The Darkest Black
1. Framing Device
I didn’t decide to start writing this essay because of anything having to do with the eventual subjects, cartoonist Jacques Tardi and author Jean Patrick Manchette. That’s not to say that those two subjects aren’t interesting to me; I have been some level of obsessed with both of them for over a decade now. But the little bug that gets in my brain and motivates me to start trying to wrestle my thoughts down on paper didn’t come from anything Tardi or Manchette put down on the page, or at least not initially. It all started with the printer: the black wasn’t black enough. And since we’re talking about noir, that was a problem.
2. Peas in a Pod
Quickly: Tardi is a fantastically celebrated cartoonist who has been at the forefront of the industry in France for 35 years. In contrast to his slow burn, Manchette shot out ten crime novels over the course of ten years, redefined and reinvigorated the French crime novel, became hugely influential, and died of cancer in the 1990s.
Tardi and Manchette first teamed up to publish Griffu in 1978, and then, after Manchette’s death, Tardi began adapting his novels, starting with Le petit bleu de la côté ouest, published in 2005. The compatibility between the two artists is uncanny; maybe a better critic could point out exactly why in just a few words, or maybe it’s one of those matchups that works without needing explanation. To elaborate a little, I could go on about how Tardi’s strong and confident linework parallels Manchette’s objectivist depiction of the world, or how both artists excel at finding beauty and poetry in the visceral, and so on. However, Manchette is not the only crime novelist with whom Tardi worked, and yet I find Tardi’s adaptations of his work more powerful than his adaptations of/collaborations with other crime novelists. Similarly, Tardi is hardly the only cartoonist with strong linework or an unflinching commitment to depicting violence. Still, I recently sat down to read a Manchette novel that has yet to be adapted, and I couldn’t help but imagine it populated by characters drawn by Tardi. The book (L’affaire N’Gustro) was in French, and as I read it, the Tardi adaptation unfolded naturally in my head, as if I understood it not in an impromptu mental translation into English, or in the native French, but in Tardi’s own visual language.
The impossibly perfect matching of an artist and writer is a rare thing; I would put Bukowski and Crumb in this category, as well Raymond Queneau and Jacques Carelman. Or, to bring it full circle, Tardi and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Tardi’s collaboration with Céline was part of a series of books published in a joint venture by Futuropolis and Gallimard, the titanic French publishing house. The idea was to marry classics from the Nouvelle Revue Francaise (an imprint of Gallimard, whose books are about as iconically French as books can be, with their cream-colored cardstock covers and red and black printing) with prominent cartoonists for a line of elaborately illustrated large-format collaborations1, 1a.
However, Tardi’s artistic compatibility with both Céline and Manchette is not to suggest that those writers are particularly similar. For one, Manchette occupied the extreme left, whereas Céline was so far right that he was banished from France following World War II for supporting fascism (and for being vehemently anti-Semitic). In terms of their writing, though, they differed as well: Manchette self-consciously wrote in a particular genre, and he used that genre toward ends (namely, political engagement and social critique) that eclipsed its staid embodiment in throwaway airplane novels. (Or “train station novels” as those relentlessly quaint Frenchies insist on calling them.) Céline, on the other hand, used writing as a giant middle finger to the French literary establishment. He viewed the establishment as one that would never have him, and his eventual acceptance in the 1950’s when his novels were rereleased following his exile seemed only to make him angrier. Ever the one to bite the hand that feeds, he famously proclaimed in his preface to the new edition of Journey that all his racist, anti-Semitic, and fascist tendencies were present in that one novel. That is a debatable point – there is certainly nothing overt, although his utter disgust with modern life and humanity in general is what gives the novel its strength. It is, after all, a psychological (and literal) travelogue about finding the depths of human misery and cruelty, and understanding one’s own capacity to withstand the realities of modern life. To accomplish this goal, Céline weaves a competent enough plot (although it is so episodic it almost feels like the book was serialized), although his real strength is in his language. Never before had slang, profanity, unconventional grammar, and colloquial speech been used so extensively in French literature. Other authors had dabbled in slang and perhaps included passages spoken in colloquial language by individual characters as a way to illustrate them more realistically, but Céline was the first to write an entire book in that language. It’s one long first-person narrative that starts with the author protesting that it wasn’t even his fault that he began speaking in the first place and finishes with the author’s declaration that he has said all there is to say, and so he should just stop talking. The character is the protagonist, but speech is both the hero and the villain – it lays bare the human condition in a way that hadn’t been explored in literature before, but it also dooms the character to occupy modern life fully and without respite. And, to believe Céline’s declaration, it brought the author literary celebrity while also getting him exiled from his homeland and briefly imprisoned.
To whittle it down a little bit, Manchette used language within the confines of a genre as a finely-honed tool to explore political and social realities, whereas Céline used an explosive form of language like a grenade, consequences be damned. Many authors maintain a carefully calculated persona like a marketing gimmick, but I believe (without having any references on which to base this conclusion) that Céline simply wrote because he wanted to talk about a world that he abhorred. He didn’t have much of a point to make except that he hated everything about modern life. He was a pacifist, but in a very nihilistic way; he was not a reactionary, because he understood that industrialization was impossible to stop, and he didn’t care to try. He hated war, and he hated people for perpetuating war; he hated Jews, because he thought they hoarded money and pushed societies toward war for their own gain. When he began to tout pragmatic steps to end war (such as deferring to the Nazis so as to not see France embroiled in World War II), the wheels fell off, and his writing started to make less and less sense. The increasing bitterness consumed him and his later works, not all of which I have read, since to me they don’t hold nearly the same power as Journey and its sequel, Death on Credit. It is in those two books that his style develops most significantly, and where his worldview burns through the page like nothing I’d ever read before. It’s not that it is dark, it’s that it so spectacularly illuminates the author’s position in a world he can’t control and is just starting to understand. There’s beauty in the suffering, in the artifice that people construct, and in the ways they hurt each other, and that beauty is in the clarity of seeing all of that for the first time, of experiencing a character as he sees it for the first time. The plot is incidental; it’s the language that elevates the story from a bitter, reactionary treatise to a work of literary art.
So, while the diversity of locales and colorful personalities lend themselves to colorful illustration, merely depicting the action of the plot doesn’t add anything to the book. Tardi’s task in illustrating Céline, then, was to illustrate his language. Obviously, this is impossible, but Tardi succeeds in injecting his own visual language into Céline’s text. He doesn’t mimic Céline so much as he captures the energy of Céline’s language through drawing. Again, how he does this is something I’ll leave to a more astute critic; I’m content to point to almost bizarrely spot-on compatibility of Céline’s verbal language and Tardi’s visual language and leave it at that. (Put more crassly, anyone can illustrate a soldier vomiting in front of a pile of mangled bodies, but only Tardi can illustrate a soldier vomiting in front of a pile of mangled bodies in a way that rises above the shock value of such a scene toward more lofty ideas like self-discovery.)
So, Céine and Manchette are very different writers, yet Tardi is a perfect match for both. I’m aware of undercutting my own point either by attesting simply to Tardi’s versatility as an artist or even worse by coming across as an obsessed fan (though I am), so I should add that Tardi is not a swiss army knife. For example, consider Le Procès Verbal, another Gallimard/Futuropolis book. Written by J.M.G. Le Clézio, the book is sparse and meditative and great match for Alain Baudoin, another famous French cartoonist. Baudoin’s expressive brush strokes and partially unfinished characters mimic Le Clézio’s smoldering prose in a way that Tardi never could.
3. Key Plate
The more I thought about it, the dichotomies between Céline and Manchette came into even starker relief: confessional versus calculated, modern versus postmodern, grenade versus scalpel, etc. However, the two authors are certainly not without commonality: most notably, that truth is easier to find in blood, guts, and sex/injury; in violence, destitution, and disease/malfeasance than it is in the linguistic games of the high modernists (Céline’s contemporaries) or the linguistic, err, games of the postmodernists (Manchette’s contemporaries).
