Benjamin Gottlieb
Category Curator

Joshua Ferris is the author of Then We Came to The End and The Unnamed, both of which are published by Little, Brown and Company, the latter just this month.  I spoke with Mr. Ferris by phone in December 2009 about The Unnamed.  Upon picking up the receiver, Mr. Ferris informed me that I’d caught him in his boxers, tangled in a sundry lot of wires and cables.  Apparently undeterred by what sounded a precarious situation, Mr. Ferris forwent any efforts to untangle himself and carried on with the interview, and for his bravery and generosity I am immensely grateful.  For his engaged and considered responses I am even more so – as I don’t doubt you will be, too – although anyone who has read his fiction is unlikely to be surprised by the thoughtfulness he herein displays.

The Unnamed follows Tim Farnsworth as he, his wife, daughter, and coworkers attempt to understand a unique illness that compels him, without conscious effort or will, to commence and, for uncertain amounts of time, continue walking, with no clear, conscious drive.  Through this, Ferris offers an egolessly insightful examination of the psychic effects of knowledge, ignorance, love, marriage, and the various compromises and comforts thereof.

Benjamin Gottlieb: I’m interested in how you consider the disease that Tim has. Would you be able to diagnose his illness, since you’ve, in a sense, lived with it for so long?  How do you think of it?

Joshua Ferris: Well, your question reminds me a little of the introduction to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, in which he calls into question the use of the word “reality” when you’re not using quotes around it.  He gives the example of – we’ll have to fact-check this* – of a plant or a flower, and he then says, “What is that plant or flower to the various people who see it?  One may be a botanist and know quite a lot about this particular biological aspects of the flowers.  One may just be a simple passerby who doesn’t even notice it.  One may be a business man.”  I forget the precise examples that he gives, but he breaks down the way in which this particular thing can be seen by a variety of different people with different perspectives.  And I think that this disease can similarly be thought of in a kind of recursive and refracting light, depending on who it is who’s looking at it.  A medical professional may be stumped but may also be put it into as narrow a niche as they’re capable of doing and saying, at the end of the day, “We don’t know exactly what this is but it’s most likely some form of neurological misfiring.”  They may be able to put it under an obsessive-compulsive aegis and put some fancy spin on it.  A mental medical professional might call it schizophrenia.  And because I had to think about it in these medical ways, I first think about the way in which a doctor would think of it.  But I also think of it metaphorically: What are the ways in which one might be able to project meaning on a disease?  I think of it also as the other characters think of it; as you pointed out, I’ve lived with it for a long time, so my impression could be filtered through the eyes of Tim’s daughter and I could think of him as sort of crazy, or I could think of him through the eyes of his wife and think of him as mysterious and pathetic but ultimately noble.  So there’s a lot of different points of reference that, over the course of the two years that I wrote the book, I spent thinking about, and I wanted certainly to think about them in as robust a way as possible.

BG: The disease is very capacious in many ways: it offers metaphors for a tremendous variety of other motifs within the novel, but even just the illness itself reflects very much upon the people who interact with it, the people who think about it, and the people who really have to deal with it.  In many ways, this novel I think will come as something of a surprise to people who are expecting something more in line with Then We Came to The End, with something with more of a satirical edge.  One of the really great, bitingly satirical parts of The Unnamed is when you’re dealing with these doctors and the sort of trading off of responsibility; what makes it so acute – especially to people who have had to deal with doctors a lot and whose sense of well-being and sanity becomes so dependent upon these professionals – is how you trace how, in many ways, these professionals can make you feel impotent in your own capacity to function as a sort of sovereign being.   There’s this moment where one of the doctors whom he sees describes his illness as “benign idiopathic perambulations,” which is just so funny and just so accurately captures the absurdity behind the power of medical terminology, which often, as in this case, merely disguises ignorance through a veneer of knowledge.  And I think what interests me about that is – really it comes up with the title – how you discuss the power of naming and knowing and believing and the differences between each of them: how much you can know something, what it means to name something, what it means to believe in something.  I’m wondering if you could talk that, about the differences between knowing, naming, and believing in this novel.

JF: The first thing that comes to mind is that a name is relief; a name means relief for something.  This was especially a torture for those who were suffering anonymously before the Internet, because now we can avail ourselves of nearly the history of the world, if we dig enough.  But without a name, none of that amounts to anything.  Suffering seems as much metaphysical as physical.  And so the naming of something puts it squarely on Earth and it implies that it will not require a superhuman gesture for its potential resolution.  If you have a name and a diagnosis, with enough attention and resources, it can very well be cured.  So, in many respects, a name feels as if you’re making a leap from some claim about what you believe – in other words: “I am sick” – to a claim about what you know: “He’s sick.”  It’s an objectification of the thing.  A lot of the diseases that I found compelling that I looked into – like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome – are diseases that are arrived at through a series of ruling everything else out.  And you get that name and that diagnosis through a series of failed positives.  I think when people get that diagnosis, it’s really half the psychological battle.  Tim doesn’t have that luxury, despite the invention of this possible name, because it exists outside the realm of the “real.” I think that a lot of the things that he’s struggling with is basically this: the difference between his disease as a name and as merely a belief, which can be easily confined “in his head.”  And he’s striving to get it to be acknowledged and made objective and validated.  The question of validation, it’s really paramount.  The interesting thing, to just to expand on that – I think a disease – the one criterion for a disease should be: somebody is suffering.  Suffering should be the criterion.  And then it gets very complicated from there, because you have to wonder if the suffering is being generated by a mental concern or a physical concern, what legitimately qualifies it as such.  And it goes from there.  It gets very complicated.

BG: So a disease, ultimately, is defined by the suffering on the part of the diseased person, to you?

JF: I think so.  That would be my definition.

BG: In that way, it seems that there are very few people in the novel who aren’t diseased in some sense.

JF: [Laughs] I’m not sure that we have many people in the world who aren’t diseased.

