The Look of Disaster: Comic Books as a Documentary Form

Artwork: Jacques Callot, "La pendaison" (detail), from Les Grandes Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre (1633). From Wikimedia.

Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form
Hillary L. Chute
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, $35 (cloth)

If violence is intrinsic to human culture, then the history of human violence is also the history of art. Greek vases from the fifth century BCE illustrate scenes from the Trojan War: blood spewing from the wounded Hector’s chest, a grief-stricken Achilles. Roman texts show images of war machines. The first purely informational literary work was a richly illustrated military how-to guide, Roberto Valturio’s 1472 De Re Militari (The Art of War).

In 1633 the innovative printmaker Jacques Callot published Les Grandes Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre (The Miseries of War), eighteen sequential prints depicting the horrors of what became known as the Thirty Years War: soldiers ransacking a farmhouse, raping its inhabitants as well as burning them alive; two dozen corpses hanging from a vast tree while onlookers chat casually a few yards away; public tortures and executions by burning at the stake.

Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War print series (published posthumously in 1863) remains one of the most compelling statements against war. Created in response to the 1808 Dos de Mayo uprising in Madrid and the long conflict it spawned between Spain and Napoleonic France, Goya’s terse written comments suggest that he was a witness to some of the scenes: “I saw it.” “One cannot look at this.” “Why?” accompanies a picture of a man being bound and strangled by soldiers. “Barbarians!” editorializes a trussed man being shot point-blank. One of the most horrific images—the remains of mutilated, disarticulated corpses arranged on a tree—earns the sardonic, “A heroic feat! With dead men!” Goya makes viewers complicit in these horrors, unable to look away, despite his injunction.

Pictorial journalism became an increasingly popular form during the nineteenth century, when newspapers and magazines like Harper’s Weekly published the work of battlefield artists who produced on-site drawings of the Civil War. By the twentieth century, photojournalism was commonplace but still had not supplanted documentary illustration. The English artist Bruce Bairnsfather sketched his fellow soldiers in the trenches during World War I. According to the artist, his weekly Fragments from France cartoons in the Bystander showed those at home the “macabre and pathetic predicament of mutilated landscapes, primitive trench life, ceaseless wearing drudgery.”

The first cartoon documentary to be shown in theaters was also the first animation about a wartime catastrophe. Winsor McCay’s twelve-minute The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) relied on eyewitness accounts to create the thousands of hand-drawn cells. McCay’s rendition of “the crime that shocked Humanity” resembled a contemporary newsreel, which in some sense it prefigured. Viewing the film remains a disturbing experience. Black smoke spews from the doomed ship as drowned corpses float in its wake. Hundreds of passengers leap to their deaths in scenes evocative of 9/11. The final, haunting image shows a mother sinking below the surface, helplessly trying to hold her infant above the water that swallows them.

One might think that a genre typically known to depict fantasy might be viewed skeptically as history. Indeed, Bruno Latour has argued that “the more the human hand can be seen as having worked on an image, the weaker is the image’s claim to offer truth.” Yet Hilary Chute argues in her new book, Disaster Drawn, that documentary comics are capable of unflinchingly representing events that verge on the unrepresentable—at times doing so better than media more conventionally associated with documentation, such as photography and film. This is because of what Chute calls their “plenitude,” the way they combine and juxtapose points of view, perspective, characters, chronology, and styles (in both words and images), allowing the viewer to become truly immersed.

Chute’s 2010 study Graphic Women explored autobiographical and sociopolitical narratives by comic book artists such as Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis (2000). Her new book focuses on Art Spiegelman, Keiji Nakazawa, and Joe Sacco, whose best-known, groundbreaking works make readers experience atrocity at ground level: as Spiegelman says of Maus and Auschwitz, “It was a way of forcing myself and others to look at it.” In Disaster Drawn, Chute offers an elegant aesthetic and theoretical argument for how “made-up pictures” allow us to enter into traumatic historical events, “inviting one to look while signaling the difficulty of looking,” making them not only an accurate form of witness, but an ethical one. Chute thus underscores her main tenet: that the form of comics is inextricably tied to a moral response to trauma. This is not advocacy, as Chute writes of Sacco’s work, but the experience of history as “a kind of haunting by the other that does not end.” “Events are continuous,” Sacco writes in Footnotes in Gaza. “But the past and present cannot be so easily disentangled. They are part of a remorseless continuum, a historical blur,” not a liminal state of transition, but an immurement in the past that one is not condemned to repeat, but to confront.

• • •

Among the most significant documentary comics is Keiji Nakazawa’s 1972 Ore wa Mita (I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor’s True Story). As a six-year-old, Nakazawa witnessed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: he was shielded and saved from the blast when a concrete wall collapsed on him. His artist father and two of Nakazawa’s siblings were among the seventy thousand killed outright, as his pregnant mother watched. Traumatized, she gave birth that day to an infant who died four months later of malnutrition. Eventually she and her son found refuge with relatives outside the ruined city.

Like his father, the impoverished young Nakazawa was an artist. He drew on the backs of discarded movie posters, sewing the pages into books, and at an early age worked as a sign painter. Enthralled since childhood by the work of Osamu Tezuka, the legendary manga artist and activist best known to Americans as the creator of Astro Boy (which debuted in Japan only six years after the bomb), Nakazawa moved in 1961 to Tokyo to become a cartoonist. He did not disclose his experience of the bombing: after the war, the American occupiers and Japanese government censored mass media in Japan, outlawing mention of the devastation wrought by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the lingering effects of radiation poisoning. Within the resulting culture of silence and denial, survivors were known as hibakusha, “explosion-affected people,” stigmatized not unlike American AIDS sufferers during the height of the epidemic in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Nakazawa found work as a manga artist, and by the early 1960s was publishing generic manga—spy stories, science fiction, samurai adventures—in Boys’ Pictorial magazine. His mother’s 1966 death from radiation sickness shattered him. When he went to retrieve her remains from the crematorium, Nakazawa says: “There were no bones lef in my mother’s ashes, as there normally are after a cremation. Radioactive cesium from the bomb had eaten away at her bones to the point that they disintegrated. The bomb had even deprived me of my mother’s bones.”

