View of Ben Katchor, Conversations

(1)

IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 19, No.2 (2017) 124

Ben Katchor, Conversations

Jan Baetens

Born in 1951, Ben Katchor is a modern picture-storyteller, whose work is one of the most intriguing that have been issued in the last decades. Each of these apparently simple words has a real importance, the keyword being perhaps picture story. By emphasizing this term, Katchor rightly stresses the differences between his work and the various strands of graphic narrative that compete for the best place under the sun after the vanishing of the newspaper and magazine strips, namely comic books (Katchor rejects the shallowness of most of the work that continues to be produced under this label), underground comix à la Crumb (Katchor’s work is not autobiographical and it is not obsessed with sex and body issues), and the graphic novel (which Katchor often finds boring, certainly if the graphic novelist claims to have literary ambitions, making the works unnecessarily long).

Yet the stories told by Katchor are deeply rooted in the industry: his favorite venue is the – now almost vanished – weekly or monthly strip, in which he can tell short but dense anecdotes readers can reread several times, without any pressure to move on to the next page; narratives told by artists whose work is being paid

Ben Katchor, Conversations. Edited by Ian Gordon.

Jackson, MS: The University Press of Mississippi, 2018, 220 p. (B & w ill.) ISBN: 978-1-4968-1581-1 (hardback)

(2)

for by the advertisements of the newspapers and the magazines, which guarantee an income while ensuring a circulation between maker and reader (for no newspaper or magazine would accept to run a picture story as art for art’s sake). Hence the frequent comparisons with poetry, less in terms of content (Katchor’s stories do not display a tone or content that is immediately experienced as lyrical) than in terms of attention and active involvement of the reader. Katchor’s loving as well as critical attitude toward literature, which he takes both as a model and criticizes for its elitist indifference to actual readers and its antivisual bias (as if real literature were incompatible with images or illustrations), is reflected in his no less loving and no less critical stance toward painting and art, which he simultaneously embraces as a possible model and rejects for the problematic relationships between art and money. Contentwise, Katchor’s work is defined by two major innovations. First of all, the fascination with place and architecture (this is definitely what compares him to Chris Ware, although Katchor’s city is New York, not Chicago). Secondly, the singular treatment of the no longer existing past, which succeeds in being charming if not regretful, without however becoming plainly nostalgic (and here, one cannot but feel some affinity with an artist such as Seth).

Although Katchor’s work, who has always self-syndicated his stories, is reprinted in book form by major publishers (mainly Pantheon), he remains much less known than other authors of his generation like Spiegelman and Crumb or of the younger generation such as Ware, Tomine, Seth, Burns, or Clowes. One can only hope that this excellent collection of interviews will bring him not only many new readers, but also many new readings, since contrary to the abovementioned artists, Katchor is bizarrely understudied in comics and graphic novel scholarship. As the interviews clearly demonstrate, this lacuna is more than regrettable. Katchor’s sharp and penetrating comments and self-analysis should therefore open new ground for serious reading, which is exactly the type of reading the author is looking for (he repeatedly insists on the fact that his work is not easy reading and that he tries to provoke a kind of close-reading that is comparable to that of the appraisal of poetry).

Which are the elements that come most to the fore in this book (well edited, with not too much overlap between the various interviews – although some of the too systematically repeated biographical matter of the author’s childhood and youth years could have been edited out in a more economical way)?

First of all, the no-nonsense approach of the profession and the very smart perception of the impact of commercial and industrial constraints on what can and cannot be done. This perception, however, never takes the form of the classic and somewhat selfish complaint about the harshness of the market and the impossibility to elaborate an artistic project in a capitalist society. Katchor, whose political convictions are clearly leftist, as one sees for instance in his commitment in favor of a free university, underlines instead the positive aspects of having to work under commercial pressure, which often triggers invention and creativity and forces the author to establish a dialogue with his readership. The beneficiary of a MacArthur “Genius” grant, Katchor is for instance not afraid of saying that the five-year financial security offered by this grant has not translated into an increase of productivity. As a full-time teacher at the New York New School, he also confesses that this kind of position has liberated him from the difficulty of always being at the lookout for new commissions and of being exposed to the panic of permanent deadlines.

One also finds — and this a second point — a similar balanced approach of the technological aspects of the profession in Katchor’s acceptance of digital publishing and communication. Given the great importance

(3)

of drawing style and the tender presentation in Katchor’s work of everything that has to do with vanished or vanishing print culture, one would expect in these interviews a strong defense of paper and ink. This is not at all the case. Obviously, Katchor is very sensitive to the quality of his books, but this sensibility is never fetishistic. Not only does the artist know that print culture is coming to an end — it will not disappear, but the rise of digital publishing will inevitably condemn it to a more marginal position —,but he also recognizes the many merits and qualities of digital publication, from different perspectives: practical (we do no longer have space to store books), ecological (print and ink are ecological disasters), and artistic (high resolution scans and good monitors do offer a better visual quality of the end-product, and since Katchor’s stories are always short ones, which can be read panel after panel, layout issues do not hinder the shift from page to screen).

Thirdly, Katchor’s idea of picture storytelling is also extremely interesting as far as intermedial and transmedial relationships are concerned. While he defends a strong medium-specific approach (what is possible in a given medium cannot be done in another one, and vice versa), he is also a deeply devoted to the self-adaptation of his work in different media: he write radio-shows that transpose his short picture stories, while collaborating with several other artists to collectively make stage performances or even full opera evenings of the same. The fundamental reason of this transmedial ecumenism and diversity is Katchor’s interest in theater, which he considers the underlying medium of his picture books. Theater is a medium whose importance is not often acknowledged, contrary to movies or animated cinema, but Katchor’s observations, which reveal a systematic disappointment with movie adaptations of picture stories, make a strong case for a more in-depth reading of the link between the dramatic mode and the verbo-visual mode of picture-book storytelling (something by the way one also finds in the work of British graphic novelist Simon Grennan).

Finally, these Conversations teach us also a lot about identity politics, more particularly about the tension between “experienced” culture (Katchor continually claims that culturally speaking the only identity he can think of is that of being a New Yorker) and “abstract” culture (the various general categories, in this case that of Jewish culture for instance, that are also mentioned or hinted at when addressing Katchor’s work). If one wants to understand what it means to be a New Yorker with Jewish and Yiddish roots who does not recognize himself in labels such as Jewish and Yiddish, one should definitely read this book (and Katchor’s work in general).

The same applies to what is probably the most directly striking aspect of Katchor’s picture stories, namely the non-nostalgic look on no longer existing objects. But here it is better to quote the author himself, in a typical fragment that may give, I hope, a flavor of his capacity of self-analysis and social critique. This is how Katchor replies to the question of whether the city of New York should have prevented or not the demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station:

How can history be preserved? In a book, or do you need to live in a museum city? Then how does all of that history relate to you as a living person? You want to recapitulate history? I don’t know, people do all of these things. They want to stop history; they become traditionalists, say we have to stop history this year. It was okay up until now. I mean, all these crackpot ideas. History belongs in our memory and in books, and I think, taken out of its contexts and put in another context, it’ s just insanity. It’s just meaningless. It’s like pulling apart anything and saying, “Well, here’s this.”. Certain movies that are trying to evoke history are just like being in an antique store, and all you notice is that all the stuff has been gathered together, and it feels like

(4)

a pile of antiques. How can you think that that will evoke the past? It doesn’t even have to evoke anything, but anyway, it’s how we’re living. It’s this moment where nobody has to immediately think too much about how things are being documented. It’s a great time. (pp. 66-67).

Jan Baetens is Editor in Chief of Image (&) Narrative.