86
Julio Cortázar’s “Fantomas contra los
vampiros multinacionales”:
from sequential rhetoric to literary blending
Julio Gutiérrez G-H
Abstract
This article intends to present the adaptation and appropriation of rhetoric and narrative elements from comics by novels in the book “Fantomas contra los vampiros de las multinationals”, by Julio Cortázar. By defining some of the main features that distinguish comics as a narrative medium with its own rhetoric rules, I intend to acknowledge the use of these features appropriated from Fantomas comics, adapted to the novel plot, and the way both languages blend into one narrative discourse.
This paper is relevant because it explores the interaction of different media in a single discourse showing the enormous value of comics rhetoric in the construction of narrative.
Résumé
Cet article se propose de présenter l’adaptation et l’appropriation d’éléments rhétoriques et narratifs des comics dans le roman “Fantomas contra los vampiros de las multinationals” de Julio Cortázar. En définissant certains des éléments centraux qui distinguent les comics comme un medium narratif avec ses propres règles rhétoriques, je reconnais l’usage de ces caractéristiques appropriées des comics de Fantomas, adaptées pour l’intrigue du roman, et la façon dont les deux langages se mélangent en un seul discours narratif. Cet article est donc important puisqu’il explore l’interaction de divers médias dans un seul discours en montrant l’énorme impact de la rhétorique des comics sur la construction de l’histoire de ce roman.
Keywords
87
1.
Most of the articles that have been written about Cortázar’s Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales1
shed light on the political dimension of the text. It is the main feature of this work, considering that its construction responds to the need of the author to raise awareness of the abuses to human rights made by Latin-American dictatorships (See Barataud, Dávila and Navarro).
Another dimension of this text is its playfulness and irony. Anne Connor explores this dimension in her article “Behaving badly: irreverent play in Cortázar’s Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales”, so that the author makes fun of himself and many other intellectuals involving themselves in a Fantomas’ adventure, by taking fragments from a comic in which the Argentinian writer appears as a character as well as some other intellectuals such as Octavio Paz and Susan Sontag. Connor refers to the format of the sequential text placing it on a lower level than literature:
the text is in actuality “una historieta,” a term in Spanish for comic book which also implies, through the diminutive of “historia,” a lack of seriousness or depth. In addition, both the association of cartoons with children’s literature as well as the implication of comedy within the “comic” genre reinforce the playful aspect of the book (Connor).
Despite the fact that Connor’s observation aims with precision at the ludic dimension of Cortázar’s work, it places the comic as a text below literature. As we will see in the next sections of this article, comics as a medium may open some new paths in terms of its narrative resources, which is the aim of this work. The Argentinian author himself values comics as a medium to spread a message to different readers:
… Fantomas was born with a very explicit intention. In Mexico, as in any other country, comics have a certain status, a huge strength in popular imagination, people devour them. Therefore, it’s obvious that by modifying any given comic as I did with Fantomas you can get through other kind of message, different from what would be literally comic. Evidently, that would become a highly useful means to spread ideas (Sosnoswki, 54).
In the interview with Saul Sosnowski, the writer takes into account the discursive strength of comics that allows reaching not only new readers, but also new ways to express meaning.. The Argentinian writer deepens that point, arguing that comics as a language allow one to blend aesthetic value and narrative content along with a powerful political or historical message. Cortázar, therefore, understands that comics’ rhetorical elements are a very useful tool to improve his work.
In this same style, this article will explore some of these discursive resources from sequential art that appear in Vampiros Multinacionales. This work was originally published in 1975 as a fanzinesque edition that resembles the format of the serialized adventures of Fantomas. This first look at the paratext lead us to think of an intention of fusing the language of comics and literature. There have been other later editions, but most of them lack these hybridization intentions from the author2. There’s a huge difference between 1975 and 2002 editions, so in this article we will focus our attention on the first publication, since it reflects in the best way 1 From now on, the title of this work will be shortened to Vampiros Multinacionales for practical reasons.
2 In his article, Navarro points out the same idea previously discussed: the modern editions of this work dismiss the rhetorical role of the sequential text fragments, particularly the one from the Spanish Publisher Destino (2002), which decided to make a new version of the sequential fragments of Cortázar’s text. The result is a very distant text from the first edition, which ends loosing the narrative strength of the visual and sequential elements that make Vampiros Multinacionales such a unique text.