In the aftermath of her death, Nakazawa wrote “Pelted by Black Rain,” his first fictional work about Hiroshima and the first Japanese comic about the bomb. It made the rounds of traditional publishers before finally appearing in 1968 in Manga Punch, a men’s magazine, where it was followed by four other atomic bomb–themed manga. In 1970 Nakazawa’s “Suddenly One Day” appeared in Boys’ Jump magazine, considered, like Manga Punch, to be a lowbrow rag. An unprecedented eighty pages long, “Suddenly, One Day” was the fictional account of a second-generation hibakusha whose child dies of leukemia, a result of his parent’s exposure to the bomb. It was many readers’ first encounter with both the facts of the bombings, and the lingering effects of radiation poisoning. The story triggered a huge public response (Nakazawa’s editor wept upon reading the story’s first pencil draft).

After the success of “Black Rain” and “Suddenly, One Day,” Nakazawa’s editor at Boys’ Jump encouraged him to create I Saw It, published as a stand-alone issue in 1972. Its grotesque images of shambling hibakusha and smoldering, melting corpses inevitably call to mind illustrations from horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Other scenes evoke the destruction wrought by Godzilla’s “atomic breath.” But Nakazawa transforms these horror tropes into an extraordinary act of witness: “he responds to the most high-tech of high technology, the atomic bomb . . . with the deliberately low-tech, primary practice of hand drawing.” Chute astutely notes that in I Saw It, Nakazawa recognized science fiction “as a genre of reality” that irradiated our world more than seventy years ago.

• • • 

The first version of what became Art Spiegelman’s masterwork, Maus, appeared as a three-page black-and-white comic, “Maus,” in Justin Green’s anthology Funny Animals (1972). The story was later expanded, serialized in Raw, and finally published in two volumes, an edition that received the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, the first ever awarded to a comic book.

A fan of Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD Magazine, the wellspring of American underground comics, Spiegelman began drawing as a boy. “I was oddly imprinted very early like a baby duck with Mad,” he said during a 2011 conversation with Joe Sacco at the Pacific College of the Northwest. “It was like tree, rock, Mad. Once I realized that comics were made by people, I wanted to be one of them.” At eighteen he started doing freelance work for Topps, where he designed trading cards, most memorably the Wacky Packages series of stickers that sent up name brands, MAD-style—Neveready Batteries, Crust Toothpaste, Ratz Crackers, Jail-O—a huge playground hit for those of us who grew up in the late 1960s (and now highly collectible, if any readers still have theirs). After moving to San Francisco in 1971, he became part of the city’s flourishing underground comics scene and, like Nakazawa, published cartoons in second- or third-tier men’s magazines like Cavalier.

Spiegelman’s Polish immigrant parents, Anja and Vladek, were Holocaust survivors. Like the hibakusha, they did not speak openly of their experiences. The young Spiegelma first learned about the Holocaust from his mother’s “forbidden bookshelf,” which consisted of pamphlets written by survivors, many illustrated with cartoons. The often-crude production values and sometimes comically drawn characters underscored the stark horror of camp chimneys churning smoke and emaciated figures trapped behind barbed wire fences. Most of these booklets were printed after the war. A few were drawn by prisoners in the camps, like Horst Rosenthal’s Mickey au Camp de Gurs (1942), which featured Mickey Mouse imprisoned in the same camp as Rosenthal, who later died in Auschwitz.

After returning to New York, Spiegelman began compiling the massive amount of documentary material—written, visual, and oral—that he used to research and write Maus, including interviews with his father, Vladek. Just as Nakazawa draws on the imagery of pulp horror, Spiegelman deploys comics tropes, such as talking animals, to chilling effect. Maus’s mouse narrator, Mickey (Art Spiegelman’s alter ego), inhabits a world of George Herriman–inspired Nazi cats and Jewish mice. This choice was inspired by Spiegelman’s research, through which he discovered that Nazi propaganda often represented Jews as rats: “Posters of killing the vermin and making them flee were part of the overarching metaphor.”

Spiegelman has said that his work “materializes history.” In Maus, as in I Saw It, the bodies of the dead are revived and revised, by hand, on the page. Like their human counterparts, many are then disembodied again, executed or consumed by camp crematoria. In Maus, as opposed to the earlier three-page, densely crosshatched “Maus,” the reader’s identification with those in the concentration camp is heightened by what Chute calls a “shaggier” drawing style: “the specified features of the animal characters are replaced by a more minimal notational style—a visual system in which the reader cannot ‘take comfort,’ as Spiegelman puts it, that ‘it ain’t you.’” There is no comfort in Maus; it “goes into the camps and stays there at length, re-creating a world meant to be studied and engaged at one’s own pace.”

Maus’s publication was a game changer for comics, the moment when the medium came of age as a documentary form worthy of scholarly study and serious critical attention. With regard to the latter, Spiegelman insisted on no less. In a 1991 letter to the editor of the New York Times, he took the newspaper to task for placing Maus on the fiction bestseller list.

. . . to the extent that ‘fiction’ indicates that a work isn’t factual, I feel a bit queasy. As an author I believe I might have lopped several years off the 13 I devoted to my two-volume project if I could only have taken a novelist’s license while searching for a novelistic structure. . . . I know that by delineating people with animal heads I’ve raised problems of taxonomy for you. Could you consider adding a special ‘nonfiction/mice’ category to your list?

