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Proust Goes Graphic by Stuart Mitchner
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arcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way: A Graphic Novel (Liveright/Norton $26.95) may be the most luxurious book of its kind. Picture a 224-page landmark amid a perfect storm of classic graphics that includes R. Crumb’s Kafka, Jacques Fernandez’s illustrated edition of Camus’s The Stranger, a graphic Odyssey, a graphic Macbeth, but nothing comparable to Stéphane Huet’s daring adaptation of a complex work that could have been pitched with the old slogan, “They said it couldn’t be done!” When critics and Proustians grumbled, Huet countered with statements of support from the Society of Friends of Marcel Proust and from the holder of Proust’s literary rights, the author’s greatgrandniece Nathalie Mauriac. He also has a respected translator in Arthur Goldhammer, whose more than 125 translations include numerous scholarly works, most notably Thomas Piketty’s best-seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
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A DRAMATIC DEPARTURE
CLASSIC BEGINNINGS
Probably the most explicit preview of the graphic phenomenon came in 1978 with Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, which was presented as “a graphic novel.” In 1986 the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale appeared, an even more dramatic departure from the standard comicbook subject matter. While both volumes of Maus eventually attracted a wide, appreciative audience, booksellers found it a challenge to categorize and Spiegelman himself was slow to accept the term “graphic novel,” perhaps because he was an admirer of Lynd Ward, a pioneer of the novel of images, with six books released between 1929 and 1937. Thus Spiegelman was an obvious choice to edit the Library of America’s 2-volume set Lynd Ward:Six Novels in Woodcuts.
For this writer, however, it all began with a humble 10-cent comic printed on the same cheap funky newsprint-fragrant paper as Donald Duck, Little Lulu, and Superman. My father brought back the first issues of Classic Comics from New York along with other special treats from the magic city of automats and skyscrapers. He liked to produce each issue as if by magic, waving his wand, crying, “Abracadabra!” whereupon I’d look under a chair cushion or the living room rug and find a Classic Comic of Moby Dick or The Three Musketeers. No doubt this was “messing with the classics” and then some, but the publisher’s heart was in the right place even if the sales pitch was a bit crass (“the greatest stories ever written” by “the world’s immortal authors”). For an impressionable sixyear-old already very much at home with comics, it was both educational (with the inclusion of “interesting highlights” in the life of each author)
PRINCETON MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2016
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