The Experience of Intersemiotic Citation in Blutch’s Total Jazz
“Blutch’s album Total Jazz (2004) includes twenty-seven stories of one page each, and another of five pages, first published in the monthly Jazzman since December 2000.1 Most of these Histoires musicales
are silent, only giving some textual indications of narrative control in rare captions. The twenty-eight main stories commented on by a foreword and three metafictional stories mention jazz musicians from the most famous ones to anonymous amateurs. They aim to express Blutch’s passion for jazz. This fondness had nurtured several of his previous works, especially his contributions to the magazine Fluide
Glacial collected in the albums Waldo’s Bar (1992) and Blotch face à son destin (2000), as well as the
travel journal Lettre américaine (1995) published by Cornélius.
1. English text established by Céline Glaude. My gratitude should also go to Maaheen Ahmed for her pertinent advice.
Benoît Glaude
AbstractBlutch’s passion for jazz nurtures several of his comic books, notably Total Jazz (2004), which is a collection of short stories first published in the French magazine Jazzman. The exploration of the transition of jazz music in this album reveals the intersemiotic potential of comics, which uses the metasemiotic capacities of its multiple codes concurrently. The description of jazz music citation in comics, from a purely intertextual perspective, is carried out in two stages: a tentative typology of citation practices comes before an analytical rereading of Total Jazz focused on Blutch’s narrative and stylistic techniques used to insert jazz citations within his Histoires musicales.
Résumé
La passion de Blutch pour le jazz nourrit plusieurs de ses bandes dessinées, particulièrement Total Jazz (2004), un recueil de brefs récits prépubliés dans le magazine français Jazzman. L’observation du passage de la musique de jazz dans cet album révèle le potentiel intersémiotique de la bande dessinée, qui cumule les capacités métasémiotiques de ses multiples codes. La description des citations de jazz en bande dessinée, dans la seule perspective intertextuelle, se réalise en deux temps : une tentative de typologique des pratiques de citation précède une relecture analytique de Total Jazz centrée sur les procédés narratifs et stylistiques employés par Blutch pour intégrer ces citations de jazz dans ses Histoires musicales.
Keywords
Exploring the intersemiotic passage of American music in Franco-Belgian comics through this album offers at least two venues of interest, for it can reveal both its intertextual and stylistic qualities.2 To the
best of my knowledge, this preliminary analysis of jazz citation in contemporary francophone comics has been the subject of very few papers:3 it is usually merged with a larger perspective, a hypertextual one,
mostly within the sphere of cultural studies. It seems that the devices for intersemiotic jazz citation in comics have not yet been fully described, especially from a purely intertextual perspective. This will be my aim here. In practical terms, after developing my main argument (1), I will apply Nelson Goodman’s propositions concerning the typology of citation practices (2). This comparison will confirm, through an analytical rereading of Total Jazz (3), the metasemiotic function of comics and will illustrate some of its stylistic features.
1. The Argument
I will be relying on Nelson Goodman’s and Gérard Genette’s schemas meant for the internal exploration of the work in an intertextual regime, rather than models embracing an external perspective of the work, to describe the intertextual phenomenon.4 Quotation5 as “repetition of a unit of speech within another
speech […] appears to be the primitive interdiscursive relation” (Compagnon 1979: 54, my translation). Within a text, it is the most obvious form of intertextuality. I follow Gérard Genette’s definition of an intertextual relationship, “as a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts” (Genette [1982] 1997: 8). This deliberately restricts the initial meaning of intertextuality, inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, and defined by Julia Kristeva as “the dialogical space of texts,” presuming that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations” (Kristeva [1967] 1986: 37). It is true that in a broad sense, “her definition seems particularly applicable to bande dessinée, even though she does not refer to visual text” (Miller 2007: 141). Nevertheless, it is important to differentiate between citation (as an intertextual tool) and rewriting (according to hypertextual processes of imitation or transformation of an original text), without positing on the fact that all writings are an intertextual patchwork.
Insofar as the system of comics is the result of an intermedial mixing of several codes or different sign systems, as Thierry Groensteen (2010: 60-1) has posited, it represents the perfect topic for this paper 2. This paper supplements my first analysis of this work (Glaude 2011: 75-91, 118-25) by adding this new perspective provided by intertextuality.
3. For bibliographical elements on the presence of Jazz in French-language comics, see Jacques Bisceglia, “Le Jazz & la BD”, in Le Collectionneur de bandes dessinées, n°75, 76, 78, 83, 91 and 110, 1994-2007. For critical approaches see Jacques Tramson, “Jazztime et BD”. Musiques du texte et de l’image, Jean PerroT (ed.), Paris, CNDP, 1997, p. 125-35; Matthew screech, “Remembering the Jazz Orpheus. Barney and the Blue Note by Loustal and Paringaux”. Journal of Popular Culture, n°43.2, 2010, p. 348-67. The proceedings of the symposium, “Jazz et bande dessinée” held at Monségur in June 2011, to be published by the UP of Bordeaux.
4. This methodological choice does not reject the quality of models ruled out, such as Harold Bloom’s (The Anxiety of Influence), and Marshall McLuhan’s (From Cliché to Archetype).
