Babel by David B

Babel by David B. (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2004).

The majority of Andre Breton’s prose works (Nadja, Mad Love, Arcanum 17, etc.) mix autobiography, dream, myth, the everyday, chance — all elements of the Surrealist project: the exploration and exploitation of the unconscious for the purposes of art, culture, and even politics (like Freud the Surrealists started in exploration of phenomena, moved into dreams and art, and then to larger cultural invetigation (in their case a move to politics)). French comic artist David B. perhaps consciously or just by affinity works this same realm. It comes as no surprise (and with a great amount of anticipatory delight for me) to learn that his next project is a biography of Surrealist Robert Desnos.[1]

Babel is bookended by two colorful single panel pages telling the myth of a rooster as a cure for epilepsy. The rooster fights off demons under the bed which threaten to take away the patient’s soul, and it acts as a psychopomp leading the souls back from the underworld. This mythic, dreamlike cure echoes the main story within.

David B. tells a digressive and tangential story around his brother’s epilepsy. The fact of his brother’s sickness forms a latent content to the story, which manifests itself in dreams, memories, images, reflections. David dreams up a mythological figure “The King of the World” who appears in various guys in his dreams and forms a mysterious seat of power. He dreams up his “ancestors” an old couple who sit at a table on the ceiling above David and his family. He reflects on his drawing as a search for a cure for his brother, an investigation to say what cannot be said with words.

The art of the story is done in red, pink, black, white, and gray. It is in an iconic almost primitive style with little detail but a heightened sense of purpose. What is there seems important: the pillow that young David sleeps on is shaped like the head of a cat with pointed ears, a shape that emulates the head of the “King of the World” (The king of the world is a cat? This mixture of cat/dream brings to mind Neil Gaiman’s Sandman story about dreaming cats). Often the drawings display a Surrealist tendency of dreaming and the unconscious spilling into the everyday. David B. in the present looks back upon his younger self as fish fly through the air around him. The “King of the World” cuts open a large flying fish and from within spill Boschian creatures.

But with all this dreamlike imagery, one of the most incongruous and visually abstract sequences is 7 pages telling an abbreviated history of Nigeria/Biafra and the war that went on in the sixties. I find it hard to connect this section (almost a quarter of the story) into the rest of the work. David B. briefly brings up the power of images as opposed to the word, but the importance to the Nigerian story feels tangential at best and jarringly incongruous at worst. He moves into a historical/political realm that is outside the personalized/dream-myth realm of the rest of the story (which isn’t to say that the brief education on that historical situation is not appreciated, it just feels out of place).

In the end, the story tells us of the importance and power of images to the artist. From the images of the dream to the images he creates with his pen, the images show what cannot be said in words.

This short work is an interesting conglomeration of elements, but the whole seems lessened but a lack of coherence among them. I look forward to reading his Epileptic to see how he sustains a longer narrative.

[1] Andrew Arnold’s online Time Magazine column “Metaphorically Speaking”, January 6, 2005.

Tags: Bande Dessinee, surrealism

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