Dylan Horrocks: Hicksville (1998 / 2010)
Is Dylan Horrocks' Hicksville the Great New Zealand Novel?
That sounds like a facetious question, but it isn't meant as one.
This 'Great [...] Novel' idea stems, of course, from all the palaver about the 'Great American Novel.' Is there such a thing? Certainly there have been many attempts to write it, and many somewhat premature advertisements for its appearance: The Great Gatsby, Of Time and the River, Gravity's Rainbow - show me a great American writer, and I'll show you their entry for the elusive prize.
The problem, of course, is that the actual Great American Novel was written long before the idea gained currency. Or one of them had been, at any rate. Personally, I would argue that there are two. The term came (according to Wikipedia) from an 1868 essay by Civil War novelist John William De Forest.
Candidate 1 has to be Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Among all the 19 claimants listed on Wikipedia, only this one has the necessary critical heft to have survived all the winds of fashion and the warring schools of interpretation to sail on majestically into the sunset.
It's an impenetrable, Mandarin text, written by an Easterner - a New Yorker, in fact - which is also a great adventure story spanning the world - not to mention all the depths and shallows of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It embodies paradox - is readable and unreadable at the same time - combines libraries of quotations with poignant accounts of the simplest human interactions.
Many people don't get the point of the first, most famous sentence of the story: "Call me Ishmael." This doesn't meant that the narrator's name actually is 'Ishmael', or even that he's adopted that as a useful nom-de-plume (like 'Mark Twain' for Samuel Clemens, for instance). It means that he is a wanderer upon the Earth, like Ishmael the eldest son of Abraham - in contrast to Isaac, Abraham's younger (but legitimate) son by his wife Sarah, the patriarch of the twelve tribes of Israel.
To a contemporary, 1850s, Bible-soaked reader this would have been so obvious that Melville doesn't even trouble to explain it. We are forced to refer to the narrator as 'Ishmael' for convenience's sake, but it's a description of character, not (strictly) a piece of nomenclature.
You see what I mean? Moby-Dick invites such speculations simply because of the oddball way in which it was written. Leslie Fiedler could cause a furore in the 1960s simply by suggesting that Queequeg and 'Ishmael' really are making love in the first chapter of the books - rather than simply lying together chastely like chums. And once you've thought that unthinkable thought, it opens up a whole serious of new perspectives on the novel (cf. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel).
The real problem arises from the almost equal and opposite claims of Mark Twain's masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, which has to be Candidate 2.
Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes - I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.So intoned William Dean Howells at the end of his long elegiac volume My Mark Twain (1910). Ernest Hemingway put it more simply (and quotably), in The Green Hills of Africa (1935):
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.The book grows and grows in its implications - with all its admitted faults - on repeated rereadings. It's hard to imagine any book so embodying the spirit of a country, or (at any rate) the spirit of both the old South and the advancing frontier.
If that isn't the Great American Novel, what is? 'There's been nothing as good since,' is the simple truth, for all the greatness of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway himself, Toni Morrison, and all the other great novelists who have flourished on those 'dark fields of the Republic,' that shopsoiled 'green breast of the New World' (to quote The Great Gatsby).
It comes down to one of those classic oppositions: Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? Schiller or Goethe? Wordsworth or Coleridge? One would like to answer all of them with the formula: "Both - and ..." - yet it must be admitted that a sneaking preference always creeps in.
There's always one of the two whom your hand brings down more enthusiastically from the bookshelf. Sometimes it's a simple classical / romantic face-off (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for instance) - but such is the complexity of each of their bodies of work, that it never resolves entirely to that.
Jane Austen / Charlotte Brontë would be another, I suppose - or Lady Murasaki / Sei Shōnagon. After a while they dissolve into triads, then groups, then just the whole spectrum of colours and shades of expression ...
Mark Twain and/or Herman Melville, then, is the best I can do for that elusive entity (or should I say chimera?), the author of the Great American Novel. It's a pretty magnificent choice to be confronted by, however!
Once before I've asked this question about the Great New Zealand novel. My answer then was a bit facetious, much though I admire the intricacies of Chris Kraus's I Love Dick (1997).
Hicksville, to me, seems to present far more solid claims. In his original article, William DeForest defined the Great American novel as "the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence." He went on to say:
"Is it time?" the benighted people in the earthen jars or commonplace life are asking. And with no intention of being disagreeable, but rather with sympathetic sorrow, we answer, "Wait." At least we fear that such ought to be our answer. This task of painting the American soul within the framework of a novel has seldom been attempted, and has never been accomplished further than very partially — in the production of a few outlines.
I'm sure that Dylan Horrocks had no such lofty intentions when he set out to create Hicksville. From what I gather, it came together from bits and pieces, written and drawn at various times, very much in the mode of his great contemporary Art Spiegelman's Maus, which first appeared, piecemeal, chapter by chapter, in Raw (1980-1991), the comics magazine he co-founded with his wife Françoise Mouly.