88 what it is intended to expose in this work. This first edition puts in tension both languages –sequential and written– allowing it to appear a balanced narrative that explores both rhetorical forms:
There is a fragile discursive equilibrium in Cortázar’s work, in which he makes a profitable use of the language of comics, as he gets close enough to the boundaries between parody and salutation to the source. (Dávila 140)
The same way as Navarro defends the place of comics inserted in Cortázar’s text in his analysis of the different reprintings of Vampiros Multinacionales, Dávila states that the language of comics inserted in Cortázar’s book is the frame in which the whole discourse is structured (128). The relevance of its structural and rhetorical elements are evident in this sense: the use of the format of the fanzine in the 1975 edition is a statement towards sequential art as a valid and useful resource in a narrative construction, that can provide interesting possibilities combined with a literary text. In this sense, Connor agrees that the rhetoric of comics may add narrative value to a literary work such as Cortázar’s: “his exploration of the comic book genre can also be understood as an extension of his greater literary project which was about questioning and re-shaping traditional narrative structure” (Connor).
2.
The hybrid nature of Vampiros Multinacionales appears along the whole text, even in the front page: as a secondary title, it says “an achievable utopia”. These words point to a project that provides this work with a deeper literary and political value according to Barataud, who tags Cortázar’s work as an adaptation (2). Her appreciation of the text, coming from its hybrid nature, provides an interesting point of view about the dialogue between both sequential and literary languages. The other researchers refer to Vampiros Multinacionales as a “historieta”, which is a less interesting concept to start with.
As Barataud defines it, it is better to think of Vampiros Multinacionales as a hybrid, and even better to think of this text as a hybrid –biologically. Its discursive nature combines both visual and textual features in a whole new product that comes to be more than a novel or a comic. The story told in Cortázar’s work is reshaped in a process that Marie Laure Ryan calls remediation, based on Bolter’s definition of the term, a process in which the components from a determined medium penetrates into another3 (30). In Vampiros Multinacionales there are some rhetorical elements from comics that are taken to reshape the textual narrative, so as to get to new readers: as in, stories are like animals that take advantage of genetics and blend some features from different species so as to thrive. Stories evolve and change adapting into new media, in mixed media (see Bortolotti and Hutcheon 444). The case of Vampiros Multinacionales is interesting, because its adaptation as a story goes through written text remediated with some elements from sequential text.
The origin of this work gives relevant information about its hybrid nature. Cortázar’s fanzine is built from fragments of a Fantomas comic printed in Mexico by Novaro publishers in February 1975. The main character is Fantomas, a masked vigilante, master of disguise and a cultured and refined thief whith a social conscience. It is a reconstruction of a previous version created and published during the first part of XXth century in France by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, in which Fantomas was also a thief and a master of disguise, but one with no mesure, an aggressive and violent criminal, very different from its Mexican counterpart. As Gomez 3 “Remediation, a concept developed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999), describes the way in which media (particularly but not exclusively digital media) refashion other media forms” (Grusin 648).
89 (2012) states, the Mexican Fantomas follows a different path from the one planned by Souvestre and Allain on the other side of the Atlantic. Their creature is initially a corrosive criminal, with a sordid violence, which later becomes softened in the movies Hunebelle made with Louis de Funès, according to the book published by Artiaga and Letourneux: Fantômas: biographie d’un criminel imaginaire (2013). The authors propose Fantomas as a faceless and bodyless creature, which nevertheless has a voice which changed along the years. In the seventies, Fantomas leapt to Latin America and evolved into something else. As said by Barataud, it is a re-writing of the French character, transformed by Gonzalo Martré into some kind of philanthropist- thief, “located as Cortázar himself in the sixties’ Paris, with political interests tending to socialism, and with a refined aesthetic taste” (Gomez 183) .
The character raised the interest in Julio Cortázar, mainly beacause it showed some features that they both shared in some way:
Fantomas, who at first was a horrible criminal, is now a lonely vigilante and he knows i started as a careless horrible fellow, and i’ve become i don’t know exactly what, but anyway someone who’s in need of justice every time i read the papers and see what happens around the world (Cortázar Papeles, 462).