Switching gears: most commercial printing is four-color process, meaning that all the colors are made up of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black or combinations thereof. Newfangled digital printers mix all the colors together via microscopic robots (I’m pretty sure), but true process printing involves the use of plates. Essentially, you stamp the same image one time with each color plate, and the overlapping combinations of color product the full-color image. The combination is called CMYK and not CMYB, because the black plate is the “key” plate. In other words, because the detail of the image is most often rendered in black, all of the other colors are keyed to the black plate; it holds the rest of the image together.
For Céline and Manchette, what I call the “low focus” (meaning, the obsession with violence, misery, blood and guts, and so on, and as opposed to “high focus” like spirituality, idealism, and virtue) is the key plate that holds their work together. And, like Céline, Manchette is unflinchingly dark. There’s a reason he’s the modern hero of the noir novel – his books are populated with such relentless violence that if they were made faithfully into movies, they would still shock audiences even in a world that has been desensitized by the likes of Human Centipede.
People don’t merely die in Manchette novels; they elevate the act of dying to a form of performance art. When a Manchette character dies, he doesn’t simply bleed to death – his bowels empty noisily as he screams in agony. Fragments of his brain splatter the walls. If a character is merely being tortured, he vomits uncontrollably, often to the frustration of the torturer. However, Manchette doesn’t sentimentalize death or violence – even as his setpieces are clogged with gore, he moves through them swiftly and then leaves them behind. The people engaging in violence are just doing a job. They are hired killers, not sadists. The callousness with which Manchette writes about violence makes the depictions darker when viewed within the novel as a whole. Rather than wallowing in violence, his books merely depict the world the way he sees it – as a fucking violent place.
4. The Pleasure of Manchette
The book I referenced earlier, L’Affaire N’Gustro, opens with Manchette at his Manchettiest. Henri Butron sits alone in a room and speaks into a tape recorder well into the night. He finishes, stops the tape, and has the intention of listening to the recording, since “his own life fascinates him.” However, before he can get to it, the door opens, and two men enter the room. One takes out a gun, at which point Butron soils himself. The man shoots Butron in the heart, and bits of flesh and blood spray the wall behind him as he falls to the floor. And, as if you could expect otherwise, his bowels continue to empty for three or four seconds after his death. After setting up the death to look like a suicide, the men take the tape and leave, eventually delivering it to a military official. End of chapter one.
I should note, though, that the book actually begins with several post-mortem testimonies about Butron from various characters the reader has yet to meet, so that by the time the reader finds Butron sitting alone in the room, he or she is aware that he was a difficult guy – hateful, dangerous, and an overall bastard, depending on which testimonies are to be believed.
All this has the effect of profoundly disorienting the reader within the first few pages of the book. This is obviously not a simple genre exercise meant to entertain and kill a few hours. On a structural level, the reader is introduced initially to a succession of characters with no context and no indication of how significantly they will factor into the narrative. The varying spotlights on Butron are similarly unreliable; they seem to converge on certain aspects of his character but diverge on others, leading to a very murky picture right from the beginning. I get the sense that Manchette is playing with the idea of an introduction, and rather than leading the reader into the story, he is blindfolding him/her and spinning him/her around a few times before letting the reader in to explore the narrative itself.
Speaking of the “narrative itself,” the narration itself is another site of disorientation. After the quick bursts that open the book, a third-person narrator describes Butron, who is in the process of narrating what will become the bulk of the book. Then, upon stopping the tape and intending to listen to it, Butron shifts roles from the narrator/author to the listener/reader – although he doesn’t completely make this transition, what with being brutally murdered and all. So, the job of listener/reader shifts to Oufiri, the military figure with whom the two hitmen leave the tape. The third-person narrator still drops in and out over the course of the book, although the bulk of the rest of the text is comprised of Butron’s narration. Frequently interrupting Butron, however, is testimony from other characters about Butron, and these interludes often narrate the same events Butron is in the middle of describing. The ultimate effect is one in which no one voice triumphs – Butron’s is the most engaging, since much of the other narration takes on a purely objective tone, whereas Butron is fascinating in his callous (although not emotionless) recounting of his misdeeds, although no one voice ever captures the mantle of reliability.
Among all the praise Manchette has received for resuscitating the French crime novel and using it to critique politics and culture, I haven’t seen anyone praise him for what he does with text. I’ll admit I haven’t looked very hard into French-language scholarship about Manchette, but I get the sense that a hard, textual analysis of his works isn’t too high on anyone’s bucket list, since he is still, after all, a genre writer. But, the narrative disorientation in play in L’Affaire N’Gustro is significant in its subversion of the very concept of genre fiction. When I think of genre fiction, I see plot as the ultimate goal – the particular genre is determined by certain tropes used in the story, but above all, any genre exercise has to move, the reader will leave it behind. Disrupting the narrator the way Manchette does in this book pulls the rug out from under the narrative momentum. Once the reader settles in to Butron’s narration, the book starts to move a little. He recounts an episode in his youth in which he steals a car to drive around a couple women, only to be confronted by the car’s owner when he returns. A fight breaks out, and the car’s owner gets injured. At this point, Manchette cuts in with an excerpt from the testimony of Jacquie Gouin (a character who has yet to be introduced at this point), and this testimony goes all the way from Butron’s birth to just after the auto theft fracas in the space of a couple pages. From Gouin, the reader learns that, as an alternative to jail, Butron joins the army and sustains an eye injury during a training exercise. Then, Manchette cuts back to Butron’s narration, and Butron proceeds to detail the aftermath of the confrontation, his legal trouble, and his military deployment in greater detail.
This strategy plays with the reader’s expectation of the novel’s velocity – rather than chugging along, it stops and starts, speeds up and slows down. The multivalent narration doesn’t just call into question the notion of each narrator’s reliability; it fragments the very nature of plot, turning the book into a formal examination of exactly what a genre novel should do if it isn’t simply going to advance a plot from point A to point B.
While thinking about the answer to this question, my mind turned to my favorite theorist whenever text is involved: Roland Barthes2. In his book The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes lays out a manifesto of sorts for how the author imbues pleasure in a text and how a reader finds it. He separates intellectual “enjoyment” of a text with a more pure/elemental pleasure. In the French, the word is “jouissance,” which is difficult to translate; most English translations use “bliss” although bliss can connote peace and serenity, where “jouissance” does not. (Keep in mind that “jouir” in French means “to come” in English). (Keep in mind that I’m talking about the orgasm version of “to come.”) So on the one hand, there is intellectual pleasure, and on the other hand, there is this untranslatable sublime experience; of course, it’s the second one that Barthes is interested in.
From the text: “The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense.” He goes onto explain that a striptease progresses from clothed to nude, and the desire on the part of the viewer is all stored in that end point, when the dancer is fully nude. Shedding individual garments builds enjoyment by building anticipation to the final garment dropping, although each step of the striptease does not create any enjoyment except in its relation to the rest of the process. Similarly, focusing only on plot, as one would when reading a genre novel, renders the individual developments meaningless except in service to the end, to the reader’s ultimate goal of knowing what happened. Barthes equates the endpoints here: a striptease is titillating the same way a plot is interesting – because at the end of both, the reader/viewer knows. A performer has become naked, and the viewer now knows what was underneath those garments. A plot has concluded, and the reader knows what happened. This is the intellectual side of things – the exercise of intellectual will over the text, to know the mysteries it holds. The problem with this pleasure is that once the end point is reached, the pleasure is over. The plot of the book never again holds the same power.
