Guttersniper

Reading Jar of Fools I kept wondering what these characters were struggling for. Although Ernie is ostensibly trying not to get kicked out of his apartment, being jobless and penniless, he doesn’t really seem to concerned. Similarly, Al seems so disconnected from reality that the dangers of being homeless and foodless. On the other hand, the Conman is overwhelmed by concerns for his everyday survival and the ability to put food in his daughter’s mouth. Ernie’s main motivation seems to be trying to get over his brother, and just when that seems impossible, Esther shows up to give him some sort of strange closure. Al’s motivations seem mostly concerned with trying to keep people convinced that he is not old and useless. This is the main reason that he engages the little girl in passing on his magic, it keeps him valuable and provides him with a new pupil who can actually help since he cannot lift Ernie out of his despair. 

The climax addresses really only the problems of the little girl, she rides away with Esther bound for her mother, ensuring that either Esther or her mother will take care of her. However, for the two magicians, they walk away still being irrelevant, jobless, and homeless. Are we supposed to regard them as successful in their quests? Al began to pass on his knowledge of magic and passed on the talisman of his hat and Ernie seems to have dispelled the ghost of his deceased brother and has reconciled with Esther even though she is not physically with him at that moment. The ending is not totally a fairytale ending, they don’t become a nuclear family with Ernie and Esther as loving parent with a loving child and Al as the benevolent yet cranky grandfather figure. But there is some closure, we feel as if we’ve made it through to the end of a transition period. The ending does stage itself as a beginning, the characters have cast of the burdens of their past while reconnecting with their old loves. The only character left out is the conman. While we never see him as a truly viscous criminal, it seems that the book does pass judgement on him as a deceiver and unworthy of his daughters companionship. And while he is the only character who makes a truly heroic sacrifice, he must make that sacrifice because his actions have cornered him. 

Not knowing where the characters will go on from here, they have all cast off what was imprisoning them (symbolized by Esther’s hair cut and Al’s giving away of his hat). And while Ernie and Al have nowhere to go, perhaps it is faith in their magic that allows us to be happy as they walk of together, reunited again. However, the tone of Esther and the girl’s departure is not as uplifting, for even if she finds a loving and caring home with her mother, the trauma of her father being taken by the police and likely into jail won’t just leave here alone. One also wonders will Esther will go since she seemed defined mostly by her relationship to Ernie, meaning that she will probably reunite with him as well at some point.

As I began reading The Rabbi’s Cat, I wasn’t quite sure what sort of story I was reading. Is it a children’s tale? Is it a book about religion? Is it a light-hearted tale about a talking cat? 

One of my first inclinations was to categorize the book as an allegory, and yet when the Rabbi says that Jews don’t use allegories, they use analogies, I began to wonder anew what this book was. An analogy? The Rabbi’s Cat reminded me of a Simpson’s episode; where the conflict introduced at the beginning has nothing to do with what the rest of the episode/book is about. At first I thought, “ok, this is a book about a talking cat.” Then it turned into a dialectical discussion of Judaism. Then the cat looses its ability to speak, so I decided that it wasn’t a book about a talking cat. However, the talking animals did place the book pretty firmly in the realm of fables. OED’s definition of a fable seems quite fitting:

A short story devised to convey some useful lesson; esp. one in which animals or inanimate things are the speakers or actors; an apologue. 

While The Rabbi’s Cat veers away from its preoccupation with discussions of religion for most of the book, it ends with a discussion of religion. If it is a fable, it is difficult to say what message or “useful lesson” it is trying to convey, unless the lesson is that we can’t know why people need religion. What is interesting to me is that it to Sfar the entire book to get to this point. The didactic air of children’s book does seem to exist in this book somewhere beneath the surface, and emerges most strongly in the dialectics of the beginning. Did Sfar set out to write a book about religion that veered away only to end up there again? Or did he set out to write a book about a cat that turned into a discussion of religion? In class, many people drew connections between religious and romantic devotion, which are two themes that it seems plausible to divide the book into. However, it is not a romance, it is not a story about falling in love. It is a story, or rather two stories about devotion; about love unrequited. The cat’s affections are never returned by the daughter, nor does the Rabbi ever witness any miracles from God. Even the nephew’s love for the Catholic singer is unrequited. 

