“Precise Impressions Scrupulously Conveyed”
Visual Artistry in Edwin Mullhouse
Wim Tigges
Abstract
American author Steven Millhauser’s 1972 novel Edwin Mullhouse combines the characteristics of descriptive prose genres, such as (auto)biography, satire and childhood memoir with those of the crime story, the thriller, and the Gothic novel. In doing so, it makes use of a variety of visual images and ekphrases, including references to a broad range of visual instruments and artefacts, notably the comic book and its derivative, the animated cartoon. In his youthful mock-biography, largely written as if it is a comic book or an animated cartoon of which he wishes us to visualize every detail, Millhauser’s precocious narrator creates in language a remarkably visual artefact.
Résumé
Edwin Mullhouse, un roman de 1973 de l’auteur américian Steven Millhauser, combine les caractéristiques de plusieurs genres en prose tels que la biographie, l’autobiographie, la satire et les souvenirs d’enfance, d’un côté, et celles de genres comme le roman policier, le thriller et le roman gothique, de l’autre. En même temps, il recourt aussi à un grand nombre d’images visuelles et de procédés ekphrastiques, multipliant les références à des artefacts visuels comme les bandes dessinées et leurs dérivés, les dessins animés. Dans la pseudo-biographie consacrée à son enfance, rédigée comme si elle était une bande dessinée ou un dessin animé dont chaque détail mérite d’être racontée, le narrateur précoce de Millhauser arrive à créer un remarquable équivalent verbal d’un objet visuel.
Keywords
animation, biography, cartoon, comic book, ekphrasis, Edwin Mullhouse, Steven Millhauser, parody
Steven Millhauser’s first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972) is conventional in that it is entirely made up of words; it is also in various ways an extraordinarily “visual” text. Its plot may be conveniently summarized by quoting from the suitably tongue-in-cheek blurb of the 1985 Penguin edition:1
Edwin Mullhouse, a novelist at ten, is mysteriously dead at eleven … Edwin’s best friend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin’s development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books, animated film, and his second-grade classmate Rose Dorn to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel Cartoons.
The same blurb labels the novel as “a brilliant satire on biography” and “a portrait of the artist as a young child.” Similarly, the scarce secondary material primarily discusses Edwin Mullhouse as a “mock-biography” (Adams 206; Alexander, Ponce & Rodríguez 11), “a witty and ingenious parody of the literary biography” (Boyd 35), “a comic novel, with strong elements of satire and parody” and “a peculiarly American novel” (Pearson 147). Douglas Fowler highlights Millhauser’s characterisation of himself as a “miniaturist,” calling him “a verbal miniaturist par excellence” (139), and Alexander, Ponce & Rodríguez note and briefly illustrate how “Millhauser’s details are not only incredibly specific, but also overwhelmingly abundant” (13). But the visual artistry of Edwin Mullhouse is most concretely pinpointed by John D. Boyd. Speaking of its plot as “a loving, richly detailed traversal of the period from birth through fifth grade in the life of a modern American Everyboy” and of the book as an “authentic chronicle of a childhood” (37), and providing copious illustrative quotations, he concludes by recognizing “the many instances . . . in which the narrator mentions photographs, movie images, cartoons (stationary or in motion), and Viewmaster scenes, and often meticulously describes them” (45).2
In this paper I will argue that Edwin Mullhouse does not only combine the “generic affinities” of the novel, biography, autobiography, literary satire, and childhood memoir (Boyd 39), but also incorporates those of the crime story, the thriller, and the Gothic novel, as well as the comic book and the animated cartoon. It is the combination of Millhauser’s, or rather his youthful narrator’s, “extreme descriptive precision” (Alexander, Ponce & Rodríguez 65) and in particular the violent and “Gothic” aspects of “artful experimentation with a blending of genres” (Boyd 46) that makes his novel read like the verbalisation of a comic book and its derivative, the animated cartoon.3
If Jeffrey Cartwright, some six months older than his friend and subject Edwin, is the summum of narratorial unreliability and a worthy pupil of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert (cf. Adams 208; Pearson 148), his descriptions of the details of a New England childhood appear to be painstakingly accurate.4
A representative illustration of Jeffrey’s almost obsessive comprehensiveness of detail or “reverence for factual accuracy” (Boyd 36) is this description of a stationery, toy and candy store in Edwin’s birthplace Newfield, Connecticut:
2. To these visual media and artefacts may be added many others, such as a kaleidoscope, a (Graflex) camera, a television camera, traffic signs, a billboard, a postcard, a painting, a jigsaw puzzle, emblems, a picture book, a telephoto, a “magic drawing pad with a thin red pointed stick for a pencil and a transparent sheath” (75), a movie, or a map. Nearly all of these references can be directly related to the way American children from the professional classes must have seen the world in a pre-digital world. Cf. Chénetier 26-27.