I realize that it’s an awfully liberal definition of the word.  But let’s take the case of somebody suffering from conversion disorder: a man thinks he has Parkinson’s.  And you will find that person convinced of the disease but still doing things like, when he or she falls in front of the doctor, not catching himself.  A normal person who’s sick with a neurological disease will at least attempt to catch him- or herself, but this person, because they have a mental disorder that has made them fabricate a horrible disease, wants to demonstrate how diseased they are.  This, too, is a disease.  That’s probably a physical disease.  There’s probably a disorder in the brain that causes them to mentally manufacture a disease.  And I believe that to be a degenerative disorder itself, even though it doesn’t fall into the category of what we think of as degenerative.  But we need to define it down; if people were listening to me, and following my definition for disease, no one would be happy because it would increase our health care costs [Laughs].

BG: To return somewhat to the distinction between what it means to name something and what it means to know something – something very on in the novel that really struck me were these two sequential passages – one follows another – and it’s when Tim’s wife, Jane, is considering her menopause and the difference between her hot flashes and Tim’s mysterious walking illness.  I hope you don’t mind me reading these two passages, which you wrote, to you.  This first one is: “He couldn’t know about hot flashes and she couldn’t know about walking.”  But the difference between the hot flashes and the walking is that one of them has a name and the other doesn’t.  Hot flashes have a name: it’s a symptom of menopause.  His walking illness doesn’t have a name.  And yet both are equally unknowable to each other, in some sense.  So what does naming do if it still doesn’t entirely make something known?

JF: First and foremost: legitimizes it in the eyes of other people, so that something so very essential to our human nature can advance.  To some extent, when a disease remains unnamed, and if that unnamed disease remains undiagnosed, I think the tendency would be to question – no matter your good intentions, some suspicion would enter in.  And that suspicion would diminish your ability to sympathize.  When you have a familiar disease or a familiar symptom – if it can be categorized, treated; it’s well-known; you can read about it, you can write about it, you can educate yourself about it, you can hear testimonials about it – it adheres to a sense of the way in which people have generally suffered and thereby extends your sympathy for that sufferer.  Without a name, the sympathy may be a little bit more grudging.  And I think that people who suffer without a clear diagnosis or medical community legitimization do so under a cloud of suspicion, and it robs them of something that they deserve.  Even if they’re malingerers: even malingering is a disease.  So I would say that naming something begins the process of sympathy.  The passage that you pointed out also brings out the limitations of that, because education and familiarization will only get the objective observer so far.   We’re each living in our individual bodies and can’t quite experience, together, what we’re each experiencing, and those limitations are frustrating even within the urge to know.

BG: The immediate sentence after that touches upon what you just said.  That sentence says: “They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breath the others’ air.”  Like with his disease – and like with many of the diseases, according to your liberal definition, in this novel – there are many extrapolations that you can take from this.  What it seems to be saying is: we are only capable of knowing people to a certain extent; we can never fully know or understand another person.  Does that seem right to you?

JF: Yeah, that seems right.  And I think that, in particular, this revolves around not just the unknowability of the other person, psychologically-speaking, and the desire to know this person, but that this “thing” that we can reach out and touch and break, kiss, make love to, the thing that feels the most real about someone – palpable and real – is unknowable, too.  I’ll give you a quote that I looked at often.  It may well be in the letters, some collection of letters, of Kafka.  It says: “We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood.  When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the grief that is in me and what do I know of yours.  And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?”† Not exactly an uplifting quote, but I think it does a pretty good job of accurately describing what kind of isolation a person can feel when they’re suffering.

BG: There’s a point right toward the end of the novel that struck me as an interesting potential counterpoint to the excerpt that I just read and it’s this point where Tim is looking at birds – which are referenced on the cover of the novel – and it says that he "had learned to distinguish between a hundred variations of unnamed winds.  He couldn't name the twitchy burrower with the black-tipped tail that scanned an upland prairie for danger, but he knew it as well as the raspy grass with the flowering spike that left soft yellow pollen on his pant legs."  He has this sense that even though he doesn’t know the names of any of these things – he doesn’t know the name of the wind, he doesn’t know the names of the birds – he still knows them, in some sense.  How do you think he knows them without knowing their names?  It seems quite distinct from the knowing and the naming disparity that you’ve drawn throughout the rest of the novel.

JF: Well I think that both Dr. Bargdasarian and Jane know he’s suffering; they just don’t know how or what to name it or what it’s called.  So that’s a broader thing.  But for him, he’s walked so long and he’s lived outside for so long that I suppose it would be a kind of almost occult thing, which he knows in a personal sense, as a mystic might know things that we’ve remained insensitive to.

BG: So do you think that the essence of the word “know” changes as the novel progresses?  Or at least what it means to Tim changes?

JF: I haven’t thought about it but it very well might.  The way the narrator uses the word might very well change, too, actually.  Because knowledge is very much up in the air in the first part of the book.  And then there’s a departure.  I think that the book does make up its mind about whether or not he has a disease; it takes a position on that.  But then other mysteries start to crowd in about exactly what it means to be a body and a mind, about what body and mind mean.  So the other mysteries crowd in but knowledge itself probably does change – the nature of knowledge probably does change.  And certainly by the end the narrator talks about Tim knowledgeably and he talks about his own knowledge – toward the world, toward his family, toward the natural landscape and things he finds in nature – with a great deal of confidence.  So I think you can certainly say there’s a qualitative difference between that latter knowledge and the knowledge that’s up in the air about his disease.

BG: There is something that, for lack of a better word, I would call almost sneaky in the progression of the novel, where it begins with one narrative tone and it ends with a very different one.  This changes about halfway through, maybe a little more than halfway through.  Why I say that it’s sneaky is that you almost seem to be playing with how much the reader can know the book, in a sense; you kind of change the game a bit.  It starts out almost more plot-driven; there are these strands that give it a propulsive, forward movement.  That continues throughout the novel but it becomes less attached strictly to the plot and it makes the novel somewhat difficult to grasp at points; it feels as though it escapes reach once the reader knows what it is.  The novel changes a lot; it has a sort of protean form.  And I wondered if this was a conscious decision on your part; if in some sense you were playing with readers’ expectations by giving the reader a sense of knowing, again, what the novel is about and then changing what the novel focuses on, changing it a bit so that what the novel is about is not graspable, in the same way that so many of the things within the novel are not fully graspable.

