Pure Thought on Paper

Between 1918 and 1920, The Little Review serialized James Joyce’s Ulysses, a work so extraordinary, so experimental, and so exacting in its efforts to render the flow and form of human experience that in literary circles it gained an incandescent notoriety, not only for its capturing of the texture of perception and memory over the course of a single day but also because the book was so fabulously dirty. “God knows I have no objection whatsoever to so-called frankness in novels,” Vladimir Nabokov offered in his college lectures on Ulysses—though he did lightly tweak Joyce for implying that ordinary citizens think about sex as much as does poor Leopold Bloom. Nabokov also criticized Joyce for stressing language too much in his depiction of human consciousness, as “man thinks not always in words but also in images.” Such a parry might seem odd to level at a writer, especially by a writer, and particularly at one who could paint pictures with phonemes as could Joyce. But Nabokov was a closet comics fan: he owned an original drawing by Saul Steinberg, and he once idly mused in the presence of the scholar Alfred Appel Jr. that Dennis the Menace might be illegitimate. As a college professor, he implored his students to make the effort to see in their mind’s eye the details of a book, and also, if necessary, to draw them, e.g., his serviceably naive sketch of Anna Karenina’s tennis outfit or his doodled floor plans of some novels’ settings. This is canny advice for both readers and writers, though it’s worrying to think that today’s librarians might just thank him for helping along “reluctant readers.”

The Belgian graphic artist Olivier Schrauwen’s Sunday is not a book for reluctant readers. Over the years Schrauwen wrote and drew the work, it was, in my weirdo orbit of experimental cartoonists, especially Charles Burns and Richard McGuire, the subject of discussion and esteem. The Berlin-based publisher Colorama serialized the graphic novel in four installments, which have now been collected in a single volume, and while not, unfortunately, fabulously dirty, it does—somewhat like Ulysses—attempt to capture the thoughts, experiences, memories, musings, and mania of one man over the minutes and seconds of a single day, along with, somehow, all of its ineffably linked people, places, and things. Through its combination of words, images, typography, color, and texture, coincidence, correspondence, and connection, it so firmly impresses the sheer peculiarity and enchantment and tragedy of human experience on the printed page that it took my breath away. The reader will also be glad to learn it is fun and extremely funny (and, fortunately, also just a little bit dirty).

The story itself is simple, almost the Odyssey turned inside out: a thirty-five-year-old Belgian typographer named Thibault Schrauwen—perhaps as ordinary a citizen as a Belgian protagonist can hope to be—awakens at 8:15 on a Sunday morning in early autumn 2017 and passes the entire day within his apartment complex while awaiting the return of his girlfriend, Migali, from her several-week trip to Gambia. As the clock ticks, he ruminates, recalls shreds of a drunken revel with a wild alcoholic friend named Rik, and rewatches a pretentious art school film he made over fifteen years earlier with Rik and Migali—and another girl, Nora, whom he briefly dated and whom he decides, after drinking most of the alcohol from a gift basket he’s purchased for his father, he is actually in love with. He falls into a sort of obsessive mania, tracking down Nora’s Instagram account and convincing himself that he’s also somehow telepathically connected to her.

Which, in fact, he appears to be. Or perhaps not, because threaded throughout are shifts in time and location, and digressions on beliefs, animals, music, ideas, sounds, themes, language, food—really, everything—which seem at first to be the imaginings of Thibault but, as the story unfolds and folds in and out and around itself, turn out to be almost certainly “real” and represent Schrauwen’s (Olivier’s, not Thibault’s) ideas of causation, coincidence, and synchronicity. All of it repeats and builds in intensity as it forms a poetic-musical fabric of time, space, sensation, and thought, linking the characters’ impulses, memories, words, and actions, starting softly but ending in a crescendo that feels sometimes like a dream and sometimes completely real; I couldn’t ever decide.