3. Chénetier, who briefly discusses this novel on pp. 22-27 of his short monograph on Millhauser, is the only critic to my knowledge who explicitly mentions comic books (“bandes dessinées”), the art-form the little boy prefers (22), as that of Edwin Mullhouse. For Millhauser’s preoccupation with the comic book, see also Bukatman 72-76. 4. It seems evident that Millhauser, coeval with his main characters (he was born in New York City on 3 August 1943, and grew up in Connecticut, where Edwin was born on 1 August and Jeffrey on 6 February of that year), used his first novel to present a near-total visual recall of his own childhood.
To the right, as you enter through a door set in the angle of two windows, stands the shining globe of a bubblegum machine on its black base, resting on a recess before a tall window with red backward letters. On the left, before a window with green backward letters, lies a low glass case covered with brown wood and containing pencil cases, erasers, colored pads, yellow pencils, brass fasteners, and bottles of blue-black ink. Beside it lies a taller glass counter with a sloping face, filled with black licorice pipes, red licorice shoestrings, red-hots, packages of bubblegum cards, black mustaches, packages of white pumpkin seeds, packages of black Indian seeds, chocolate babies, root-beer barrels, Mary Janes. The tall sloping counter stretches past the window with green backward letters and continues in front of a wall that is hung to the ceiling with rubber daggers, plastic water pistols, whistles with white balls inside, strips of tattoos, false noses, one-way silver eyeglasses, handlebar mustaches, black masks, silver masks, rubber cameras, blue harmonicas. On top of the glass counter sit bright orange-and-green yo-yo’s, small blue boxes of red caps for pistols, odorous stacks of bubblegum cards, turning stands hung with potato chips in waxpaper bags and small games wrapped in cellophane, and a transparent plastic container attached to a standing piece of cardboard, holding a layer of brown pennies mixed with nickels, for the March of Dimes.5 Old Rapolski stands behind the counter, smiling with broken teeth and
watching with small dark suspicious eyes; across from him, before the dark windowless wall filled with shelves of cookies and cans, the older boys stand in noisy groups, flipping cards, combing their hair, drinking soda out of bottles, and playing crude games like Paper Scissors Stone. (136-37)
Jeffrey’s narrative style is indeed highly visual. It abounds in appropriately childlike images that often, as in the above quotation, highlight the primary colours and exaggerated precision of a comic book panel. An earlier paragraph, describing “a perfect summer morning,” opens: “The sky had been soaked for hours in blue easter-egg dye and the grass shone like green cellophane” (25). For Edwin, a cold in the nose is “a voyage down the Amazon, a flight through the blue on a magic carpet, a journey to the mountain where grave bearded men drink liquor from kegs and make thunder by playing ninepins” (66). Stalking Rose Dorn, with whom he is obsessed as much as is Edwin, Jeffrey notices: “Over the black tree-line the sky was almost white, and as I made my way down the hill toward the trees and sky I felt as if I were being drawn into a world bleached of all color and existing only in tones of black and gray, as if the landscape were its own photograph” (155). Edwin is said to compare “a suddenness about the first real day of spring . . . to the movie version of the Wizard of Oz, which begins in brown and white and bursts suddenly into color” (180-81).
