Butterfly Hunt

“For reading in trains and buses”, or, one of the most notable projects of modern times

‘The paper is rubbish,’ remarked Jasper, ‘and the kind of rubbish—oddly enough—which doesn’t attract people.’

‘Precisely, but the rubbish is capable of being made a very valuable article, if it were only handled properly. I have talked to the people about it again and again, but I can’t get them to believe what I say. Now just listen to my notion. In the first place, I should slightly alter the name; only slightly, but that little alteration would in itself have an enormous effect. Instead of Chat I should call it Chit-Chat!’

Jasper exploded with mirth.

‘That’s brilliant!’ he cried. ‘A stroke of genius!’

‘Are you serious? Or are you making fun of me? I believe it is a stroke of genius. Chat doesn’t attract anyone, but Chit-Chat would sell like hot cakes, as they say in America. I know I am right; laugh as you will.’

‘On the same principle,’ cried Jasper, ‘if The Tatler were changed to Tittle-Tattle, its circulation would be trebled.’

Whelpdale smote his knee in delight.

‘An admirable idea! Many a true word uttered in joke, and this is an instance! Tittle-Tattle—a magnificent title; the very thing to catch the multitude.’

Dora was joining in the merriment, and for a minute or two nothing but bursts of laughter could be heard.

‘Now do let me go on,’ implored the man of projects, when the noise subsided. ‘That’s only one change, though a most important one. What I next propose is this:—I know you will laugh again, but I will demonstrate to you that I am right. No article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs.’

‘Superb!’

‘But you are joking, Mr Whelpdale!’ exclaimed Dora.

‘No, I am perfectly serious. Let me explain my principle. I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated; that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains and on ‘buses and trams. As a rule they care for no newspapers except the Sunday ones; what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information—bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat.’

Jasper had begun to listen seriously.

‘There’s something in this, Whelpdale,’ he remarked.

‘Ha! I have caught you?’ cried the other delightedly. ‘Of course there’s something in it?’

‘But—’ began Dora, and checked herself.

‘You were going to say—’ Whelpdale bent towards her with deference.

‘Surely these poor, silly people oughtn’t to be encouraged in their weakness.’

Whelpdale’s countenance fell. He looked ashamed of himself. But Jasper came speedily to the rescue.

‘That’s twaddle, Dora. Fools will be fools to the world’s end. Answer a fool according to his folly; supply a simpleton with the reading he craves, if it will put money in your pocket. You have discouraged poor Whelpdale in one of the most notable projects of modern times.’

‘I shall think no more of it,’ said Whelpdale, gravely. ‘You are right, Miss Dora.’

Again Jasper burst into merriment. His sister reddened, and looked uncomfortable. She began to speak timidly:

‘You said this was for reading in trains and ‘buses?’

Whelpdale caught at hope.

‘Yes. And really, you know, it may be better at such times to read chit-chat than to be altogether vacant, or to talk unprofitably. I am not sure; I bow to your opinion unreservedly.’

‘So long as they only read the paper at such times,’ said Dora, still hesitating. ‘One knows by experience that one really can’t fix one’s attention in travelling; even an article in a newspaper is often too long.’

‘Exactly! And if you find it so, what must be the case with the mass of untaught people, the quarter-educated? It might encourage in some of them a taste for reading—don’t you think?’

‘It might,’ assented Dora, musingly. ‘And in that case you would be doing good!’

‘Distinct good!’

They smiled joyfully at each other. Then Whelpdale turned to Jasper:

‘You are convinced that there is something in this?’

‘Seriously, I think there is. It would all depend on the skill of the fellows who put the thing together every week. There ought always to be one strongly sensational item—we won’t call it article. For instance, you might display on a placard: “What the Queen eats!” or “How Gladstone’s collars are made!”—things of that kind.’

George Gissing, New Grubb Street (1891)

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