The Times responded:

The publisher of Maus II, Pantheon Books, lists it as ‘history; memoir.’ The Library of Congress also places it in the nonfiction category: ‘1. Spiegelman, Vladek -- Comic books, strips, etc. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Poland -- Biography. . . . 3. Holocaust survivors -- United States -- Biography. . . .’ Accordingly, this week we have moved Maus II to the hard-cover nonfiction list, where it is No. 13.

• • •

Like Spiegelman, Joe Sacco is the son of immigrant parents, who survived German and Italian airstrikes on Malta during World War II. Born in Malta, Sacco lived in Australia until 1972, when at the age of ten he moved with his family to the United States. He received a bachelor’s in journalism, and although he cites the New Journalism of the 1960s and ’70s as a major influence, he grew disenchanted with a journalistic career after college. He moved to Malta, where he created the country’s first narrative comic, before returning to the United States. He founded an alternative comics journal and did satirical comics work before becoming engrossed in the ongoing Gulf War. This led to Palestine, which was published in nine installments beginning in 1993, received the American Book Award, and was collected as a standalone work in 2001. His later works, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (2000), The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (2003), Footnotes in Gaza (2009), The Great War (2013), and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012, with Chris Hedges) all explore “how history becomes legible as history.”

An on-the-ground journalist, Sacco immerses himself in the lives of those who lived (and are living) through conflicts that have torn their countries and lives apart. His crowded pages, the result of Sacco’s “saturation reporting,” are dense with meticulously drawn, almost photorealistic details. Sacco calls his work “slow journalism.” One can get lost in the pages for hours.

Sacco never loses sight of individual bodies, dead or living. He writes: “You see extremes of humanity in places like Palestine and Bosnia. . . . Mostly what you see is innocent people being crushed beneath the wheels of history.” His work expands the limits of what can be documented. In “A Thousand Words,” a six-page installment of Palestine, Sacco recounts his unsuccessful attempt to photograph Israeli police brutalizing a peaceful protest of Palestinian women and children. He was not standing in the right place to get the shot. “There’s nothing here,” an editor tells him. A camera limits what an artist can capture in ways that drawing does not: Sacco eloquently explains how the comics artist’s ability to place himself anywhere within the frame can surpass even a camera, to capture Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “perfect moment.” “When you draw, you can always capture that moment,” he writes. “You can always have that exact, precise moment when someone’s got the club raised.”

Sacco’s close-up drawings put the reader in a crowd being attacked by Israeli soldiers as the club slams down. Palestine’s final, black frame underscores the brutality of everything we’ve read so far, but also might suggest a tabula rasa for beginning a new story. In the Middle East alone, myriad artists have joined Sacco in creating comics of witness, including Magdy El Shafee’s Metro: A Story of Cairo (2012); Wajdy Mustafa’s Levant Fever: True Stories from Syria’s Underground (2015); and Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s animated film Waltz with Bashir (2008). In a world in which sophisticated photo editing has taught the savvy viewer to approach purportedly documentary photos with due skepticism, pictorial journalism—trustworthy, ironically, for the undisguised nature of its contrivance—might in time achieve nearly equal footing with more conventional documentary forms.

• • •

In her introduction to Disaster Drawn, Chute recalls Roland Barthes’s visionary 1970 essay “The Third Meaning,” which analyzes still frames from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1944 film Ivan the Terrible. The essay was also one of the first to describe the ability of comics to “open up the field of meaning through its dual inscription and mobilization of time.”

Barthes notes the two most common ways a viewer responds to a film or series of related images. The first is largely informational: we register the characters, settings, costumes, time frame, and dialogue, and from these construct a narrative that interprets the series of images. The second meaning is symbolic. Whatever information we’ve already absorbed can be deepened, and our perceptions perhaps altered, by an image’s symbolic or metaphorical weight: a clenched fist; a bowed head; teeth bared in a grimace that might be a snarl or smile.

There is a third, subtler hermeneutic Barthes identifies, which he terms the “obtuse meaning.” This meaning derives from the profound pleasure found in a purely visual depiction. Think of the sublime moment in Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée—a film consisting solely of black-and-white still frames, except for when we see the motion of a woman’s eyes suddenly opening to gaze into our own. It is the moment that can only be experienced in film or another diegetic art, Barthes states, “namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am convinced that these ‘arts,’ born in the lower depths of high culture . . . present a new signifier.”

In comics as with film, our recognition of the artist’s hand and eye elevates our experience from that of passive viewer to engaged witness, even as we acknowledge the unreality of what we see. As film critic Matt Levine wrote in a blog about Barthes’s essay:

In the fissures and cracks of the filmic image, when we realize that pictures on film are indeed unique in a limitless number of ways, the transfixing real-unreal rift by which cinema operates becomes quite clear. This is what the third meaning is about: realizing that these images are illusions, and becoming simultaneously enraptured by how immersive, striking, and real they are.

It is this real-unreal rift that Sacco explores so memorably in his work: “the past and the present cannot be so easily disentangled,” he says in Footnotes in Gaza. “They are part of a remorseless continuum, a historical blur.” And while photographs that claim historical accuracy can be faked, provoking outrage, we know (and trust) that the artist’s hand and eye have collaborated to create the images we linger over in the work of Sacco, Spiegelman, Nakazawa, and the emerging artists whom they have inspired. They render the unspeakable in a language we can all understand, conjuring voices and histories that might otherwise go unheard.

Originally published on BostonReview.net.

An America That Never Was: Norman Rockwell's Vision

Norman Rockwell's studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

Deborah Solomon

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30.00 (cloth)

Seventy years after the appearance of the Four Freedoms sequence, among Norman Rockwell’s best-known works, the artist continues to be derided as an assembly-line purveyor of sentimental kitsch, a victim of his own popularity and of the changing tastes of the late twentieth century.

But that judgment isn’t damning. An American Art Museum exhibition recently featured his paintings from the collections of George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg. And on December 4, seven of his paintings went on the block at Sotheby’s, where his Saying Grace netted $46 million, tripling the previous record for a Rockwell sale.

