{"id":96888,"date":"2016-04-12T14:53:44","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T18:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=96888"},"modified":"2016-04-12T15:47:39","modified_gmt":"2016-04-12T19:47:39","slug":"bodies-moving-through-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/12\/bodies-moving-through-space\/","title":{"rendered":"Bodies Moving Through Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Blutch\u2019s graphic novel\u00a0<\/em>Peplum<\/a>\u00a0shatters the <\/em>Satyricon.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In an interview after Peplum<\/em>\u2019s first publication in book form, Blutch tells of a reader who asked him why he was such a difficult author. \u201cBut I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019m difficult at all!\u201d he exclaimed. \u201cI don\u2019t understand why I get asked that. What I do is fairly simple, and not at all intellectual. In my stories, I try to favor action.\u201d And in action, Blutch\u2019s book abounds: stabbing, stoning, amputation, eye-gouging, sex, seafaring, Attic dance, pirate attacks. Yet these sequences are as artificial as they are visceral, feral, and formal at once. Taking as its title the European term for the sword-and-sandal cinematic subgenre, Peplum<\/em> offers a decidedly different take on the toga epic\u2014one of aporia and ambiguity, a fractured tale of antiquity in all its alien majesty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Part of this may be traced to the book\u2019s origins. When he began serializing Peplum<\/em> in 1996, Blutch was a talent to watch, a twenty-eight-year-old admired for his expressiveness of line and his experiments with dream logic and surrealism (\u201chalf Jacques Demy and half Bu\u00f1uel,\u201d he called them), but he was not yet a hero to a generation of cartoonists, and more than a decade from taking top prize at Angoul\u00eame, France\u2019s largest comics festival. He had already shown himself to be a stylistic virtuoso, but still wore his influences\u2014Will Eisner, Daniel Goossens, Morris (creator of Lucky Luke<\/em>), Jean-Claude Forest (creator of Barbarella<\/em>)\u2014on his sleeve. Fresh off a successful run at the satirical revue Fluide glaciale<\/em>, he turned to another publication instrumental in making Franco-Belgian comics the art form it is today: the aptly named \u00c0 suivre<\/em> (Stay tuned), which in its heyday had hosted the talents of Moebius, Jacques Tardi, Hugo Pratt, Mu\u00f1oz and Sampayo, Peeters and Schuiten.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d had enough of parodies, the constant nods to this and that, the innuendo and authorial winks,\u201d Blutch remarked, \u201call the mental crockery and referential baggage, the byzantine architecture of humor. I needed to do something pure, stripped down, fresher and more direct.\u201d What better source than antiquity? Blutch set out to create the sequel to a beloved book he\u2019d \u201cnever wanted to end\u201d: the Satyricon<\/em>. Already a motley tonal medley\u2014prose and verse, comedy and tragedy, romance and satire\u2014Petronius\u2019s novel has survived only in fragments, a condition Blutch found conducive to leaving his artistic mark. \u201cThe people were all naked; all I had to draw was bodies moving through space. Peplum<\/em> paved the way to a kind of musical physicality for me, a path I\u2019ve been following ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n

What began as investigative and imaginative reconstruction soon became free improvisation: Satyricon<\/em> remixed, if you will. Names are changed or dropped. Lines are plucked from context\u2014what was once narration becomes the characters\u2019 commentary on their own actions. Petronius compares a city without culture to a pestilential field; Blutch turns it into an actual physical setting. Of Petronius\u2019s most famous set piece, Trimalchio\u2019s feast, only a single late episode is kept, a suitor\u2019s sexual embarrassment before his mistress, and even there the classes are upended: instead of a patrician mistress and a slave, Blutch serves up a would-be nobleman and a lowly actress. The very era is shifted from the fiendish decadence of Nero\u2019s Rome to the Second Triumvirate, allowing Blutch to open with his take on a scene that the peplum genre, if not drama itself, has fetishized: the assassination of Julius Caesar.<\/p>\n