JF: Yes, I was.  The movement is meant to parallel the unknowability of Tim’s self.  And the setting up of traditional plots – plot strands, narrative strands – in the beginning that ordinarily get resolved was intended to be thwarted.  I was always aware of establishing them and then thwarting them.  And I think it’s probably fairly obvious why: the nature of the book itself is what can and cannot be known.  And if you have an element of your plot that is tidily summed up I think it does a disservice to the more aching questions that haunt the characters.

BG: What you set up at the very beginning of the novel is this kind of taxonomy of habit, in a way, where people’s lives are largely dependent on habit, on habitualized routines.  And disease is certainly something that pulls people out of their routines and out of their habits, and it’s something it does with the characters in this novel.  But when they’re pulled out of those habits they’re pulled almost into another world of new habits, of new habits that define the “ill” world, the world of Tim’s illness and later of other illnesses that other characters develop.  Do you think that it’s possible to live without habit?  Do you think that these characters, or Tim in particular, escape habit?

JF: There are two questions there; they’re both very compelling.  The answer to the first one is: I think that the making of habit and the breaking of habit is nearly the definition of freedom.  When you have the right to make them and then break them you have full freedom.  And very often habit allows you to create or work, invent, recreate – whatever it may be – and the breaking of those habits might be through force – because you have certain obligations – but it might also be to escape your life, to some extent.  So I think that in many respects the novel’s about how habit and personal freedom are very much interlinked.  When he is forced to make new habits, those habits are quite different than the ones that he had when he was living as an autonomous man, determining his life as he wanted.  And those new habits seem to him the opposite of freedom: they seem like habits made by Hell.  And the question becomes – whether it’s a disease or whether it’s an obligation or responsibility, some larger force calling to you – the question is: how well do you adapt to them?  I think the tendency is not to adapt well, to rebel to some extent.  There’s certainly been a very long literary history of that, but outside of literature I think it says a lot about the person’s character.

BG: And what do you think it says about Tim’s character?

JF: Well, misery is not accepting your fate.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Fate is what limits us.”  That’s a different notion of what I think we traditionally think of as fate.  We traditionally think of fate as being a fickle force working its magic, either as a design of God or a meaningless, random cosmos.  But when you think of fate as that which limits you, then you can start to think of the ways in which you accept those limitations, the ways in which you attempt to overcome those limitations.  And my intention for the book was to show this character doing both: rebelling against them, almost to the point of suicide, and then accepting them, with the same physical ramifications.  His physical health is not improved by his mental capitulation to his new fate.  But he manages, I think, a dignity and hopefully a kind of heroism by defying the fate that his body has saddled him with.  And that seems to be the best thing you can do if you’re sick.  And it’s what is probably, quietly, in a very unsung manner, done every day by people who are chronically or mortally ill.

*As per Mr. Ferris’ suggestion: this suggestion appears pp. 252-253 of Nabokov, Vladimir, Lectures on Literature, Fredson Bowers, ed., New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1980.   In lieu of both an awkward perversion of Mr. Ferris’ actual response and a copyright-infringement-length excerpt of Nabokov’s lecture, I recommend, should you neither have a copy of Lectures on Literature nor any desire to purchase or borrow it, reading the passage here, via Google Books.  It begins with the paragraph that opens, “‘The Carrick,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and ‘The Metamorphosis,’” for those who want to cut straight to the chase.

†This is from a letter to Oskar Pollak, one of Kafka’s closest friends.  The full letter is available in English translation in Frederick R. Karl, trans., Franz Kafka, Representative Man, New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991.

The image for this interview is taken from the cover of The Unnamed.  The pre-colon part of the title is an excerpt of a sentence that appears quite late in the novel and is hopefully not giving anything away.

In The Naked and The Conflicted, an op-ed piece in the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times, Katie Roiphe offers an uneasily defiant defense of the sex scenes – alternately reviled and lauded for their exuberantly misogynistic perversities – of the mid-20th century's so-called Great Male Novelists.  She also offers an even uneasier, if more confident, condemnation – a sigh of disappointment, really, but one that strives for salience and profounder articulation – of contemporary male writers' ostensible aversion to creating depictions of sex as outré and salacious as those by Updike, Roth, and Mailer.

The article is worth reading not because it is particularly penetrating or on-target in its attacks but because its argument makes momentary advances toward the general vicinity of what could prove more interesting territory.  Roiphe's argument is all over the place; rather, her argument is quite simple, but she attempts to couch it in other trends and literary movements of various cultural and artistic significance, the ultimate lameness of which distracts from the impact of what, one senses, she really wants to say, namely: that she really likes Updike and Roth’s descriptions of sex and is disappointed that contemporary male writers do not describe the act as pruriently.  The essay begins intriguingly: she wonders, wisely without immediately offering any answer, why a sex passage from a recent Roth novel is still capable, in at least one instance, of provoking shock – and in this one instance also disdain and annoyance – despite the fact that most contemporary literary scholars and trendmakers deride such passages as outdated, intellectually naïve, and essentially uninteresting.  It is a worthwhile consideration: is the shock that Roth’s descriptions of sex cause any less worthy of note simply because the shock is of a condescended-to sort, because it is seen as passé and juvenile?  Roiphe chose a poor example to elucidate this point – the “shock” she describes is, I suspect, actually something closer to incensed irritation, of the kind one feels when someone like Rush Limbaugh says something predictably and blandly offensive about, say, homosexuality – but this is not reason enough to dismiss the thrust of her point here (it is less a cohesive essay than an observational and perambulatory approach to an opinion she seems unwilling to let be a mere matter of taste, and of which she can’t help but try to make grander extrapolations, and thus “here” literally refers to that particular part of the essay, as it largely disappears afterwards; this "essay" is similar in this respect to hers): why is it any less "wrong," so to speak, to dismiss something as immature, cliché, or tiresome – as the sex scenes of the Great Male Novelists now often are – than it is to dismiss something as grotesque, perverse, or immoral, as the sex scenes of the Great Male Novelists once were?  Why is it not wrong, ultimately, to simply dismiss something?  The answer seems obvious: it is a question of quality, one may say, of thoughtfulness and ability, although the immense presumptions one must make in order to stake out a claim for the quality, thoughtfulness, or ability of one work or artist over others are staggering – and I’m sure to many it is more clear than it is to me.  But it always seems a loss, in some sense, to not be interested in something that others like or take interest in.  With the exception of several works by Roth, I generally can’t stand the output of the Great Male Novelists; and while a certain petty sense of empowerment comes from this, I ultimately feel much the worse off for not being able to grant their writing the proper time to, at the very least, understand and be interested in why others like them.