The flipside to the intellectual pleasure of the text is that which resides in the edges. Returning to the analogy of the flesh, Barthes (ever the pervert, as he himself readily admits) describes the different kind of pleasure that exists when two pieces of clothing momentarily spread apart and flesh is glimpsed underneath. This moment is not part of a progression from clothed to nude; it is a flash that suggests the mystery of what lies underneath but is totally self-contained. The edges of a text are where it seeks to undermine itself, where it departs from traditional narrative. But, Barthes is not placing unreadable postmodern texts on a pedestal here; to him, Flaubert and de Sade are masters of the “text of bliss” because their texts abandon a traditional narrative structure at the same time that they are still easy enough to follow.
Thus the idea of the edge: to Barthes, a book by Flaubert is blissful to read, because it juxtaposes the conventions of the traditional plot-driven serialized 19th Century novel with a realist dismantling of narrative. The plot moves the book from point A to point B, but the true enjoyment is in the way discontinuity dismantles the narrativity of the text without rendering it unreadable. Manchette, anyone? Here is an author of genre fiction who goes to great lengths to subvert, interrupt, and disorient the plot’s progress from beginning to end. The edges in this book are neon-lit from the very first page, and once the reader realizes that Manchette is doing much more than being cute, the pleasure of reading a book like L’Affaire N’Gustro takes on a surprising new dimension.
Manchette’s success here is the same as Flaubert’s, in that L’Affaire N’Gustro still succeeds as a noir novel. As Barthes notes, if Manchette used the conventions of the genre as window-dressing for his linguistic games, reading the book would be a chore. What is pleasurable is that the ultraviolence, sexual aggression, and rip-roaring plot continue to pull the reader in even as the text itself twists and turns.
5. Journey to the Darkest Black
Manchette’s last novel, La position du tireur couché, translated as The Prone Gunman and (more successfully, in my opinion) Like a Sniper Lining up his Shot, is more subtle in its textual subversion, although it is far from a traditional genre exercise. Its narrator is a static 3rd person with an extreme behaviorist focus, to the point that the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters are never expressed. Here is another edge: the reader is drawn in to finish the portraits of Manchette’s characters, and to populate them with inner lives that the narrative leaves blank. As well, the premise of the book is so absurdly cliché that Manchette seems to be thumbing his nose at the entire genre: he has become such a master by this point that he can take even the most contrived premise and weave a successful book with considerable depth out of it. The premise is as follows: Martin Terrier is a successful mercenary and contract killer who wants to cash out so he can retire with his high school sweetheart and live a life of comfort. Conveniently, the woman had promised him that she would wait ten years for him to do what he needed to do.
Of course, his plan unravels, also in expected ways. Of course his employers have something to say about his decision to retire and rope him in for one last big score. Of course his sweetheart moved on and married a sensible man. And so on. So, like the beginning of N’Gustro, in which the death of the main character is known from the beginning, the general plot of Tireur is not hard to figure out without ever reading the book. Sure, there’s a twist at the end, but even that is something that a reader of this genre would expect.
Personally, however, my reaction to Tireur was much stronger; despite the contrivances, it stayed with me for days, and I kept returning to it to try to figure it out, although I wasn’t really sure what it was I needed to figure out in the first place. Whereas N’Gustro is a great little noir novel with some really daring subversive narrative structure, Tireur was more readable and moved quickly from beginning to end, yet I had a much more difficult time extricating myself from the text. I suppose I was trying to finish filling in the characters and never felt comfortable totally pulling away.
I should also add that my reading of this book was different than N’Gustro (and not just because I read it in English first). My first encounter was with the English translation of the Tardi adaptation, published in 2011 by Fantagraphics. Then, I reread the Tardi version in French, and finally I read the original novel in English. So, I have experienced reading this book from multiple perspectives, all in the hopes of better focusing my thoughts on it. A side effect, though, is that the story now feels larger to me than a single book, since I have approached it from so many different angles.
Despite being a very faithful adaptation, Tardi’s version of Tireur is substantially different from the novel3. I don’t mean that is different in terms of the plot… It’s so obvious that it should go without saying, but telling the story using half pictures and half words dramatically changes the reading experience. To return to Barthes, the narrative still moves from point A to point B, although the combination of visual art and text creates a specific set of edges in the text through a visual addition-by-subtraction. I didn’t notice it until I had read the comic alongside the original book, but Tardi deftly excises chunks of narration that he can easily illustrate in order to move the narrative along. This might seem like an obvious thing to do for a cartoonist adapting a novel, but it’s still pretty sly in its maintenance of balance between retaining the word-for-word narration of the novel and incorporating images to illustrate the action.
To clarify a little, the panels that grab me are not simply where Tardi replaces textual narration with visual narration. (Meaning, if the narrative read “X drove the car from his home to his office,” and cartoonist drew X in the process of driving the car from his home to his office, this wouldn’t be particularly interesting. It’s adaptation, so that sort of textual/visual substitution is to be expected). Instead, it’s the way Tardi pulls off a textual/visual mixture rather than a textual/visual substitution. Consider the following panel as one example among many… The text reads, “Past Châtelet, the Estafette stopped for a red light. Terrier quickly took advantage of the moment to climb into the back, where Maubert was beginning to stir. He hit him hard in the back of the head with the butt of the Smith & Wesson before returning to the wheel and setting off again.” However, in the comic, Tardi crops the narration after “Maubert was beginning to stir.” His illustration tells the rest of the story.
Two things happen here: first, Tardi invites the reader to make the connection that the “opportunity” presented by the red light is the opportunity for Terrier to clobber Maubert with the butt of his gun. Second, in illustrating the attack, Tardi goes beyond what is described by the text; the violence is just as quick, but the effect on the reader is more visceral, both in terms of the victim’s suffering (Maubert’s pained reaction) and the aggressor’s urgency (Terrier’s scrunched, tense face). In this way, the comic is similar to the novel but altogether different, and the play between the images and the text (and the metaplay between the adaptation and the original text) demands an actively engaged reader. (Sure, the rollicking tale is fun enough just to sit down and read, but what I’m getting at is that there’s so much more there.)
For instance, the illustrations betray Manchette’s behaviorist focus at the same time that they enhance it. The story opens with a sweeping depiction of a London street, focusing eventually on Terrier hiding in a van, gun in hand, ready to do some killing. He sees his target, shoots him, and then shoots his girlfriend (complete with loud emptying of bowels). Then, he returns to his hotel, has a drink, cleans and disassembles his gun, and goes to sleep. In the novel, the narration ticks through his actions like a shopping list, rigidly avoiding giving up any information whatsoever about what Terrier might think about any of what had just transpired. Ditto for the comic, as far as the text is concerned. It should be noted that Tardi doesn’t take many liberties with Manchette’s narration (for the most part), so what’s there is there verbatim. Still, in drawing Terrier as he completes all of these actions, the reader of the comic sees more of Terrier than the reader of the novel. The extreme tightness of the novel’s opening scene is loosened slightly by the inclusion of the illustrations – seeing the way Terrier carries himself in the course of completing his job and handling the aftermath and getting a feel for his facial expressions gives the reader significantly more insight into the workings of the main character than the bare text in the novel. Still, Tardi doesn’t exactly draw Terrier with an expressiveness that is out of step with the novel – his face is generally blank, save for a spike in intensity in the heat of the moment when he’s doing his killing, and his posture doesn’t communicate much more than coldness. As a result, the illustrations have the dual effect of pulling the reader in by depicting Terrier much more naturalistically than in the novel (since a picture tells a thousand words and all that) while simultaneously keeping the reader at arm’s length by depicting Terrier in a way that gives away as little as possible of his inner workings.