Going back to the fable, this story is not one with the strongest moral message, but it does discuss morals a lot. However, as said before it arrives at no final argument. It only arrives at the fact that we don’t know why we are devoted to certain things. And if the cat’s love is analogous to the Rabbi’s religion, then what the Rabbi says about religion in the final page also applies to love. We can’t know why we need to love people and it often seems that we’d be just as happy not bothering at all.

“Well, on the most basic level, clarity is of paramount importance. There may be certain instances where you want the reader to work more and piece something together, but in general he or she should be able to absorb the story easily and with little effort.”

-Jason Lutes on his work

I got through Jar of Fools quickly.  I wasn’t trying to rush through it, I was plowing through a book the way you do when you are always hungry for the next page.  I couldn’t stop turning the pages.  At the end, though, there unfortunately was a final page.  After letting the experience settle, turning over the emotion slowly coagulating in my brain, I started to consider why this particular graphic novel (or, here, picture story) was so readily digestible.  I attributed it at first to the gripping story.  I figured I just liked the narrative content a lot more than I liked other things we have read.  I was ready to leave it at that as I am often—to steal Alison Bechdel’s words—a “haphazard scholar.”

However, sitting down to write this post I decided to see what I could find about Lutes and Jar of Fools on the internet.  I came across an interview he gave to comicsbulletin.com in which he constantly stresses the importance of accessibility in creating narratives with pictures (comics, graphic novels, picture stories, whatever you want to call them).  To achieve accessibility Lutes does “things like never having more than a sentence or two in a word balloon, so it can be easily absorbed by the reader. In general, mainstream comics pack way too many words on the page, which hinders the comics reading process. The writers, for the most part, don’t understand how comics work and don’t trust the pictures to tell their part of the story. The end result is poor flow and less engagement on the part of the reader.”  He also “stage[s] most conversations from eye level, and pay careful attention to the body language and facial expressions of those involved. Mainstream artists tend to overuse dramatic or skewed “camera” angles, unconscious of the fact that how you frame a shot is an inflection in itself, and can undermine what’s being conveyed through the character interaction.”

Carrying these thoughts in my mind I skimmed back through Jar of Fools and was struck by how all of these incredibly simple panel add up to such a thick emotional response.  Each panel is straightforward, there are no curveballs here.  You get what you see.  However, the real power of the story does not rest on the page, it rests within the reader.  The panels, pages, and chapters add discrete portions of weight—and the reader cruises through the work with such ease (because the medium is so deftly controlled)—that recognition of personal involvement does not occur until late in the book.  That’s how it worked for me at least.  I didn’t think I particularly cared for anyone in the story until Ernie was considering mirroring this brother’s suicide.  From then on I had intense sympathy for all of the Untouchables the narrative contains.

-

The interview I reference is here:

http://www.comicsbulletin.com/smallpress/98144619120449.htm

Why was this book focused around characters who have “old-fashioned jobs,” that are reminiscent of another time? A con-man, three magicians…

Jar of Fools seems to be about the truth and deception, it seems to be about the show of life. And con-men and magicians make their living based on deception and tricks. Everyone in the book is putting on a show, from Lender’s many different guises he assumes to con people, to the show that Al and Ernie have to put on as magicians in order to make a living.

Al’s brother, Howard, even had to put on a show in order to end his own life without making it seem like he purposefully took his own life; it was an accident, that was the scene he had set up.

Everyone in the book is being fooled, the people Lender cons, the people who enjoy Al and Ernie’s magic tricks, the workers from the home who are constantly being fooled by Al, the workers at the cafe where Lender and his daughter steal a cash register, etc.

But the presentation is always good, so people are fooled. What makes people want to go see magic tricks if they know it is a trick? Because they want to be tricked, they want to believe in it for a little. Ernie explains to Claire  the importance of the presentation of a trick. He says what’s actually magical is not the trick, “but what it makes possible in people” (73).

Obviously, loads of people are being deceived by the main characters in the book, but as Lender says to Al in a fight they have, “[people] sometimes don’t want to know the truth”(84). They want an easier story to swallow, whether it’s the story of a card trick that lets them believe in magic for a while, or the story of a heart broken man who needs a cup of coffee. Those stories are easier to understand than the inner workings of a card trick or the fact that a man and his daughter are living under a bridge and need food. Deception is a big part of life.