5. Unlike Nelson Goodman (1978), Gérard Genette distinguishes between citation and quotation: “every text may be cited and thus become a quotation, but citation is a specific literary practice that quite obviously transcends each one of its performances and has its own general characteristics” (Genette [1982] 1997: 8). A likelihood of confusion even appears in the French word citation, “confusing the quotation’s meaning (of the utterance) and the action of citing (of the enunciation)” (Compagnon 1979: 37, my translation).
devoted to intertextuality.6 I characterise the empirical notion of the comics medium by the codes upon
which it relies as a mode of operation, i.e., “the manner in which the system acts, more particularly the sense (sight, hearing, etc.) to which it is directed” (Benveniste [1969] 1981: 11). Semiotic approaches deal less with perceptual channels or isolated sign systems than with the relations they maintain between them, as Émile Benveniste foresaw (ibid.: 12, 22). In this sense, it seems “entirely conceivable to take up the semiologic project in Goodman’s view (or to make a semiologic use of the symbol theory) by focusing the research on transsemiotic relations” (Vouilloux 1997: 16, my translation). From an analytic perspective, the study of the symbols’ logical and practical relations (in the general and neutral meaning intended by Nelson Goodman) within the system of comics will aim at explaining the possibility of the passage from one signifying system (jazz music) to another (comics).
Nelson Goodman’s analytical approach rejects the preconceived radical notion claiming that language in a purely verbal sense constitutes a universal metalanguage, i.e. the only semiotic system able to refer to every other semiotic system (Benveniste [1969] 1981: 18). Citation creates a privileged environment for observing the metafictional function of comics. “Building an utterance by talking about another utterance, taking it for an object, if only though a gesture, shrug or frown, occurs through metalanguage” (Compagnon 1979: 82, my translation) or rather, in the fictional context of Total Jazz, through metafiction. Likewise, “variations upon a work, whether in the same or a different medium– and still more, sets of variations–are interpretations of the work” (Goodman 1988: 82). In this way, jazz improvisations that use processes comparable to pictorial cut-outs (Hadler 1983: 94) “enter the metadomain, for the focus of such activities is more on the medium as such (the instrument and its player as well as the musical system) than on the musical ‘message’” (Wolf 2007: 312-3).
6. Since this work considers comics and jazz as signifying systems, it does not refer to the concept of intermediality, which is the media equivalent of intertextuality, considered in its broad sense, i.e., covering “any transgression of boundaries between different media” (Ryan 2009: 267).
Fig.1 Étude du préjugé de la bande dessinée classique envers le jazz, panels 1-3, in Total Jazz © Blutch-Cornélius 2013
To assert that, in the excerpt of the “Étude du préjugé de la bande dessinée classique à l’égard du jazz”
(fig. 1), Blutch’s drawing neither copies nor repeats but, rather, quotes Hergé’s images, amounts to
saying that the iconic code can talk about itself, especially within the same system: meta-comic strip, meta-painting, meta-film, etc. In addition, as Nelson Goodman has shown, “a visual system that has means for quoting its own symbols normally has means for quoting other visual symbols” (Goodman 1978: 55). Comics deploys the metasemiotic capacities of its codes simultaneously, thanks to which it has a cross-system metafictional potential. By the conjunction of their characteristics, comics can directly and indirectly quote images, words, musical notation, word-image combinations, and can cite itself, with every potential of distortion that those quotations allow.
When do we have quotation in wordless comic strips? The first panel (Fig.1) reproduces a panel by Hergé and substitutes the opera singer’s face (La Castafiore) with one of a jazz singer. The next two panels stage Tintin, Captain Haddock and Snowy, famous characters, in poses that would give a feeling of déjà vu to readers of Tintin’s adventures. It is highly probably that a number of readers will not only identify Hergé’s graphical style and his universally famous characters, but also the two panels as they appear in one album of the series. In this case, the panels of the album Les Sept boules de cristal7 (page
11, panels 8, 9 et 12) are partially reproduced, minus the speech balloons. These panels can be identified even when they are inserted in the sequential continuum of Total Jazz and share an equal status with the other consecutive panels. The insertion of a citation, by using what Danielle Chaperon calls the “split strategy,” consists in using “the frame of the box to assert and neutralise, simultaneously, this effect of troubling incongruity” (Chaperon 2007: 29, my translation). The quotation seems relatively obvious, although the importance of the reader’s responsibility for identifying the quotation, should be noted. The problem in this iconic quotation is both the recognition of the borrowed fragment and the duplication process. Therefore, this extract of Hergé’s work seems doubled by a manual, visible process. It bears the hand of Blutch who authenticates the work like the phrase at the bottom of the “canvases painted ‘in the manner of’ a famous artist, thus providing the exact equivalent of the self-confessed literary pastiche” (Genette [1982] 1997: 386). Needless to say, the matter of a metasemiotic icon requires flexibility: any iconic homosemiotic citation “will depend upon what we are willing to take as an adequate analogue of replication in direct verbal quotation” (Goodman 1978: 49).
Fig.1 refers, in effect, to an intertextual citation of an episode of the adventures of Tintin,
formulated (“Dans Tintin…”) and written in the didactic frame of an “Étude.” Therefore, this quotation fulfils both necessary conditions that Nelson Goodman identifies in the quotation: “(a) containment of some paraphrase of what is quoted”–which may even be reproduced in its totality, since any expression is, of course, a paraphrase of itself–and “(b) reference to what is quoted, by either naming [direct quotation] or predication [indirect quotation]” (Goodman 1978: 43). The strip in question satisfies Goodman’s first requirement for citation, since it paraphrases (with the exception of the speech bubbles) three boxes of one page from Tintin’s adventures. It also meets the second requirement for citation: it refers by naming, “Dans Tintin…”, although with little bibliographical precision, to the original boxes mentioned above. 7. The citation of comic strips in comics is not new: in this 1948 album, Hergé staged (p. 61) the heroes from one of his other series: the Brussels urchins Quick & Flupke.
