Matt Dube
On Madden and Queneau
Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story and Raymond
Queneau’s Exercises in Style share a project, to tell the same story 99
different ways and in the process to prompt their reader to be conscious of the
ways we respond to different styles. But Queneau writes only prose, and Madden
is a cartoonist, adept at juxtaposing word and visual image. It is at least in
part for this reason that their respective projects, in the end, reveal
different things.
Maybe the first significant difference is the way the
primarily visual language of comics, like movies, lacks a clear distinction
between first- and third-person narration; it’s possible, and Madden even does
it once here, to overfill the panels with narration from the speaker, but
seeing a graphic stand-in for Madden on the page complicates the way his story
works: we are watching him experience something that, by definition, we are not
experiencing. Suture, in the traditional
sense of feeling ourselves part of the story, is frustrated by the medium in
spite of longstanding claims about the way superhero comics, for example, allow
their readers to play out adolescent power fantasies. We watch him, and feel
for him, but never feel that we are him; for his story to summon from us an
emotional response (and Madden’s short stories often do), it is because he
makes of his central character a kind of everyman who we are like, but who is
not us.
Queneau’s prose, on the contrary, foregrounds his
character-as-speaker in a different way. He is not one of the three main characters,
but is just an observer, a Queneau. But since so many of the exercises
are interested in style (that is, after all, the title), the style must emanate
from somewhere, some writer. So Queneau’s book, despite the passivity of its
speaker, becomes an exploration of the same, of his inner resources. What
distinguishes one story from another in Queneau’s book is something that is
never seen; their identity emanates from outside the story, whereas for Madden,
everything that matters must be on the page, a kind of locked door of narrative
mystery.
Another difference between the two books is the size of
their frames: Queneau’s exercises are all short, but beyond that, some are
really short, some are a little longer, and there’s some variety. But Madden,
in maybe 90 of his 99 exercises, limits himself to using eight panels; almost
always, the page he’s drawn pivots on the slightly right-of-center panel that
says, “It’s 1:15,” and nearly all the stories end with the identical phrase,
“What the hell was I looking for, anyway?” It’s hard to say if this is a limit
on Madden or not, but he uses it as a tool that Queneau doesn’t have, plays the
forced punctuation of the page end in different keys: amused frustration,
existential longing, self-denigrating humor, etc. It makes Madden’s exercise
more formally rigorous than Queneau; where Queneau chooses a style, he can
write till he’s done what he needs to do in that style, then stop. Madden, too,
chooses a style, but has, in most cases, only eight panels to demonstrate that
style.
I don’t mean to suggest that Madden’s book is more
accomplished because it engages an additional constraint. Queneau’s long march
of exercises is cumulative in a way Madden’s isn’t; we see the story develop,
become fuller and more tantalizing. Also, I felt like there were things Queneau
had left out, additional exercises I was almost motivated to add, a feeling I
never had reading Madden’s book. His exercises are more self-contained, and
don’t comment on one another to change the way we read an earlier exercise as
sometimes happens in Queneau’s book. Even when Madden’s linework looks outside
his story to other cartoonists (R. Crumb, Herge, George Herriman), the
particular exercise remains hermetic, never changing the stakes of the original
story (as Queneau does, for example in his “West Indian” where the patois
changes the locale and makes it feel more dangerous) or commenting on the
original. Despite the inspiration Madden takes from Queneau, the two books
offer us very different sets of pleasures. I think we should be thankful for
that, but also surprised.
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