Sarnath Banerjee’s Portrait of the Comics Artist as a Collector by Ernesto Priego
the goal is to actually use the pen and ink to create comic book pages. (When found, the pen will remain unused: “What if I break the nib. The pen rots away along with several other objects, stashed in my red room, rare LPs of favourite musicians, who I cannot listen for the fear of damaging the records” (2006:3). This dilemma is indeed well known in comics.) In Banerjee’s single-panel page (a splash panel I suppose) a quotation by Jean Baudrillard from his essay “The System of Collecting” (1994:7-24) describes the state of constant flux of the collector, who becomes weightless in a universe of tangible objects. The caption containing Baudrillard’s lines is not narrative, since it is in fact an extraneous quote which serves as an excuse to illustrate the merging of practice and theory, life and art in a comic book page. These lines of theory are noticeably out of place in a fictional comic book page, and yet they are literally both mise en cadre and mise en page (Samson and Peeters 2010; see also Bartual 2010). Furthermore, one cannot resist saying that in the most literal sense this mise en page is also a mise en abyme. Banerjee’s one-panel page is an interruption in Corridor’s fictional narrative progress. The reader understands the action takes place in the realm of the imaginary (the theoretical in fact) and not the “reality” of the diegetic universe, in which the protagonist has set out to find his tools. Resembling the moment in which the walker stops or slows down to see him/herself reflected on a mirror or window, the page is a pause, a parenthesis, where the paper of the page, the page itself understood as a “technical unit” (Groensteen 2007) and the frame containing the images and words the reader
50
sees work jointly as an exercise of media-specificity, where the book as fiction becomes an artist’s sketchbook or journal. The protagonist falls in this time-space continuum after getting lost amongst the streets and crowds of Delhi. The constant waves of vehicle and human traffic are intoxicating, and the journey (the descent) becomes a trip. The body of Banerjee’s artist collector (the man in the crowd) suddenly finds himself drifting in space, apparently weightless (defying the gravity of the physical world), and yet falling in a whirlwind that includes books, records, boxing gloves, a flask, a boot, a film reel, a poster, a skateboard, an unplugged radio, a chess knight. The purposeful flânerie of an author in search of his creative tools sets the physicality of the
Banerjee, S. (2006) Corridor. A Graphic Novel (Delhi: Penguin Books India, 7)
O
human body in ontological equivalence with other objects invested with a value (an aura?) recognisable by a community of collectors. The collector’s “fall” is the subjection to a higher power (like
n this page from Corridor, (2006) Indian graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee expresses the state
gravity or magnetism), an expression of the drifting , fluctuating identity of people and things. In a
of existential drift of his character, a comic book artist in search of “a seemingly innocent-
world defined by uncertainty, collecting both enhances and offers the momentary relief of [self ]pres-
looking object”, the perfect pen and ink. These tools are essential for him and are very hard to find
ervation. It is as if Banerjee had wanted to redraw Benjamin’s interpretation of Klee’s Angelus Novus.
in the city where he lives: the artist’s journey is portrayed almost like an epic descent into the pur-
And indeed, “collectors are physiognomists in the world of objects,” as Benjamin wrote in 1931
gatorio of urban Delhi. Banerjee’s protagonist literally falls into the centripetal force of the collector’s ambition to first
(1982:59-67). Collecting as the practice of “physiognomy” (from the Greek physis; ‘nature’, and gnomon; ‘judge’ or ‘interpreter’) implies then a conscious interpretive act which is physical in itself. It is
find, and then to possess, the coveted objects. Acquiring the pen is not an end in itself, though, since
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012
51