2. A Tentative Typology of Jazz Citation in Comics
In order to establish a typology, I will now compare examples of (homosemiotic) verbal citations and of (heterosemiotic) jazz citations in comics. For the first case, I reproduce an example and its various forms of quotations, all devised by Nelson Goodman (1978: 41-56). This involves a deliberately “tenseless statement” (ibid.: 41): /triangles have three sides/, for which geometrical inaccuracy does not matter in the beginning. For the second category, I have collected jazz citations in the album Total Jazz; i.e. examples of jazz music in comics. Here are the types of intertextual relations considered by Nelson Goodman (ibid.: 42-3), where the verbs to name and to contain signify to designate explicitly and to
reproduce completely.8
• A2 both names and contains A1 • A3 contains but does not name A1 • A4 names but does not contain A1 • A5 neither contains nor names A1 • A6 contains without citing A1
This model allows me to suggest a typology of jazz quotation processes in Total Jazz according to its five kinds of intertextual relations called, in the same order as the list above: highlighting, suffixation, designation, reformulation and supplementation.
Highlighting
The representation of the musician seated at his piano (fig. 2) follows the paradigm of classic pictorial composition, of portraits or genre paintings,9 although the drawing of the hands playing on the keyboard
conveys emotions triggered by the music in the pianist and the listener. However, this panel is not entirely in line with the traditional typology of the iconography of music and musicians (portrait, genre painting, still life), even though it depicts a musician. It alternates between the allegory of the jazz musician and the romantic image of the star experiencing creative torment, to finally resolve into a free self-expressive figuration of “the artist himself, trying to transcribe his impressions by using variable shapes” (Junod 2009: 25, my translation) and black and white contrasts.
8. Thus, the verbs to name and to contain do not have the same meaning as to denote and to paraphrase in the definition previously stated. Therefore, there is no contradiction.
9. The most famous example in early comic strips is the page Wilhelm Busch entitled “Ein Neujahrskonzert” (1865) or “Der Virtuos” (1868), which shows a spectator entranced by the spectacular piano playing of a virtuoso. Curiously, an homage to the German author written at swing era, described him as a pioneer of jazz: “A jazzy rhythm often springs up, with Busch, and it is not surprising that he found most of his successors precisely in America” (Heine 1932: 128, my translation).
Type of
naming Verbal exam-ple Example in Total Jazz
Highlighting have three “triangles sides”
Cinq solos, panel 1, in Total Jazz © Blutch-Cornélius 2013
Naturally, the acoustic information of a concert has a precious complement of audition in the perception of the body language and the posture (seen as acting out emotions) of the instrumentalist in action. In the system of comics, despite the absence of acoustic manifestations, the visualisation of the musician’s gestures transmits the ritual expression of jazz (Béthune 2009: 26) depicted by iconic devices. In this case, Blutch conveys what he values in Jaki Byard’s piano playing: “his generosity, his way to push back the limits of the frame” (Dutilh 2008: 153, my translation). The facial expressions (his frowning face) and gestures (his frenzied hands attacking the keyboard) of the black artist do not work as affect
displays indicating the emotional state of the musician, but “as illustrators to emphasize occurrences of
dissonance and ‘blue’ notes” (Graham et al. 2005: 207) in Blues for Smoke. In other words, the musical performance conveys generic information visually, allowing the spectator to identify the specific genre of jazz involved.
Without using the text, the reader, even a learned one, would probably not identify Jaki Byard (who is most likely to be recognized through the spectacular piano playing). Indeed, Blutch’s portrait does not copy a picture famous enough to be identified as a citation. In addition, the figurative precision of the facial features fades in favour of the two iconic elements enthralling the reader’s attention: the hand play, in the bottom left-hand quarter of the panel, and a record sleeve, in the space diametrically opposite. The readers of the Jazzman magazine, who this page initially targeted, probably have sufficient knowledge of jazz culture to recognise the copy, confirmed by the legend, of the Blues for Smoke record cover. It is actually the insert, representing a steam engine, embedded in the top right-hand quarter of the cut out panel. Although it has been drawn again by Blutch, the unfamiliar object fits into the panel in
such a way as to “reclaim its plastic incongruity and set itself apart from the other graphic elements of the page” (Chaperon 2007: 21, my translation). It relegates the diegetic space to another level than the one of the sleeve.
It is true that the panel shows syntactically miscellaneous content that seems to disrupt any cohesive framing and to leave the combination of fragments to the reader’s assessment, both within itself (heterogeneity of its components) and within the page (as each panel is cut out and relatively indistinct from the others). However, the semantic unit of the jazz isotopy establishes a hierarchy amongst the fragments and in this way restores their frame. Thus, the panel that expressly contains the image of Jaki Byard’s record–as the sleeve is outlined (“framed” in a way) by a black line that gives it the autonomy of an object–and explicitly refers to it, in its bibliographic reference, “Jaki Byard ‘Blues for Smoke’ 1960–CANDID–.” Accepting mimetic criteria that are not too demanding and provide identification, the process of the making of this image is the painterly equivalent of quotation marks (representation of the frame, easel or even picture rail within the pictorial composition). Insofar as the context does not interfere with the sleeve, but rather illustrates its musical content, it would underscore the direct quotation of the Blues for Smoke sleeve.