The Argentinian writer acknowledges this new dimension of the character, provided by Martré who pictures Fantomas as a “socially conscient rogue” (Gomez 183), which may be similar to the idealists and political revolutionaries Cortázar followed in the seventies. Hence, Fantomas emerges as some kind of Latin-American Robin Hood, devoted to protect culture from capitalism. In this sense, the Mexican Fantomas is part of the Mexican tradition of the wrestlers’ masks, according to Gomez. Martré’s comic is a re-writing of El Santo, the popular wrestler, but a much refined one: “A Santo, after all, dressed in a frac. In that consists the invention of the Mexican Fantomas, the elegant menace by Guillermo Mendizábal and continued by Martré” (Gomez 190). This transatlantic Fantomas lost most of its French predecessor; it became a hero, a solitary vigilante who faced social injustices that reflected in one way or another the times in which the strip was published4.
In Vampiros Multinacionales, Cortázar takes fragments from a Fantomas adventure published in Mexico in 1975, titled “La inteligencia en llamas” (Intelligence on fire). The author alternates both media using the story as a thread that gives cohesion to both different modes of expression. The use and profit of the rhetoric of the sequential medium are not separated from the discursive development of the written parts of the text: they merge in a continuity that gives as a result a text that goes beyond an illustrated story. In that sense, the Argentinian writer performs more an appropriation than an adaptation: he takes and modifies the comicbook to the convenience of his story. Though, the story has to adapt itself to the expressive limits of image and sequence, and maintain its coherence and cohesion in every jump from one language to another.
So Vampiros Multinacionales, intended as some kind of appropriation, is mostly a discursive adaptation: a remediation. There are certain features of the narrative discourse (as Chatman conceives it in his book Story and discourse) that experience a series of transformations when merging with another discursive form. The literary discourse blends with the language of comics so the narrative adapts to maintain the continuity of the 4 In some way, this character has many elements in common with El Zorro, the masked hero born in the pulp fictions that jumped into the comic and films, which lead us to think about a source of inspiration to Fantomas. As well as El Zorro, Fantomas was a masked vigilante that in his latest stage had a powerful social and reivindicative message, shown in adventures full of action.
90 story –the chain of events, as Chatman describes it (19), transforming the means through which that content is communicated. Those transformations are restricted to what the story requires the discourse to become. As in biology, there is a mutual correspondence between the story and media, such as the relationship between species and their ecosystems, as James Gibson describes it through the concept of affordance: the author defines it as when the environment provides the animal, being beneficial or harmful, implying a complementary relation between the animal and the environment (127). Affordances are those qualities that allow the subject to interact with its medium, as well as those features from the environment that make them suitable for the subject. The affordances, given this reciprocity, are defined as well as by the nature of the context as by the species that inhabit it: the niche is the instance of its configuration. It is not relevant where the animal lives, but how it lives there.
By accommodating this concept to the relationship between media and narrative, we can parallel media with the environment and the story as the animal that inhabits it. Now we understand and have defined this parallel, the most relevant subject is how story and media interact according to their respective boundaries. The affordances will always attend to what the story demands to become an effective narrative discourse; through the discourse, the medium will provide what is needed by the story, nothing more. Media affordances, as they are called by Gunther Kress, describe how discourse gains profit from rhetorical properties of media complying with what the story requires: they are, in more simple words, “the potentials for representational and communicational action by their users” (7).
These potentials imply that media determine at some point the nature of the narrative discourse, so that they are not merely plain conduits that transport the message, “but material supports of information whose materiality, precisely, “matters” for the type of meanings that can be encoded” (Ryan 1). The emphasis that Ryan gives to the materiality of media is relevant to what we are commenting on here. Comics have some features that they share with literature, but also there are many others that are exclusive to the sequential art. The page layout, the visual composition, the arrangement of sequences or the mixed use of written text and pictures give the author some particular rhetorical resources to enhance the expression of his or her communicative intentions.
Through comics’ media affordances, Cortázar uses the rhetorical resources of the sequential medium in order to blend both narrative forms: comic and novel. Cortázar reshapes Fantomas’ comicbook taking the needs of his story into account, but also considering the limits of both media. The affordances of comics and written text get in such tension that resolves in the hybridization of both languages in a palimpsestic text that, according to Hutcheon’s perspective, defines the nature of adaptation (9).
The product is a re-writing of both Fantomas’ adventure and the Russel Court Ruling5, in which the Argentinian writer took part, in an intent to reach a massive group of readers in order to inform them about the situation of Latin-American dictatorships (see Dávila 124).
