Karasik and Masukali's 2004 graphic adaptation of Paul Oster's post-modern classic City of Glass,
according to Art Spiegelman, I quote,
created a strange doppelganger of the original book, unquote.
The strangeness that Spiegelman attributes to the work relies on the aspect of format.
Very often people are alienated or estranged when artists or writers dissolve traditional form.
When in the 1980s Art Spiegelman used a medium of pop culture to tell a personal story about the Holocaust,
using mice to impersonate Jews and cats to impersonate Nazis,
people were shocked because the familiar has been made uncannily strange.
How can an author use the comic form in order to broach the issue of genocide?
In the US, the medium of graphic narrative was for a long time associated with carefree children's literature,
meaning funny cartoons such as Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry,
which is why Spiegelman's work signaled a radical break with traditional representations of American culture.
Similarly, City of Glass is not supposed to be read by children, nor is it intended to be comical in tone.
In fact, Oster's story is often categorized as post-modern or meta-fictional gothic.
I don't know how many of you know the book, but the story centers around a lonely mystery novel writer named Daniel Quinn,
who has lost his wife and son until one night, is asked to take on the role of a detective.
More precisely, he is asked to follow Peter Stillman, an old professor just released from prison,
who in the past conducted a linguistic experiment in which he locked up his son in a dark and isolated room,
hoping that he would learn the innocent and pure language of God.
After nine years of imprisonment, the professor's experiment was discovered and the old man was sent to prison.
In order to protect Stillman's now grown-up son, Quinn takes on the case,
but has to learn that all the clues he gains do not help to unveil the mystery, but that they further complicate the case.
In the end, the old professor commits suicide, he jumps off Brooklyn Bridge, and Quinn's clients disappear.
This illusion, Quinn visits the empty apartment of his clients, strips off his clothes,
and continues to write in his notebook until he himself disappears into nothingness.
Maria Beville argues that City of Glass, I quote,
creates a gothic landscape of multiplicities and unrealities, a dizzying fairground of despairing ghosts and doubles, unquote.
In fact, Auster's anti-detective novel excites ambiguity and intellectual uncertainty,
so that we as readers can never be sure whether we are dealing with the world of fantasy or the world of reality.
Furthermore, the flood of intertextual references suggest the phenomenological presence of earlier authors in texts,
so that the literary past constantly haunts the present.
Being familiar with psychoanalytic theory, one realizes that Auster's discursive strategies share a conceptual similarity
with the notion that Freud first introduced in his 1919 essay, The Uncanny.
The Uncanny for Freud is first and foremost an intra-psychic phenomenon, a product of the unconscious that brings to light,
I quote, everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open, unquote.
Belonging to that species of the frightening that goes back to that what once was well known and had long been familiar,
The Uncanny emerges whenever the thresholds between the past and the present or the real and the unreal are crossed.
For Freud, The Uncanny is therefore linked to doubles, ghostly appearances or deja vu.
In other words, everything that triggers in us the notion that Ernst Jensch has termed the dark feeling of uncertainty.
With the following reading of the graphic adaptation of Auster's City of Glass,
I want to show how themes and techniques of The Uncanny have been translated into the multimedia space of a graphic narrative
and how the visual dimension extends the novel's major themes, the postmodern metaphysics of identity and the crisis of representation.
And in a further step I want to demonstrate how the encounter between the textual and the visual leads to a duplicity of signification
which adds another layer of uncanniness.
Now let me start with demonstrating how The Uncanny manifests itself on the intro diegetic level.
Already at the very beginning of the story does The Uncanny reveal itself to the protagonist and reader.
Daniel Quinn picks up the ringing phone in the middle of the night and hears, I quote,
a voice unlike any he had ever heard, at once mechanical and filled with feeling,
hardly more than a whisper and yet perfectly audible and so even in tone that he was unable to tell if it belonged to a man or a woman.
Asking for the detective Paul Auster.
Whereas Quinn experiences The Uncanny moments lately through the ghostliness of the unknown voice,
The Uncanny as the reader experiences manifests itself through the aesthetics of meta fiction.
As soon as the ontological author's name is mentioned on the intro diegetic level,
the reader is left in a state of alienation as normally echoing Foucault, the author's name is not fictional.