In conclusion, this panel contains a type A2 collage, a direct citation that names and contains a copy of a foreign body. The verbal example created by Nelson Goodman simply corresponds to a replica of the A1 text framed by quotation marks: “triangles have three sides.” This form of highlighting
(fig. 2) uses three signs of embedding that deal with the three channels of communication peculiar to
comics: juxtaposition of the narrative levels, linguistic repetition, and integrative graphic style. Firstly, regarding the codes of the medium, three juxtaposed narrative levels are interacting with each other: first of all, the citation of a record sleeve embedded in the panel in the form of an insert, then the embedding caption that comes under narrative commentary, and finally the genre scene of the jazzman during his performance, playing a theme recorded on the considered disc. Secondly, on the linguistic level, the contrast of the fonts in the name “Jaki Byard” appearing above and under the record sleeve creates two different functions to both texts (which otherwise have a similar role of identification): a decorative function for the quoted discourse and a bibliographic function for the embedding discourse. Thirdly, on the iconic level, the framed image of a steam engine is a representation of the quoted disc sleeve that contains the music performed on the piano by the character; on the plastic level, the obvious coherence of only one graphic style facilitates the integration of the three juxtaposed fragments. This example shows the importance of staging in comics for the translation of a jazz effect.
Suffixation
The following representation of a listener (Fig.3) does not come from caricature, but, rather, from the Romantic tradition. In the 19th century, an interest in the emotions of the subject of the aesthetic
experience developed. This panel contains some of those clichés: the bourgeois interior, the inspired or even melancholy ecstasy as a “feature of concentration, […] the almost religious attention of the listener who appears immersed in his inner world” (Junod 2009: 16-7, my translation), especially as he is listening to a jazz theme of mystical inspiration. The quotation of the chorus “A lov’ suprîme” is only distinguishable, initially, from plagiarism because it is produced by the soundtrack rather than by a character. The presence of a chorus within the multimodal discourse poses an insertion problem specific
to comics. For those who know the John Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme, this example disregards the phrasal (or sequential) suture and evinces the hiatus of textualities.
Type of
predica-tion Verbal example Example in Total Jazz
Suffixation have three sidesthat triangles
Jazz au moyen âge, panel 5, in Total Jazz © Blutch-Cornélius
2013
The panel quotes the text of one of Coltrane’s standards by reproducing his lyrics between two wavelets, working as quotation marks, surrounded by random notes, all of which is emitted by the broadcasting source (a record player). The frame of the box and this mixture of waves and notes framing the song assert and neutralise the effect of heterogeneity of the assembled fragments. Hence, the syntactic link no longer conceals the collage; on the contrary it sets up similarities and contrasts between the series of boxes. This embedding process invests the image with an illustrative role regarding the text, as in the early picture stories where the space of the text is impervious to that of the image. There are no redundancies, but rather determinations; the denotations of the chorus are set by those of the story that is being played out in parallel in the autonomous diegetic space. This story shows a young boy trying in vain to listen to the disc of Coltrane’s quartet in several rooms of the house, repeatedly driven out by members of his family, who do not share the same interest for modal jazz. In a way the image is used as an ironic predication (by antiphrasis) to the words “A lov’ suprîme.” It displaces the sense of the chorus to the context of a domestic chronicle staging a child starving of affection and driven out of his family space because of his musical tastes.10 “But in return the ‘cited’ text must, as it were, give up
its transitivity: it no longer speaks, it is spoken […], the borrowed text at once denotes and refuses to denote” (Jenny [1976] 1982: 45). This is an example of suffixation (A3).
10. This humorous “Jazz au moyen âge” topic reappears in the page entitled “Seul contre tous (Jazz aux temps modernes)” where a fatheris the laughing stock of his children because ofhis passion forChick Corea.
Designation
Second type of direct quotation of jazz in comics: a panel (Fig.4) names but does not contain Buddy Bolden’s orchestral music; it is a designation (A4). Naturally, the nominal designations “musique,” “cacophonie,” “vacarme” or “mélasse” only provide information about the musical genre towards which the reception seems ideologically geared, i.e. jazz. One can point out that this type of direct citation can be done both through words (description) and images (depiction) of the musical artefact, e.g. the character holding a copy of a recording of the orchestra in question, as with the record sleeve in the example for highlighting (Fig.2). Nonetheless, “this powerful ghost” of Bolden has been “mute for us” so far, for lack of recording (Réda 2011: 79, my translation). In the second panel (Fig.4), the arrow on the caption indicates the title of the musical theme, performed by Herbie Mann on the flute, which is reformulated in the picture as: “Hold on, I’m comin’.” The text captions the puffs of breath, which do not contain the jazz standard as they do not replicate it in any way, although they rephrase it. This is a new case of designation (A4).
Type of
naming Verbal exam-ple Examples in Total Jazz
Designa-tion The element A1
Créole orchestra, panel 3, in Total
Jazz © Blutch-Cornélius 2013 Sonny Sharrock, panel 2, in Total Jazz © Blutch-Cornélius 2013
Reformulation
The following panel (fig. 5) proves that the indirect visual citation of a chorus does not need naming or containing. The page raises an issue of identification as, apart from the title “Rencontre au sommet,” the sign of a “Studio” and the physical characteristics of the two jazz icons, it is lacking in the sort of designation devices examined in the previous example. Admittedly, Blutch has chosen to rephrase the jazz playing of the saxophonists by a mix of contorted fonts in musical notation. Thus, the image does not distinguish the playing of the patriarch Coleman Hawkins, pioneer of the be-bop, from the young Sonny Rollins’, representative of modern jazz. Nevertheless, the meeting of the two tenor saxophonists is famous enough (Réda 2011: 307) to posit that this page recounts the 1963 recording of their legendary album Sonny meets Hawk! in the RCA Victor studios. Naturally, this interpretation poses a problem of subjectivity but, in case it is convincing enough, it would suggest a type A5 indirect citation or
reformulation.