In Chapter 10 of Part One (“The Early Years”), the precocious biographer records that “[w] hat fascinated the future author” in his alphabet books (at the age of three!) “was not the jingle but the letter”. One of those books gives each letter a “personality,” which to Jeffrey explains “the evident origin of Edwin’s later theories concerning the personalities of letters and the physical properties of words,” for instance his “claim that all words looked like things: ‘yellow’ was a ship with a rudder and two smokestacks, ‘bad’ was two chairs on opposite sides of a table, ‘did’ was three people standing on line” (39). Jeffrey, who rather deplores this fascination of Edwin’s, somewhat later describes his own “task” as a biographer as resembling “one of those connect-the-dots pictures that lead you in a series of invariable 5. A non-profit organization to combat polio, founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938.
steps from a seeming chaos of numbers to a sudden recognition of the still incompleted pattern to the final closing of the gap, when number 63 is at last joined to number 1 and you see before you a flower, a kitten, a weeping clown” (41).
Jeffrey closes off his account of Edwin’s “Early Years” by pondering some of the problems faced by the biographer, one of which is that “unlike real life, which presents us with question marks, censored passages, blank spaces, rows of asterisks, omitted paragraphs, and numberless sequences of three dots trailing into whiteness, biography provides an illusion of completeness, a vast pattern of details . . .” (101). However, it is “the biographer, so to speak, who creates the artist” (102). He then opens “The Middle Years” with the detailed ekphrasis6 of an animated cartoon, in which a stupid fox tries to capture
a white rabbit, the violent means to this end which he respectively employs (a firecracker, a cannon, a gun-trap, a rocket, and a rolling boulder) constantly backfiring against himself.
Edwin Mullhouse is pervaded with references to comics and (animated) cartoons. Edwin is given his first comic book at age four, the very item the loss of which by lending it to his destructive class-mate Arnold Hasseltrom he later on vividly deplores (215)—“a new kind of book that made its appearance one darkening afternoon that fall, and was destined to exercise a considerable pressure of influence on Edwin’s imagination” (58). However, this interest does not actually catch on until six months later, when he recovers the comic under a box of marbles, and Jeffrey “saw its glossy cover catch the light; under a bright red sky a vast snowball rolling downhill contained a duck and a pair of yellow skis”; from that moment onwards “Edwin plunged into a dazzle of many-colored adventures from which in a sense he never emerged. From that moment on he began to live in a world of frames and colors” (60).
Edwin’s fifth birthday gifts include “a year’s subscription to Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories” (73). Not long afterwards, Edwin and Jeffrey make the acquaintance of seven-year-old Edward Penn, who lives in a heated cellar where he has filled a whole wall with “hundreds and hundreds” of cartoon characters. He also has a bookcase entirely filled with comic books. We are told that “Penn’s passion for comic books . . . was not all-embracing; like Edwin after him, he had no interest whatsoever in what he called adult comics: detective stories, adventure stories, horror stories” (86). Interestingly, these are precisely the type of comics that proliferated during the 1940s and early ’50s: “By 1946 comic-book reading was an established habit . . . among almost all children of the time” (Benton 41). This is when debates on the possible harmfulness of comic books also began. In 1948 “[g]uns erupted” (ibid. 43), and until 1954 the western, crime and horror genres began to proliferate. It was the latter year, that of Edwin’s violent death, which saw the publication of the most severe indictment of comic books and 6. The term “ekphrasis,” by origin the rhetorical term for “a self-contained description, often on a commonplace subject, which can be inserted at a fitting place in a discourse” (Lanham 39), is not universally defined. Heffernan defines it narrowly as “the verbal representation of graphic representation” (299); Mitchell (151-81: “Ekphrasis as the Other”) appears to limit the genre of ekphrasis, which he defines as “a curiosity,” to “poems which describe works of visual art,” but as a “more general topic” he follows Heffernan’s definition (replacing “graphic” by “visual,” 152); Smith “return[s] to the original definition of ekphrasis so that it encompasses a descriptive scene within the novelistic text in which there is a representation of any work of art” (12); Robillard sets up an intertextual (or “intermedial”) scalar and differential model for ekphrastic texts, which allows for a broad variety ranging from detailed description to stylistic or topical association (61). A fine example of a generic prose ekphrasis is Millhauser’s short story “Klassik Komix # 1” in The Barnum Museum (1990), in which the author deconstructs and reinscribes T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by scrupulously describing the cover and individual panels of a fictive “comic book” version of that poem.
