The Cage
The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James. Coach House,1975.
I wanted to give this book a serious review, but alas I can’t. For one thing, it’s already overdue from the library (from another library, so I can’t keep it forever), for another, I just couldn’t concentrate on it. I read it two times, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is an ambitious experiment that doesn’t really work. I’ve not read any commentary on this book, though it has come up in a lot of my recent comics reading as an example of different formal traits (its lack of any people/humans/figures being a major one).
I originally heard of it as a kind of nouveau roman comic, which perhaps colored my view of it. It does read stylistically like a nouveau roman, but it didn’t, to me, read as a successful example of the style. The text portions of the book sound like one of Robbe-Grillet’s descriptive passages, but lacking the other elements of Robbe-Grillet’s work (narrative drive for one thing) I just couldn’t keep any interest in the abstract descriptive passages that accompany the images. It’s like taking out the focusing character in Le Voyeur or Jalousie.
Each page of the page features at most one image, drawn in a panel like a comic. The drawings are often quite beautiful, done with ink (mostly thin lines) in a realistic though simplified style. There are some very interesting transitional movements between the panels. One sequence zooms in on a building, moving closer while simultaneously showing the structure become cracked and decayed. Another shows a room from different angles as it fills with sound. Many panels also take an empty room and then put something in the room.
The visuals themselves work much better than the text. Reading the book as a silent sequence of images is perhaps more amusing than slogging through the text. Reading the text I got the impression it was some kind of metaphor for artistic creation. It almost reads as a pastiche of Robbe-Grillet.
Like I said, this album deserves more attention from me, but at this point I’m not sure it interests me enough to try.
A good introduction/review/critique of the book is in the Summer 04 issue of Indy Magazine. For a different kind of essay on the album see this piece in Image and Narrative.
Tags: experimentalcomics, nouveau-roman
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