I found the novel easier to take at face value, whereas the comic seemed to goad me into attempting to understand the characters better than is possible. This is why it stayed with me so strongly after reading it. Manchette’s narration is so cool and methodical that it is difficult not to follow it as it progresses. In contrast, Tardi’s characters are so over-the-top in their actions and reactions that some scenes, while being easy to follow thematically, barely make sense on an emotional level and require multiple readings. This isn’t an indictment of Tardi’s illustration; in fact, it is the opposite. Tardi is a master of expressing subtle emotions, especially on faces – and usually with not much more than some squiggly lines – and here, he succeeds in capturing the fact that his characters are experiencing strong emotions while somehow avoiding giving any clues as to what they may be feeling beyond the most obvious reactions (fear, pain, anger, etc).
The bottom line, though, is that the adaptation should offer more meat to chew on than the original text. If not, there’s not really much of a point to it. Like in his collaborations with Céline, the illustrations push the text to new places. Some of this, as I’ve described, is due to the nature of reading a comic versus reading a novel, although some of it stems from areas where the comic more directly plays with the original text of the novel. Tardi’s adaptation is very faithful, on its face, especially for around the first third of the book. However, in some key areas, Tardi’s version veers away from Manchette’s in subtle but significant ways4.
Now, I’m not talking about ‘editing for length,’ so to speak. Tardi leaves out certain details and even a couple entire scenes that are not consequential to the narrative (one that springs to mind is later in the novel, when Terrier leaves Alice at his hotel room and goes to visit a doctor, among other errands). This type of omission doesn’t really concern me, since leaving it in wouldn’t have added anything, besides a few more Tardi pages to look at (nothing to sniff at, sure).
Of greater import is the novel’s comment on the futility of ‘having a plan,’ and how Tardi represents this differently in the comic. In the novel, there are two scenes in which Terrier engages with a minor character long enough to listen to the character talk about having a plan to improve his situation. First, he talks to a hotel desk clerk, who confides to him that his ambition goes beyond working at the hotel, and that he’s squirreling money away in order to do something greater. Then, a bit later, a taxi driver says almost exactly the same thing to him. As a result, the reader understands that Terrier is not unique in his desire to set aside a fixed amount of time in his life to put a plan into action, however utopian his endgame comes across. It makes a larger statement about class mobility as well, suggesting that all throughout the service class exist people who have their sights set higher than their menial jobs. The spectacular failure of Terrier’s plan, in which he ends up in his father’s dead-end job with his father’s debilitating injury, puts a point on Manchette’s critique of the optimism people hold for upward mobility. There are those in power and those who aren’t, and Terrier’s transgressiveness in this regard, for all its drama, lands him exactly back where he started.
Interestingly, although both the hotel clerk and the taxi driver are present in the Tardi adaptation, neither gets enough screen time to describe to Terrier their grand plans. As a result, the comic narrows Manchette’s criticism of the myth of class mobility to Terrier himself. The class issues specific to Terrier’s situation (such as Alice’s father telling him that he has no future with her, or his unfulfilling one-night-stand with an employee at Alice’s father’s record player assembly factory) are still present, although the comic presents his failure to move up as his own, and less as a general constant of modern capitalist society.
Still, even with the spotlight directly on Terrier, the Martin Terrier of the comic is different than the Martin Terrier of the novel. Tardi’s Terrier is machine-like, powering his way through physical, emotional, and circumstantial setbacks (things like having his finger forcibly dislocated, being betrayed, and finding the dismembered corpse of his cat suspended in an aquarium, respectively) without losing focus. Manchette’s Terrier maintains the machine-like focus, although he stumbles and struggles and is at times overwhelmed by his emotions. In the novel, as Terrier’s plan falls apart and he takes desperate measures to try to resuscitate it, he visibly comes apart at the seams, until the final climactic scene in which a shot to the head metaphorically kills his grand gambit and relegates him to the lower class forever. In the comic, as his plan falls apart, he focuses only on how he can resuscitate it, ignoring even his sudden inability to speak as a mere inconvenience, until the final climactic scene in which all of his illusions suddenly come to an explosive halt via that shot to the head.
I’ll go into greater detail… At the beginning, Terrier’s emotional response to events around him (or lack thereof) is pretty much the same in the book and the comic. A good touchstone is when Terrier learns (in the newspaper) of his ex-girlfriend’s death, and that she was raped and tortured. He had split with her earlier in the book in order to put his plan in motion, cash out of the hitman game, and run away with Alice, and he learns the gruesome details of his ex’s death while in the car before driving to see Alice (and her husband Felix) for the first time in ten years. In his typical behaviorist style, Manchette writes:
As he read, Terrier brought his thumb and index finger to his face and mechanically smoothed his eyebrows. Then he threw the newspaper on the floor of the DS, turned off the overhead light, and passed the palm of his hand across his forehead to smooth it out. He seemed to reflect for a moment. He did not seem shocked. Perhaps he experienced a little sadness. Certainly he must have been thinking, for his face was screwed up in concentration. After a moment, he clicked his tongue and started the engine. He continued to frown all the way to his destination.
This scene is represented similarly in the comic, including the notation that Terrier might have been a little sad, and that he was definitely thinking, judging from the look on his face. Tellingly, Tardi doesn’t illustrate his face here, and instead pulls back from the car entirely, showing the environment around it. In the novel, the narration focuses the reader’s attention on Terrier’s face, a face twisted up in contemplation, but not betraying any specific emotion. The comic further distances the reader from Terrier’s emotional state by pulling away from his face rather than focusing in on it – thus making it even more difficult to tie Terrier to any particular emotional response to this event.
However, it isn’t until Terrier’s plan really starts to go awry that the novel and comic versions of his character begin to differ. The pivotal scene occurs when Terrier and Alice are involved in a violent clash at Alice and Felix’s country home. At this point in the story, Terrier has shown his face in his hometown and declared his intention to take Alice away, per his original plan. Felix good-naturedly entertains Terrier’s declaration, thinking Terrier is a lower-class thug beyond whom Alice has evolved. Felix invites Terrier to spend the weekend with them at the country home and uses the occasion to humiliate him, in order to illustrate just how far below Alice he is, both economically and intellectually. The happy gathering is interrupted by Rosanna Rossi and her thugs – Rossi is the sister of one of Terrier’s long-ago victims, Luigi Rossi, and she wants her revenge. In the shuffle, Felix gets shot, and while Rossi draws out her interrogation of Terrier, Alice manages to sneak up unnoticed and stab her through the back with a pitchfork. Terrier shoots the thugs, and then he and Alice escape by car.
Terrier tells Alice to stay, but she insists on sticking with him, and so they leave together. And here is where Terrier’s plan begins to fall apart. He was supposed to be done with the killing game, collect Alice, and steal away to a comfortable retirement. However, Alice’s husband and a bloody clash get in the way, and even though he leaves with Alice in tow, it is clear to him that there are more loose ends to tie up, and that he is not really free from his old life. In the novel, the first cracks in Terrier-the-machine’s exterior start to appear around this point. When driving toward Paris with Alice, she tells him that she isn’t tired and can drive if he’d prefer to sleep, and he responds by giving her “a perplexed look, as if she had said something strange that didn’t fit into his perspective. They spoke little after that.” This trend continues from here; whenever Terrier is confronted with something that doesn’t fit into his plan, he has a difficult time responding and either says nothing or stammers.
This difficulty with speaking happens again when Terrier tries to tell Alice that he is financially ruined. See, yet another hitch in his plan is his financial manager’s sudden murder (staged to look like a suicide), and so he realizes that he must return to his previous work if he is to raise enough money to escape with Alice as he’d previously planned. In the comic, he animatedly tells Alice that he needs to go back to work, and after laughing at him, she responds that he should go do what he needs to do, and that she’s beat and needs to sleep. In the novel, Terrier has a much more difficult time verbalizing his predicament. Narrating the scene, Manchette writes, “His lips moved, but he no longer seemed capable of speaking. ‘I’m ruined,’ he said suddenly.” Then, after explaining that he must return to work, he leaves the hotel, at which point Manchette adds, “Terrier had left the hotel and was walking toward the metro. At times, his lips moved. But he made no sound.”