But other people aren’t the only ones being deceived. Often times the deceiver’s are being deceived as well. Lender is tricking himself into thinking that he is providing a good life for his daughter.  As he says himself, “I do have some dignity” (85). Dignity enough to lie to himself because he himself doesn’t want to hear the truth; that he isn’t providing the kind of life his daughter needs.

Al provides Lender with a way out, though, when he says referring to Lender’s skill as a con-man, “I guess maybe that’s what you were dealt. But sometimes cards can be traded in and an Ace, y’know, an Ace is the bridge between a deuce and a king” (85).

From that one speech, we suddenly see Lender come up with a plan, a plan that seems to be his last deception. Lender sets up the scheme to steal the cash register, but seems to set himself up, “forgetting” it was the day the cops checked for homeless people under the bridge,  so that Claire could go to her mother and maybe live a better life. He finally stopped deceiving himself. It seems clear that it was his last con because on pg. 126 his face looks rather sad and depressed despite his words, “Things’re lookin’ up pumpkin.”

This book speaks to the heart of Shakespeare’s quote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

I’d like to think about how the unsolved/unresolved “mysteries” mentioned below function for Lutes and his characters. I suppose there are two kinds of mysteries in the text. The first, are mysteries for both reader and character…the nature of the relationship between Esther and Ernie’s brother, and the circumstances surrounding his death and the recovery of the straight jacket. The reader however, is left wondering about these explicit mysteries and about another sort of overarching mystery—what the world of these characters looked like before the fall, and what it looks like after the last page of the book. These are mysteries only for the reader. We never get to see the magicians showered, shaved and onstage, but presume they were once successful. As Al says on page 93, “As you an’ I both know it ain’t a magicians world anymore. Unless you’re fucking David Copperfield, making the Eiffel Tower disappear on T.V.” One wonders what things looked like when it was a magician’s world. We glimpse this world through the antique shell deck, the shine of the top hat, the poster of Ernie’s brother on the back of the door. Likewise, we aren’t provided a resolution. We never learn the provenance of the straight jacket in which Ernie’s brother purportedly drowned. We don’t know whether Ernie and Esther are reunited, or whether Claire joins her mother in the south. Somehow I appreciate this. There is room for imagining what is left unsettled. Lutes seems to be a bit of a magician himself. His decision to conceal the circumstances that lead to current circumstances is a bit like a magician’s vow never to reveal his tricks.

It isn’t the “trick” that ought to do it for us anyway, as Ernie explains to Claire. “They know. They give in. It’s a little surrender. A moment of belief.” “In what,” Claire asks. “I don’t know, anything. Anything other than what they know, or what they think they know. That’s the magic. Not the trick itself, but what it makes possible in people. Or what it used to make possible anyway.” Despite what Ernie says about the breakdown in the world’s tolerance for or appreciation of “magic,” magic still functions in their world, perhaps in less predictable ways. Esther, who was conned by Nathan, reappears in the middle of the night, and they reconcile. A little girl is able to con a con man, to make the Queen of hearts appear and her dad proud. An old man is able to escape the metaphorical straight jacket of an institution. For the reader, these moments function as “moments of belief.” The difference, perhaps, between the magician’s world and the world of the story, is that the magicians aren’t always in on the trick; sometimes they are the brunt of the trick. The magic is there, but somehow unbridled.  We can’t simply walk into a theater to get our fix of magic. We have to seek it in the world, to work to find it.  Instead of a handkerchief really being a dove, a swindler is really a father, trying to support a little girl; a cash register becomes a decoy to allow for the escape of a ragtag group of friends. 

There is some kind of calm in the misery and mystery. As Ernie talks into the tape recorder he says, “Looking out at the gray and brick, the darkened windows and empty streets…It started to rain and you know, it seemed so miserable, the picture of misery, but it wasn’t so bad. The birds, the sky, the moist and crumbling cement…I understood them better, I think. Or if I didn’t, at least I felt more at peace with my lack of understanding.” Similarly Al recognizes the end of the road as the beginning. When the two are left alone after the departure of Nathan, Claire and Esther Al says, “This is how it begins.” “Begins?” asks Ernie.” “You, me, everything. Hatless an’ rootless an’ at the bottom of the world. Let’s get out from under this permanent shadow we been livin’ in once an’ for all.” Like the queen, their humanity, their resilience reappears and reappears despite all odds. 