3.
Taking into account Chatman’s distinction between story and discourse allows us to think of Vampiros Multinacionales as a merging of two different discourses –from comics and from literature – in order to keep 5 The Russel Court Ruling was created by the english philosopher from whom it receives its name. It was originally intended, in its First version, to researWch on the crimes committed during Vietnam war. The second version researched on the political situation in many Latin American countries, in which there where violations to the human rights.
91 a coherent story, which aims to be the political conflicts in Latin American countries during the seventies. This blending of two different rhetorical forms reveals itself in diverse dimensions. The visuality and dynamism of the sequential medium is remediated into a written form that adapts to the media affordances of comics.
One of the rhetorical elements from comics remediated to text are the captions, those texts that usually appear in the upper area of the frame as text that describes settings, actions or even thoughts from characters. In Vampiros Multinacionales there are many sentences that indicate an action accompanied and ornamented by an adverb: “the narrator broke through almost supersonically” (Cortázar Fantomas 9). The tone gives the narrator’s voice some super-heroic closeness to Fantomas by the use of these kind of words. In the Fantomas’ comicbook from which Cortázar takes the fragments that complete Vampiros Multinacionales, it is possible to see the same grammatical tone in the captions: “thanks to his ultra-sensitive readers, he could reach the author of the assault” (Martré 26), even some prefixes such as micro- that indicates something exceptionally small (Martré 28). The superlative use of adverbs gives the actions a fantastical tone. The adventure seems more “alive” and spectacular for the reader. The effect put the characters outside the territory of the everyday.
Another interesting remediation appears in the titles heading the chapters of Vampiros Multinacionales. In them, Cortázar compresses some relevant actions of the fragment and adds some meta-textual comments that refer to the text itself: “About how the narrator could reach the train in extremis (and from now on there will be no more titles for the following chapters, because at this point there start to appear many beautiful pictures to divide and relieve the reading of this story)” (Cortázar Fantomas 11). The author makes use of the para-texts of the narration and integrates them into the diegetic action in the same way as captions do in comics. The information contained in those lines is complementary, but not necessary, to acknowledge the actions properly, the same way in which the framed texts over the drawn frames complete at some point the information contained in the picture in a merely descriptive way, almost repeating what the reader sees in the frame: “He entered the next building and climbed the rooftop. He was carrying a small but very powerful signal detector” (Martré 29). In the cited fragment, the text heads a picture in which we see Fantomas standing in a building listening to the signal depicted with onomatopoeic typography.
This resource is, in some ways, a gate through which the narrative voice leads the reader from literary discourse to sequential discourse: “But the comicbooks have that, you despise them and all that, but at the same time you start looking at them and once in a while photo-novels or Charlie Brown or Mafalda takeover and suddenly FANTOMAS, the elegant menace, presents:” (Cortázar Fantomas 13). At this point, the language of comics penetrates fully into the literary text, almost as an infiltration. The game that Cortázar proposes to the reader is remarkable in this sense: he interrupts the text with a fragment from the original Fantomas’ adventure in comics and at the same time comments about the role of this medium in popular culture and its impact. In line with the ideas presented by Connor or Barataud, the use of the rhetoric of comics has this strategic dimension to point out a political topic6. The clearest example of this is where the narrator comments in a metatextual way the use of the fragments from La inteligencia en llamas as a means to “make the revolution in order to be revolutionary”, as Cortázar (narrator-character) himself says in Vampiros Multinacionales, to 6 The narrative structure of Vampiros Multinacionales is widely described in Barataud’s article. The use of pieces of a Fantomas’ comicbook gives Cortázar the chance to play along different narrative layers: an upper level with an omniscient narrative voice, the next one where the writer –as a character –sits in a train reading the comicbook, and a lower one in which he is a character in the book he is reading in the train. As the media mix in the discourse, the levels blend and cross over. It is in this diegetic cross-over in which the remediation occurs, and allows the author to profit from the sequential medium and to reach his aesthetical and political goal.
92 assume the responsibility of denunciation, always with a naïve-less irony: “let’s get into Fantomas as an epitome of my point of view in this matter, and to the wise, etcetera” (Cortázar Fantomas 26).