Type of
predica-tion Verbal example Example in Total Jazz
Reformulation
that three-angled polygons have three straight
bound-aries or
que les triangles ont trois bords droits
Rencontre au sommet, panel 6, in Total Jazz ©
Blutch-Cornélius 2013
Supplementation
Supplementation is the opposite of reformulation, as it is “an expression [which] may contain A1 without quoting it either directly or indirectly; e.g.: /A6 No triangles have three sides such that any two are parallel/” (Goodman 1978: 43). In geometrical metalanguage, this definition limits the A1 proposition. Indeed, it corrects its precision, modifies its inner meaning, and therefore does not cite it, even though it contains it in its original wording. The allusion “Dans Tintin…” of the caption of the following panel (Fig.6), taken alone, does not refer precisely to the source panel, of which only some iconic characteristics remain intact. As for the pictorial representation of the singer, notably her face, which is graphically homogeneous with the drawn world of the album Total Jazz, it is a distortion of the picture of a character from Tintin’s adventures (without any recourse to a paraphrase). Supposing that the reader identifies Bianca Castafiore, his analysis of the quotation will vary considerably depending on whether he recognises the original box of Les Sept boules de cristal. The negative option corresponds to the hypertextual case of pastiche (Fig.1), whereas the positive option is a travesty, both intended in the sense of Gérard Genette ([1982] 1997: 385-6).
The reader’s identification of La Castafiore as a result of the clues provided by Hergé’s clear line and from the textual message of the caption (“Dans Tintin…”), and the consequent functioning of Blutch’s comic strip as travesty or pastiche are respectively based on the reader’s ability to recognise the original box or not. Considering this possibility of functioning as a pastiche, the panel corresponds to an imitation of an image that is not identified for it is also a recreation. The fact that Bianca Castafiore is transformed into a black singer illustrates “indirect imitation, which is in all arts characteristic of the pastiche–the imitation of a master’s manner in a new performance, one that is original and unlisted in his
catalogue” (Genette [1982] 1997: 386). Of course, Blutch’s intention is not to copy Hergé. The master’s line that is reproduced appears marked, affected, as is often the case in transworld migrations. As a result, imitation (pastiche) is never far from transformation (parody) in comics that are considered playful. In view of the ideology of the caricatural style in comics, Thierry Groensteen has raised the question whether “parody would not be, at different degrees and modes, an integral part of every humoristic comic book” (Groensteen 2010: 7, my translation). We know that in hypertextual relations, the serious mode is never far from the satirical mode, just as “the intertextual use of discourses always has a critical, playful, and exploratory function” (Jenny [1976] 1982: 61). On the ideological level, the disclosure of prejudice regarding jazz in classical comics “serves to emphasize the conflictual relationship entertained by independent-sector artists [like Blutch] with their immediate predecessors” (Miller 2007: 144) in the Franco-Belgian field of comics publishing. Blutch’s work is in line with this ideological project by the recurring appropriation of Disney’s and Hergé’s worlds.11
Travesty is also a hypertextual practice, in a satirical rather than playful mood, but when it is not satirical, it corresponds to an intertextual type: supplementation (A6). Indeed, “the stylistic characteristics of the resulting works quite naturally prompt one to view them as playful or satirical transformations, but the transforming gesture itself is not tied up with a specific mode, in painting any more than in literature” (Genette [1982] 1997: 385). The transformation of La Castafiore is in line with an “Étude du préjugé de la bande dessinée classique envers le jazz” (according to the title of the page), carried out in tribute (to Tintin or to Billie Holiday–who knows?), despite the wrong chords. Musically, the prejudice that is denounced here affects jazz singing as much as it once affected Romantic opera. Originally, Hergé’s strip quotes a great aria taken from Charles Gounod’s Faust. Therefore, two vocal aesthetics are mixed in the “quotation within the quotation” done by Blutch: “the opera voice, seeking weightlessness,” and “the jazz voice, itself, exposing its imperfection” (Martin 1998: 68, my translation). Be that as it may, this last type of intertextuality is on the verge of hypertextuality (A6, supplementation) and is close to a distortion, which is nothing other than reclaimed plagiarism. According to Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle, the pictorial distortion “appears as an iconoclastic act with a two-pronged effect: it consists in causing interference to a message, so that this interference sparks off a reset of meaning” (Fresnault-Deruelle 1988: 99, my translation).
11. Foreshadowing his later work, Blutch winning entry for a competition launched by Fluide Glacial in 1988 was a short pastiche of Tintin au Tibet.