If you’re confused, we can go back to the book’s beginning. Here, an affably Nabokovian introduction from the cartoonist Olivier frames the book as his valiant attempt to recreate a single, apparently meaningless day, as remembered and reported to him by his cousin Thibault:

Hello, my name is O. Schrauwen, graphic author. Over the last decade, I have devoted myself to documenting the lives of some of my relatives. With this in mind, I got talking to my cousin Thibault Schrauwen about six years ago. He spoke with great displeasure about “wasted days.” Days, filled with procrastination, aimlessness and boredom, in which he failed to do anything edifying. His account intrigued me and immediately seemed a suitable subject for a new graphic novel. I asked him if he was interested in doing something with this rather negative subject, the wasted day. I was convinced that through the wonders of the comic medium we could make something beautiful out of it. He reluctantly agreed.

Thus at the very outset Schrauwen dusts aside any notion that the book is fictional; the object in your lap is as much a real part of the story as the story itself, and it inhabits your world, not a made-up one—just as Humbert Humbert’s manuscript of Lolita does. Olivier even appears in Sunday’s pages as a character, first as an actor in the art school film, then again midway, interviewing a sunglassed Thibault (who seems nothing like the Thibault we’ve come to know in Olivier’s drawings), and finally at its end, as part of a Felliniesque midnight gathering of all the book’s characters, who have arrived outside of Thibault’s apartment to surprise him in the first few seconds of his thirty-sixth birthday. The importance of this day (Monday) has previously been only grudgingly alluded to amid Thibault’s increasingly drunken self-loathing, a fact he is apparently unwilling to face, if not actually the unconscious cause of his inebriation (since who hasn’t had the horrible feeling that none of one’s friends care enough to observe one’s birthday?).¹

I should clarify that the exuberance with which Schrauwen channels thought, or what academics now call “interiority”—and specifically American English interiority, in which Schrauwen composed the book—is as rich, pink, and flowing as frosting from a pastry bag, having nothing in common with the deliberate stiltedness of his introduction. There are probably as many fucks in this book as there are in the average contemporary conversation (I’d estimate several hundred), and I don’t want to imply that what is essentially an extremely ostentatious undertaking comes off as pretentious. On every page the reader will cringingly recognize him- or herself² in the painfully real and revealing raw thoughts of Thibault:

Maybe I can add some emojis? Maybe even change the font…
pfff
That won’t change much if the content isn’t there
Fuck you, Antoine
Yuck
Perhaps I oughtta jerk off again
That’ll relax me

In this tone it evokes a feeling congruent with (but absolutely not in the style of) Karl Ove Knausgaard’s very European as-truthfully-as-he-can-tell-it self-examination in My Struggle, or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov—or, perhaps most properly, the unnamed protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (in Nabokov’s translation, Memoirs from a Mousehole; the word chthonic plays a major part in Sunday, as does the life of one specific rodent).

Which brings up an important structural point: the anchor of this book is not, as in most comics, a grid of images with applied text but an ongoing spine of text connecting short bursts of Thibault’s thoughts set along the top of every panel; the images either converge or wildly diverge therefrom as memories, imagined scenarios, or events transpiring simultaneously, such as in the earliest section when Thibault readies his bath while his neighbor breakfasts and, in Thibault’s memory, dim recollections of the drunken night with Rik slowly come into focus. Similar to the seemingly simple innovation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here (2014), in which images are layered on top of one another—connecting not only on x- or y-axis (left/right and up/down) but also on the z- (in/out)—Schrauwen’s text spine opens up possibilities heretofore unimaginable. The “wonders of the comic medium” Schrauwen refers to in his opening words are indeed dramatically realized. In what other medium could one simultaneously inhabit the mind of a character and “see” both his memories and imaginings, as well as the pursuit of a mouse by a cat across the apartment roof while his girlfriend walks the streets of Gambia, all easily understood without being disorienting or, worse, suffering the airlessness of technical experimentation without human grounding? Most split-screen experiments in film feel forced, but comics—endemically split-screen themselves—are built from a grid of images subdivided and squared by the very shape of the page itself, and allow such experiments to easily flow, especially as the images bend and shift effortlessly from panel to panel. Special effects, schmecial effects. This is pure thought on paper.³

It’s probably clear by now that I’m wildly admiring, even envious of Schrauwen’s work. Comics are a living language, and we cartoonists steal from one another like rats. Should word balloons sit on top of the image or behind it? Should eyes be dots or lidded scallops? Should color be local or mnemonic? Should I kill myself? These are questions we seek answers to in our own work and in the work of others. Unfortunately, it’s the instinctual balance of all of cartooning’s component parts, not just one trick, that constitutes an artist’s power. Schrauwen’s oeuvre—from his 2011 collection The Man Who Grew His Beard to 2014’s Arsène Schrauwen (about another supposed relative of Schrauwen’s, his grandfather) through several other books to now—demonstrates an artist carefully testing his work against the cold experience of reality, and seemingly incessantly asking, Does this work? Does this feel right?