the violence many of them contained, as well as advertisements for knives and guns: the Freudian Dr Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham lists cases of juvenile delinquents who admitted to reading violent comics,7 but none quite so outrageous as that of 11-year old Jeffrey shooting his coeval
bosom friend for literary reasons. “For Penn,” Jeffrey (a delinquent who ultimately remains scotfree) reports, “Superman and Dick Tracy and hairy monsters were real inhabitants of the real world” (86). Jeffrey himself may have been less naive, and Arnold’s possession of pistols, a revolver, and ammunition as well as his violent disposition may or may not testify to pernicious reading material. Edwin’s comic book and cartoon fantasies appear to be of the most innocent Walt Disney or Looney Tunes nature.8
Jeffrey once observes Edwin “engrossed in a Mickey Mouse adventure” (164), and Edwin’s first “[u] ninspired tales of the “Middle Years” are described as “centering upon Donald Duck” (187).
Edward Penn has also experimented with animation, the page-flipping technique of which is explained in detail (87). Fascinated and excited, Edwin vainly tries to persuade his mother “to permit him to paint pictures on the cellar walls, on the walls of his room, on the ceiling of his room, on the walls of his closet, on the ceiling of his closet, on the inside of his closet door” (88). Only two more visits to the moody Edward, “a boy of sudden passions and sudden coldnesses,” follow. It is during his third and final visit that Edwin announces that he is going to write a book.
From the very beginning Edwin is described as the “future author of Cartoons” (5, 14), that “immortal novel,” begun “in the autumn of 1952” (6). Like Edwin Mullhouse itself, it is not a comic book, but it is clearly inspired by this graphic genre. Boyd describes it as “a barely disguised autobiographical narrative” (42), and Pearson regards Jeffrey’s “evaluation” of Cartoons, “a funhouse mirror” which shocks us “by distortion into the sudden perception of the forgotten strangeness of things” and gradually makes us “feel that we are experiencing nothing less than the real world itself . . .,” as an estimate which “could just as well serve as an estimate of Millhauser’s book” (149; cf. Edwin Mullhouse, 264-65). Jeffrey informs us that “[t]he single most important influence of the animated cartoon upon Edwin’s masterpiece . . . is the cartoon image” (223), but also that “[i]t was the animated cartoon . . . that acknowledged frankly a violence in things, and provided Edwin with a method of reflecting the violence he had witnessed in the course of his own quiet life,” commenting on what he calls “a certain disturbing quality in Edwin’s list of cartoon titles” (266). He is referring to the “well over two hundred cartoons” Edwin and he saw “during the Middle Years” (222), the titles of which Jeffrey considers to possess the “disturbing quality” of “repellent cuteness” (223).
That the mild-mannered Edwin was never averse to evoking the macabre may appear already from the themes of some of the thirty-one stories with which he fills his short-lived family newspapers. These include a “ridiculous fable” about a hungry boy who is killed by eating the foundation of a chocolate-cake mountain (188); a dream-tale about a boy and a pillow threatened by a witch; a “sentimental tale” about a little blind girl who drowns as her brother walks on smiling—but the brother turns out to be deaf; 7. See e.g. the 22 cases listed on pp. 150-53. Wertham estimates the number of comics in 1954 as fluctuating around 90 million copies a month (307). For a summary of Wertham’s book and its consequences for the comic-book industry, see e.g. Daniels 83-90. For the history of comic comic-books in the period 1946-1955 see Benton 41-55. 8. Wertham’s onslaught was primarily directed towards the so-called “crime,” “horror,” and “romance” comics, but he also comments unfavourably on the supposedly “harmless” animal comics and cartoons (e.g. 309).
and a story, “possibly influenced by Through the Looking-Glass,” about “a boy who steps through the lens of a camera” and becomes “trapped in a piece of film” (190). There is also a “shocking tale about a boy called Nedwi who shoots himself in the head.” Jeffrey goes on to comment: “The ridiculous ending, in which you learn that the gun was only a cap pistol, does not diminish the horrible fascination of this ominous tale” (191). The final story is about “the death of a crayon called Green, who gets smaller and smaller until he disappears. In the usual happy ending [commenting on an earlier story Jeffrey notes that “Edwin was partial to happy endings”] we learn that Green lives on in the drawings of the boy who caused his death” (191). We are also informed that “[t]he theme of creatures stepping out of books or off walls or out of dreams is a favorite with Edwin” (187). Millhauser, as in fact all through this novel, here cleverly combines a true-to-life rendition of a seven-year-old boy’s fantasy and its inspiration from both domestic events and his reading, with a spoof on the kind of material that in the ’50s and ’60s became the material for pedagogical and even psychological analyses of the juvenile mind.