Today viewers can admire Rockwell’s humor and eye for detail while dismissing the end result as saccharine and self-consciously folksy, embodying a mid-century patriotism and optimism that most Americans no longer feel or even recognize. For instance, nearly all of the figures in his pre-1960s work were white. His masters at the Saturday Evening Post, the magazine whose covers he illustrated from 1916 until 1963, refused to let him depict African Americans in anything but subservient roles.

It was a situation Rockwell attempted to remedy with his most influential and perhaps greatest work, The Problem We All Live With. Run as a two-page spread in Look magazine in 1964, after Rockwell had left the Post, the painting was inspired by Ruby Bridges, the first African American to enter an all-white grade school in New Orleans after court-ordered desegregation. Rockwell’s painting shows the first grader, escorted by federal marshals, determined and staring straight ahead. She ignores the concrete wall beside her, painted with the word “nigger”and the letters “K.K.K.,” and she ignores the unseen, ugly crowd that stands where we, the viewers, stand. The marshals are seen only from the shoulders down, emphasizing the girl’s solitude, and courage.

Five decades later the painting retains its power. Yet at the same time it demonstrates what the U.K. critic Mark Hudson calls “a peculiarly American approach to external conflict: the idea that it is what is being defended that counts; what is being fought about and against is almost irrelevant.” It is an acute insight into Rockwell’s work. His gaze nearly always focused not just on the home front but also on an idealized representation of home and comfort. His were not so much reflections of our country’s innocence as visions of an America that never was.

As Deborah Solomon writes in her expansive yet oddly superficial American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, “Rockwell’s art, however accessible, keeps his deepest inspirations hidden from view.” And they remain hidden, even as she takes readers on a long journey from Yonkers, where Rockwell’s maternal grandfather painted domestic chickens and game birds such as grouse and quail; to New Rochelle, where he lived alongside successful illustrators and artists such as Joseph Leyendecker (creator of the Arrow Collar Man) and Coles Phillips; to Arlington, the Vermont village where his flinty neighbors posed for myriad Saturday Evening Post covers; to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, another quaint New England town.

Rockwell began drawing when he was six or seven years old, copying cigarette cards. Other childhood influences were books illustrated by Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. And his father used to read Dickens aloud to his children, which suggests young Norman would also have seen the work of George Cruikshank and John Leech, noted illustrators of Dickens’s novels and stories. Gangly and unhappy with his appearance, “a bean pole without the beans,” as he wrote in his 1960 autobiography My Adventures as an Illustrator, Rockwell left high school at sixteen and entered art school. His work became his life.

“I put everything into my work,” he wrote.

I feel that I don’t have anything else, that I must keep working or I’ll go back to being pigeon-toed, narrow-shouldered—a lump. When I was younger I used to work night and day, possessed by a sort of panic that I’d lose everything if I didn’t drive myself. . . . the drive is still in me. People ask me why I don’t take vacations or retire altogether. I can’t stop work, that’s the long and short of it.

The panic never went away. Despite the domestic warmth captured in his illustrations, the adult Rockwell was emotionally reticent, depressive, and plagued by near-constant anxiety. He had years of therapy with the famed psychologist Erik Erikson, who came up with the term “identity crisis” to describe a critical stage in human development when an adolescent grapples with various “identity fragments” and attempts to integrate them into a healthy psyche. It is a condition that Solomon’s Rockwell seems to embody. He wed three times, twice impulsively; none of his wives appears to have been a love match. Summing up his first marriage, which lasted fourteen years, he said, “It wasn’t particularly unhappy, but it certainly did not have any of the warmth and love of a real marriage.”

He had three children with his second wife, Mary, an alcoholic who was repeatedly hospitalized for depression. A major impetus behind the family’s move to Stockbridge was the presence there of the Austen Riggs Center, a well-known psychiatric hospital where Mary and Tom, one of the Rockwell’s three sons, had spent time. According to Solomon, Rockwell believed Mary “had trouble harmonizing with anyone besides psychiatrists.” It is something that might have been said of the hypochondriac Rockwell, who made a point of surrounding himself with doctors, going so far as to rent a garage apartment to an Austen Riggs psychiatrist and his family.

His late-life marriage to a retired schoolteacher, like him a septuagenarian, appears to have been content.

• • •

Rockwell took pains to refer to himself as an illustrator rather than a fancy-schmancy artist.

“The story is the first thing and the last thing,” he said in a taped lecture at the Art Center School in Pasadena in 1948. To gauge a painting’s success, he’d observe a viewer’s reaction to it.

If you came in, I would just wait to see if you laughed or not. I just love that. That isn’t what a fine-art man goes for. I don’t care whether it is art or not. And by the way, I always say that, and then I have to put in an argument that it is art.

While Rockwell’s artwork is often dismissed as kitsch, most of it lacks the most distinctive feature of kitsch—pretentiousness. An exception is the set of illustrations he did for Look in the 1960s and early 1970s, presidential portraits and attempts to illuminate serious social issues of the day, with titles such as How Goes the War on Poverty?, The Peace Corps (J.F.K.’s Bold Legacy), and The Right to Know. Few of these have anything like the power of The Problem We All Live With.

That power may have emerged from Rockwell’s association with child psychiatrist Robert Coles, a colleague of Erikson’s who witnessed Ruby Bridges being escorted to school. Coles volunteered to counsel Bridges during this period. In 1963 he published a study of the psychological effects of desegregation on African American children, and went on to write Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear. Solomon notes that Rockwell probably read Cole’s 1963 study, and it’s easy to imagine that he was deeply affected by it (he illustrated Coles’s 1968 Dead End School, another book about desegregation). Bridges didn’t model for Rockwell’s painting, but he captured the self-assurance and dignity of the little girl.