In the novel, this scene underscores the reality that Terrier’s plan was the backbone of his entire being. As the plan falls apart, he becomes considerably weaker, to the point that he has trouble speaking. This difficulty with speech reaches its climax when his voice fails him completely and he spends the last part of the novel writing his thoughts on paper whenever he needs to communicate. In the comic, on the other hand, returning to work is simply what Terrier must do, and so he announces as much and sets about doing it.
The strongest diversion between the comic and the novel takes place in the scene between Terrier and Alice that follows his initial proclamation that he must return to work. Plot-wise, it isn’t hugely consequential, but in both the comic and the novel, the scene is one of the most illustrative of both Terrier’s and Alice’s personalities, although in very different ways. To summarize: Terrier returns to the hotel room to find Alice in a drunken sleep. She wakes up, and they have an argument in which he demands that she hide out while he takes care of his business, since his employers could use her to put pressure on him. She insists on staying with him, and she drunkenly invites him into bed with her for sex, despite his protestations that more pressing matters must be dealt with first. The scene ends when Cox’s henchmen burst in to capture Terrier and Alice and bring them to Cox.
And again, in more detail…
[Note: for some reason, the translator of Manchette’s novel translated “Alice” as “Anne.”]
Novel: “Anne was sleeping. She was crying in her sleep. Terrier studied her. He had an anxious, perplexed expression. Since the young woman continued to moan in a miserable, infantile way, he took her by the shoulders. She was naked in the bed. He gently shook her. She opened her eyes and stared at him with a lost look…
Comic: He returned to his room around 5:00 PM. Alice stopped sobbing in her sleep and woke up suddenly.”
Novel: “How many people have you killed?”
“Don’t drink any more! We have to take care of practicalities! Practicalities!” Terrier repeated nervously. With his hands in his pockets, he was facing Anne and rocking impatiently on his heels. The young woman took a swig from the bottle.
“You’re on the blink,” she declared in a neutral tone. She might as well have been pronouncing a diagnosis concerning a broken clock. “On the blink. Come to bed, then.” She threw herself violently back down, with her eyes hermetically sealed, without letting go of the bottle. Her whole face was red, and a flush spread across her throat and breasts. “Let’s fuck.” She opened her eyes. “That’s what you wanted,” she said decisively.
Comic: “How many people have you killed?… Dumbfuck! Psycho! Pervert! Come to bed and let’s screw! Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Quit drinking! There’s some practical matters we need to resolve!”
“Let’s fuck!”
So, a number of things in play here. As the scene opens in the novel, Terrier pauses to linger over Alice. True to his style, Manchette does not elaborate on Terrier’s thoughts, except to note anxiety, which is in keeping with what we’ve seen of him as his plan collapses. Immediately, Terrier is more of a participant in the scene, taking direct action, and involving himself with Alice, rather than reacting as events unfold around him, as he does in the comic, when Alice simply wakes up and the two begin arguing. And, in the comic, he contends with a very different Alice as well. Tardi’s Alice is missing the deliberateness that she possesses in the novel. She is much more aggressive and impulsive; in both scenes, she is very drunk, although her drunkenness in the novel causes her to bounce between amorous, angry, and resigned, whereas in the comic her sexuality is dialed up to the point drowns out the other facets of her character. When she says, “Let’s screw!” she adds “Isn’t that what you wanted?” The question at the end seems almost to be goading Terrier into sleeping with her, poking fun at him that he is hung up on other matters. In the novel, she doesn’t ask if sex was Terrier’s goal all along, she declares it. She presents herself to him, declaring that she is offering to him in that moment the fulfillment he had been working toward for a decade.
Terrier’s refusal, then, means different things in different contexts. In the novel, he is dealing with a more complex set of emotions; while Manchette doesn’t make them clear to the reader, he nonetheless indicates that Terrier is having a difficult time processing what is happening around him. The consummation of his relationship with Alice is at hand, but he is breaking down, suffering a crisis of his identity, and the reader gets the sense that he is unable to act on his desire. His only hope at this point is to cling to practicalities (both verbally, as evidenced by his nervous repetition of the word, and thematically), and to ignore Alice’s sexual availability.
Over in the comic, he is not breaking down, but Alice’s over-the-top come-ons are not conducive to his being able to get his plan back on the rails, so he resists them. The back-and-forth is of two people who have very little bonding them together but circumstance, and Alice is simultaneously amused and angered by the ridiculousness of the situation, prompting her to drink and to act irrationally. Terrier’s insistence on imposing a rational course of action only makes her more combustible. Unlike the Alice in the novel, who sadly but deliberately arrives at the conclusion that she and Terrier should sleep together, Tardi’s Alice is cavalier, her rational self unseated by the absurdity of the preceding 24 hours of her life.
Terrier doesn’t nervously repeat his statements here, he (aided by Tardi’s illustration) seems almost to bark instructions at Alice and – very far from the Terrier who gently shakes her awake in order to stop her sobbing – he sees her come-ons as ridiculous. To him, Terrier-as-machine, he can’t consummate his relationship with Alice until everything else has been settled; she is the endgame and not something to distract him while the game is still being played.
Finally, after Cox’s henchmen have rounded up Terrier and Alice, they bring Terrier to see Cox, commanding Alice to stay behind. Terrier says, “Any problems, just scream.” And, in the comic only, Alice replies, “Shithead.” Her animosity toward him is highlighted in the comic – it exists in the novel as well, but as part of a portfolio of emotions she experiences while processing her situation – whereas, in the comic, it becomes the defining feature of her relationship him. It begins in the previous scene, in which she manages to emasculate Terrier even while offering herself to him, and it continues even more so as the story progresses.
Following from this scene, true to the clichéd nature of the main plot, Terrier has no choice but to accept Cox’s offer to complete one final job, in preparation for which both he and Alice are installed in a remote country house and overseen by Maubert and his female companion. One afternoon, when Terrier is out for a walk, accompanied by Maubert’s companion, he assaults her suddenly and escapes into a nearby town so he can make arrangements to extricate Alice from Cox’s agents’ grasp. He returns to the sight of Alice in mid-coitus with Maubert, and he promptly loses the ability to speak.
Again, the novel and the comic arrive at Terrier’s muteness differently. Starting with the comic this time, Tardi depicts the progression of events with a masterful sense of velocity, using his panels to shift the setting rapidly from a forest path to a remote road to a town to the inside of a telephone booth. There, he lingers for four panels while Terrier speaks on the phone and then returns to the exterior of the country house, the staircase leading up to the door, and finally to a shocked Martin Terrier suddenly finding himself unable to speak. The text here is used sparingly, and Tardi includes precise timestamps to heighten the effect of these events elapsing over a compressed period of time.