Intertextuel type Verbal example Example in Total Jazz
Supplementation
no triangles have three sides
such that any two are parallel
Étude du préjugé de la bande dessinée classique envers le jazz,
panel 1, in Total Jazz © Blutch-Cornélius 2013
3. The Visual Insertion of Musical Citation in Total Jazz
Critics universally praise the very personal1 graphic style of Christian Hincker, known as Blutch,
admiring the brilliance of this black and white specialist’s brushwork. It became a model, among others, that Jean-Christophe Menu, one of the founders of L’Association, recognises in Craig Thompson’s works as well as in Le Combat ordinaire by Manu Larcenet (Menu 2005: 38-9). This publishing phenomenon of stylistic imitation is not new,2 but such institutionalization is not without contradiction with Blutch’s
statements that challenge the consistency of his graphic style: “I am not at all stable, I don’t believe I have a drawing style, I don’t know what ‘style’ means. Each time I begin a book, I never know how to do it. I start again from scratch” (Bocquet 2010: 255, my translation). Within the artistic field, “imitation is never a simple identical repetition, but it is rather the condition to any innovation” (Béthune 2009: 13, my translation), despite Plato’s critique of mimesis. The recognition of a “Blutch” style and more generally of a “nouvelle bande dessinée” imprint (Dayez 2002: 7) implies that we are aware of a stylistic unity, if not of a person then at least of a genre. For “imitation of generic styles is no doubt as old as the genres themselves” (Genette [1982] 1997: 89) and henceforth becomes symptomatic of their institutionalization. I will focus my analysis on Blutch’s narrative and stylistic processes used to insert jazz citations within his short stories.
By showing images, i.e. through monstration, Total Jazz converts jazz into Histoires musicales. Blutch narrativizes in them his passion for jazz that he declares in the paratext of his work.3 By creating a
1. This style calls to mind Jijé’s, one of the masters of the golden age of Franco-Belgian comics.
2. Like other French general publishers, the publishing strategy of the Éditions du Seuil regarding comics calls to mind the idea of the “nouvelle bande dessinée,” making it a “‘false independent’ among independents” (Menu 2005: 35, my translation). Although the first Seuil edition was out of print, Total Jazz was back in print in February 2013 at Cornélius, an established publisher of alternative comics.
3. This paratext–made up of a foreword (by Alex Dutilh, editor of Jazzman) and three comic stories–constitutes a reflection on the fragmented text of Total Jazz through the comics medium. This reflection mediated by the author himself, who does not hesitate to stage himself in his work, confirms that “metareference has recently ‘infiltrated’ even popular media” (Wolf 2007: 316).
narrative about jazz through the lives of jazzmen, Blutch quenches a collector’s passion. His first contact with jazz, during which he was “obsessive about some musicians” (Dutilh 2008: 153, my translation), became a ritual of initiation into his objects of veneration. Despite a general tone of tribute, Blutch’s comic book tends towards “derision and caricature, and this inclination to mockery is nothing less than a constituent of comics’ ‘own genius’” (Groensteen 2010: 11, my translation). The criticism of pop music, for example, in the story “Viva Italia!” recalls Robert Crumb’s famous page titled “Keep On Truckin’”. For Crumb and for modern painters, “its complex dissonant sounds and dynamic energy made jazz a fitting analogue for modern life” (Hadler 1983: 92). However, Blutch turns inside out this model of life “uniting the people with music and dance in urban public spaces” (Eizykman 2007: 157, 163, my translation), to defend private listening and inner appropriation of post-bop standards.
Significantly, Total Jazz (2004) quotes few musicians from the first half of the century, except Buddy Bolden and Duke Ellington on his deathbed. Both legendary conductors epitomize the transition of jazz production from community to individual, soloist and/or composer (Réda 2011: 62, 78). Apart from these two icons, Blutch prefers the post-bop repertoire, notably free jazz and jazz fusion, from Ornette Coleman’s Something else!!!! until the 1970s. Beyond 1975 in Total Jazz consists of tributes to jazzmen of the previous period, staged during late concerts in Paris (Miles Davis in 1991, Wayne Shorter in 2001), or through amateur musicians perpetuating their memory. This selection corresponds to the individual repertoire of young American modern-day sidemen (Blutch himself was born in 1967), who “will probably know more of the compositions of well-known later jazz figures like Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Wayne Shorter” (Becker & Faulkner 2009: 56).
The album Total Jazz weaves a complex network of references. Citing jazz music in comics, “which is based on showing, leads to directly represent what is […] usually only mentioned in a allusive or elliptical way” (Groensteen 2010: 125, my translation). The quotations are still narratively motivated; their enunciative place is clearly designated. Blutch admits that: “when I listen to jazz, most of the time, it is like reading a novel. I hear the stories. Duke Ellington, for example, is incredibly narrative, it is literature” (Dutilh 2008: 155, my translation). And yet, the musical semantic experiences raise the difficulty of associating denotative labels with musical extracts. This research “shows how the listener, called on to characterize what the music expresses, appeals to interpretants4 that correspond to the
conceptualized and verbalised meaning of natural language” (Vouilloux 1997: 101-2, my translation). When a listener refers to a jazz piece that he is listening to, for some facts or events, the narrative constructed about them “is not in the music, but in the plot imagined by the listeners from functional objects” (Nattiez 1990: 246).
This narrative is the mark of the author’s intention, which the reader or the listener tries to infer through the comic book. According to Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “this mechanism is most conspicuous in the comic strip, since–and this is a part of its charm–the imagination of the reader fills the narrative void which exists between two images. It is exactly this process which operates when we hear music in a more or less spontaneously narrative mode of listening” (Nattiez 1990: 243). This fragmented aspect also appears in some pages of Total Jazz, where the porosity of the frames loosens the linear nature of 4. Bernard Vouilloux uses the concept of interpretant from Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotic model.
the narration. And yet the individual panels of the wordless comic strip representing “one moment in a continuous action […] are separated by smaller time spans […], but they are linked together by stronger causal relations” (Ryan 2009: 274), than in comics with speech bubbles and captions. The aesthetic of fragments at work in some pages of Total Jazz is appropriate for Blutch’s subject, as Alex Dutilh points out: “Blutch invites us in this way to enter the thoughts of the musician. Within his feelings, his sensibility. And as a result, somehow, within the intimacy of the improvisation process. […] This is the reason why Total Jazz is not a collection ‘about’ jazz, but a book ‘of’ jazz” (Blutch 2004: foreword, my translation). Nevertheless, the work’s coherence has clearly been carefully constructed, far from the visible disarray of underground comics coming from genuine graphic jam sessions or drawing concerts by Blutch and Brigitte Fontaine in duo.