Roiphe dutifully admits that these writers – with Upike, Roth, and Mailer as their primary embodiments – deserved much of the condemnation they received for their enthusiastic sexual repression of female characters; but this comes across in her essay as almost a platitudinous given, as something that has, through a kind of well-meaning but hollow acceptance, lost its moral urgency and weight.  This flippancy allows her to implicitly re-embrace the misogyny exercised by the Great Male Writers; where she severely errs – where her essay embarrasses itself most, really – is in her treatment of contemporary male writers, then: “The current sexual style is more childlike,” she states; “innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex.”  This is a grand generalization – most of Roth’s notable male contemporaries, say, Bernard Malamud and Walter Percy, weren’t much concerned with sexual salacity; and many contemporary male writers, say, Jonathan Ames and T.C. Boyle, have written some pretty kooky sex scenes – but what’s worse is how she uses it: essentially, to poke fun at these “cuddly” contemporary male writers, who, she deigns to suggest, have been cowed into their aversion to frank descriptions of wild sexual behavior simply because “their college girlfriends denounced” the sexuality of the Great Male Novelists.  It is as if she is trying to emasculate them, as if the responsibility of a true “Great Male Novelist” were to think about sex a lot and then describe it in breezily exotic detail.  She seems to think that contemporary male writers have essentially failed as interesting writers for precisely this reason.  And she also avoids an unavoidable element of the discussion, if one quite taboo to bring into ostensibly scholarly conversation: the personalities of these writers.  Few of the contemporary male writers she mentions have the chauvinistic, phallocentric, wife-stabbing Weltanschauungen of the Great Male Novelists; she does not consider the likely possibility that their disinterest in the particular world views of the Great Male Novelists may come less from a reaction against these figures and more from their simply having entirely distinct approaches to and understandings of the world.  That the writers she discusses are male is, of course, of central significance, but she avoids making this essay a concerted effort of gender analysis, which could certainly have helped it; should she have wished, it would certainly have been possible and potentially interesting, if necessarily flawed by its tremendous ambition, to have made this an exploration of the post-1970s feminist and gender equality movement male mindset.  Instead she chooses, without articulating why – popularity, presumably, is what connects her chosen authors –, several male writers out of time and artificially coagulates their variously representative parts into what she presumably believes to be a coherent and solid whole.

These are bewildering tactics – of emasculation and coagulation, that is – but what is most lacking in her essay is a comprehension of what, other than describing sex in a straightforwardly salacious way, these Great Male Novelists were, at their best, doing.  When not using sex as a ploy for readers' attentions or just for novelty's sake, these writers used it as a forum for investigating a variety of relationships, not just between the acts’ participants but also within them and, as with Roth at his finest, around them, culturally, socially, even politically.  What Roiphe misses is that many contemporary male authors have eschewed sex as the forum for these investigations; they have moved to other fora, perhaps in part because the Great Male Novelists, so often not at their best, besmirched much of what could be intelligently and provocatively culled from examinations of sex.  They have moved to workplace exchanges; they’ve moved to housing projects; they’ve moved to hunger and eating, to fear and drowning.  They’ve moved to tennis courts.  She calls these writers "cuddly."  And while more people may cuddle in their novels than in those of the Great Male Novelists – and the work of the latter camp, in their interest in the ménage à trois, in penis length, and in acts of sexual degradation, is certainly not where one would want to go to read a great passage about cuddling – this designation – in which she takes these contemporary writers' treatments of sex and makes them emblematic of their entire approach to the world and literature – is myopic, offensive, and incurious.  Little in David Foster Wallace's examinations of addiction and depression is cuddly; little in Dave Eggers' depictions of his parents' deaths, the life of a "Lost Boy of Sudan," and the horrors that a family faced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is cuddly.  Some of the authors she chooses – Jonathan Safran Foer stands out most notably – are easy targets for this attack, and I would not jump quickly to his works' defense; but to lump people like Foster Wallace and Eggers into the same category as Safran Foer or Benjamin Kunkel – who is somewhat more curious and intellectually engaging – simply because their work is alike in a shared absence of giddy depictions of sex is so reductive as to effectively derail all the analytical potential that her initial premise had promised.  Personally, I think people like Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Junot Díaz explore their terrains far more fruitfully and exuberantly than Roth, Updike, and Mailer ever did beds, couches, and the backs of cars.  What Roiphe seems most upset by – and what she has every right to be upset by – is that sex is not as exciting to her in Saunders, Foster Wallace, or Díaz’s texts.  I wish I could be as excited by the Great Male Novelists as she is, or that I could at least find them interesting; I wish, too, that she could see what the value of sex is in the best of Roth, Updike, and Mailer’s work – beyond the exuberance of their prose – and locate in contemporary writers where and how these valuable explorations have been taken up.  The sex scenes of the Great Male Novelists will always be there for her, and Foster Wallace's tennis courts will always be there for me; how nice it would be if they could all always be there for all of us.

The illustration for this – which Roiphe's analysis sparked but doesn't quite live up to – is by Paula Scher and was published with the Times article.

