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Remembering the Jazz Orpheus: Barney and the Blue Note by Loustal and Paringaux

2010; Wiley; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-5931.2010.00745.x

1540-5931

Matthew Screech,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Paringaux collaborate on comic strips that revive an old text/image arrangement: words appear beneath pictures and there are no balloons at all.Some critics mention Loustal's and Paringaux's original use of that text/image combination: Benoı ˆt Peeters, who analyzed one page from their album Barney et la note bleue, describes their attempts to establish new relationships between texts and images (91 -93).Other commentators like Patrick Gaumer and Claude Moliterni think Loustal gave comics a literary dimension (403).Barney et la note bleue was translated into English and published under the title Barney and the Blue Note.Sales were unspectacular and the critics largely ignored it, although Alan and Laurel Clark praised Loustal's ''evocative watercolours' ' (115).This article will encourage a wider appreciation of Barney and the Blue Note among English speakers, by analyzing the album in translation and by drawing upon an interview with Loustal. 1 Over the coming pages, the implications of having no balloons to represent speech and thought are discussed; I also assess the album's contribution to comic strip mythology and enlarge on its literary aspect.Barney and the Blue Note differs sharply from other comic strips.Nevertheless, it resembles literary work by French filmmaker/writer Marguerite Duras and French detective novelist Patrick Modiano, who were both highly praised by Loustal at interview.Despite the differences in their chosen forms Loustal, Paringaux, Duras, and Modiano directly engage their readers with remembering the past.In order to do that, they abandon conventional, linear modes of storytelling in favor of fractured narratives; readers piece the narratives together by making an effort of memory.When Barney and the Blue Note is pieced together, it recounts the meteoric rise and fall of a half-forgotten 1950's saxophonist, who was briefly the darling of the Paris jazz scene before succumbing to heroin.Loustal said that the hero was loosely based on the saxophonist Barney Wilen, but added that Barney was mythological: ''There's a bit of Chet Baker and of the jazzman's myth in general'' (qtd. in Alagbe ´47). 2 To place Barney and the Blue Note in its context, the history of text/image narratives up to the 1980s requires revision, with particular emphasis on two artists who influenced Loustal: Herge ´and Moebius.Pierre Couperie has analyzed the French tradition of telling stories by combining pictures with words.The nineteenth century Images d'Epinal, for example, put texts beneath images.In the texts, omniscient narrators recounted hagiographies, historical events, folktales, and songs; meanwhile, the pictures illustrated whatever the narrators described.The pictures thus played a subordinate role and, for all their charm, they interrupted left-to-right reading: the reader's eye was constantly pulled from the text up to the picture and back down to the text again.Words and pictures also came together in Rodolphe To ¨pffer's Monsieur Vieux Bois (1827), a humorous strip with texts below pictures and still no balloons.In To ¨pffer's work, for the first time, pictures and texts were equally important to understanding the story.Benoı ˆt Peeters and Thierry Groensteen argue that To ¨pffer's interplay between texts and images make him the first comic strip artist.In America, texts also appeared beneath pictures in the early comics, the best known being Harold Foster's Tarzan (1929) and Prince Valiant (1937). 3The pictures were saved from redundancy by Foster's highquality artwork.Tarzan had close-ups, panoramic views, and ''motion lines'' that created the illusion of objects moving through space.Prince Valiant depicted the days of Arthurian chivalry, with a previously unseen elegance of line: bold knights, beautiful maidens, castles and battles evoked an age of heroism and gallantry.Loustal distanced himself from the above-mentioned text/image stories: ''Those strips did not influence me at all.They are like excerpts from novels, cut out and stuck below a picture.You see someone opening a door and the text says 'he opens the door'; but there's no point in showing it as it is written down.''FIGURE 1. Barney plays ''Besame mucho'' (9).