Continuing his freewheeling collage, Blutch cribbed the central conceit of a young man in love with a mysteriously frozen woman from Roland Petit\u2019s 1953 ballet,\u00a0The Lady in the Ice<\/em>. He gave his own frozen woman the head of the Lady of Auxerre<\/em>, a Cretan sculpture in the Louvre, and an Egyptian body, and lends the hero\u2019s other paramour, an androgynous youth, the face of the Boy with Thorn<\/em>, a Hellenistic bronze in Rome\u2019s Palazzo dei Conservatori. \u201cWhen I see something I can use,\u201d he says, \u201cI take it. Wonderful things make you want to steal them.\u201d Blutch would not read other Romans until later, but striking impressions of light and rock from a trip to Sicily snuck into the book.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Blutch has explored, in art and interviews, his own love-hate relationship with movies and their persistent influence on comics. He has deplored a tendency toward storyboarding in comics that to his mind restrains their reach, suggesting that comics are capable of \u201clarger, richer\u201d narration\u2014\u201cmore elliptical, mysterious, and poetic.\u201d Over the years, he has variously attributed Peplum<\/em>\u2019s cinematic inspirations to Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom he found close in spirit to Petronius (Accattone<\/em>, The Hawks and the Sparrows<\/em>, especially Medea<\/em>); Orson Welles, whose low-budget-Shakespeare look he liked (Welles also filmed Petit\u2019s ballet); Joseph Mankiewicz; and Italian B movies. If Peplum<\/em> avoided Hollywoodian flamboyance, it was also a response to the venerable, slightly musty peplum tradition in Franco-Belgian comics\u2014say, The Adventures of Alix<\/em>, an educational, sensational staple of Blutch\u2019s childhood. But the elephant in the room, whose importance Blutch has alternately avowed and denied, praised and repudiated, is Federico Fellini. Indeed, Fellini\u2019s description of his intentions and process in making his 1969 Fellini Satyricon<\/em> is surprisingly apt for Peplum<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

Sparse fragments, in large part repressed and forgotten, made whole by what might be called a dream. Not by a historical epic reconstructed philologically from documents and positively verified but by a great dream galaxy sunken in the darkness and now rising up to us amid glowing bursts of light. I think I was seduced by the possibility of reconstructing this dream with its puzzling transparency, its unreadable clarity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Fellini\u2019s spectacle focused on the baroque and debauched. Blutch\u2019s vision, without sparing any barbarity or hedonism, is ultimately less cynical, more fantastical, darker and starker. Blutch has called the Satyricon<\/em> as exciting and estranging as science fiction:<\/p>\n

\n

a literary UFO from the fourth dimension, because you don\u2019t really get what\u2019s going on, people are laughing but you don\u2019t know why, things you\u2019d find sad they think are funny \u2026 The incredible thing is they don\u2019t have any of the same norms, it\u2019s like life on another planet.<\/p>\n

At the same time, they\u2019re so distant from us they\u2019re almost prehistoric: in the boat scene, they\u2019re living with animals. Back then animals were still very much with us, beside us; we were almost on an equal footing. I wanted to depict a world completely foreign to our own. These are human beings, and at the same time there\u2019s nothing human about them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This reading reflects his desire, from Peplum<\/em> onward, to do away with psychology: \u201cI can\u2019t stand that kind of romanticism, that idea of literature.\u201d Events are presented, but motivations remain obscure. As he journeys from savagery at the far edges of empire to disappointment at the heart of Rome, Peplum<\/em>\u2019s impostor protagonist somehow retains a certain innocence, at the mercy of the ferocity and vice around him, and Blutch withholds judgment.<\/p>\n