It is a universal rule of all real literature that writers should create characters who are smarter than themselves, lest their stories spiral into irony and derision.⁴ Unlike the characters in most graphic novels, which still carry the taint of the form’s commercial origins, Schrauwen’s feel real, and he affords them great sympathy and expansiveness of mind and heart. He avoids the simplistic cant and caricature of many cartoonist contemporaries (I’m including myself here), producing characters who act and move like living, breathing people on the page.

Or, in electoral parlance, they seem like the kind of folks you might want to have a beer with. Spoiler: there are many beers had in this book. Not only by Thibault but especially by his old friend Rik, who is a Dostoevskian rascally alcoholic, following his instincts and impulses, and who encourages Thibault’s worst inclinations: a (recent?) incident involving theft and the destruction of property slowly returns to a horrified Thibault in fragments (ironically, as he day drinks and smokes, the smell and taste of the alcohol and cigarettes acting as his own madeleine).⁵ This said, you can’t help but like Rik, particularly as he goes out of his way to make a genuinely thoughtful birthday gift for Thibault, seeming to understand his friend’s self-limitations and unrequited emotions with a penetration that only the close confessional of the beer-soaked bar booth can provide.

Again, Thibault essentially never leaves his apartment. He is terrified (1) by his neighbors who, knowing he’s alone, try to bring him food, and (2) by an editor who torments him via e-mail, asking for an overdue typography assignment.⁶ Thibault tumbles further and further into himself, titillated by the thought that his old friend Nora might be as in love with him as he’s decided he now most certainly is with her (that is, after a few beers). Schrauwen captures Thibault’s slow cognitive decline in sad solitary inebriation, his physical coordination dwindling in direct proportion to the arrogance of his rightness about this or that topic as it passes before and within him.

One begins to wonder whether Thibault suffers from some sort of agoraphobia or autism, his socially aphasic inclinations if not his profession itself somehow contributing to a mania where he begins to “read” the world as letterforms, recalling not only Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Texts” (which I have no idea if Schrauwen has read)⁷ but also the aesthetic structure of comics itself. As I’ve tiresomely written many times, comics are an art of reading pictures as well as words; the relationship between looking and reading is sort of like the relationship between singing and talking—they both require the same tools, but engage vastly different modes of cognition, experience, and feeling. Whereas the Western artistic tradition has only recently begun to cautiously legitimize the reading of pictures, the Eastern world has accepted it for centuries in picture scrolls and pictographs and written languages that are adjacently pictorial themselves.

Schrauwen so thoroughly plays with these ideas in Sunday—the characters sometimes even visually align themselves with familiar typographical characters—that by the time you’re through it, you’re seeing things differently. In fact, I found myself at one point in a quasi-psychedelic state of mind, trying to “read” objects and images not only on the page but also in my actual surroundings. The effect is overwhelmingly strange, aligned in a way with how Tolstoy not only convinces the reader of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” that he (Tolstoy) has died and come back to tell the good news, but also manages to somehow provoke in the reader some of the same physical sensations that poor Ilyich suffers.⁸

OK: sex. How much thought, or time (or, in this book, space), do we actually give to it? According to Sunday’s protagonist, it’s a goodly amount. Sex enters his mind in his third minute of consciousness and recurs throughout the entire work, as extreme-present onanistic act⁹ but also as an oft-tapped well of memory and a zone of possibility. In a medium where sex is either raw and ever motivating (Robert Crumb) or ignored (Dennis the Menace), Schrauwen walks a more empathetic path, recreating a sense of its alluring siren without being filthy about it. There’s something of the nature documentary to his slight yet explicit distance, anthropologically curious while oddly tender at the same time. Thibault “gets up” out of bed and then, reminded of James Brown, “gets on up” and puts on and briefly dances to “Sex Machine,” bits of the song repeating in his head for hours (and pages) thereafter, like the idea of sex itself, which appears quite regularly and reliably, again and again. The overall effect is utterly familiar, genuinely funny, and very, very real.

