A Copy of a Copy of a Copy: (Auto-)citation in Breakdowns

Spiegelman’s work was produced against a backdrop of the postmodern movement in art and literature – Postmodern practices such as radical defamiliarization, a ‘mad’ register, the failure of Enlightenment mechanisation, and indefatigable quotation appear in Spiegelman’s

image of an artist drinking ink – Breakdowns includes Kurtzmanesque transformation of comedy to bleak comedy – Jewish humour often serves as a means to stave-off emotional

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collapse – The dual ‘zaps’ of Breakdowns are its dramatization of formal and mental collapse – Like an archetypical madman Breakdowns talks to itself

During the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde American works such as John Barth’s The Floating Opera (1967), Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967), and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977) employed acutely self-reflexive postmodern aesthetics. A key characteristic of these works was the extravagant use of quotation. At the same time, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein in his work Drowning Girl (1963), James Rosenquist with Marilyn Monroe, I (1962) and Andy Warhol’s Eight Elvises (1963) were appropriating images from American pop culture and creating art which similarly flaunted its status as aesthetic artefact. Postmodernism in the arts is characterised by shameless appropriation, camp humour,

recycling of past styles and artistic movements, a breakdown in distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, repetition and temporal confusion. In the same tradition, Spiegelman’s work in Breakdowns self-consciously references a variety of visual and literary sources from a range of genres and intersects with the other ‘signatures’ of the postmodern sketched here.

The purpose of this section is to establish the following; that the references in

Breakdowns serve, as with other postmodern works, to call attention to form, and to introduce themes of madness by way of quotations in the style of MAD cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman and archetypically Jewish dark parody. This gallows humour, it shall be argued, appears concurrent with and in response to, the threat of psychological collapse. These strands can be drawn together in the observation (also of relevance to the chapter as a whole) that in

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The 2008 version of Breakdowns includes a series of prints of the cover of the 1977 edition (which is also the first panel of Portrait). These panels appear in a range of different colours. In some the dimensions are disoriented and elements are missing. Kartalopoulos reads the image as a mission statement for the volume: ‘Spiegelman is unwilling to allow any of comics’ properties to go unquestioned and un-utilized’ (Kartalopoulos 2005, online). The following analysis shall significantly develop Kartalopoulos’ argument by exploring the purpose of the defamiliarization, madness, and quotation in this image and others that appear in Breakdowns.

This image can be found on pbase.com

Fig. 10 Breakdowns’ Warholesque prints reference the act of referencing.

The collage foregrounds and thus defamilairizes the mechanisms behind the comic book form, specifically the large colour palates available to current comic book creators (a huge leap from the four colour printing process utilised in the production of mid-twentieth century comics) and the alignment and colouring process used to create comics. The

repetition of the same image alludes to the mass production of print comics. One can imagine the image sliding off a printing press, stacking one above the next. Spiegelman has repeated the image, but in some instances colours are misaligned and shift thus simulating a

mechanical error and a failure in the process of mechanisation.

The foregrounding of form in this image coincides significantly with the theme of madness. The wild-eyed artist is in the process of drinking ink, perhaps to drown himself or to vomit onto his drawings. His tools, and his artistic output, are literally internalised and (the reader might infer) regurgitated, offering a visual continuum between the bodily, the affective and the artistic as well as a thematic continuum between the mechanised rational process (of

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printing) and acute psychological disturbance. His bile and his own tormented body have gone into the comics he draws. This theme of mental and physical breakdown also appears in the lettering of ‘Breakdowns’, which begins clear and upright but then collapses and cracks (breaks down in other words) by the final ‘S’ as his madness, manifest, overwhelms the form. To rephrase this in terms introduced in the previous chapter (section 1.6) which concerns the Holocaust as the madness produced within post-Enlightenment rationality, Spiegelman makes reference to the mechanisation and wide use of the printing press – landmark signs of the march of civilisation and the growth of human knowledge – not in order to emphasize their utility, but to call attention to the constructed nature of his art and to simulate madness within these signs of ‘progress.’ This image thus serves as a signal of emotional distress and a thematic microcosm of the volume and, indeed, the Spiegelman canon as a whole.

The repeated image of the artist drinking ink also introduces the theme of quotation; the image alludes to Warhol’s mixture of the everyday with high art as well as his signature use of distinctive anti-realistic (or psychedelic) colour palates in reproduced images. As Warhol was attempting to bridge the gap between art and the everyday, Spiegelman was attempting to bridge the distance between ‘comic book’ and ‘art’ by calling attention to the tools and skills of the comic book creator. By alluding to Warhol, Spiegelman also offers a focus upon recreation rather than creation. This allusion acts not only as a parodic

reproduction of Warhol, but reproduction to the second degree; a reference to the act of referencing itself.