Other rhetorical elements from comics remediated into text comes from dialogues and actions. The narrator, as in comics (particularly those like La inteligencia en llamas), only complies setting space, time and actions, and occasionally is able to enter the psyche of a character, mainly the protagonist. The structure of Cortázar’s text, alternating one and another discourse, aids to reach continuity in the story despite the discursive differences. This alternation reaches more effectiveness where the written text offers the description of the scene before the dialogue expand the action through the balloons along the whole page taken from the Fantomas’ comicbook: “But his thoughts were cut down by that other technological beheading which is the phone, Fantomas was calling someone sitting behind a broken glass” (Cortázar Fantomas 30). That person behind the broken glass, as the reader can see in the next page (a fragment from La inteligencia…) is Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer. Cortázar “frames” the visual sequence in the scene depicted by the cited text, as if it was a caption for the first frame of the next page (see Cortázar Fantomas 31).
In the same paragraph, the narrative voice makes a pause in his narration to represent in a very descriptive and visual parenthesis his thoughts about what he is reading in the comicbook (the cross-over between narrative levels is active at this point; so the author jumps from the action “inside the comicbook” to the situation inside the train in which he is reading that comicbook):
As he was about to get to know about Fantomas’ last phone call, he thought with a vague horror in that specification, he thought about the past and the present of his country, in a returning status quo in which the worst tortures seemed ordinary. Far behind, in the wide screen of the past century, Juan Manuel de Rozas’ mazorqueros [a para-police gang] were galloping in the memory, a close up showed their facones [a typical Argentinian knife used by the “gauchos”, the local cowboys] slicing the prisoners’throats, that slow “refalosa” described by Esteban Echeverría and Hilario Ascasubi, the knife that little by little goes through the tissue while the victim, standing and witnessing his own death hears someone saying: “Do not complain, my friend, it was a lot more painful for your mother giving you birth” (Cortázar Fantomas 30).
The text represent a succession of images (like vivid frames) that depict violent scenes from Argentinian history as if they were projected in the “widened screen of the past century” in a very vivid sequence almost approaching the language of film. The juxtaposition of images suggests, also, some of the lines that define comics as a medium, specifically as McCloud defines it, comparing it to a very slow movie, as “juxtaposed pictures and other images in deliberate sequence” (8). Cortázar complies with this definition by applying a strategy of construction of the discourse of his work by blending both comics’ and literary texts’ languages in a hybrid form. The written text enables a continuity with the Fantomas’ adventure fragments, so that both different languages, coming from different contexts, become one discourse giving shape to a story.
Another example of what it is intending to be explained in this section may be found in dialogues. The integration of both languages gives as a result fluency between the visual and textual display of dialogues along the narration. Cortázar keeps continuity between the source text (the Fantomas’ adventure) and his own writing by a pertinent cutting, the same way as film editors do. In Vampiros Multinacionales, the author proposes a subtler “edition” of the action by merging the narrative levels of the comicbook the narrator is reading and of his context. When he arrives in Paris, he plans to resume his reading, but suddenly Susan
93 Sontag interrupts him on the telephone. The conversation they have implies a change of direction in the story, so that the ending of the source text is altered, although it keeps coherence and cohesion with all the previous events from the comic book:
-You’re such a sweetheart – said Susan, and the narrator considered that she wasn’t meaning it and he felt like wandering across the ceiling, like launching fireworks through the window –Don’t you see, Argentinian fool, that all of this is a smokescreen. The truth is other. Fantomas’ been wasting his time (Cortázar Fantomas 35).
In the source text, Fantomas finishes the adventure escaping a huge explosion from a building and defeating Steiner and his plans. However, Cortázar interrupts that outcome, so that the adventure has not concluded yet, and the participation of the Argentinian writer has not come to an end either. The narrator alternates pages from the source text with the dialogue to blur the line that divide the two narrative levels of the comic book and the characters that are discussing the mentioned text. The result is the merging of the narrative discourses (written, visual) through the dialogue, so that this particular kind of remediation allows the author to take control of the story, appropriate it –more than adapt it– and transform it in a new, hybrid narrative product.
4.
As one commented earlier, media affordances are an important part of the process of adaptation. In the case of Vampiros Multinacionales, they play a role in the modulation of some narrative structures exclusive to comics that are used by the author as an aid to merge the two media that share the narrative discourse of the work. We have seen how remediation works, but there are other strategies that Cortázar uses to build his text. From the point of view of narrative syntax, there are many recognizable narrative resources from comics relative to continuity and juxtaposition of text and image that the Argentinian author adapts to his needs, taking the media affordances of comics into account. The first media affordance deployed by Cortázar is the sequential structure of comics and the link between different elements from one page to another through the page breakdown.