As stated earlier, The Uncanny emerges out of the ambiguity produced by a sudden lack of boundaries between the real and the fictional world.
More specifically, from the unexpected return of the non-mimetic, meaning all that which should have remained hidden in order to maintain the mimetic illusion.
The fact that Paul Auster now referring to the actual flesh and blood author also received two nightly phone calls in which a person asked for detective agency
and which served as the major inspiration for the novel's beginning and this further nourishes the meta fictional play between reality and fiction.
However, Paul Auster is not only present as a name but also as a fictional persona bearing the same name.
At one point of the novel, Quinn being estranged by his detective case but also by his fake identity of Paul Auster
looks up Paul Auster's address in the phone book and pays him a visit.
Quinn is highly puzzled when he learns that the Paul Auster he is visiting is not a detective but a writer.
The fact that the empirical author is visually present as his fictional double conjures up intellectual uncertainty about who functions as the guiding or implied voice of the text.
According to Paul Atkinson, Auster's strategy to bring to the surface his own empirical persona is related to the postmodern notion as famously articulated by Roland Barthes that the author is dead.
And I'm quoting from Atkinson now, the only way to kill the author is to create a fictional double in the text which undermines the author's position as an invisible guiding principle for the text as a whole.
Thus, in the graphic novel, the reader, when looking at Auster's drawn alter ego, is trapped in the complex web of unnamed narrators and multiple and multiplied authors who all seem to be on the same level.
This notion of multiplicity leads us to another feature or a similar feature of the Freudian uncanny that we encounter on the story and oriented level, the double or doppelganger.
The most uncanny outcome of the inner compulsion to repeat Freud claims is the double, which Freud considers as a disturbance of the ego.
Where the self may be duplicated, divided and interchanged.
Freud believes that the double invokes a sensation of the uncanny, especially when a person may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self.
In City of Glass, Auster applies a great number of different doublings, most of which can be read along the lines of the Freudian uncanny.
For example, when Quinn is looking for the old professor, he is suddenly confronted with two identically looking men.
One dressed in a neat suit, the other dressed in rags, and he doesn't know whom to follow, so he has to rely on a principle of chance.
The uncanny mirrorings Quinn experiences indicate that his process of investigation, in fact, concerns nothing but his own self.
Quinn is literally in his mirror stage, which undermines the very logic of identity.
Towards the end of the story, Quinn notices his reflection in a shop window, I quote, not recognizing the person as himself, unquote.
This uncanny mirror moment, in which Quinn realizes that he has transformed into a bum, also comes to stand for the instability of his identity.
Unconsciously taking on the social role of the man he first investigated, Quinn also becomes a mirror image of the old stillman.
Having lost his abutment due to his obsession with the case, Quinn, without a place to return to or to identify with, his subjectivity disseminates into the complexity of urban space.
In the graphic novel, the protagonist's mirror moment, in which he perceives his new, shabby persona in a variety of differently framed mirrors, suggests that the postmodern self is nothing but a prestige of styles glued to a surface.
The visual Nisanabim, that splits Quinn's persona into a variety of fragments of the same, also alludes to Quinn's internal crisis of the self that follows the act of repression.
In linguistic terms, Quinn's bricolage identity is expressed through the abit structure, created by the doublings of names, initials or numbers, a process which one could call semantic doubling.
The various instances of semantic doubling serve to point to our language's potential to play mirror tricks on us.
Also, Bernd Herzograd suggests that language deceives in that it is a surface signifier, promising depth, signified.
For example, Daniel Quinn shares the first name with Auster's fictional and also actual son, Daniel, and at the same time his name mirrors the initials of Don Quixote, the hero of Cervantes' story that functions as one of the book's intertextual references.
Quinn's pen's name is that of William Wilson, the protagonist of Edgar and Poe's famous story about Doppelganger.
Strangely, it is his fictional alter ego named Max Work that Quinn perceives more real than his true self as a writer.
Quinn instead conceives of himself as leading a posthumous life, which, as Maria Beville has argued, establishes a typical Gothic situation of undeath.
As a result of the process of repression, Quinn becomes increasingly haunted by the ghosts of his characters, of other writers who precede him, and of his own other selves.