Jason Lutes has a real patience in allowing his story to build up.  I admired his willingness to allow a plot to come together slowly, and to allow large portions of his book to take place without giving us all the information.  I wouldn’t say that ‘Jar of Fools’ is a ‘mystery’.  But I felt that I was reading one.  The mystery of his brother’s death does eventually take a large place in the story—there is that stretch in part two where Ernie even strolls around looking for evidence and trying to find the diving suit.  That detective work made me suspect that Ernie would eventually follow the evidence to some sort of answer or explanation…But he doesn’t, exactly.  The answer he reaches for himself comes through his conversation with Esther, not the diving suit.  The mystery, I suppose, comes from the fact that all five characters (and Ernie’s brother) are very obviously mysterious—not only does Lutes make conscious choices to make this the case (like allowing us glimpses into the strange background of Ernie and Esther’s relationship), but he simply does not include much in the way of exposition. That’s not a particularly thorough way of communicating what I mean, but I don’t know much there is to say about that other than the fact that the book is “mysterious”.

The drawings are terrific.  They rely on simple outlines for most of the characters—which reminded me to a certain extent of Tintin, which is given a pretty funny homage on page 77.  But Lutes gives his environments a detailed grittiness that is in contrast to his people, who are drawn simply and are mostly very pretty in their own ways.  (Pretty, or handsome, in the most c0nventional sense—not that this is a negative.)  I love the way Al was drawn, and conceived.  On page 59, in particular, his frazzled look after pulling a remarkable escape—”Whattya think I *huff* am—seventeen?”—hits the note perfectly.   There are certain things Lutes seems to love drawing in his characters—like bushy eyebrows and unshaven bristles.

For what it is, I would have liked for ‘Jar of Fools’ to have filled out a bit more by its conclusion.  There is so much left unresolved, and to an extent I felt as if Lutes was ending the novel just as he had begun to pull back some of the shadows over his characters.  I do not necessarily think that there was a resolution to Ernie’s agony over his brother’s death, either, but it would be rather banal to offer a resolution in any case.  ‘Jar of Fools’ may be 142 pages, but it is extremely short in its way.  It has the feeling of a short story, and a brief glimpse into the lives of some very interesting characters which is intentionally cut short, just as the relationship between the five is cut short by the arrival of the police and the leaving of Esther and Claire.  Lutes obviously intended it that way, but I felt as if, had he chose to do so, he could have spun a far longer story and sustained my interest.  I plan on checking out ‘Berlin’ over break.

One more thing I thought about relating to The Rabbi’s Cat after class today.

I’m really interested in this idea of viewing humanity through the cat’s eyes, and how it gives us, the readers, a different perspective.  There’s a certain honesty that’s achieved from the bluntness of the cat’s narration.  But this blunt honesty is performed by another character in the book, one we barely touched on, that is, the cousin El Rebibo.

When reading this part of the book, I was startled by the rabbi’s acceptance of Rebibo’s lifestyle.  Although he is immediately shocked to see his wonderful cousin singing on the street dressed as an Arab, the rabbi ends up accepting Rebibo’s lifestyle, which is shocking considering how critical he was about Paris lifestyle earlier in the chapter.  On page 24, Rebibo in detail describes his unkosher life,

No, I’m sorry. Let me put it this way, man to man: I’m madly in love with her, but since she’s a singer she’s banging half of Paris in addition to me.  So when she doesn’t come home at night I get drunk and if it goes on much longer I’ll end up blowing my brains out.

The rabbi handles this news quite calmly.  “So there hasn’t really been any talk of marriage yet, right?” he replies.  Eventually, it is only Rebibo that causes the rabbi to enjoy Paris.  The two connect by playing music together, and auditioning at Ventura’s.  Although their duet is unsuccessful, Rebibo is able to secure a performance in the show for his solo act.  After this, the rabbi is finally able to meet his son-in-law’s family.

But why Rebibo?  I think its because he’s one of the few people to be honest with the rabbi, in a similar way to the cat.  On the trip to Paris, the rabbi’s daughter and son-in-law seem to constantly hide things from the rabbi.  Perhaps its because they’re frustrated with his complaining, but I think treating the rabbi like a crazy old-fashioned man makes the situation worse.  The rabbi needs bluntness to understand, something he receives only from

Overall, I was just shocked by the contrasting character of the rabbi from the beginning of this last chapter of the book to the end.  He’s just so frustrating in the beginning of the book that the contrast of his peacefulness by the end of the book is so refreshing.  The rabbi’s conversation with his son-in-law’s father is one of my favorite scenes of the book.  He just seems so accepting about religion, rather than imposing about it.  He doesn’t lecture the father for his lack of religion, or not supporting his son’s search for God.  The rabbi just lends advice casually, and wisely, helping this total stranger understand his son.