Poem Strip, Dino Buzzati's graphic novel, owes a great deal of its charm and artistic success to factors not intrinsic to the work itself; were it not written in the 1960s – 1969, not least of all – and were it not written in Italian – by an Italian – it might not have pulled its stunts off as comfortably and coolly as it has.  Its debts to the unfortunate stereotypes of the period and Buzzati's nationality make many of the delights to be had in Poem Strip somewhat uneasy: few feel entirely pure; instead they are often weighted by a kind of snarky clemency, one that allows Buzzati to use tiresome pseudo-philosophies and woman-as-metaphor tropes precisely because they fit so cleanly and handsomely into clichés of its time and place – specifically: of the 1960s as guilelessly and naively hedonistic, and of Italy as the European stronghold of that particular brand of woman-worship that deals, by its very nature, in sexism, dehumanization, and misogyny.  So while Buzzati's work, one of the most aesthetically pleasing books published by the always reliable NYRB Classics this past year, thrives on these pleasures – ones derived by a subversion on the part of the reader: the reader's knowing and gentle allowance of its intellectual shortcomings are more often than not the source of the work's pleasures, as opposed to anything within the work itself – it is ultimately undermined by the lenience one must give it in order to enjoy it.

But it can be enjoyed.  The full title of the work is Poem Strip, Including An Explanation of the Afterlife; this explanation, when the necessary caveats are accepted, is wonderful: Buzzati frames the afterlife as enervating in its relentless fulfillment, as a place where unhappiness is yearned for - not an unfamiliar treatment, but one herein explored with a charming sincerity, and occasionally a remarkable ingenuity.  The protagonist is a singer quite accurately aligned – by Daniel Handler, on the back cover – with Donovan: his talent is not quite up to par with his ambitions or considerations of himself, but his songs are pleasantly elevated by an occasional perversity of thought; his lyrics, perhaps more thoughtful and considered than most, are nonetheless not quite aroused to greater significance by his voice, as are Bob Dylan or Neil Young's clumsier lyrics by their interpretive vocal capacities.  One can practically hear his wild, unoffensive delivery lavishing off a well-worn, once much-listened-to 78, howling confidently alone amid the silent cries of adoring teenage girls.  It is unclear whether this particular impression of his protagonist was intended by Buzzati; but it is precisely this snarky clemency that allowed me to take delight in him.

Many of Buzzati's illustrations are terrific; some are simply remarkable.  Upon completing the work, I found myself unexpectedly moved, not just by the images but by the story as well.  Perhaps this was a result of my conditioned acceptance of its shortcomings snagging upon the unexpectedly acute emotions of its final pages; I felt as if I'd been had, as though Buzzati had been cultivating these low expectations precisely to upend them come the work's conclusion.

Excerpts from Dino Buzzati's Poem Strip.

Like many boys and, if the stereotype stands up to scrutiny, fewer girls, I once read comic books almost exclusively.  I rarely read superhero comics and the ones I did read I felt somewhat ambivalent about; they seemed, as I think they might to many contemporary comics aficionados, to delegitimize the medium, or just to cheapen it and validate, with their broodingly simplistic Manichean drives, the clichés that so many readily apply to comic books.  This is a rationalization long after the fact: at the time I think I was drawn to non-superhero comics not with this in mind – although it may have been lurking somewhere deeper, if still superficially, in my inclination – but simply with the seeming oddness, the foreignness, of non-superhero comics: the absence of the at least outright fantastic made the characters and events within these comics – "indie," I remember thinking of them as and hearing them called at the time; I don't know if this has since been largely abandoned, although I imagine its usage, as in all other media to which this word has been applied, has been discouraged by its practitioners and admirers – feel more real, in some sense, more intimate and empathetic; but the absurdity of much of the plots and worlds in which these otherwise realistic characters lived was attractive – and this was something I would later realize is applicable to and found in all media, really – because the absurdness was thereby made all the more real.  Many of these comics helped to open up the absurdities of quotidian life to me and make them fun and notable, whereas before they were primarily just annoying and forgettable.

I've recently been drawn back to comics, after a many-years hiatus.  Initially, it was superhero comics I was drawn to; perhaps this was because superhero comics felt new to me: I couldn't locate any significant interest in them in my youth and therefore it felt like a growth of interest as opposed to a return or, more scarily, a regression.  I asked many friends if they could recommend superhero comics to me.  One title that came up was Doom Patrol, often considered the first "dark" superhero comic, something people like Alan Moore would, with great melodrama and maudlin attempts at complexity, later further explore.  I decided to buy this and, on my way to the cash registers, I noticed a beautifully drawn cover with a slightly off-center title and a charming depiction of a one-eyed Bearskin Hat-like creature standing at the bow of a wooden ship, from the center of which sprouts a fungal profusion of interconnected Italian villa-esque houses.  The name of the comic book is Monster Parade and it is by Ben Catmull.  I ended up being much more excited about Monster Parade than Doom Patrol and feared that my comic book interest may indeed be more of a return – even, indeed, a regression – than a growth.

I have yet to make my way through Doom Patrol, but I have read the four different sections of Monster Parade several times.  Three of them are largely driven by the terrifically rendered terrains and creatures within, as a landscape of inclement weather-creating beings carry out their respective responsibilities.  One, the second, is about the arrogant Prof. Williams' trip aboard an express railway, notable for his irksome cabin-mate and a man-eating monster.  Catmull is a remarkably careful but playful draftsman and his ability to convey a consistency of tone and atmosphere despite exegetic and stylistic shifts is a wonder.  In the second section, the only one with a distinctly narrative thrust, he also displays a capacity – rare among comics artists who seem more interested in the visual and atmospheric – for well-calibrated timing and a charming admixture of quotidian and affected dialogue.  This is one of the best things I've read in a long while.

Monster Parade #2 is apparently coming out soon.  Catmull takes a great deal of time in creating and crafting each of his works – his much-adored Paper Theater is very difficult to track down, having long since its initial publication entirely sold out – and this commitment to his work results in a rare blessing for his readers.  He also works in video and film; his Leftover graveyard footage and Leftover Town Footage are both immaculately realized and, somewhat unfortunately, far more gripping than the music video for which they were put to use, in large part because the song distracts from and lessens the impact of his images.

Excerpt from Monster Parade.

Excerpt from Monster Parade.

Excerpt from Monster Parade.

Image from Monster Parade #2.

Image from Monster Parade #2.