Last but not least, Auster applies the Freudian notion of the return of the repressed through the protagonist's trauma of the death of his son, Daniel.
For example, the dialectical image, evoking the sudden moment when past and present merge, manifests itself when Quinn, or the reader, experiences sudden moments of involuntary memory.
As exemplified in the following panels, the unexpected and sudden recurrence of a panel showing a child's face screaming, scribbled in black crayon, disrupts the narrative flow and structural logic and thus visualizes Quinn's return of the repressed, Quinn's trauma of the death of his son.
The fact that the screaming phase constantly recurs in a different context also points to its importance for the story's overall message.
As Chacar argues, the screaming child is, I quote, the center of the book. It will appear again and again each time in a surprising context, which will add to its significance and to its visceral impact.
Thus, it will come to signify Quinn's dead child, Peter Stillman, his anger at Stillman Sr., Quinn's own childhood, a generalized sense of lost innocence and the alienation of man from his fellow man and from himself.
More generally, the screaming phase recalls Munch's famous painting, The Scream, and reminds us of the unrepresentability of subjectively experienced terror or haunting.
In both examples, in Munch's painting and asked the story, the cause for the scream or the threat is not visible but lies within the protagonist's subjective minds.
In both examples, the scream is silent and in the graphic novel, the verbal text that accompanies the screaming phase is very often an authorial command that does not directly relate to the screaming phase.
Text and image are clearly separated through a dividing line.
Karasik and Masukali thus depict a scream that cannot be verbalized or rather can only indirectly or metaphorically be verbalized.
It also reminds us of Heidegger's notion that the uncanny is part of our dasein and thus a fundamental mode of our existence.
The screaming phase thus is as much an expression of Quinn's overall state of existential homelessness.
In the preface of the graphic version of Auster's novel, Art Spiegelman points out that, I quote,
City of Glass is a surprisingly non-visual work at its core, I quote, because it is first and foremost concerned with linguistic science and language.
So why then taking the challenge of translating this book, this complex web of words into a visual narrative?
The combination of image and text serves as a further irritation or deconstruction that, as Schmidt argues, allows no solid pattern of strategy with which to quiet the continual play within them.
This lack of a solid single narratological pattern also pays tribute to the fact that Auster's story is a psychologized narrative.
In the interpretation of Dreams, Freud defines the unconscious as a picture story, a sort of catalog of memory images that is acted in Dreams.
On one of the last pages of City of Glass, when Quinn runs out of pages of his red notebook, also the graphic novel's grid, this grid division disintegrates and page numbers disappear into black nothingness.
In fact, stable panels turn into flexible pages, fluttering down a dark abyss.
At the abyss spring, we see the shadowy silhouette of a witness of the scene, whose identity, of course, is unknown.
Karasik and Masukali's translation of this scene not only intensifies the postmodern paradigm that meaning is never fixed,
but also the fact that Dreams, these unconscious picture stories, can never be complete and also can never be fully articulated.
The brink of the dark abyss, over which the panels fall, symbolizes the transition of the conscious to the unconscious,
and also the disturbing tension that will remain between word and image, between the visual and the textual material.
This tension is related to what Freud calls the navel, a blind spot or place, and I'm quoting from Jay now, which has to be left obscure, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown.
It is probably this obscure, unknown spot to which Quinn disappears in the end. All in all, Quinn's story is, in fact, nothing but a reprocessing of a traumatic experience.
The graphic adaptation of City of Glass represents both a technique and effect of the uncanny death through the intersection of medial forms of representation,
generating eclecticism that is analogous with the spatiality of the mind in which the past or respectively the primordial story is constantly revisited.
The heap of trash forming the last image of the book points to the remnants of the past or of the intertextual references that burst into flames as the story comes to an end.
But in fact, and as we are reminded of Philip K. Dick's concept of kibble, these useless objects or remnants of the past might have the power to reproduce themselves, to double.
As another compulsive repetition of the narrative themes of loss, the last note at the right corner saying,
and wherever he may have disappeared to, I wish him luck, suggests that Quinn's story cannot be finalized but might continue or start anew elsewhere. Thank you.