Quoting Jacques Barzun, who remarked that “[e]very biography is something like a detective story,” (qtd. in Clifford 155) Adams comments that Barzun “could hardly have imagined the grisly ending of Edwin Mullhouse, in which the biographer murders his own subject for artistic effect and a smooth ending” (213). In fact, three more children disappear or die in mysterious fashion in the course of the novel. By the end of the long chapter in which he is introduced, the apparently sickly Edward Penn “seemed to have faded almost completely away” (93). Rose Dorn perishes in a fire—possibly but not certainly caused by a clearly jealous Jeffrey Cartwright (179). Arnold Hasselstrom, a violent character who befriends Edwin, runs off with a loaded .32 Colt automatic after a fighting bout in the school playground, and is shot by a policeman in self-defence (221). Even the mystery of Edwin’s death is never fully solved: is it “reality, game, or dramatic performance”—suicide, murder, or, as ultimately suggested by Boyd, no more than a metaphor for “the extinction of childhood” (44)?
Besides aspects of the crime comic, Edwin Mullhouse also incorporates elements of the Gothic novel and of the thriller: the macabre, the uncanny, the terrifying, graphically represented, i.e. described in horror-comic manner, and in an atmosphere of increasing tension and excitement. Edwin’s “tragic death” is announced in the very first sentence of the novel, and there are repeated references to suicide and to pistols, the latter often in a playful, comic-book fashion.9 For instance, when Edwin and Jeffrey
are playing at Indian and cowboy, Mr Mullhouse, after handing his son a package which we later learn contains his first comic book, says: “Oh by the way, Jeffrey.” Jeffrey turns around and Mr Mullhouse says: “‘Bang,’ . . . shooting me in the head with his finger and closing the door behind him before I could reach for my gun” (59). Not long afterwards Jeffrey, feeling literally haunted by his subject’s ghost, recalls “the bloody horror of Edwin’s end” (78). More gruesomely, Jeffrey owes his memories of elementary school to “a recent nightmare” (93), which ends with the image of “a little baby lying with a blanket up to its chin, its face sheeted with gleaming blood or slime” (95). When he talks to Edwin about mortality, Jeffrey reports himself as hearing, “faintly in that prophetic silence, the sound of wings beating madly in his eyes” (102).
Of Rose Dorn, who “rhymed with forlorn” and whose mother was a witch (127), Jeffrey early on 9. Cf. Chénetier, who remarks that the psychology and outward appearance of Millhauser’s characters are often “typically” borrowed from the iconography of the comic book (112).
announces that she dies “horribly but dramatically” (128). Shortly before her death, Jeffrey dreams that Edwin stabs Rose in the neck with a pair of scissors, “slash[ing] nimbly around her hands and between her fingers, tearing her left cheek with loud ripping sounds, cutting off pieces of her soft upper lip, and plunging the sharp point repeatedly into her closed eyelid.”10 As Jeffrey tries to stop him, Edwin raises
the bloody scissors over Jeffrey’s head, and he wakes up, “feeling as if the darkness were a huge stone crushing me” (171-72). Feeling scorned by Edwin, Rose becomes an avenging fury, soiling Edwin’s coat, yanking up another girl’s dress so as to reveal her underpants, throwing a flaming match at a boy, drawing violent pictures, cutting off her own hair, and being ultimately removed from school (173-78). Two days later she is dead.