Solomon is rightly dismissive of those who refuse to see the artistic merits of Rockwell’s paintings. Yet American Mirror engages in more pop psychology than it does serious analysis of Rockwell’s work or its influences upon American popular culture. It is less mirror than telescope, peering through gaps in the curtains for glimpses of the unsavory in the artist’s life. The book suffers from le vice americaine, that tendency to reduce every life to childhood or sexual trauma or dysfunction or, ideally, all of the above. In Rockwell’s case, there were mother issues (she, too, was a hypochondriac), an ineffectual father, and an older brother who was a star athlete, “a real boy’s boy” whom Rockwell grew estranged from.

Most of all, there is the question of Rockwell’s sexual identity: Was he a repressed homosexual? And did he have a secret thing for young boys?

Solomon isn’t the first to explore sexual undercurrents in Rockwell’s work. In 2006 Richard Halpern’s Norman Rockwell: Underside of Innocence made many of the same points that Solomon does. John Waters’s late films gleefully explode Rockwell’s vision of a more innocent America. He told Solomon, “That painting he did about the little black girl walking . . . inspired Lil’ Inez in Hairspray.” Pecker, the innocent savant obsessively photographing his friends and neighbors (including male and female strippers) in Waters’s eponymous film, could be a sweetly perverse shutterbug stand-in for Rockwell. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks can be seen as sexualized subversions of Rockwell’s golden age vision of small-town America, just as Lynch’s The Straight Story is a Disney-produced homage to the Rockwellian ideal. “Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymus Bosch,” as Lynch’s sound mixer described Blue Velvet. “I love his work,” Lynch told Solomon in a 2008 interview.

Solomon presents a great deal of anecdotal evidence for Rockwell’s repressed homosexuality. She makes much of a 1934 fishing trip the forty-year-old Rockwell made with his studio assistant Fred Hildebrandt, five years his junior. The two shared a bunk in a remote Quebec camp, with their guides in the upper bunk. In his diary Rockwell writes, “Fred is most fetching in his long flannels” and later, “We paddle to portage near a waterfall. I strip and frollick about—see photos.”

“All of this,” Solomon writes, “is suggestive material, up to and including the ‘lick’ in his spelling of ‘frollick.’”

Really? Given Rockwell’s reticence, would he truly have left a written record of anything that would suggest physical impropriety with another man? Whatever Rockwell’s predilections might have been, Solomon seems almost comically off the mark here. Her speculations take a somewhat darker turn when she discusses Before the Shot, a 1958 Post cover. It shows an eight-year-old boy holding up his pants so that part of his bare backside is exposed. The doctor behind him prepares a needle as the boy stares suspiciously at the doctor’s medical diploma hanging on the wall. The painting is meant to be funny—it is funny, if you can put any thoughts of pedophilia from your mind, which Solomon believes is almost impossible to do in twenty-first century America.

Solomon also sees latent homoeroticism in The Runaway, in which the same young model, hobo’s bindlestick on the floor beside him, is painted sitting in a diner with the kindly cop who is buying him lunch before taking him home to his parents. The diner’s amused owner leans expectantly on the counter, presumably waiting for the boy to decide what he wants to eat.

“The officer represents the warm arm of the law,” Solomon writes:

authority at its paternal best; he’s the quintessential Officer Friendly. On closer reading, however, the cop can be seen as a figure of tantalizing masculinity, a muscle man in a skintight uniform and boots. There is something sensual about the expanse of his massive back, the sharp creases in his shirt formed where the fabric pulls.

Solomon also raises an eyebrow over Rockwell’s long affiliation with the Boy Scouts of America, first as a longtime illustrator for Boys’ Life, and later as illustrator of the Boy Scout calendars, which he drew nearly every year between 1925 and 1976, two years before he died.

Solomon’s suggestion that repressed homosexuality was the dark wound that bled into Rockwell’s work is not necessarily wrong, but who knows? And who cares? It is a blinkered view, and her zeal to unearth hidden meanings contributes to some odd readings of individual paintings, a with her analysis of Saying Grace, the Thanksgiving-themed 1951 Post cover and record-seller. The painting shows a grandmother and grandson, formally if not expensively dressed, saying grace in a crowded restaurant to the bemusement of other, more casual diners. Solomon eloquently describes the work as “a ballet of gazes, a delicate interplay of actions and reactions that together affirm the power [of] . . . the act of looking.” She goes on to note:

A smattering of backward, Cubist-style lettering on the window—“TNARU”—spells the end of the word restaurant while containing the anagram UN-ART and suggesting the self-mocking message U R an ANT.

Well, okay, maybe. Whether or not Post readers saw a coded reminder of their own cosmic insignificance, in 1955 they voted Saying Grace their favorite Rockwell cover.

• • •

The Norman Rockwell of American Mirror is a cold fish, clinically anxious and emotionally detached from those closest to him, dependent on psychiatrists and pharmaceutical amphetamines to combat panic attacks. He sounds more asexual than anything else. His third wife lived with another woman before she wed him, and afterward didn’t share his bed. “At last, he had found his feminine ideal,” Solomon writes, “an elderly schoolteacher who was unlikely to make sexual demands on him.”

Yet the golden glow that clings to his images of young boys (and girls) doesn’t strike me as a haze of latent sexual desire. It is a more complex and intense longing: for childhood, for family, for human connection. And it is one that Rockwell himself was acutely aware of.

“Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn’t the perfectly pleasant place I thought it to be,” Rockwell mused:

I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and painted only aspects of it—pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there were only Foxy Grandpas who played football with the kids, and boys fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard. If there was any sadness in this created world of mine it was a pleasant sadness. If there were problems, they were humorous problems. The people in my pictures aren’t mentally ill or deformed. The situations they get into are commonplace, everyday situations, not the agonizing crises and tangles of everyday life.