This potentially alienating aspect of Blutch\u2019s storytelling is at odds with the oft-remarked immediacy of his art. Blutch conveys the hero\u2019s experience of his ordeals more through posture than dialogue. In calm and combat, rest and movement, his characters have a gracefulness to them, as of poses in dance, organic and vulnerable\u2014expressionist outlines lent volume by fine, dense, even furious hatching, emerging from broad swaths of darkness or, in one violent instance, spouting inkblots of blood. However detailed these figures, their faces remain simpler, cartoons with dotted pupils; often only the speaker\u2019s features are clear, lending focus to a scene. If now and again he cribs profiles from classical repertory\u2014as in the pirates with their round shields and plumed helmets\u2014it is less for historical context than evocative impact. From panel to panel, the level of stylization can shift sharply, subject to the intensity of emotion. Blutch is an artist for whom drawing is not only thinking but feeling, forever in search of moments; a drawing is an attempt to capture and share the impulse of wonder that prompted it. \u201cWhen you\u2019re little and you love something, you want to draw it,\u201d he reminds us.<\/p>\n

However, as he grows older, he finds himself increasingly less inclined to draw \u201cwhat I call \u2018transitional images,\u2019 which don\u2019t convey much. A comic consists of memorable scenes, the ones you really want to draw. You have to draw the others so readers can follow along, but \u2026 there\u2019s something mechanical and frustrating about it. It\u2019s not sensual enough.\u201d Already evident in Peplum<\/em>, this itch to omit might seem at odds with what originally drew Blutch to the Satyricon<\/em>: \u201cthe fact that parts are missing lets you reconstruct the missing passages yourself.\u201d Perhaps it is that he asks of readers no more than he would of artists: an immersion in moments of vivid sentiment that moves toward the completion of an imagined universe.<\/p>\n

Peplum<\/em> took Blutch two years, during which time he also sidelined in projects for other publishers in France\u2019s budding nineties alternative comics scene. By the time it was done, \u00c0 suivre<\/em> was on its last legs. Peplum<\/em> was unceremoniously dumped in its pages as essentially a studio cut, butchering Blutch\u2019s work\u2014eliminating, among other things, any page without words. Casterman, the publishing house behind \u00c0 suivre<\/em>, promised to restore these in a later publication, but that never happened. The handsome edition that eventually came out from the influential comics publisher Corn\u00e9lius in 1998 and has since become a modern classic owed much, by Blutch\u2019s own admission, to founding editor Jean-Louis Gauthey. Gauthey commissioned an epilogue from Blutch and devised the book\u2019s structure: ten chapters prefaced with new vignettes and chapter heads. The result maintains a special place in the heart and oeuvre of an artist always guided by feeling, restlessly in search of the new.<\/p>\n

This essay appears as the introduction to Edward Gauvin\u2019s new translation of\u00a0<\/em>Peplum<\/a>, out this month from New York Review Comics. Read an excerpt here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Edward Gauvin has translated more than a hundred and fifty graphic novels and is a two-time winner of the John Dryden Translation Competition. He is the contributing editor for Francophone comics at <\/em>Words Without Borders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Blutch\u2019s graphic novel\u00a0Peplum\u00a0shatters the Satyricon. In an interview after Peplum\u2019s first publication in book form, Blutch tells of a reader who asked him why he was such a difficult author. \u201cBut I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019m difficult at all!\u201d he exclaimed. \u201cI don\u2019t understand why I get asked that. What I do is fairly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":962,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[21927,13253,21924,21925,21915,134,131,13160,21926,10344,21920,21931,21919,21930,21928,17054,1406,21921,1470,21922,21916,21929,10578,1631,200,948,21923,7134],"class_list":["post-96888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-a-suivre","tag-ancient-rome","tag-antiquity","tag-barbarella","tag-blutch","tag-cartoons","tag-comics","tag-federico-fellini","tag-fluide-glaciale","tag-graphic-novels","tag-hugo-pratt","tag-jacques-demy","tag-jacques-tardi","tag-joseph-mankiewicz","tag-lucky-luke","tag-luis-bunuel","tag-moebius","tag-munoz-and-sampayo","tag-orson-welles","tag-peeters-and-schuiten","tag-peplum","tag-petronius","tag-pier-paolo-pasolini","tag-rome","tag-science-fiction","tag-shakespeare","tag-sword-and-sandal-epics","tag-the-satyricon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy 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