Thierry Groensteen defines the discourse of comics through its spatiality, and the particular ways the visual array of the page can articulate a narrative through what he calls arthrology: “comics panels, situated relationally, are, necessarily, placed in relation to place and operate on a share of space” (Groensteen 21). The way Cortázar works with the Fantomas comic book fragments, and even with the other illustrations used along his text, lead us to think that the use of the discourse of comics reach further objectives than the construction of a complex framework of visual allusions, as Dávila states (128). “Historietas” can’t be a pretext, since their arthrology articulates the discourse of Vampiros Multinacionales.
An example of this comes in the first irruption of the fragments from Fantomas’ adventures in the written discourse. In the 1975 edition of Vampiros Multinacionales, many pages are arrayed so that the pictures integrate to the written text in a “relational situation”, in which the space of the page is relevant. When the first illustration appears, the text “adapts” to the sequential medium narrative and discursive rules, leaving almost half of the page blank and an incomplete sentence, “Anyway, the thing was” (Cortázar Fantomas 14), so as to create a continuity regarding the next page which depicts a whole page from the comic book Inteligencia en llamas. This interruption of the text, under the light of comics media affordances, may be seen as a page breakdown: Cortázar gains the narrative tension of the incomplete sentence to earn the interest of the reader
94 the same as comics artists do: leaving an incomplete action or narration so that the reader is compelled to move to the next page, conscious of its relation of continuity regarding the previous fragment.
Cortázar is conscious of the nature of the media affordances of comics, as the narrator states before the first page breakdown: “captured as a sardine in a fishing net but decided to accept the law of that game and read frame by frame with no hurries, as it commands that pleasant experience that every old dog knows and follows [...]” (Cortázar Fantomas 14). In Cortázar’s work, the game is an important topic that appears transversally in almost all of his texts. In this case, he sets the rules of the “game” of reading a comic as the rules of composing the discourse of the hybrid text he is proposing in Vampiros Multinacionales.
The page breakdown “game” is a constant throughout Vampiros Multinacionales. At some points, the use of media affordances from comics merges with the use of textual affordances. There is a sentence followed by colons, a punctuation element that points a pause in reading and implies that the next idea is related to the previous one. In Vampiros Multinacionales, Cortázar use this discursive connector as a means to draw attention to the page breakdown, or more precisely, to remediate that media affordance to textual media. The result is a fluent narrative discourse, in which both media coexist harmoniously (see Cortázar Fantomas 25-33).
The affordances are a tool to which Cortázar resorts to perform the narrative game he proposes in Vampiros Multinacionales. The author profits not only from ready-made structures from Fantomas’ comics, but also from other visual elements:
This set of multiple signs in the surface of the text, and the repetitive capacity from popular culture myth pictures, constitute the funding elements of the visual/verbal setting in Fantomas. Apart from citing an episode from Mexican comics (La inteligencia en llamas, script by Gonzalo Martré and drawings by Víctor Cruz), Cortázar uses photography to “assault” the reader, from the Surface of the discurse, with iconic symbols from the repetitive machinery of repression, torture and political and economic dominion (Dávila 127).
What Dávila points to in this paragraph is relevant, since it reveals how the structural dimension of the narrative discourse connects with the political dimension of the text. That is the sense Cortázar is looking to embody in his text, for one side, but also there’s an objective related to discursive experimentation as we have been attempting to describe here: “Cortázar himself stated in an interview with Saúl Sosnowski that his primary interest in writing the comic book Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales (1975) was to reach a wider audience and disseminate the findings of the Second Russell Tribunal” (Connor). The attempt to reach a wider audience requires the incorporation of the discourse of comics, which gives the author, as it was said, the chance to perform his literary “games”.
Apart from the direct reference to sequential narrative, as pointed by Dávila in the previous quotation, Cortázar uses other images, such as illustrations and photographs, but keeps the discursive fluency that he built along with the fragments of the Fantomas’ comic. Barataud comments briefly about this strategy (6), but her analysis does not acknowledge the role of the media affordances.