The introduction of a new class-mate “shortly after Halloween” (196), the intractable Arnold Hasselstrom, ends with a violent scene. Insulted by the namby-pamby way in which the schoolmistress has tried to make him accepted by the class, he performs his first violent action. The chapter concludes with the following snapshot:
A photograph would show Arnold Hasselstrom in profile, standing beside his desk with his back to the window and his eye wide open. Beside his feet lies an open lunchbox. Across the room Billy Duda is seated with a hand raised before his face and the fingers spread; on his face is an expression of terror. Behind him, on the blackboard, is a zigzag crack. Beside him, on the floor, lies a rock the size of a baseball. (198)
As Pearson aptly formulates it: “Millhauser’s kindergarten world is a violent one, replete with manslaughter, fire, and murder, not to mention the more typical namecalling, fistfights, and rock throwing” (149). Ironically, it is very much the world of the “crime comic.”
A full account of Cartoons is given in Chapters 12 and 13 of Part Three. Jeffrey quotes its first paragraph, and describes and summarizes the rest in a five-page ekphrasis (260-65). It is “a feature-length cartoon in technicolor, taking place during one timeless and enchanted night, bathed in cool midnight tones of silver, blue-violet, green-blue, and blue-green, with occasional splashes of lemon and crimson” (261). The “hero,” recognized by Jeffrey as Edwin himself , wakes up and leaves his house, “followed by a mysterious black-cloaked figure in a broad-brimmed black hat.” Meeting up with a “ghost,” the two “step unto a raft and make their way downstream . . . to the ghost’s home in a burrow or cave,” the description of which Jeffrey praises as “one of the high points of the book,” reading into it a combination of Penn’s cellar with Rat’s home in The Wind in the Willows.
Who can forget the undulating fog-furniture, the clanking skeleton cat and the mouse of mist, the gloomy meal of moonbeam soup and cobweb stew served in hollow skulls by white-bibbed bat waiters, the skeleton-hand spoons and the lightning-flash knives, the row of black-framed family photographs each of which is blank, the coffin standing against the wall and containing on its shelves a dead letter, two deadlines, a dead heat, a deadlock, a deadpan, a death rattle, and 10. Wertham describes (43) and includes the picture of a comic-book panel showing a woman whose eye is about to be pierced by a hypodermic needle; this panel is part of a story from True Crime Comics #2 (May 1947), entitled “Murder, Morphine, and Me” (Benton 155, and see the illustration on p. 54).
a dead end, the fireplace where petrified wood is burned to produce the shadows of flames, the light-switch that causes an overhead cloud to drizzle, the bat-wing umbrellas, and the wonderful revelation that the melancholy ghost is an imaginative painter whose wildest fantasies resemble precisely the news photographs in the Sunday New York Times. (262)
And so it goes on. The hero visits a black forest on a hillside, at the top of which he sees “a crooked haunted house” which he enters to find “a weeping yellow-haired princess in a crimson dress” (Rose Dorn used to be dressed in red), and where he is chased by a “black-eyed witch” (263). The house goes up in flames, and the hero wanders on. At some stage “he sees before him a vast black wolf chained to the wall, straining at the end of its chain and dripping saliva that gathers in dark gleaming pools”; this wolf is lashed by “a white-haired lady in shiny black boots on a blue piano stool in the corner” (264). At last, he “becomes aware of the figure in black” who has continued to follow him. The book concludes with “a long chase through all the rooms of the hero’s cluttered house . . . in which all the formulas of the cartoon chase are used in a kind of crescendo of clichés as the clumsy pursuer is continually outwitted by the clever pursued” (264), but then:
suddenly there is an unexpected reversal, the cloaked figure reappears and plunges a dagger into the hero’s white throat, thick crimson blood pours out and forms symmetrical patterns on the white sheet, and as the circle closes, the hero’s last moments are depicted in a series of images that appear in rapid succession in his eyes: two steamships slowly sink, the spinning wheels of a slot machine stop at two skulls, a cash register rings up NO in one eye and SALE in the other . . . and two winged heroes sit on two white clouds strumming two golden harps as two little circles close and That’s All, Folks! writes itself across each eye. (265)