Dan Nadel is art director and editor of PictureBox, Inc., which has published some of the most exciting, innovative, and unique comics and art books of the past decade.  Comics artists who have been published by PictureBox include Paper Rad, Ben Jones, C.F., Mat Brinkman, Frank Santoro, Gary Panter, Lauren Weinstein, Charles Burns, and Brian Chippendale, to name what PictureBox manages to make seem a paltry few; among the many other artists published by PictureBox are Brian Belott, Trinie Dalton, Michel Gondry, Wilco, and Black Dice.  Nadel also edited The Ganzfeld, an annual multimedia collection of design, illustration, comics, and essays; in October 2008, it released its final issue.

Nadel's comics anthology Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969 is a singular account of work from the earliest period of comics history – starting shortly after Hogan's Alley became the first widely successful comic strip – through the point just before the underground comics boom of the 1960s re-invented much of the medium.  Separated into five distinct but somewhat symbiotic sections, this is far from a strictly historical or chronological account of the development of the medium over the past century; rather, it is an introduction to a variety of early comics artists, long since largely overlooked, and their respective abilities and experiments, which Nadel briefly discusses in introductory sections but mostly leaves for the reader to peruse and pour over.  His second book in the series, Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940-1980, will be released May 1, 2010.

This was my first interview and I do hope that you will forgive me my neophytic mistakes and tendencies; what follows is in part an uneasy collision of Nadel's expertise in the subject and my inexpert grasp of comics history, of Nadel's affable demeanor and my overeagerness to make the best of the opportunity.  Fortunately, Nadel took my nascent interviewing abilities and the lacunae of my knowledge of the subject in generous stride, and I remain confident that, though my contributions to the conversation may prove lacking, Nadel's responses to them are never less than illuminating.

All words in bold link to their respectively appropriate pages.

Benjamin Gottlieb: I’m interested in how you think of what you’ve done with Art Out of Time and what you do with PictureBox, and if you see them as working in tandem.

Dan Nadel: I would say that, four years ago or so, when everything was a little bit newer, it seemed like they were really working in tandem – partly because PictureBox was less of a business and more inert: I made fewer books.  So, my day-to-day was based around Art Out of Time and working on a handful of books – one with Paper Rad, one with Marc Bell – and a lot of what I was doing was looking at things that have been marginalized or working with artists who were interested in working that way or in things that had been overlooked and figuring out how best to think about and then publish them.  So I did see the activities as being very alike.

Now, because there’s been so much more business to attend to everyday, I have less time to think about it and it’s more like now my sensibility as a publisher and an historian inform each other according to the artists.  The sequel to Art Out of Time, which is coming out in May, is called Art in Time, and it’s about adventure comics, exclusively, and that was very much an outgrowth of working with Christopher [Forgues] and Frank Santoro and [Brian] Chippendale and Gary Panter and being increasingly interested in detective novels and science fiction and stuff like that – stuff that I’ve come to actually as an adult rather than as a kid, and it comes from being interested in what the artists I’m publishing were reading and discovering.  So Art in Time is very much informed by that; it’s less of an archaeology project and more of an exercise in… sensibility, I guess.

BG: One thing that strikes me about that is this strong connection to genre.  Comics are so rooted in genre –

DN: Well, comic books are rooted in the superhero genre.  But comic strips are not.  It’s just that it’s a financial model that has grown and kind of overtaken comics, which is based around superheroes – but the medium itself began as a really multifaceted, multi-genre place, in the same way that film did.  When comic strips started, they had everything from adventure stories to slice of life stuff to crime procedurals to fantasy to reportage.  Really, everything you could imagine was happening from around 1895 to 1920 or so – just a million different kinds of comics being made.  Just like there are today.  Today is actually much more reflective of the beginning of comics than any other time.

BG: Why do you think that is?

DN: Because people came back around to thinking of it as a medium rather than as a set of restrictive genres; the financial model changed enough to allow certain artists to sell a hundred thousand copies of a memoir comic book.  These things have been successful – Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis is successful; Maus is successful – so it’s very much an outgrowth of that, of the mere possibility that these things would be saleable.  And a generation – two generations of cartoonists now – kind of came up having seen the underground and realized that, once again, comics are a malleable, pliable medium.

BG: Art Out of Time ends with – it ends in 1969 – the birth of the underground comic book movement.  A lot of the comics that came out then that didn’t rely on the same economic structure that demanded these genre conventions still took a lot from genre – they still took a lot from, as you say in the book, the comics that they often read when they were kids – and they pervert them somehow, they sort of play with them.  Why do you think that, when comics started to take this still-saleable route away from genre, it still had these connections to genre forms?

DN: I don’t know what you mean.

BG: That, with people like Crumb, he was still very much interested in genre conventions and in exploiting them and perverting them and twisting them in different directions.

DN: Well, Crumb was interested in using the formal techniques of, say, Little Lulu comics, but he was just as interested in Mutt and Jeff and things like that.  I think that what started to happen was you had a lot of people – people like Justin Green or Bill Griffith, who came out of art school, or Art Spiegelman, who was more self-taught – who were less interested in their recollection of comics as a kid and more interested in seeing comics as a new medium.  Justin Green did an autobiographical comic called Binky Brown that explores Catholicism and sexuality and Griffith was doing observational comic strips and Spiegelman was doing a lot of formally inventive strips that were just about the mechanics of the medium itself.

I think that with the counterculture comes a kind of counter-thinking.  So, yeah, a lot of cartoonists were making their own versions of the horror comics they grew up with, or the funny animal comics they grew up with, but a chunk – I mean, a small group – were making comics that they were basically inventing out of whole cloth.

BG: Do you have any sense why they were drawn to comics?

DN: Yeah: comics are a great, easy medium, in the sense that they’re accessible.  Particularly in the 60s.  Think about the 60s – a huge counterculture publishing boom; underground comics were selling thousands of copies.  So, in the same way that somebody would want to make rock n’ rock – because everybody else was making it and there was a demand for it and an audience for it and it was part of the zeitgeist – somebody might be drawn to making drawings or to having narrative inclinations; but if you were in the fine art world at that point, you wouldn’t know where to go: narrative was discouraged, image-making was discouraged.  And you sort of had to do something, and comics are drawing and writing, and it’s not out of reach.  So it makes sense to me as something that someone would go after.

