tones of darkness. It is remarkable that Conrad used terms like “sombre”, “colouring” and “tonality” (the latter both visual and musical).
Indeed, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness lives in the reader not necessarily as a purely linguistic or verbal experience: it inhabits us visually; haunts us in fragmentary visual images, very much like half-remembered dreams do. In the novel, Marlow agonises over his inability to “convey the dream-sensation […] that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams…”:
“He [Kurtz] was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?”
This is at least one of the premises that makes the adaptation of Conrad’s most famous and controversial novel into comics form such a challenge. The independent British comics publisher Self Made Hero released this month Heart of Darkness: A Graphic Novel, [2010; 128pp; 241x165 mm; paperback with flaps, B/W and duotone; £12.99] adapted by David Zane Mairowitz and illustrated by Catherine Anyango, and all things considered the book is a triumph.
Artwork by Catherine Anyango, courtesy of Self Made Hero
Embedding fragments of Conrad’s “Congo Diary” (1890) onto the fabric of the story, this graphic novel is necessarily the result of much textual simplification, and as such it is unable to convey the full narrative complexity of the original (multiple narrators; proleptic devices, etc.). Nevertheless, the collaboration between Mairowitz and Anyango produces a beautiful, evocative, haunting visual text that transmits, precisely, “a tonality of its own.”
At first Anyango’s pencil drawings appear inflexible and inappropriate for fluent comics storytelling, but that feeling quickly evaporates. Her characters possess the stiffness of rigor mortis: evoking Conrad’s multiple references to the “stillness of life” and the “attentive immobility” of people and things, the stillness of those “playthings of Time.” Anyango’s duotone illustrations bleed onto the whole page, filling with blackness the whole visual, textual space, not leaving any blankness even where conventionally other comics would leave a white frame. Even the narrative captions appear as “engraved” on the very fabric of the textual darkness, and the speech balloons are translucent, like spectral echoes of voices half-remembered from dreams.
Conrad’s novel describes the “immense”, “impenetrable”, “infernal stream of darkness”, ”a darkness darker than the shadow of the night,” and Anyango’s drawings are merciless in flooding the narrative journey with different tones of black and grey, until the very end, in which the reader finally witnesses something similar to light, through the dense veil of fog.
Anyango and Mairowitz’s adaptation succeeds in conveying a journey into darkness; one veiled by the filters of consciousness, perception and subjectivity, in this case mostly limited to Marlow’s (and Conrad’s) perspective, at least from the point of view of writing. Interestingly, the illustrations also tell a different story, allowing the reader to see more than the verbal narrators, making us as readers wonder who the implicit visual narrator we cannot see is.
Artwork by Catherine Anyango, courtesy of Self Made Hero
Needless to say, this beautiful edition of Heart of Darkness: A Graphic Novel is not a substitute for Conrad’s novel, but as an adaptation it is as “faithful” as it could possibly be. It is precisely in what is missing from it that we may find its true success; in the way it makes us “see” a story about amongst other things invisibility and void. The original’s sombre theme survives with true sincerity through its heavy, darkened pages.
In a passage of the original that did not make it to this adaptation, Marlow talks of silence and solitude: “These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness.” This comic book is “another art altogether”, but its fidelity to Conrad’s novel lies precisely on graphic narrative’s innate strength: its power to make us see.
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Heart of Darkness: A Graphic Novel is published by Self Made Hero and distributed in the UK by Turnaround.