“Edwin’s book,” comments Jeffrey, “is bound to the real world more tightly than a photograph” (265). However, in a “dark realm” beyond the “brightness” of the “recovery of a world we had not known we had lost,” he insists, “in this dark realm, Edwin’s distortions are not distortions at all, but precise impressions scrupulously conveyed. For in this dark realm, Penn is in truth a ghost, and Rose Dorn a weeping princess, and Arnold Hasselstrom a chained and bleeding wolf. And as for that mysterious figure in black: ‘But don’t you know?’ said Edwin, and I suggest we leave it at that” (266). If and to what extent Jeffrey realizes that Cartoons is in the main Edwin’s way of getting even with his often annoying biographer is left in the open. After his comment that it was in particular “the animated cartoon that taught Edwin to combine the precise and the impossible. It was the animated cartoon that acknowledged frankly a violence in things” (266), Jeffrey concludes in the voice of a generalizing adult:
I think it is permissible to say that in his immortal masterpiece the false images that feed our American dreams—the technicolor and stardust through which America, poor savage inarticulate giant, expresses her soul—are in a manner purified, are used seriously in a serious work of art but without losing their gimcrack quality, so that every syllable (written in blood, gentlemen, in blood) seems to plead to be taken as a joke only. (267)11
11. Ronald Schmitt echoes “the extremely provocative and interesting question whether a generation influenced by the Third Generation comics [the post-World War II Marvel Comics Group, Eroticomics and Underground Comics], confronting the corrupt, military-industrial complex of a generation influenced by Second Generation
“Of Edwin’s masterpiece, Cartoons,” Adams writes, “we learn little except that its style is based on the comic book and the animated cartoon and that it ends with the classic cartoon closing, ‘That’s All Folks!’” (211). In fact, Cartoons is a mise-en-abîme of the whole novel.
Discussing Edwin Mullhouse Fowler proposes that “Millhauser is animating the trite materials of Pop culture into a magical story of love and death,” and that he is “really creating a story with its animating energies subtly transplanted from the Brothers Grimm” (143, italics mine). The emphasis on animation is interesting. Later on he adds more generally that this author’s narrative is “stereoscopic” rather than “a narrative of the linear, mimetic, naturalistic mode” (147). Can we call Edwin Mullhouse a “comic book in prose,” or even in a certain sense a “graphic novel”?
According to Duncan and Smith the term “graphic novel” is “a label applied by creators and publishers to distinguish a comic book, which in practice is longer and perhaps self-contained, in contrast to most periodical comic books” (4). A comic book they define as “a volume in which all aspects of the narrative are represented by pictorial and linguistic images in a sequence of juxtaposed panels and pages” (ibid.). David Carrier lists “the three essential qualities of comics” as being “the speech balloon, the closely linked narrative, and the book-size scale” (174). Thierry Groensteen (12ff.) rejects most definitions of comics as “unsatisfactory” (12), and limits his own definition of comics to “a predominantly visual medium” which is to be analysed in terms of its own “morphology, syntax, and the semantics of iconic sequences” (127).12
To label novels like Edwin Mullhouse or even short stories like Millhauser’s “Klassik Komix #1” as “graphic novels” would create a confusion of terms. Paraphrasing Henry Fielding’s famous definition of the “comic romance,”13 for Edwin Mullhouse I would propose the label of a “comic book in prose.”
If “[g]raphic style is to the visual character of a comic strip14 what diction is to language” (Harvey 649),
then reversely Millhauser’s diction, amply illustrated in the foregoing pages, may well be described as his “graphic style.” As to Edwin Mullhouse, the question arises which defining characteristics of the comic book or graphic novel feature in it. David Carrier’s formal requirements (balloons, pictures) obviously cannot apply. Instead, one has to think of such conventional comic-book and cartoon themes as extravagant situations, exaggeration, violence and fantasy, and possibly a panel or frame-like construction.15 “The funny animal genre . . . contained some of the best work ever done in the comic book
comics, brought about the student activism which shook universities in the 1960s” (155). Edwin Mullhouse was published in 1972, i.e. towards the end of the Vietnam War; the Americans fighting in that war were partly brought up on the very comic books and animated cartoons decried by Wertham, and the Marines sent out in the early ’60s were almost exact contemporaries of the author as well as of Edwin and Jeffrey.
12. For lavishly illustrated discussions and surveys of the comic book, see e.g. Benton, Bukatman, Daniels, Perry & Aldridge, and Sabin.
13. “Now, a comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose” (Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of
Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams [1742], “Preface”).