The most interesting demonstration of Cortázar’s profitable use of the media affordances of comics in the use of illustrations taken from different contexts but, through the aid of the narrative discourse of the text operating as an anchoring function as Barthes describes it (37), allows the reader to relate the pictures with actions narrated in the text. The criteria of the author in the selection of the images focuses on the way
95 actions are depicted: Cortázar takes advantage of illustrations that show incomplete actions, such as the case of that with the man in black holding something in his hand in front of an open drawer (Cortázar Fantomas 54). The text that precedes it aids the reader to orient the interpretation of the image in function of the needs of the story: “the next picture captioned Fantomas impudently hiding the amount of the indemnization that the Chilean military board payed to the Anaconda or the Kenneccot” (idem). In the described case, Cortázar is maximizing one of the main media affordances of comics: the nature of the frame and its property of depicting a “lasting instant”, as Gasca and Gubern describe it (13), based on the concept of pregnant moment coined by Lessing in his work Laocoon (152). This unfinished action constitutes the base for the construction of sequence in comics. In the case of Vampiros Multinacionales, the elements that build the hybrid form of sequence (blending text and picture) are incomplete propositions (such as those provided as examples before), and depictions of actions in progress.
The position of the character, suspended in an unfinished action, allows the reader to relate it to the fluency of the discourse, just as Lessing explains in his essay, and how later Gasca and Gubern take the concept and readjust it to comics, so that the illustration may be interpreted as a frame in a comic, and not a mere picture since it depicts an incomplete action related to the preceding one and following frames by causal relations. Likewise, the previous sentence to the picture may be taken as the “framing” of an unfinished idea which is causally linked to the adjacent picture. A very clear example of this is the transition from the frame that depicts a group of men around a table expecting the arrival of an older one in a wheelchair (see Cortázar Fantomas 52). Right under the frame, the text continues as if it was part of the image, or as if the picture was the first part of the sentence that follows it: “because she [Susan Sontag] just acknowledged that Fantomas, preceded by Pisces, assumed the character of a paralytic millionaire…” (idem). Image and text are blended in one single phrase, in a proposition which require both the drawing and the words to achieve its whole sense.
The continuity that sequence requires in its definition is provided by the preceding text that performs as a previous frame, or a caption of text that describes the actions the picture implies. The position of the character, performing an action frozen before it is done, makes the effect of frame from a sequence, which Cortázar uses by linking it to an action narrated by the text surrounding the illustration, as seen also combining narrative text with copies from documents (Cortázar Fantomas 48-49). Cortázar’s textual game explores multiple dimensions from comics’ media affordances.
5.
We have seen some of the elements from sequential medium rhetoric that Cortázar uses to propose an hybridization between comics and the novel, which result in a pouring of features from one medium to another, along with metatextual games that Dávila describes in his article. Thus, Fantomas blends with literary language, carrying along the rhetorical elements from comics. Also, Cortázar transfers his literature to comics along with other real characters (e.g. Paz, Sontag). The game has many possibilities for expansion: formal experimentation with the result of a brand new rhetorical proposal blending literary and sequential languages; a metatextual intervention through three narrative levels that penetrate each other, and finally an exploration through the media affordances of comics, and its use to incorporate other visual elements that offer a sophisticated productivization of sequential language by the use of photographs and illustrations taking into account their possibility to evoke a narrated action. The whole blending of narrative forms close with the use of paratexts such as the cover of the book itself:
96 On the one hand, Cortázar is breaking the dichotomy between high culture and popular art, but he also plays with the conventions of the comic book itself. First of all, as previously mentioned, the cover of the text implies we are reading a comic book, but the book actually begins and ends in normal narrative layout (Connor).
There is a re-writing of the Fantomas comic and an appropriation in order to spread the results from the Russel Court. Although, it has not been remarked that the appropriation is reciprocal, because Cortázar makes a free use of the Fantomas adventure, but at the same time the language of comics suffuses the whole work with its rhetoric to the point that many critics agree to call it a comic book rather than a novel.
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PhD in Humanitats by Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). Currently, Julio Guttierez researches and teaches in Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago de Chile at the Liberal Arts Faculty. His research goes through comics, adaptation theory and the tensions between different media in the transposition process. He has published the article “Nocilla experience, la novela gráfica: adaptación y reescritura” (2014), and a chapter in the book “Framescapes: graphic narrative intertexts” (2016).