If the effect of jazzy spontaneity appears so constructed in Total Jazz, it is probably in response to a major problem: “How to mention music without sound?” Despite the absence of reported speech, Blutch’s panels are not soundproof, even though it is not acknowledged that the system of comics has a soundtrack (Lacassin 1971: 409-16). The expression “‘to see the music’ […], metaphorical in itself, implies a recourse to a metaphor” (Junod 2009: 15, my translation), which reminds us of the evidence that comics do not have any soundtrack. As Nelson Goodman points out, “sound can be contained in a picture, or a picture contained in sound, only if the notion of containment is stretched beyond any pertinent limit” (Goodman 1978: 55).
Although he staged jazz listeners and jazz producers, Blutch did not want any dialogues in Total
Jazz:5 “I have emphasized precisely this absence [of sound] by deleting the dialogues in these pages.
Because a dialogue is already a sound and because, in a way, it interferes with that other sound that is music. So, those panels are mute and I try to visualize music in them. I don’t know what the result will be, but I hope that the mystery of silence will be useful” (Dayez 2002: 50, my translation).6 For example,
Blutch represents (fig. 6) La Castafiore’s singing, which can be read in Hergé’s original panels by using signs other than linguistic ones. These signs come within the iconic code (representation of nonverbal aspects of language), the media code (use of an ideogrammatic code specific to comics such as drops and intensity strokes) and the musical code (characters’ borrowings of the notation system of music). The choice of wordless comics makes the contact with jazz more intimate, as “visual aspects of music personalize the music, drawing performers and listeners closer together in a shared experience” (Graham
et al. 2005: 204). Comics detach the nonverbal behaviour of live musical performers from the aural
experience, reinforcing “the separation of audio and visual dimensions of music that has begun with the invention of radio, gramophone and silent movie” (ibid.: 224). The choice of silent comics underlines the importance of the expressivity of the body that characterized Blutch’s entire work, particularly through dancing. Making music does not only go through the aural sensory channel, it “is also characterized by a continuously changing and meaningful use of facial expressions, body movements, and hand gestures” 5. Apart from a page entitled “Créole orchestra” (Fig.4) and the comic stories of the paratext.
6. This approach calls to mind Louis Armstrong’s scat which, according to Jean-Pierre Martin, influenced the contemporaneous novel style. This way of singing that “dissociates meaning from speech” asserts “the failure of the text, the insufficiency of the words” (Martin 1998: 61, my translation), while emphasizing the creative individuality of the soloist in a collective improvisation.
(Graham et al. 2005: 203), affecting the music performance on perceptual and affective levels.
The visual dimension of the music performance has inspired artists for a long time (Junod 2009: 18). Compared to the pictorial tradition examined by Mona Hadler (1983), Blutch uses highly varied citation practices, as we have seen. Among the jazz quotations in his comic book, types of naming (A2, highlighting or A4, designation) are more common than types of predication (A3, suffixation or A5, reformulation), whereas there are few cases of supplementation (A6). According to Nelson Goodman, “a direct quotation of a sentence both names and contains it; an indirect quotation does not name and need not contain it” (Goodman 1978 : 42). By preferring types of naming, Blutch usually cites jazz directly. Thus, the way Total Jazz refers to jazz is often direct, through its reclamation of the iconography of jazz as well as its reinterpretation of jazz standards. Therefore, its search for the jazz spirit comes within variation rather than predication. About the waitress who served as a model for the cover of Total Jazz,7
Blutch claims “I drew my inspiration from this ‘real’ girl. It was not a literal representation, but the spirit of jazz” (Dutilh 2008: 155, my translation). The artist expresses his passion for jazz in this comic book and takes an interest in the possibility of transmitting it “when it becomes significant, when it becomes tangible” (Bocquet 2010: 247, my translation). He tries to convey the jazz spirit and its performer’s sensuality as he feels it himself. To do so, he imitates jazz, considering it as a way for musicians (and for Blutch himself) “to claim themselves as members of a community and to declare their affiliation to a shared tradition” (Béthune 2009: 23, my translation). Quotation allows him to claim ownership of variation as a creative mimetic process of songs of the jazz repertoire, which “are, for the most part, formulaic, elaborate variations on a small number of templates” (Becker & Faulkner 2009: 24).