BG: The most recent work that you include in Art Out of Time is by Rory Hayes, who came about during the beginning of countercultural comics.  And when you look at his work, it really just seems as if he has put his id to paper.  And you can’t really find aesthetic forbears with him, where you can with, say, Crumb.

DN: Not in comics, no.

BG: Right; not in comics.  And Crumb referred to Hayes once – I think this was in The Ten-Cent Plague, or maybe Art Out of Time, actually – as “a great American primitive.”*  If there was this capacious room for people to come in and essentially recreate the form and create their own forms, do you know why would Hayes have been considered a primitive, even though this should have ostensibly been “his” place, in a sense?

DN: Yes: comics culture has always been focused on bypassing modernist ideas about drawing.  Comics culture is rooted in this idea of realistic drawing or “good” drawing that’s based in a kind of mid-19^th century ideal and ignores the last hundred years of art history, basically.  So, given that, Hayes would never be accepted: it’s flat; it’s scratchy; it does away with foreground and background; it does away with all the pictorial conventions of academic drawing or quality illustration of the first half of the 20^th century.  That’s why: there’s no trace of good drawing there – good drawing according to a sort of 19^th century standard.  By a lot of people’s standards now – certainly people who are looking at it from an art perspective – he was a much more interesting draw-er than most of the people who comics people considered great drawers.  He wasn’t interested in a perfectly delineated arm or finger.  That wasn’t his priority.

BG: You were talking about the approachability of comics and how that brought many people in the 60s to work in comics.  When you look at Hogan’s Alley and Hogan’s Alley being really the first hugely successfully comic strip, what do you think it was that made it so successful and approachable?

DN: Oh, I don’t know.  I think Outcault tapped into something that had a kind of immigrant and working-class humor.  It’s hard to say.  The character of the Yellow Kid was what really did it, less the substance of the strip.  And how a character becomes iconic is tricky business.

BG: One thing that’s notable about him is that he rarely speaks.  This was in The Ten-Cent Plague – that one of the reasons that he was successful as a figure and that Hogan’s Alley was successful as a strip was that you didn’t necessarily have to know English very well in order to appreciate it, and so it appealed to a lot of immigrants.  Comics are treated as this prototypically American form, and yet when you look at the first successful comic strip and then the other successful comic strips that emulated Hogan’s Alley, they were geared, in some sense, more toward American immigrant communities and not “mainstream” America.  An argument – I’m not sure how strong this argument would be, but an argument nonetheless – could be made that comics’ beginnings were essentially a part of the American immigrant experience.

DN: Yeah, I don’t know how true that is.  You’re talking about one strip in particular, and it certainly did have that appeal.  But it’s the fact that the Yellow Kid caught on and became a kind of merchandising bonanza that is really what drove the growth of comics; it’s not so much that it had this kind of cultural appeal.  Other comics that were successful were strips like Little Nemo in Slumberland or Hairsbreadth Harry, which were very much rooted in a sort of Victorian fantasy.  And these newspapers were for rich and poor; and the people that helped drive them, ultimately, were the prosperous classes.  So I don’t know if that really has traction.

BG: Well, let me jump to another part of Hogan’s Alley that drew me in, then.  The Yellow Kid rarely speaks, and when he does it’s usually in one brief spurt; you don’t see him in conversation.  And when he does speak it’s in this very strange vernacular that you sort of have to almost decode.  There are many comics – Krazy Kat is an example of this, and another one that I had been unaware of until I read Art Out of Time is Nize Baby – which have these very particular, strange patois that I wouldn’t know how to place–

DN: Well, Nize Baby is Yiddish.

BG: It’s Yiddish?

DN: Yes.

BG: Well, it seems to me that a lot of this playful use of language has vanished from contemporary comics.

DN: Again, it’s hard, because you’re pulling out kind of strange things.  The Yellow Kid spoke this sort of immigrant patois that was reflective of downtown New York at the time and it was attuned to how people were speaking; Milton Gross and Nize Baby – that came out of his being immersed in Yiddish culture; and Harriman was a Creole who moved up North and worked in New York and was focused on what he was hearing on the street and combining it with what he grew up with.

I wouldn’t say it’s something that’s disappeared from comics because if you’re looking for something with sort of interesting language rhythm you can look at Paper Rad or any number of artists; it’s just that things aren’t as localized and there aren’t those kinds of dialects in America anymore.  Or, at least, artists aren’t coming out of those communities and making comics, I should say.  So I don’t think it’s a function of the medium so much as a function of – it’s up to the artists to document their own experiences.  The only thing that’s really changed broadly is that culturally there’s less emphasis on playful, nonsense language, like there was then.  There’s not the same nonsense poetry and play with verse as there was then.  So, no, I don’t think it’s particular to comics, really.

BG: Do you see more contemporary comics – both from what PictureBox and The Ganzfeld has produced to Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics – as part of a continuum that began with a lot of the comics that you discuss in Art Out of Time?

DN: Well, there are a million different branches coming off of a few different trunks.  I don’t think that there’s a way to do a linear continuum anymore because there’s too many influences occurring in too many times, but I think there’s a certain – particularly amongst people doing non-superhero comics – a certain overlapping area of shared languages, in terms of how people are dealing with space or time or figures.  But it’s pretty diffuse, especially these days.  I think that things have certainly split off from superhero comics pretty radically.  But within non-superhero comics I think there are a million different influences floating around.  Some people can share Crumb and some can’t; some people can share Moebius and some can’t.  It’s too diffuse now to pinpoint a single continuum.

BG: If not a single continuum, at least, do you think that – as with people like Rory Hayes in the 60s – comics are still a place for people to come in and completely fabricate their own worlds?

DN: Absolutely.  A hundred percent.  Especially now.

BG: Are there people you like or people you follow who are doing that now?

