Adaptation and Amplification in Paul Auster's City of Glass

ADAPTATION AND AMPLIFICATION IN PAUL AUSTER’S CITY OF GLASS Cara A. Williams A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of English University of North Carolina Wilmington 2008 Approved by Advisory Committee Dr. Christopher Gould Dr. Nicholas Laudadio Dr. Meghan Sweeney Accepted by ______________________________ Dean, Graduate School TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………..…iv LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………....v INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………..…1 ADAPTATION………………………………………………………………………….11 Omission and Loss………………………………………………………………15 GENRE CONVENTIONS..……………………………………………………………..21 Not Just for Kids Anymore: Comics Conventions……………………………...30 ANALYSIS………………………………………………………………………………35 Clear as Black and White………………………………………………………..35 Reading Between the Lines……………………………………………………...38 Visual Motifs…………………………………………………………………….44 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………..52 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………....54 ii ABSTRACT Paul Auster’s meta-fictional detective story, City of Glass, involves a complex linguistic investigation into the nature, function, and meaning of language. Using a highly conventional literary genre, detective fiction, Auster, using deconstructionist principles, carefully structures the collapse of these conventions, ultimately a signifying structure, and with them the collapse of language. Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli adapted from City of Glass a graphic novel, Paul Auster’s City of Glass, extending Auster’s interrogation of signifying structures to the signification of pictorial images. The novel offers a deliberate challenge to comics theorists such as Scott McCloud and Will Eisner who have made claims to the universality and culturally transcendent meanings of pictorial images. This thesis argues Karasik and Mazzucchelli establish the ambiguity of signification and the concept of deferral and difference in pictorial images thus employing the conventions of comics to collapse the signifying conventions of the comics genre and with it the collapse of comics pictorial-based language. Paul Auster’s City of Glass, I would like to suggest, creates an independently viable text that brings Auster’s crisis of meaning full circle by indicating the ambiguity of signification on multiple levels of representation whether spoken written or drawn. Borrowing from Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation, this thesis explores the relationship of the graphic adaptation to its source text in order to propose that, rather than merely illustrating Auster’s text, Karasik and Mazzucchelli add resonance to Auster’s work, creating a new text that can be interpreted and understood with no prior knowledge of the source. At the same time, the adaptation lends validity and value to iii alternate cultural forms such as graphic novels and adaptations, both of which have been historically marginalized in English studies. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks for the completion of this project go to my director, Dr. Meghan Sweeney. Her enthusiasm, her encouragement, and, most importantly, her refusal to let me prolong or give up on this project is greatly appreciated. Equal thanks go to Dr. Nicholas Laudadio for his patience and encouragement. And thank you to Dr. Christopher Gould for agreeing to be a member of my committee in the eleventh hour. His understanding and assistance are greatly appreciated. My gratitude is also extended to Jason Mott who helped me rediscover a love for comic books and graphic novels. More importantly, each time I felt like quitting the program and claimed I was moving to an atoll in the South Pacific, Jason would tell me, “Okay. But remember that wherever you go, there you are.” For keeping me grounded and contained, for his words of practical wisdom, and for his unwavering support, I am especially grateful. v LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Example of a montage panel that demonstrates the adaptors interpretation of prelapsarian and postlapsarian language...………………………8 2. Example of visual narrative ……………………………………………………..19 3. Example of pictorial deferral of meaning………………………………………..40 4. Window as an Example of Visual Motif …….…………………………………..43 5. Prison Door as an Example of Visual Motif ………...…………………………..46 6. Locked Window as an Example of Visual Motif….……………………………..46 7. Crying Child as an Example of Visual Motif…..………………………………..49 8. Brick Wall as an Example of Visual Motif……………..………………………..51 vi INTRODUCTION In the good mystery, there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so—which amounts to the same thing. […] Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end. (Auster 15) Even at the end, it is possible that no circumference can be drawn. Paul Auster’s meta- fictional detective story, City of Glass, involves a complex linguistic investigation into the nature, function, and meaning of language. Using a highly conventional literary genre, detective fiction, Auster carefully structures the collapse of these conventions, ultimately a signifying structure, and with them the collapse of language. Basing his detective novel on deconstructionist principles, Auster’s novel defies centering. Each word and symbol is designed to defer meaning, even after the novel itself has finally come to a close. Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli extend Auster’s interrogation of signifying structures to the signification of pictorial images. Karasik and Mazzucchelli adapted City of Glass into a graphic novel, Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which was later reprinted as City of Glass: The Graphic Novel. The novel offers a significant challenge to comics theorists such as Scott McCloud and Will Eisner who have made claims to the universality and culturally transcendent meanings of pictorial images. Karasik and Mazzucchelli are able to establish the ambiguity of signification and the concept of deferral and difference in pictorial images. They employ the conventions of comics to collapse pictorial-based language. Thus, Karasik and Mazzucchelli do not merely recreate Auster’s ideas; they employ his strategies on a different plane—a plane of language that was perceived by some comics theorists as defying the structures of verbal language. As an adaptation, the graphic novel should not be conceived of and read as an illustration of the source text1 or as secondary to the source text; Paul Auster’s City of Glass amplifies the ideas in the source text while, at the same time, being independently viable. Scholar Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of Adaptation, asserts that adaptations are “repetition without replication” (Theory 7). Adaptations are often treated as secondary works and evaluated by their faithfulness to the “original” text—a method she deems unproductive (Theory 7). Drawing on Hutcheon’s theories of adaptation, this thesis will argue that Karasik and Mazzucchelli (re)create a new text in Paul Auster’s City of Glass to engage with the themes of the source text using pictorial images in combination with verbal language to propose that no representation or signifying process is concrete. The graphic adaptation of the novel brings Auster’s crisis of meaning full circle by indicating the ambiguity of signification on multiple levels of representation whether spoken, written, or drawn. Hutcheon describes adaptations as having a “double nature” that informs and is informed by the source text. Similarly, I will argue that rather than a simplification of Auster’s prose novel or a retelling of Auster’s story, the adaptation, as Hutcheon argues about adaptations as a whole, is a text that works in conjunction with and separate from its source text (Theory 6). The relationship between Auster’s novel and Karasik’s and 1 Hutcheon uses the term “source” to refer to a prior text to which adaptations “have an overt and defining relationship” (Theory 3). The term, which will be henceforth used in this paper, attempts to diffuse the loaded language of originality and derivation common to the study of adaptations. 2 Mazzucchelli’s graphic adaptation creates a productive tension between text and image that draws attention to the visual elements of the narrative as well as the linguistic and rhetorical nature of the visual. This tension is created using comics conventions and graphic storytelling. Comics are, in fact, a unique and complex medium. Contrary to what some may assume, reading and interpreting comics actually requires advanced literacy and sensitivity to art and literature. It is this interaction of art and literature that makes comics such a dynamic and growing medium. In “asking us to read back and forth between images and words, comics reveals the visuality and thus materiality of words and the discursivity and narrativity of images,” explains Marianne Hirsch in her editorial “Collateral Damage” (qtd. in Whitlock 966). Within comics, image and picture work together, adding to one another and, sometimes, productively disrupting one another; the images work as mimesis and the text as diegesis to create a medium in which text and image are constantly in dialogue. “Comics are not a hybrid of art and literature,” explains Gillian Whitlock in “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics,” “but a unique interpretation that transcends both and emerges through the imaginative

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