Due to the page layout, the reader doesn’t see what causes Terrier to lose his voice – and there is nothing in the comic that suggests any lead-up to this. Unlike in the novel, where difficulty speaking is a visible symptom of Terrier’s declining mental state, the sudden muteness arrives like a ton of bricks, the first sign that Terrier’s machine-like deliberateness may crack. Of course, upon turning the page, the reader learns quickly what caused Terrier such shock, as Alice is in the middle of screwing Maubert. Her reaction upon seeing him is not one of embarrassment; instead, she greets him with, “What the fuck are you doing here, dipshit?” And then, after Maubert shuffles out, “You thought I was gonna wait ten years for you? You think I’m gonna wait another ten years? You think Félix was the only one before this? You think I’m some kind of little porcelain doll? What do you think I am? Idiot! I screwed around on Félix more than once, by the way.” Terrier being mute, of course, can’t respond to her tirade, although he does explain his muteness via a pen and paper, on which he writes, “I can no longer talk. No idea why. Maybe the shock of seeing you fucking that asshole. This is a huge pain. Hopefully it will pass. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”5
Alice’s “betrayal” here doesn’t seem like much of a betrayal – beyond the fact that she and Terrier demonstrate almost no affinity for one another, their relationship in the comic is especially antagonistic. Terrier’s desire to escape with her doesn’t take her into account as a real person and not simply the adult embodiment of his childhood fantasy. However, the sight of her having sex with someone else, coupled with her rather damning and unapologetic explanation is the clearest sign Terrier receives that his plan was doomed to failure all along – even if he can robotically navigate the human dangers, Alice was never going to escape with him, because she didn’t want to. Unlike the novel, in which the futility of upward class mobility is painted in fairly broad strokes, in the comic, Terrier learns the lesson in a much more personal fashion. It isn’t from Cox’s impromptu speech about how there’s nowhere for him to escape to (he brushes this aside), and it isn’t via his conversations with other low level workers about their life plans (since he doesn’t have these conversations in the comic) – it’s from Alice, the impetus for his entire plan in the first place, which makes the realization all that much more damning. Still, this isn’t enough to throw him off his tracks, and so he informs the other characters that he will communicate via written notes for the remainder of his stay, and he proceeds with his preparations for the final job.
Now, back to this scene in the novel. (I should add that I do happen to be going somewhere with these back-and-forth comparisons. In addition to the fact that I find a close reading of how Tardi adapts the novel into a comic interesting in itself, I do have a point to make about it all. Just not yet.) In contrast to the velocity of the scene in the comic, Manchette draws out Terrier’s actions, both leading up to his stumbling upon Alice and Maubert in the act, and his response to it. Because of the page break in the comic, the reader sees Terrier’s shocked face, and then turns the page to see why he is shocked; in the novel, Manchette stretches out that moment of time. Terrier arrives in the room to see the two having sex, although his state of shock brings everything to a sudden halt – and even though the events of the novel don’t move at quite the same pace as the comic, this sudden pause is still jarring. Terrier’s loss of speech is not sudden – he tries to make sounds, but the difficulty speaking that has been creeping up all this time finally takes hold completely, and he makes only muffled sounds. The record player masks his presence at first, and Manchette even goes so far as to include the lyrics playing on the record, the light in the room, and the sounds coming from outside. Terrier finally makes himself known by pulling the record player’s plug out of the wall.
From here, their confrontation plays out similarly to the comic, although the antagonism between them is less vitriolic; rather than “What the fuck are you doing here, asshole?” Alice simply looks offended; rather than writing that he may have lost his voice due to the shock “of seeing you fucking that asshole,” Terrier merely writes that his muteness may be from psychological shock.
At this point, the novel and the comic again more or less converge for the rest of the story: Terrier helps Alice escape Maubert’s country house and proceeds with his final job. Minutes before pulling the trigger, he realizes that he’s been set up and Maubert is about to murder him; he retaliates, killing Maubert, and then sets out to find Alice and ultimately to confront Cox. Along the way, his friend and mentor gets blown up by a landmine, and he rips someone’s ear off. In the final confrontation with Cox, he learns that he had been set up all along as a patsy, but that Cox as well is a pawn in a larger game; Cox shoots him twice in the head, and he suddenly regains his ability to speak, moaning to Alice that she is beautiful as he passes out. In the denouement, the reader learns that Terrier will indeed be relieved of his duties with the company, although the bullet in his brain has damaged him to the point that he is only able to work as a waiter in the same restaurant as his father – and that he is prone to the same bouts of cartoonish idiocy that made his father a laughing stock around town. Alice stays with him briefly and then leaves suddenly in the night, and the story ends with Terrier asleep, taking the position of a sniper lining up his shot.
The conclusion to the story couldn’t get much worse for Terrier – his entire goal was to elevate himself above the level of his father, and at the end of it all, he becomes exactly like his father, with the same low-end job, and the same debilitating mental deficiencies. Only in his sleep does he retain some grasp on his dream of escaping his situation, almost like an amputee feeling phantom sensations in an amputated limb. Alice leaves, because she has no reason to stay; with Terrier unable to escape with her according to his plan, she no longer factors into any future with him – if she ever did at all. It is a blunt object of a book: a violent, gruesome story of failure and disappointment.
Both the novel and the comic begin and end with a framing device:
It was winter, and it was nighttime. An icy wind, having blown straight down from the Arctic, funneled into the Irish Sea, swept over Liverpool, and raced across the Cheshire Plain, where cats flattened their ears, shivering, upon hearing it rumble in the chimneys. The wind blew over the small Bedford van’s lowered window, straight into the eyes of the man sitting within. The man did not blink.
And then, at the end, the exact same description, except, instead of finding Terrier in the Bedford van, the wind “rushes across the gray French plains and comes pushing on the windows of Martin Terrier’s little abode; but these windows do not rattle and by now the wind has spent itself.” One of the major differences in Tardi’s and Manchette’s approaches to the story becomes evident when considering the effect of the framing device on the story as a whole: the novel situates Terrier in his environment via the framing device. It begins and ends the novel with a naturalistic focus, one that continues throughout the book. Manchette frequently departs from the immediacy of the story and from Terrier’s reactions to the events around him to describe both physical details of Terrier himself as well as his surroundings. His inclusion of the lyrics of the record playing on the record player when Terrier walks in on Alice and Maubert is a prime example of this, although it is more or less consistent throughout the book. Coupled with the wider social commentary contained within the novel, the framing device has the ultimate effect of depicting Terrier as a pawn in society at large. Of course, he is already a pawn in a game being played by people more powerful than himself, but Manchette makes a larger point about Terrier being one among many who seek and ultimately fail to move beyond their station in life; it is not Cox or the Company who is the villain in this case, it is a class-based, capitalist society. In this way, Terrier, though certainly not likeable, becomes a relatable character, because his plight mirrors the plight of the lower class. He is a pathetic hero who starts to fray around the edges before completely unraveling and finally getting shot in the head.
The same framing device, in Tardi’s hands, has a much different effect. Without the narrative lapses into naturalistic, almost poetic descriptions, the comic puts a spotlight on Terrier and leaves it there throughout. Given Tardi’s history with Céline’s Journey to the end of the Night, it is difficult not to draw parallels in this case. To recap: Journey starts with the main character protesting that he had never said anything in the past, and that it was his friend’s fault for goading him into speaking up about his beliefs. From this point, the novel is nothing but the main character voicing his beliefs, as he recounts his incredible tale from that initial conversation. 600 pages later, when he has reached the end of the night, he finally has run out of things to say and closes simply with: “So let’s speak no more of it6.”
Similar to Journey, then, Tardi’s adaptation uses the framing device not to paint Terrier as one among many, but instead to zoom into Terrier’s life and stay there until there is no more to say of his story, at which point Tardi pulls back and leaves Terrier for good. In this case, it is significant that the wind has spent itself by the end of the novel; like Céline’s “Let’s speak no more of it,” the now powerless wind fleshes out the conclusion that there is nothing more to say about Terrier. His story is done, and so the book ends. Fin.
One approach isn’t necessarily superior to the other. As it concerns the story itself, I prefer Tardi’s method of restricting his scope mostly to Terrier and those immediately around him, although there is plenty to mine in Manchette’s use of a murderous psychopath as an everyman through which he explores society’s class structure, and Tardi doesn’t really touch this at all. As a result, much of the tension in the novel of this unhinged character somehow taking on pathos and even inviting a little sympathy evaporates, and the Terrier that remains in the comic is purely an absurd character. He imposes a rational grid upon his life, and he refuses to recognize that it is all a fool’s game; he becomes absurd through his insistence to proceed according to this life plan even in the face of everything falling apart around him. Without the backdrop of social commentary, he is simply an absurd failure, and his antagonistic relationship with Alice, his impotence, and his inability to outwit the Company all illustrate him as a man going through a protracted total failure. If he were more aware of his own failure – and if Tardi drew him with the sort of physical foibles that Manchette describes over the course of the novel – he would become tragic, but divorced from this self-awareness, his plight does not come across as tragic.