In his introduction to Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers (1979), Christopher Finch writes:

Every image interlocks with half a dozen others. In a sense they are all part of one massive work. Each takes on a greater significance because of those that have preceded it and those that will follow it. . . . We should not judge Rockwell by any individual work, nor even by a selection of his finest paintings, but rather by the cumulative effect of his total output.

Viewed like this, Rockwell’s century-spanning American panorama isn’t nostalgia or kitsch. Nor is it the “social document” that Solomon memorably calls “America before the fall—a world devoid of pollution, drugs, and violent crime.” It’s something richer and stranger: an alternate history of the United States, one as Rockwell wished it had been. Even his autobiography is a kind of alternate history. “His memory,” his son Tom told Solomon in 1999, “was the Norman Rockwell version of his life.” Most of Rockwell’s work is not even illustratio in the purest sense of that word—images designed to elucidate an individual text—but invention.

Nearly all of the work he is best known for—the 332 covers he did for the Saturday Evening Post—depicted vivid scenes and characters, executed in photorealist detail, that were sprung from his own imagination. They are scenes and characters from a movie playing in Rockwell’s head, cast with his neighbors in Arlington and Stockbridge, a film that he projected onto canvas for an audience of millions.

Or, perhaps, his works constitute a deck of magically resonant tarot cards, Major and Minor Arcana depicting the distinctly American, numinous world echoed in their titles: “Contentment,” “Springtime,” “A Temporary Setback,” “First Flight,” “The Critic,” “Fleeing Hobo,” “Armchair General,” “Ticket Agent.” Shuffled and reshuffled, they can be arranged in countless patterns, avatars creating a narrative of hopeful yearning that still manages to move us, even as the imaginary world they inhabit remains forever just beyond our reach.

Originally published on BostonReview.net.

Was glam any different from pop? Simon Reynolds has the answer in 'Shock and Awe'

David Bowie in May 1973; a year earlier, he'd memorably performed "Starman" on "Top of the Pops." (Associated Press)

Myriad books have been written about the birth of punk, its cultural godparents in the Warhol Factory and Detroit, and distaff cousins in the United Kingdom, where Margaret Thatcher was punk’s evil stepmother. 

Yet with a few exceptions, punk’s gold-sequined older sibling, glam rock, has mostly been ignored by the critical establishment. Simon Reynolds’ “Shock and Awe” goes a long way to fill that void. If David Bowie’s death inspired more writers to tackle the subject, they’ll be hard-pressed to surpass Reynolds’ work. 

The best music criticism comes from equal parts love and obsession, often cut with a modicum of grief — the dissolution or slow decline of a once-great artist can break your heart as much as a great love song. Reynolds' behemoth (the book is 700 pages) grew from his exposure to Marc Bolan on "Top of the Pops" when Reynolds was 8.

Still—700 pages devoted to a self-consciously superficial musical phenomenon that blazed at the dawn of the '70s, then fizzled out in just five years? Reynolds states that his book has been cooking since 1985, which is a long time to contemplate what seems like a simple question: "What is it that makes the glamorousness of glam different from the standard-issue razzle-dazzle of pop music?" The answer can be summed up in two words: David Bowie, whose career runs through "Shock and Awe" like real gold thread among all the rhinestones and Lurex.

Glam was music for kids (mostly white) weaned on the Beatles, whose 1970 breakup opened a chasm between 1960s rock and whatever would come next. This rising generation of young teenagers formed a huge audience eager for a music to call their own. In the U.S., we called it glitter rock, and our exposure was mostly limited to scattershot AM/FM airplay and the occasional, much-anticipated appearance of a band like Slade or T. Rex or Mott the Hoople on the biweekly TV series "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert." The Brits, on the other hand, had weekly shows like "Top of the Pops" and "The Old Grey Whistle Test" that regularly introduced new acts to a mass audience.

Enter Bolan, whose platform shoes stomped all over the last remnants of the '60s. Formerly a member of the gonzo-styled band John's Children, Bolan went on to form the winsome folk-rock duo Tyrannosaurus Rex. After penning twee, occult-tinged songs ("She Was Born to Be My Unicorn"), Bolan ditched his acoustic guitar and picked up a white Fender Stratocaster, whereupon Tyrannosaurus Rex morphed into the hard-rocking T. Rex.

T. Rex's self-titled debut contained a few hippie holdovers, but glam finally made its entrance when Bolan sashayed onto the set of "Top of the Pops"  in 1971, bedecked in satin and his wife's glitter makeup, and warbled "Hot Love." The album "Electric Warrior" appeared soon after, riding on the success of monster hit singles "Get It On" (in the U.S., "Bang a Gong") and "Jeepster."

Meanwhile, Bowie, Bolan's brilliant frenemy, was struggling through a series of hitless albums, despite (or because of) his knack for relentless self-invention, leapfrogging from Anthony Newley-styled cabaret songs to the horrors of "The Laughing Gnome," finally penning the melancholy "Space Oddity," which became his first hit.

In 1970, he released "The Man Who Sold the World." Its sleeve flaunted a photo of a languid Bowie sporting pre-Raphaelite locks and a long blue-and-white satin gown. Later, an equally androgynous image adorned "Hunky Dory," though more Garbo than fin de siecle damsel.

Then came Bowie's historic April 14, 1972 "Top of the Pops" performance of "Starman." Bowie stood beside guitarist Mick Ronson, both gorgeously attired in outrageous outfits by designer Freddie Burretti. In a gesture that looks tame now, Bowie drew close to Ronson and suggestively snaked an arm over the guitarist's lamé-clad shoulder and then sang the line, "I had to phone someone so I picked on you," and with a sly, knowing smile, stared and pointed directly at the camera, beaming his message across the country.

For a generation awaiting their watershed moment—Elvis shaking his televised pelvis in 1956, the Beatles storming "Ed Sullivan" in 1964—this was it.