“The truth is, you go where people will accept you.” (p139)

For anyone doing creative projects, I’ve found this video tutorial by Steve Hamaker to be very useful. Hamaker is the guy going through and coloring all of Jeff Smith’s Bone, which he uses as the basis of this tutorial. The intro sequence is irritating but I promise it gets better.

He uses Photoshop here, but all of this can also be done with the free, open source image editor, GIMP.

I really enjoyed ‘The Rabbi’s Cat’.  Along with ‘Epileptic’, it may be my favorite graphic novel we’ve read this semester.  We only spoke briefly in class about the significance of the setting, but 1930s Algeria is an especially interesting place to set a modern dialogue about religion, and not only because it’s ‘exotic’ (though that is absolutely part of the entertainment).  I suspect that Sfar put quite a bit of research into his recreation of the environments.  Though he only touches on the various cultural clashes that occur daily, when he does, it’s very engaging.  The Jewish rabbinical student who makes sure to attend the arab whorehouse, for example.  There is also something interesting and retrograde about the fact that, though they are still in conflict, there is a form of bond between the native arabs and jews in relation to the French colonialists—”We don’t serve arabs or jews here.”  Today it seems that jewish culture is considered to be inextricably Western.  Israel, for example, is often touted by anti-Israel speakers as a sort of bastion of Western imperialism, even, in the Middle East.  And there is an element of truth, I think, in the idea that our support of Israel (whether right or wrong) stems partially from an idea of Western solidarity.  That is something that is missing in the world of ‘The Rabbi’s Cat’, where a Rabbi and a Muslim friend can laugh at the French exam given by a colonizer.  (Not to say that those cross-religious relationships don’t still exist in the middle east, but the colonial dynamic does create something different.)  Sfar touches on the Western conception of Judaism as a Western religion when the Rabbi’s nephew Rebibo (El Rebibo!) says that in France “to play a Jew you have to have a Polish accent…Playing a North African Jew just doesn’t work, people aren’t interested, it’s too complicated for them.”  For alot of readers, including me, I suspect that this is particularly why this story of North African Jews is so interesting, because it is at some level challenging to the popular conception.

A couple side notes about the art—we spoke today about the Rabbi and his cat and Malka and his lion as counterpart pairs, and I like how the Rabbi and the cat share the same very simple, undetailed art style while the two are together while Malka and the lion stand out as equally complex.  I also noticed that, particularly on the bottom left of page 79, Zlabya’s fiance looks suspiciously similar to the author’s photo on the back cover.  The ears, the hair, the eyes and the nose are all identical.  I wonder if he used himself as a model for the drawing…  Or even perhaps for the character to some extent…  Not that one could really know from his fairly limited role.

The scenario of Rebibo performing in an Arab caricature is interesting.  Black minstrel performers are often criticized in retrospect for exploiting a negative image of their race in order to make money.  The flipside, of course, is that minstrelsy was one of the few ways for black performers to truly become successful in entertainment (alongside whites in blackface).  For Rebibo to imitate another’s racial stereotype though, seems akin to performing in blackface—though in this case, he too belongs to a different suppressed minority.  Still, while he is sympathetic, the act is wrong…  And much more wrong than it would be were he imitating a Jewish stereotype.  The Rabbi, though, is willing to condone it.  I wonder if his character would make the same decision were it North African Jews who were being mocked.

I loved the ending.  The Rabbi admits he doesn’t know, but smilingly continues with the service.  The entire book has been about exploring questions like these—”If we can be happy without respecting the Torah, why should we exhaust ourselves to apply all these precepts that make life so complicated?” (And in Judaism there is no concept of penance for heaven and hell as there is in Christianity)  I do not believe the Rabbi is continuing because he realizes it’s a sham but he enjoys it at some level, which I suppose could be suggested.  I believe Sfar is suggesting that while asking these questions is important, knowing the answers or not knowing them does not necessarily discount the importance of religion to people, or make it meaningless.  Religion does not have to be about knowing all the answers, and I think that this is something which many evangelicals and extremists of all stripes could take to heart.  So could those who would simply discount religion for this reason.