This absurdity is what caused this book to stick in my mental craw for so long – for a book with an easy-to-follow plot, I was having a hard time putting the pieces together in a way that added up to anything more than a genre exercise. Not that there’s anything wrong with a genre exercise, but I felt that if it were intended simply as such, I would have an easier time moving past it. (I should add that this is exactly what Barthes means when he talks about the edges of a text bumping up against each other to produce pleasure.) Seen in the context of the absurd – as a genre exercise in existential absurdity via the conventions of noir – the book started to take on new life as I reread it. The triumph of Tardi’s illustrations is not only how well he captures Manchette’s behaviorist perspective, but how he manages to juxtapose Terrier’s impenetrable exterior with everything falling apart around him. I already knew that Tardi was an expert illustrator of violence – what I didn’t expect was how much Tardi is able to wring out of the less physically violent scenes, such as the confrontations between Terrier and Alice, or between Terrier and Maubert. The art plays a key part in Terrier becoming absurd rather than pathetic/tragic – he is drawn with such confidence that the reader can actually see the hyperviolence of the plot bounce off of him without having any effect, that is, until the final bullet finally lands in his brain.
There are a few key terms in play here as I stumble toward a conclusion, and their relationship is worth discussing further. First, there was pleasure as “jouissance,” and then noir, and finally the absurd. One conclusion I don’t want to make (as I noted earlier) is that Manchette’s noir novels use the conventions of noir only as window dressing for some postmodern textual games as a playground for old Barthes. Manchette’s deep engagement with the genre is evident in just how much he commits to it – it is precisely due to this commitment that his books have so much power. The same holds true for Tardi, which goes back to why they are such a phenomenal pairing. Tardi begins with a novel that is considered one of the high points of French noir, and he manages to make it even darker. His adaptation of the story increases its velocity, trimming non-essential scenes here and digressions into poetic narrative there. His panels heighten this effect, leading to a near breathless pace, from one violent setpiece to another. It finally comes to an explosive conclusion when Terrier gets shot in the face, like a car suddenly crashing into a telephone pole. Without the little moments for self-reflection during which the reader comes up for air, the bleakness of the story is relentless. Tardi manages to infuse as much darkness into the story as is possible – the darkest black.
The characterization of Terrier as absurd thus fits hand-in-glove with the exceptional darkness of the comic. In such overwhelming bleakness, reality has a difficult time making rational sense; as Terrier thrashes about trying to control events around him, he merely gets swept away by the force of these events. Rational action loses any effectiveness, and what makes Terrier absurd is his absolute refusal to submit to this force. “This force” is the essence of noir – a sublime (in the literal sense of the word) space that is incomprehensible, horrifying, and strangely beautiful. The violence (and sex) that permeates the noir novel is the storm, while the eye of the hurricane is pure darkness. To recall Céline, this concept is not unlike the “end of the night” – one major difference, of course, is that Céline’s alter-ego Bardamu submits to it readily, whereas Terrier resists it at all costs. However, as an elemental force, it doesn’t really matter how these characters engage with it, and both books end roughly the same way.
6. Jouissance, Violence, and Submission
In N’Gustro, after the first time that Butron gets arrested, he gets beaten up in jail by a group of thugs. After a typically brutal description of the beating, Butron expresses a sentiment that seems applicable here (but please note that my translation is inexact, since I’m not proficient enough in French to be much of a translator). During the attack, he recalls, “I could no longer even articulate anything, because of a kind of somnolence. I’m no homo or masochist, but I’ll say frankly that there’s ‘jouissance’ in being brutally roughed up by a group of thugs, especially when they’re intellectually inferior.” This sentiment sets the tone for the book, as Butron emerges from his legal trouble only to come out more determined to live life as someone who flouts authority en route to his own personal gain. Whereas Terrier engages in killing for pay as a means to an end that involves only happiness and tranquility, Butron never eyes an endgame – he submits to the elemental noir force readily, and it pulls him along his life until he too gets shot. Again, the ending is the same, regardless of how the characters engage with noir. I should add that there’s quite a bit more in N’Gustro to dissect, but I won’t go into it here. I hope to see a Tardi adaptation of it one day (in addition to the version that plays out in my head whenever I read it).
7. Light and Dark
There is a two-panel sequence in another Tardi adaptation, Le der des ders by Didier Daennincx. This book is more of a traditional detective novel and less of a no-holds-barred noir in Manchette’s style; it follows a PI named Eugène Varlot, a World War I veteran who is still haunted by his time in the trenches. (Fantagraphics publisher and Tardi translator Kim Thompson helped me with the title: it is a slangy way of saying “the war to end all wars” – so even though this is a detective story, the aftermath of the war plays an equally important part.) It’s a great book, and maybe I’ll get bored again in a couple years and write another essay about Tardi’s war comics, of which there are many. What I want to touch on here, though, is a sequence in which Varlot follows a woman he is investigating as she goes to a nightclub frequented by air force pilots. Impersonating a pilot, he infiltrates the club and sits at the same table as the woman, watching her eventually disappear with a man into a back room. He follows with another woman who has taken a shine to his war hero persona, unsure of what he will find in the back room. When he opens the door, cast in darkness, he sees an orgy in progress, depicted by Tardi as nothing more than suggestive shadows and outlines intertwined with each other. This sight triggers Varlot’s PTSD, and his mind flashes to a starkly lit battlefield strewn with twisted, mangled corpses and body parts. These two panels are beautifully rendered by Tardi; the dark is the site of sex and the light is the site of death. Living flesh in the dark, dead flesh in the light. Permitting myself the intellectual irresponsibility of conflating noir-the-genre with noir-the-color, this sequence ties back to this idea I’m trying to hammer home of noir as an elemental force. The light (to return as well to Barthes) lays everything bare, like the text that is only interesting in terms of what happens at the end, at which point it ceases to be pleasurable. The light shows off the horrible reality of what the war to end all wars wrought across the European landscape. The dark, however, is the elemental force; in the dark, the twisted figures become mere abstractions, and it becomes a site of pleasure (even moreso given that in this particular example, there’s a whole lot of sex going on). In the dark is where the pleasure of abstraction and the shock of finality meet up; orgy or no orgy, from a textual perspective, this scene is all about jouissance.
This scene also illustrates the power of the color black in Tardi’s hands. It seems overly simplistic, but it can’t be ignored: the black and white color palette is essential to a comic like Tireur’s success as noir. So tied to the story is the black and white that the 3-color silkscreen that accompanies my edition of the French book just looks weird. As a standalone art object, I love it, but it feels separate from the world of Tireur with which I’m familiar. So, finally, I’m back where I was at the beginning: in a book like this, the absolute most important aspect, aesthetically speaking, is the color black, and if that isn’t right, everything falls apart.
8. Framing Device
A few months ago, I emailed Kim Thompson asking about the possibility of Fantagraphics ever releasing deluxe editions of Tardi’s work for the English-speaking market. His French publishers do this routinely – they release the trade edition in the standard “album” size and then produce a separate special edition that is larger (usually 12” x 16”), which is often accompanied by a signed and numbered print. This edition is called the “tirage de tête” (literally, “head printing”) although publishers sometimes release the trade edition earlier, despite the name. Thompson responded to me that in a market where Tardi sells 100,000 copies of a book, a 500 or 1,000-copy special edition requiring different plates, different binding, etc. still makes financial sense. Unfortunately, in the English-speaking market, sales figures don’t justify a separate deluxe printing. (To which I plaintively responded, “Fine, just have him sign a print or put the book in a slipcase or something!” because I’m the kind of nerd who is impressed by that stuff.)