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The repeated practise of citation and corruption-through-repetition throughout Breakdowns is found in its most completely realised form in Auto-Destructo (Spiegelman 2008, 25) with its intricate homage to Rube Goldberg whose cartoons often depicted elaborate devices designed to accomplish a simple task.

This image can be found on screwballcomics.blogspot.com

Fig. 11 Rube Goldberg’s Automatic Cigar Cutter (1930)

Unlike a typical Rube Goldberg machine, however, Auto-Destructo is circular and designed to make the observer ‘depressed by its uselessness’ to make them ‘realize[...] the futility of all existence [...] and ingest […] a lethal overdose’ of sleeping pills (Spiegelman 2008, 25). Like Rube Goldberg, Spiegelman parodies the Enlightenment aspiration to improve human lives through technological advances. In Spiegelman’s version the very purpose of this ornamented device is to call attention to its own impracticality. Since the specific cartoons cited here were intentionally ridiculous and exaggerated, Auto-Destructo fails to satisfy Genette’s conception of ‘hypertextuality’ as a form which transforms a serious text or genre into a playful one. Auto-Destructo is comedic and, as such, the parodic transformation is intra- rather than trans- generic (from slapstick comedy to dark humour). The comedic text, in this case the Rube Goldberg cartoon, should be, by its nature, unsuitable for parody (a comedic imitation of a single text) because it does not take itself seriously to begin with. Any attempt at derision simply produces another genre of comedy. The comic mechanism in Auto-Destructo thus ridicules the ridiculous, but with the ulterior motive of unveiling the inner workings of a decidedly un-funny subject.

The violent comedy of Auto-Destructo engages with suicide and depression to explore subversive and disturbing elements found in the familiar (in this case the Rube Goldberg

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cartoon). One of Spiegelman’s influences in this regard is Harvey Kurtzman, who drew parodies, mainly for MAD Magazine and Playboy which exposed the violence inherent in slapstick. Spiegelman asserts of Kurtzman’s parody of McManus’s Bringing Back Father that the change in drawing style transforms slapstick comedy into domestic violence (Spiegelman 1999, 80). Spiegelman reproduces Kurtzman’s approach, transforming light-hearted slapstick into darkly violent parody. Kartalopoulos contends that ‘Spiegelman’s status as cultural commentator is more relentlessly associative than Kurtzman’s, and his subjects are often less pre-packaged than MAD’s targets’ (Kartalopoulos 2005, online). Spiegelman’s specific brand of quotation, seen in Auto-Destructo and the Warholesque images of the artist drinking ink, tends more toward general pastiche (the self-conscious imitation of a genre) than Kurtzman’s precisely targeted parody. Nonetheless, much of the intratextual play at work in Auto-

Destructo can be understood as Spiegelman referencing Kurtzman who in turn is referencing Goldberg with an attendant transformation of what the mainstream defines as innocent humour into a bleak and dissident dark comedy.

To draw together the comments on the two quotations described above, we can assert that this strain of dark humour (manifest, in these cases, through allusions to self-inflicted and slapstick violence) is in certain respects a characteristic of a Jewish comedic tradition (both Spiegelman and Kurtzman are Jewish) in which ‘laughing at difficulties’ provides a coping mechanism in the face of hardship (Avner Ziv 1993, ix). In this context, Frankl argues that in Auschwitz ‘[h]umor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation’ (Frankl 2004, 54). Humour serves, in Breakdowns, as a means to allude to madness, psychological anguish, and suicide in a manner which protects the individual from being

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overwhelmed by that which would otherwise be too terrible for comment. To make the point explicitly, the bleak humour in Breakdowns, observed in the examples of quotations and parodies mentioned above, serves to introduce themes of violence, depression, suicide and associated mental disturbance into familiar artistic signatures and processes.