14. A comic strip is a short sequence of images: a few panels, in rigid layout and simple composition, and generally serialized in a newspaper or other periodical (Carrier 7). A comic book may be a collection (“album”) of such a serial, or a volume containing more than one short strips and stories by various artists, but the term is generally used for a single book-length graphic story.
15. Chénetier repeatedly remarks upon the importance of the delimiting “cadre” or frame in Millhauser’s oeuvre (22, 75).
medium” (Duncan & Smith 36), and it was precisely in the ’40s and early ’50s that the number and titles of comic books in all kinds of subgenres (animal, romance, western and crime) flourished (ibid. 37). To anyone familiar with the hand-drawn Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, which first appeared in 1940, and the early cartoons from the Disney and Schlesinger studios (e.g. Looney Tunes featuring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck), Millhauser’s ekphrastic descriptions perform precisely what according to Groensteen rarely happens when “reading” a comic: describing in its totality “the potentially descriptible image” (124). As some of the quotations from Edwin Mullhouse will have shown, Jeffrey Cartwright represents the world as if it is “hand-drawn,” like a sequence of comic book panels or an animated cartoon. Of course, the visual “realism” of some of Jeffrey’s descriptions resembles that in comics by Hergé (Tintin) rather than by Disney.
Lawrence Abbott calls the panel “the fundamental unit of comic art” (156). Edwin Mullhouse abounds in descriptive panel-like scenes such as the one about the Newfield store quoted early on. When Jeffrey digresses and his biography “escapes its frame,” he is “reminded of certain pictures in Edwin’s beloved comic books in which a horse’s nose protrudes over the edge into the margin of the page or the hero’s toes come over the bottom of the frame as if he were about to step into your lap, brandishing a sword” (78). In the “Early Years,” the world ends “a block away, and houses ‘beyond the bakery’ might as well have been in China or a comic book” (88). The description of a thunderstorm experienced while at school includes that of a “zigzag flash of lightning [that] sawed the sky in half, followed by words like crash! and boom!” (135).
Explicit references to the animated cartoon occur as well. On two occasions (48-49 and 106-09) a cartoon is ekphrastically retold. The trance-like behaviour of one of Edwin’s new class-mates, Carol Stempel, is compared to that of “a cartoon character who walks off a cliff into the air, quite at ease until he looks down and sees that the ground has vanished” (133). When Rose Dorn runs away from Edwin in the playground, her legs move so fast “that you were reminded of a fleeing cartoon character whose legs and feet are represented as a blurred spinning circle” (147). Irritable and melancholy when he has a writer’s block during the lengthy process of composing Cartoons, “Edwin once expressed a fondness for the cartoon fellow who walks alone under his personal raincloud, which rains only on him in a beaming world” (252). And during an excursion with Jeffrey to a delapidated fun fair, Edwin calls an old man in gray “a living cartoon,” thanking him “in appropriate cartoon fashion (‘Thanks, mister’)” (10).
According to Pearson, “Millhauser certainly mocks our idealized view of childhood, our romantic intuition that childhood is actually a Rousseauian playground, all innocence and purity” (147). But childhood is also “a time during which lived experience has a special beauty and intensity, a world abundantly populated by mute, inglorious artists’ (Boyd 43). In Edwin Mullhouse Millhauser reinscribes a notion of imagination that is strongly reminiscent of comic books and cartoons. He has his young but exceptionally precocious narrator write prose almost as if it is a comic book or an animated cartoon of which he wishes us to visualize every detail, and Jeffrey Cartwright can be said to have composed a visual artefact in prose. Of course, what could have been conveyed in a single picture (“worth a thousand words”!) had to be described in many words, but Millhauser does this so graphically that we continually seem to “get the picture.” To vary on one of his narrator’s comments on Edwin’s novel Cartoons,
Millhauser’s distortions “are not distortions at all, but precise impressions scrupulously conveyed” (266). And That’s All Folks!
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Wim Tigges is a guest lecturer in English-language literature at the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University. The focus of his current research is mainly on aspects of popular culture, both literary and visual. He has published both in English and in Dutch on a variety of subjects, ranging from Old English riddle poems to the TV action-fantasy series Xena: Warrior Princess.