Americans missed that broadcast, one reason glam never caught on here the way it did in the U.K. But there were other factors as well, which Reynolds nimbly examines. U.K. glam's camp hearkened to the rollicking, tongue-in-cheek excesses of English music hall and panto dames, rather than the brittle irony of the Warhol Factory. Britain also retained remnants of a once-vibrant dance-hall culture, and unlike that other musical stalwart of the '70s, prog, you could actually dance to glam's 1950s-inflected rhythms.

American glam trended darker, inspired in part by the divine decadence of Bob Fosse’s film “Cabaret,” with Joel Grey as the sexually ambiguous, demonic MC whose Pierrot whiteface looked like a death mask. Lou Reed’s detached, almost funereal litany of Factory drag queens in “Walk on the Wild Side,” its chorus fading into Bowie’s ghostly saxophone solo. And America’s obsession with violence provided fertile, blood-soaked ground for Alice Cooper’s Grand Guignol antics featuring dead babies and boa constrictors, as well as the (literally) self-lacerating performances by the ferocious Iggy Pop, frontman for the Stooges. 

British glam had its high-toned side, represented by Bowie, of course, as well as Roxy Music, with a legendary lineup that included Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and Bryan Ferry. 

Still, much U.K. glam was self-mocking and seemingly impervious to embarrassment. "Shock and Awe" encourages YouTube viewing of performances by nearly forgotten bands like the Sweet and Mud, whose deliriously silly "Dyna-Mite" and "Tiger Feet" spawned a dance known as the shoulder jive. A beefy Gary Glitter rolled eyes and hips, lip-syncing "Rock and Roll Part 2," though amusement at his ludicrous prancing is undercut by knowledge of pedophilic crimes that he was sentenced for in 2015.

Indeed, the history of glam is haunted by the faces of the young female groupies, some barely pubescent, who came to be as much a part of a musician's wardrobe as feather boas and teased hair. On the Sunset Strip, Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco drew all the name bands of the day, along with an army of camp followers like Sable Starr and Pamela Des Barres.

By 1975, glam's target demographic was aging out of red satin hot pants and into the monochrome palette favored by the Ramones and Patti Smith. As the decades passed, it seemed little more than the brief interregnum between the 1960s and the long shadow cast by punk. But Reynolds makes a good argument for glam representing an "individualized, privatized form of revolution" and "glamour as a spooky insistence of self."

Its most enduring cultural legacy is glam's open engagement with the fluidity of gender: with gay, bisexual and trans identities. Reynolds cites the mass popularity of Queen's Freddie Mercury, whose Beardsleyesque flamboyance somehow managed to elude the attention of the band's audience, enabling him to enrapture them in "an embrace that hovered somewhere between acceptance and ignorance." As Bowie wrote in 2001, "We were giving ourselves permission to reinvent culture the way we wanted it. With great big shoes."

"Shock and Awe" ends with a chapter noting glam's influences over the last 40 years. Unsurprisingly, it's a Bowie-centric list. Ultimately, "Shock and Awe's" examination of the glam era doesn't solve the mystery of who David Bowie was, or begin to fill the cultural black hole left by his death. "What if there is an afterlife, after all?" Reynolds ponders as he listens to the last track of Bowie's final album, "Blackstar." "Perhaps that's another definition of glamour: lustrous images generated by organic, perishable beings that live on in personal and collective memory, long after their source has withered."

Hand's most recent novel is "Hard Light."

"Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century"

By Simon Reynolds

Dey St. Books: 704 pp., $18.99 paper

Originally published on LATimes.com.

‘A Man Lies Dreaming’: Imagining Hitler as a low-rent private detective

Is the world ready for a hard-boiled Hitler? “A Man Lies Dreaming,” Lavie Tidhar’s stunning alternative take on the Holocaust, audaciously imagines the 20th-century demon as a middling private detective named Wolf.

It’s November 1939, six years after Germany’s Communist Party trounced Wolf’s National Socialists in the country’s election. The disgraced and debased Wolf (his name a nod to the German meaning of Adolf) has fled to England, like many other refugees. There he has hung out a shingle in London’s seedy Soho, among the whores and corrupt coppers, and a serial killer who is seeking to frame him. One day, a beautiful young Jewish woman comes to Wolf, asking for help finding her sister.

“I looked at her face. She was nothing but trouble and I knew it and she knew I knew,” Wolf writes in a voice icy as that of any classic gumshoe. “I had no business hunting for Jews in the year of our Lord 1939. I once had faith, and a destiny, but I had lost both and I guess I’d never recovered either. All I could see was the money. I was so cold, and it was going to be a cold winter.”

Wolf’s search quickly leads him to a slaver’s den run by Hermann Göring, once a fellow leader of the National Socialists, now a wealthy pimp. But before you can say Philip Marlowe, Tidhar’s narrative abruptly shifts.

Now we’re in Auschwitz, and a man named Shomer lies dreaming the noir novel we are reading. Before his imprisonment, Shomer was a successful writer of shund, pulp fiction. His wife and two young children have been exterminated in the camp. He spends his days digging graves and his nights lost “in that murky half-world which was once his novelist’s mind.” He fights against any memory of the world that’s been destroyed, as well as that murky half-world he inhabits when he sleeps.

“Stories, stories, he is sick to death of stories! Yet they are all he has.”

Tidhar, who was born in Israel and is now based in London, lost most of his family in Auschwitz. In this novel, as in earlier ones, he uses his impressive talent to create brilliantly subversive alternate histories. His 2011 novel “Osama” features Osama Bin Laden as the renegade antihero of a popular series of novels within a novel, and his 2013 novel “The Violent Century” imagines a world where superheroes are as common as soldiers and accountants.