Which is also one way of describing Schrauwen’s approach to drawing—or, more properly, cartooning. He aims for a cultivated naive clarity without virtuosity for, one assumes, the sake of legibility. In other words, the smooth, show-offy pen line of, well, Dennis the Menace is nowhere to be found. Instead, it’s the humble mark one might associate with a grocery list, or recognize in the work of David Salle, the cartoonists Yuichi Yokoyama and Christopher Forgues, or the pioneering graphic fiction writer Ben Katchor. Schrauwen knows that the half-life of an image in comics is exactly the fraction of a second it takes the eye to move to the next one, and he’s not wasting his or anyone’s time. In this, he is deferential and congenial; it’s the equivalent of writing clearly and simply, and the professional benefit is that he finishes a lot more pages than the rest of us cartoonists.

He also deploys a wider palette of visual tools than any other graphic novelist I can think of, declining, for example, to represent space and experience as anything other than sensation and impression except in a few moments when their texture and complexity demand a more familiar “illustrated” approach. Blurred images indicate an uncertainty about or unconcern for space in exactly the way one experiences it. Schrauwen allows images to slightly merge or overlap, to reflect the possibility of rounding a corner to find—what? yes, the corner we know, but maybe something else, unforeseen. In this, he has especially harnessed the medium of printmaking, which by historical example 98 percent of comics use, applying a two-color palette in the cheap mimeograph-esque Risograph process in which these chapters first were serialized: he assigns colors at the book’s introduction to the past and to hypotheticals and allows them to combine to indicate the present, or to disassociate to produce a feeling of uncertainty, or to do whatever the story requires or Schrauwen feels. Then, toward the end of the book, he suddenly draws more “virtuosically,” in black chiaroscuro, for its return-from-Oz-like celebratory/funereal meeting of all its characters. This is an artist firmly in command of his medium.

Finally, the reader and the book cannot escape its title and the day on which it is set, associating Thibault not only with impiety and moral struggle but also typographically with the very T image of the Crucifixion itself (don’t worry—it’s not pretentious, but funny). Schrauwen also sets an hour or so of Sunday in the nave of a church, repurposed in twenty-first-century post-ecclesiastical Europe as an experimental performance space. (As a guest at the 2022 Italian Comics and Games festival in Lucca—claimed to be the largest of its kind in Europe—I marveled at the throngs and thongs of cosplaying teenage demons and princesses and superpeople all colorfully greasepainted and parading along the ridge of the medieval wall of the town, an endless stream of lurid spectacle yet also of sweetly innocent self-expression, while nearly all the churches in town opened their doors to American media companies—and, in one case, a sports video game brand, which had hung a screen in front of the centuries-old crucifix, still peeking out from behind, all the pews temporarily removed and replaced by cushioned recliners, their plump armrests excavated with large drink holders, colorful pamphlets and plastic swag bags littering the marble mosaics below.) While the importance of Sunday to Sunday is implied, and Schrauwen’s introduction refers to both the day and the book as faithful, the theme only gradually develops until it almost overtakes the action in a penultimate scene in which Thibault smokes some of his girlfriend’s high-octane weed while trying to make sense of the movie version of The Da Vinci Code, his inner thoughts overlapping Schrauwen’s redrawing of the film’s banal scenes in a maelstrom of dissociation and—? Thibault cannot die, since he provides the novel’s reportage…right? Well, I don’t want to give anything away, but the book taken in its sum feels to me to be Schrauwen’s quiet, unspoken, and affecting attempt to capture what we used to call God.

In this spirit, Sunday will make you love those you already love, but more. I’ve deliberately left out much of the plot and story and the characters who contain such feelings because I don’t want to ruin any more of it for you. I hope you will read it, especially if you’re a person who loves books and appreciates being respected by a writer and is interested in the fine texture of experience itself and the ongoing, lifelong effort of cultivating an inner voice—a private pursuit slowly being eroded by phones and screens (said screens play a huge part in the book, incidentally). In a word, Sunday is a masterpiece, and it will be a long time before it is completely understood and comprehended—or, I think, bettered.