A further illustrative example of the role of quotation in the volume can be found in the allusion to Crumb on the cover of the 2008 volume. Breakdowns does not only quote Warhol and Goldberg, but earlier generations of comic book creators such as McKay and Gould, and Spiegelman’s own contemporaries, specifically Robert Crumb. The latter

quotation, as well as reinforcing mad, compulsive, and mechanised repetition described in the images above, serves as a means to signify the counter-cultural edginess of the volume, manifest in the potent ‘zap’ that the content pledges to deliver. The cover of the 2008 reissue of Breakdowns alludes to Robert Crumb’s cover of Zap Comics #0 (a recovered issue

published between #3 and #4 which Crumb had previously thought lost). The cover of Zap Comics #0 shows a man ‘zapped’ by electricity. He has been thrown into the air and his muscles are contracted by the shock. This charge is channelled through his genitals rather than his head suggesting, perhaps, that the impact of this comic is more corporeal than intellectual. The cover of the 2008 reissue of Breakdowns shows a man who has slipped on a page from the comic in an allusion to a slapstick violence typical of a Looney Tunes cartoon (with a comic replacing the traditional banana peel) as well as Crumb’s Zap. The motion of the character tripping is a recurring symbol in Portrait. This ‘squiggle [...] viscerally expresses multiple and often contradictory ideas and emotions, such as concentration, contemplation, obsession, frustration, bewilderment, disorientation, creative insight,

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inspiration, mystery, ambiguity, incomprehensibility, and the opacity of meaning’

(McGlothlin 2011, 47). The threat and promise of the volume, the image suggests, is that it will expose the reader to an onslaught of emotional and formalist chaos, both of which are hallmarks of the underground genre which Crumb led. This onslaught promises to be so severe that, like Crumb’s cover for Zap Comics #0, the reader’s engagement with the comic causes (or is about to cause) not just mental but also actual physiological damage. The repetition and mechanised madness of the volume, it promises, will be irreparably impressed upon the reader.

These images can be found at sirrealcomix.mrainey.com (figure 12) and pbase.com (figure 13)

Fig. 12 and 13 The cover of Zap Comics #0 and Breakdowns both communicate a sense that the content will have a psychologically and physically damaging effect on the reader.

This theme of mental disturbance coincides with numerous acts of auto-citation and repetition, both of which, in these texts, also signify formal and emotional near-collapse. The remainder of this section shall, accordingly, concern the subject of auto-citation. Alongside references to extra-textual sources, Breakdowns contains many instances of auto-citation. Portrait references (or foreshadows, given that the volume begins with the most recently produced text) both the other works within the volume and Maus, in single panels, characters and themes. ‘Michelle’ resembles the face Spiegelman’s mother draws on the first page and drawings from other works in the volume are visible on an easel in first panel (Spiegelman 2008, 2). Portrait is, in other words, a thematic and visual collage of the other texts from Breakdowns. In one sequence of panels, for example, upon deciding on his metaphor for Maus, Artie greets an African-American man with a peace sign. The man is clearly unimpressed. In the next panel Artie, followed by a crowd of black mice, comments to

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himself: ‘I know bupkis [in Yiddish ‘nothing’ or, literally, ‘goat shit’] about being black in America!’ (Spiegelman 2008, 13). The use of hand gestures and the insistence on boundaries between the African-American and Jewish-American communities foreshadows A Real Dream: Hand Job and the story itself describes the genesis of Maus. Other references multiply and overlap. Page 19 reuses a panel from earlier in Portrait with alternate dialogue. The original sequence depicts a disturbing scene in which an older boy curses and spits on Artie’s mother. In the revised version the young Artie states that ‘[w]hen same size-panels are the basic units, one can rearrange, replace or reuse parts’ to which his mother replies ‘[s]equences can be edited like film footage!’(Spiegelman 2008, 19). This panel uses,

describes, and foreshadows the stylistic device used in Little Signs of Passion where portions of the text are apparently unconnected to the images, and also signposts the concept behind Boxes for the Salvation Army. Breakdowns can thus be regarded as a collage of intratextual auto-citation with multiple texts informing the content of a single panel. Technically, the collection collapses and cascades inwards in a collage of auto-citations which produces a confused, broken and (in Derridian terms) ‘mad’ register: chronology, timelines, and

narrative voice are radically destabilised. In a manner peculiarly reminiscent of the archetypal madman, Breakdowns thus incoherently ‘talks’ to itself.

To summarise the use of (auto)citation described above, Spiegelman’s exploration of madness in Breakdowns is thus not isolated to a single figure but built into the form of the text itself. The internal formal convolutions of Breakdowns resonate in a baroque fashion with the thematics of psychological introversion and the collapse of social and mechanical structures concomitantly evoked in the series. In this context, the following section will

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further detail the formal play at work in Breakdowns and examine the ways in which this postmodern approach to form contributes to both the tone of the individual texts and the overall theme of psychological disturbance. Initially the following argument will continue to focus on how Spiegelman connects form with madness. The remainder of the chapter, from section 2.4 onward, will then seek to answer the question of to what end by drawing these concepts together into a coherent model which can be understood using literary and mythic figurations of madness.