Numerous historical figures appear in his new book: the British fascist Oswald Mosley, Diana Mitford and her sister Unity (the latter as besotted with Wolf as she was with Hitler in real life), Rudolf Hess, Ian Fleming, Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh. Shomer himself is inspired by a late 19th-century writer whose pen name was Shomer.

Despite its dark subject, “Man Lies Dreaming” can be very funny, as in a scene where Wolf runs into Leni Riefenstahl, who is starring in an unlikely sequel to “The Great Gatsby.” It is also remarkably poignant. Once Mosley’s Brownshirts come into power, the diminished, Jew-hating Wolf faces a Jew’s fate — and, ironically, perhaps an insight of what it means to be a Jew. He remains reprehensible, but Wolf is not a monster: frightened by the sight of rioting refugees, “he saw himself bared, ugly in the mirror of their suffering.”

Set during the election of a demagogue who battens on the fears of an underemployed populace threatened by thousands of foreign-born refugees, “A Man Lies Dreaming” feels disturbingly prescient. Tidhar holds up a mirror not just to Wolf, but to ourselves. In doing so, he reminds us that even — especially — under the most terrible of circumstances, stories are all we have. And in the right hands, they can be a formidable weapon.

Originally published on WashingtonPost.com.

'Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction' yields writing of strangeness and beauty

In the 11th century, the German historian Adam of Bremen wrote that the Finns “are to this day so superior in the magic arts or incantations that they profess to know what everyone is doing the world over…. All this is easy for them through practice.” Their command of words and sorcery is so legendary that modern Swedes who consult a fortuneteller say that they are “paying a visit to the Finns.”

Yet why is it that only a few Finnish writers — among them Tove Jansson, Elias Lönnrot (compiler of the “Kalevala”), Johanna Sinissalo and the Estonian Finnish Sofi Oksanen — are known to American readers?

The challenge of translation is one reason — Finnish is a notoriously difficult language for nonnative speakers to learn, with gender-neutral pronouns and grammar. The Finns’ often unconventional way of looking at the world may be another — think of Sibelius’ yearning symphonies, the quirky films of Aki Kaurismäki, Alvar Aalto’s undulating buildings, Jansson’s endearingly amorphous Moomins.

Cheeky Frawg, a small press specializing in the literature of the fantastic, often in translation, is publishing an omnibus volume of the brilliant, visionary modernist Leena Krohn — think Jorge Luis Borges intersecting with Isak Dinesen, Flann O’Brien, Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino.

The comparisons help put Krohn’s body of work into context but do nothing to capture the ineffable, melancholy strangeness and beauty of her writing. This is great literature: Shame on us for only now discovering it.

Krohn has written more than 30 books for adults and young readers. A variety of works published between 1976 and 2009 are collected here, including six short novels and novellas, short stories, critical essays and novel excerpts, some of which have been difficult to find in the U.S.

The volume opens with “Dona Quixote and Other Citizens. Portrait (Tales of the Citizens of an Unusual City).” The book consists of a series of chapters, most only a page or two in length, which can also be read as individual stories — a technique similar to that of Lydia Davis and a hallmark of nearly all of Krohn’s fiction here. The “unusual city,” never named, is recognizable as modern Helsinki but a Helsinki at once as commonplace and marvelous as Gabriel García-Marquez’s Macondo. Here is the narrator’s first meeting with the eponymous protagonist:

“I was sitting on the pedestal of a statue when something passed me by. It was as long and thin as a piece of straw, and it moved so lightly that it seemed to slip along above the dust of the road. It had a pair of binoculars at its neck and it stopped by the railing and began to look out at the sea.”

The piece of straw is an old woman known as Dona Quixote, and so odd yet acute are Krohn’s descriptions of the city and its denizens that a reader is at first not quite certain whether the story is set on Earth or indeed if the narrator (or Dona Quixote) is human. It’s as though the story was told by a member of another species, amazed by even the most mundane things.

This sense of mingled strangeness and recognition reverberates through all of Krohn’s work, most clearly in “Tainaron: Mail From Another City.” The narrative is framed as a series of letters, never answered, written by an unnamed woman to her distant lover, describing the city where she now lives — where the residents are insects.

Many of them are human-sized and possessed of human speech, their behavior a distorted mirror held up to that of Homo sapiens. In a vast, teeming beehive, the narrator has an audience with the immense queen, who, ceaselessly giving birth to her offspring, shrieks, “But what is a mother? … She from whom everything flows is not a someone …”

Later, at a funeral parlor, the narrator is shown the exquisite coffins that hold only “a single organ, often an eye or antenna [or] part of a wing, a part with a beautiful pattern.” Told that there is no crematorium in Tainaron, she insists on knowing what happens to the rest of the bodies. The funeral director takes her to an underground chamber, where she is at first sickened and then exalted by the sight of dung beetles devouring the dead. “And here, then, was their work: to distill pure nectar from such filth, to extract from the slimy liquid of death health, strength and new life.”

This singular vision of a transcendent connection between species also shines in “Datura,” where ingesting the seeds of the titular poisonous plant subtly changes the way a woman perceives the world, and “The Pelican’s New Clothes,” in which a pelican befriends a lonely boy named Emil. Only children recognize him as a pelican: dressed in human clothing, the pelican calls himself Mr. Henderson. He gets a job taking tickets at the opera and is enthralled by “The Magic Flute.” (He especially likes the birdcatcher, Papageno.) Reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s work, it’s a book that deserves to be called a classic.

As do nearly all of the extraordinary tales collected here. “Beauty is the universe’s most enduring quality,” Krohn, now 68, states in her afterword, “it is repeated in atoms and galaxies, numbers and relations and the way a tree grows.” This is a writer whose work can rewire your brain, leaving you with an enhanced, near-hallucinatory apprehension of our fragile planet, and of all the beings that inhabit it.

Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction
Leena Krohn
Cheeky Frawg Books: 850 pp, $36.99

Originally posted on LATimes.com.