DN: I think Ben Jones completely reshaped the medium.  I think CF is doing that and I think Mat Brinkman did it and I think that Chris Ware did it when he came in – and Dan Clowes.  These are guys who added whole vocabularies to comics to suit their needs.  Clowes invented formal devices to add layers of content onto his stories.  Chris Ware did the same and also brought in a radically new sense of color and light and emotional warmth to comics that really hadn’t been there before; and he had to figure out new ways of drawing to do that, new ways of production and new ways of connecting panels to one another.  These are very difficult feats.  So, yeah, I think it’s actually happening with increased frequency right now because there are so many great cartoonists working.

BG: It seems that within maybe the last decade of the 20th century a lot of comics and graphic novels started to come out that focused their content on what it is like to be an outsider, in some sense.  As far as I know, a lot of the underground comics beforehand didn’t focus as much on that even though it was an essential undercurrent of it.

DN: Crumb built his persona as an outsider.  So did Justin Green and [Kim] Deitch and Spain [Rodriguez].

BG: But those seem to me more like delights in outsiderdom while Clowes and Ware seem to focus more on the daily grind of feeling like an outsider and feeling like you don’t connect.  And I’m wondering how much of that might have to do with maybe a growing stability of comics as being seen as an artistic medium with many different possibilities for self-expression.  And so a lot of the underground comics used the medium for self-expression, but of a slightly deviant, perverse sort where they were exploring integral parts of their particular selves – whereas Clowes and Ware seem to explore what it’s like to simply live in the world and live these sort of quotidian lives.

DN: I don’t know.  A lot of what Harvey Pekar did was very much about that.  I guess I don’t see Clowes and Ware as writing about a kind of everyday, quotidian experience.

BG: What do you see them as writing about?

DN: I see Clowes writing really dense narratives about whatever the subject is that he’s writing about.  But I never thought of him as chronicling being an outsider.  And Ware I’ve always thought is about relationships between people and emotional being.  I don’t think of either of them as being outsiders, in that sense, in the kind of Catcher in the Rye sense.

BG: Yeah, I didn’t mean it in the Catcher in the Rye sense.  I meant in the sense that, for one reason or another, people who read comics are treated as geeks; it’s a common joke in movies or TV shows that the geek character likes comics and video games, or something along those lines.

DN: Our culture is dominated by geek culture, so if it’s a joke now, it’s a kind of jealous joke.  But, by the same token, I also just don’t really care.  It’s like, we all have our cross to bear.  So what?  You read comics and you got made fun of?  Tough shit, you know?  It could be worse.  It’s a mature enough medium and we’re all human beings and we’re moving along.

BG: Do you feel that the maturity of the medium–

DN: To me, the medium has been mature the entire time.  There’s a certain amount of cultural acceptance of it now – in that it gets reviewed in The New York Times and things like that – but since the beginning it’s produced really substantial work.  It’s just that culture has now caught up with it.  And that certainly affects the medium: it means that now there are grants available and you can make a living out of it and you can sell a lot of books and you can teach at a university, and all of that goes toward helping the medium – having any amount of institutional support is going to help.  People say that it’s going to adversely affect it because it’s not underground anymore or whatever but that's just a bunch of baloney.  It’s up to the artist.

BG: Why do you think it is that it has received this wider critical acceptance now?

DN: We’re a visual culture now, much more so than we ever have been.  I think that, superficially, the fact that there have been so many successful comic book films has helped.  I think that a generation had to kind of rise and overthrow the Boomer generation to allow for a supposed low culture to be accepted, and that the crumbling of the high-low divide that people in their thirties – and sort of now in their forties – really worked hard for has happened.  The push was begun by Boomers like Spiegelman and Crumb and then the momentum just carried through.  It’s a generational thing, to my mind.  Somebody as esteemed and sophisticated as Dave Eggers – a figure like that, forty years ago, would never have been interested in comics.  I think that that’s a really good example of the cultural shift.  Nobody’s interested in this high-low divide anymore; everybody knows it’s sort of bullshit.

BG: A parallel that you can draw that has obvious limitations – but that you can also go into for a very long time – is in looking at the two major media that evolved in the 20th century: one is comics and the other would be film.  One observation I had when I first read Art Out of Time was that the first comic in the book is The Explorigator, in which the main characters travel to the moon, and that recalls how in early film there was an interest similarly in exploring foreign territory – you can find an uneasy similarity to that in something like George Méliès’ film Le voyage dans la lune.  It seems that in the early stages of comics and film there were far more adventure stories, about going somewhere else and doing other things.  Do you think this had anything to do with – or do you think it’s specious to say this – exploring a new medium, in some sense?

DN: You mean, moon as metaphor for a new medium?

BG: Well, that many comics and films at the time were about exploring new, bizarre, previously unexplored terrain.

DN: I guess I probably wouldn’t go there because I don’t think these guys were thinking in that sort of metaphorical context.  Exploring other worlds was very much a thing then, like with Jules Verne.  I don’t think they were thinking on that level.

BG: In terms of not thinking on that level… Inevitably, whenever a medium is canonized and brought into the fold, people try to find these links to other artists who are already within the canon.  This past weekend I saw the movie Crumb, and there’s a critic who tries to tie Crumb to certain artistic forebears.  Since it seems fairly reasonable to say that Crumb probably didn’t see himself as a descendent of Bruegel, do you not see these extrapolations as fair?

DN: I think they’re perfectly fair, as long as they’re not ascribing intention to the artist.  That’s what curators and historians do.  When I grouped all those comics together in Art Out of Time, it was an extrapolation.  It’s totally fair and it should be done.  That’s the beauty of criticism and history.

Yeah, Crumb would chuckle or something at that kind of thing; but no artist wants to be put in a box, and who can blame them?  But I think it’s good and necessary that we start looking at all these things in some sort of larger context, whatever the context may be.

BG: And with the increasing canonization of new comics, and old comics, is this something then that you see as something progressive and good?

DN: I wouldn’t give it one value or another; it all depends on the situation.  It depends entirely on what and who and how and when.  At least there’s a conversation.  And that’s good.  A conversation is good.

*It was in Art Out of Time; my apologies to Mr. Nadel.