Sometimes, the publisher adds to the tirage de tête by using a better paper stock as well. Tardi’s first Manchette adaptation, Le petit bleu de la côté ouest (published by Les Humanoïds Associés), featured a tirage de tête with really chunky off-white uncoated paper, which I appreciated. Unfortunately, the black didn’t register quite as dark as it does on a coated paper, and the result is a little washed out, a little like the volume is turned down. I love the way the larger format lets the panels breathe and causes the detailed line work to appear rougher and more immediate, but without that dark, dark black, the overall presentation suffers. The content is still the same, but one of the chief rewards of comics – the immediacy of the aesthetic experience – gets muffled ever-so-slightly.
Whether or not Futuropolis, the publisher of Tireur, was conscious of this issue or not when they published its tirage de tête is unclear, although their description of the book suggests as much:
“To salute the return of Jacques Tardi, the master of black and white, Futuropolis brings you – in the mythical 12” x 16” format – a deluxe, limited, signed, and numbered edition. The 98 plates are printed in two colors (the black is supported by a Pantone color to give it more intense depth) in a size that approximates the format of the original pages.” So there it is, as clear as can be: simply printing Tardi’s artwork with a normal 2-color process does not do justice to the master of black and white (and of course, the master of noir). Tardi requires something extra – a black that has been specially formulated to be the darkest black the printer is capable of printing. This color is pure darkness, and it becomes a part of the overwhelming noir of the book; mere black just isn’t dark enough.
Notes
1. That such a venture was even entertained by a publishing house with NRF’s reputation is a testament to the high cultural position cartooning occupies in France. In the US, such a mashup would amount to ‘The Classics Illustrated,’ with dumbed-down illustrations and heavily abridged text. The Futuropolis/Gallimard books, on the other hand, present the original text, complete with at least one illustration per page, splash page illustrations, and so on. I haven’t counted, but I would bet that there are over 100 individual illustrations in Tardi’s Journey to the end of the Night, all created specifically for that volume. And, to lend even more prestige to the imprint, the books ape the design of the classic NRF books, although they are flexibound in large format (close to the traditional “Album” size of French comics, which is 23 x 32cm).
1a. According to Kim Thompson, Tardi’s Céline illustrations also mark an important moment in his development as a cartoonist as his “clear line” style (a popular style in Europe descending from Tintin creator Hergé) starts to loosen up. I would add to this that, upon closer examination, Tardi’s style slowly changes throughout the book. It is not immediately evident going page by page, although looking at the first page alongside the last page presents a striking stylistic difference. The opening illustrations are very neat, with a tight, almost fussy line illustrating Paris’s streets and cafes. By the middle of the book, it looks almost as if Tardi had begun by drawing with a freshly sharpened pencil and neglected to resharpen it as he drew. The illustrations give a sense of velocity to Céline’s narrative, but they tie into the novel on a deeper level as well. After all, the main character begins the novel as a buttoned-up medical student who has never spoken out of turn before; once he begins speaking, his character development truly begins. As this process goes on, and he moves further along in his journey, the reader sees Tardi’s style develop in parallel, to the point that, just like the narrator, the illustrator at the end of the novel is not the same illustrator he was at the beginning. I’m not quite making the point that Tardi’s stylistic development exactly corresponded with his illustration of this book; however, I do find it interesting how Tardi visibly plays with his own style just as Céline comes into his own as a writer and the main character undergoes a translation over the course of the book. What a great fucking book is my point here, I suppose.
First illustration - clear line
Toward the end - not very clear line
2. My favorite thing about Barthes is that he can flat-out write, and he is the only theorist I have the patience and stomach for in these post-graduate school dropout days. Hypertechnical, twisted, and downright impenetrable writing is so fashionable among late 20th Century critical theorists that reading Barthes is almost guilt-inducing. His obsession with language didn’t end at the texts he analyzed, and so he put as much care into his prose as he did his critical pursuits. Almost more impressive, though, is his intellectual rigor. While Deleuze and Guattari ambitiously (and arrogantly) tried to rope pretty much all philosophical thought into their intellectual system in the 2-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Barthes was more concerned with going small than going big. In S/Z, for instance, he fills 300+ pages by painstakingly analyzing the short story “Sarrasine” by Honoré de Balzac, and in doing so, lucidly enumerates his own theory on text, narrative, and meaning.
3. Hopefully no one will want to crucify me for calling Manchette’s original text “the novel” and Tardi’s adaptation “the comic.” I’ve never been a big fan of the term “graphic novel,” and I certainly didn’t want to use it here, since it would be all kinds of confusing. Hopefully the amount of time and energy I’m devoting to Tardi’s work is evidence enough that calling it a “comic” or “cartooning” is simply a reference to the medium, and not an attempt to diminish it.
4. In an interview about Tardi’s fourth Manchette adaptation (published in 2011), Ô dingos, Ô chateaux, he elaborates on his task in creating an adaptation. To him, adapting Manchette isn’t all that difficult, because Manchette is a detail-oriented writer. The flow of the action, the characters, and the settings are all very well described, so there isn’t great need to change things around just for the sake of it. (Although, Tardi remarks, this is exactly what all the film adaptations of Manchette’s do, which is why they aren’t very good.) As a result, his job is to concentrate all of his energy on how to narrate the action of the book. I like this focus on narration, because it underscores how the comics adaptation attempts to tell the same story using a different instrument altogether: the combination of text and images. This process isn’t unlike translating from one language to another, which Kim Thompson affectionately likens to karaoke. And like karaoke, it is unrealistic that Tardi would “sing” Manchette’s novel without adding in his own voice. So, while it is remarkable just how faithful his adaptation ends up, I couldn’t help but wonder about the subtle ways in which Tardi’s voice showed through in the narration of Manchette’s novel. 13,000 boring words later, I almost have something that resembles an answer.
5. Before I get to the comparison with this scene in the novel, it’s worth mentioning that Terrier’s impotence with Alice becomes an issue in both versions of the story. It’s not explicit in either, although it plays a more prominent role in the novel, like all the other signs that Terrier is falling apart. (Physically – he loses his potency, becoming more and more desperate as he grasps for control.) In the comic, it is less explicit, although there are mentions of it. The first time Alice confronts him, before he joins her and Félix at their country house, they lie in bed together naked, and at first Terrier is unable to touch her on account of his hands being too cold. It’s unclear from this scene what Alice expects, although she gets out of bed and gets dressed just after Terrier notices his erection going away. After this, the next time they are alone is the previously discussed scene in which Alice offers herself to him and he is unable (or unwilling) to act. Finally, immediately before leaving for his walk in the current scene, Alice says goodbye: “Whatever. Go freeze your nuts off!” To which he responds, “I explained it to you. It’s because I’m on a job. I have to concentrate. That’s it. I have to concentrate.” This explanation occurs in both versions, although it takes on different meanings in each: in the novel, it comes across as a feeble explanation by a man who is well aware of the futility of his predicament, whereas in the comic, it seems more as if Terrier would prefer to ignore all sexual activity in order to focus on the task at hand.
6. In one of the most egregious mistranslations I have ever seen, the English version ends with “And that will be the end of us.” While this may be more poetic and contain more gravity, it obliterates the framing device of the novel and totally changes the way the reader interprets the ending. Translation is by nature an inexact process, but how this utter violation of Céline’s masterpiece has remained in print for almost 70 years is beyond me.
Note: All photos are my own. Scans of ‘Like a Sniper Lining up his Shot’ are copyright and appear courtesy of Fantagraphics.
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