As we have seen, the second example of designation (A4) (Fig. 4)–which quotes the recording of “Hold on, I’m comin’” on the vinyl record Memphis Underground conducted by Herbie Mann–proves that the image can rephrase a jazz theme to which it refers by “some features, such as feelings and aspects of design and style [that] are common to painting and music” (Goodman 1988: 81). Which jazz style properties are exemplified by Blutch’s graphic style? For old school critics, Miles Davis’s early modal experiments break up the jazz to “glorify the soloist with all the resources of a color range which in the meantime moved from the lightness of watercolor to the pomp that allows himself a painter who indulge in decoration” (Réda 2011: 285, my translation). The first post-bop experiments foreshadow free jazz anarchism and the unholy alliances of jazz fusion, both celebrated by Blutch with Total Jazz. The following strip (Fig.7) continues the pictorial reformulation of the musical theme from The Herbie Mann Group entitled “Hold on, I’m comin’” by showing each sideman in a tracking shot. For its opponents, the group breaks with authentic jazz by merging it with an “electrified” rhythm and blues. It brings together “the ultimate representatives of a jazz to which they rashly claim to adhere (Larry Coryell, Sonny Sharrock) [who] will test out sound effects to electrocution” (Réda 2011: 244, my translation). Far from assimilating the two virtuoso guitarists’ playing, Blutch gives two contrasting overviews. Before him, modern painting had already “equated contrasts with dissonance and, significantly, jazz is a 7. Similarly, a character in the story “Viva Italia!” holds a Jazz Magazine cover showing a female profile with an Afro hairstyle. This authentic 1971 issue ran as a headline “Du côté de l’Amérique noire”, reflecting “how romantic notions of an essential black culture continued to exist among the French jazz press during the 1970s, perpetuating the legacy of black exotica in France” (Lehman 2005: 42).
style characterized by both these elements” (Hadler 1983: 92). He shows the moderate fingering of Larry Coryell producing an evanescent and clear sound, represented by circular patterns surrounded by a thin line. In contrast, he shows the brutality of Sonny Sharrock’s playing, frenetically scratching the strings, with thick black brush waves that will soon drown out the group’s ethereal sound. According to the poet Jacques Réda,8 free jazz (to which Sharrock belongs) produces a cacophony releasing jazz music “with
a brutality that it will never survive” (Réda 2011: 317, my translation).
This citation reformulates the song “Hold on, I’m comin’” by taking advantage of “the correlative abstraction of painting and music” (Hadler 1983: 98). More than denoting any eventual meaning of the tune, it graphically possesses its jazzy properties and refers to them, i.e. it exemplifies jazz in the sense of Nelson Goodman (1978: 32). Probably one of the most interesting aspects of Blutch’s graphic work in Total Jazz is that he repeatedly tries to represent the instrumental performance through images. While music or cinema are “able to let someone hear on the first listen the totality of a masterpiece displayed over a certain period of time” (Eizykman 2007: 169, my translation), Blutch’s comic book as well as Crumb’s “Keep On Truckin’” achieve this without sound.
When Blutch’s drawing conveys a jazz standard, it exemplifies some formal characteristics of the theme which, in return, allows identification of the reference. This is what the story “Rencontre au sommet” (Fig.5) illustrates. The title establishes a referential relationship. Such a reference is not far from allusion: all in all, “reference from variation to theme goes in one direction (by exemplification) to certain common features and continues in the opposite direction (by denotation) from that feature to the theme” (Goodman 1988: 70). Therefore, one can see that the use of the concept of citation “within the autographic arts9, where the reproduction has a status of copy or forgery, calls for reworking” (Vouilloux
8. Jacques Réda has participated in Jazz Magazine since 1963, where Ornette Coleman’s free jazz experiments were ambiguously received until the late 1980s (Lehman 2005: 38). This venerable French monthly merged in 2009 with the recent magazine Jazzman, which first published Total Jazz between 2000 and 2004.
9. According to Nelson Goodman, “copying as a relation in an autographic singular symbol system [like painting] differs drastically from replication as a relation in an allographic multiple one [like photography]” (Goodman 1978: 49).
1997: 75, my translation). Many jazz quotations in Total Jazz correspond to a pictorial variation referring to an original model while betraying the intervention of a second hand, Blutch’s oh-so-recognizable style.
Conclusion
The difficulty posed by intertextuality–namely how can a comic book include recognizable heterosemiotic fragments without altering them completely?–is made more complex by the multimodal nature of comics, which combines several codes. Nevertheless, the observation of comics and jazz intertextual relations throughout the album Total Jazz has shown at least two aspects of interest. Firstly, jazz quotation in the comic book, as heterogeneous transposition of musical material, reveals the interaction between distinct codes within a signifying system. Thus, the collage, technical quotation device, reflects the system of comics by wrenching it “from the inertia of its codes through the pernicious addition of a foreign body” (Fresnault-Deruelle 1988: 106, my translation). Secondly, the intra or inter semiotic collages must be considered “as a way of constructing symbols, these are among the instruments for world making” (Goodman 1978: 56). As a fictional world, the comic book narrative incorporating musical episodes hovers between two dramatic principles: the production of diegetic verisimilitude and non-narrative musical performance.
Through this break, which can be bridged in the narration, jazz citation reveals the poetical quality of comic books like Total Jazz. In every case considered above for the typology, the entire diegesis has been maintained due to framing processes that I have described. Nevertheless, the cited fragment “tends to behave, not like a story within the story, but like a word of a poem in its relationship with its context, with everything that this implies concerning stylistic instability, unverifiability, incongruity” (Jenny [1976] 1982: 53). Each intertextual reference identified as such in Total Jazz “introduces a new way of reading which destroys the linearity of the text”: each quotation leaves the reader a choice to go on reading, “taking it only as a segment like any other, integrated into the syntagmatic structure of the text, or else turns to the source text” (ibid.: 44). Here, we find a double reading procedure: the famous linear/tabular dialectic, which is common to both comics and poetry. This reasoning opens new research opportunities for the links between comics and poetry.
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Benoît Glaude is visiting lecturer and Ph.D. student of Languages and Literature at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve). His research focuses on the stylistic of comics’ dialogues. Email benoitglaude@yahoo.fr