The first volume of Maus, 'My Father Bleeds History,' appeared in book-form in 1986, the year of the great graphic novel explosion. It was one of the three groundbreaking works which appeared during 1986-87 to confound dismissive critics (as chronicled in Douglas Wolk's 2007 book Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean).
They were (in no particular order), Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, and Alan Moore's Watchmen.
I suppose if you live in a cave you might have avoided encountering any of these classic works. The film of Watchmen (in its various versions) is more illustrator Dave Gibbons' gig than Alan Moore's - it left out one of the graphic novel's crucial subplots - although an animated version of this, a pirate story, was released separately. It's a critique of superhero comics (as Don Quixote is a critique of novels of chivalry), but that's only one of the many things it does.
The Dark Knight Returns is only loosely connected - more on a thematic than a plot level - with Christopher Nolan's 'Batman' film trilogy, though it's hard to imagine the latter existing without the former. It's the most conventional of the three, though Frank Miller's subsequent projects 300 and Sin City show that he, too, is a creative force to be reckoned with.
The second volume of Spiegelman's Maus, 'And Here My Troubles Began,' appeared in 1991. Dylan Horrock's Hicksville began to be serialised in the second volume of his magazine Pickle, devoted to 'the finest in New Zealand comics', in 1993.
When I met Dylan Horrocks at the 2018 Manawatu Writers' Festival, he told me that in many ways he still considered that the best way to read the novel: in its original serialised form, surrounded by other comics, and all the other contextualising bits and pieces by him and other artists which had to be edited out in book form.
I tried to explain to him something of what Hicksville had meant to me when I first read it in the late 1990s (I was late to Pickle, unfortunately, though I certainly followed his Milo's Week strip comic which ran in the NZ Listener between 1995 and 1997).
Hicksville was an achievement of another order, however. And - much though I enjoyed its follow-up, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen (2014), it couldn't really be said to have quite the same heft. But then, the same could easily be said of Twain and Melville's follow-up books: respectively, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852)).
So what did speak to me so powerfully in Hicksville? First of all, it was a piece of identity literature: intimately bound up with the problem of what it is to be a Pākehā New Zealander - stuck in what seems to be the wrong hemisphere, with the wrong cultural conditioning, and yet with an increasingly powerful sense of place and identity.
The strip comic with Captain Cook, Charles Heaphy and Hone Heke included at various points in the narrative gives a perfect metaphor for this sense of cultural drift - not quite knowing where you are, but engaged - consciously or unconsciously - in learning how not to worry too much about the fact.
There are nice vignettes of exile, too: strip comics drawn on the kitchen table in a London flat, side-trips to Eastern European countries to pick up on their own complex comics traditions - not to mention Sam's phantasmagorical journey to Hollywood to see the world of his alter-ego / nemesis Dick Burger close-up ...
Above all, Hicksville is a comic obsessed with comics. Everyone in the imaginary town of Hicksville, set on the tip of East Cape, reads comics all the time, and is intimately knowledgeable of their strange, compromised history: caught between the devil of commercialism and the deep sea of unfettered artistic experimentation.
And then there's that Name of the Rose-like secret library of manuscript and limited edition comics, including the greatest works of the greatest creators, the ones that they longed to write, but somehow never managed to, stored in the old lighthouse on the point, watched over by the enigmatic Kupe.
Into this situation comes Leonard Batts, an American comics journalist, author of a biography of Jack Kirby, who is investigating the latest comics sensation, Dick Burger, by paying a visit to his mysterious Antipodean hometown. (I don't know if the resemblance between his name and that of Leonard Bast, the hapless victim of class snobbery in E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910), is intentional or not, but given the general level of erudition in Dylan Horrocks' work, it wouldn't surprise me at all ...)
There's a lovely sense of recognition when the comic reenacts a classic scene from John O'Shea's pioneering NZ film Runaway (1964) to herald Batts's arrival in town. Things only come into existence the moment they're written about - or filmed, or drawn - in this novel, and such imaginative acts appear to be stored forever in some kind of Akashic tablets of the soul. That, at any rate, is how I read the book's overall message.
Is it strictly a work of speculative fiction, could one say? That's harder for me to answer. Certainly the fact that it's set in an impossible place - a town in a parallel universe (not unlike the one in Moore's Watchmen, where Nixon gets perpetually re-elected, and pirate comics have the place superheroes hold in our reality) - would appear to substantiate the claim.
It's less realist at its roots than either Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn: that much is certain. Less, too, than any of its possible rivals for 'Great New Zealand Novel': the bone people? The Lovelock Version? The Matriarch (either in the original or in its rewritten version)?
However you classify its genre, for me Hicksville holds all the aces: it's funny, sad, wise, intricate, and incorrigibly from here. It took a long time for the Americans to notice what they had in Melville - not to mention the fact that Mark Twain was something far more than a clown. I hope it doesn't take us quite so long to see the merits of Dylan Horrocks' masterpiece.
The latest, 2010, edition of the comic includes a wonderfully elegiac introduction. In it Horrocks charts his earliest comics influences - Charles Schulz's Peanuts, Carl Barks' Donald Duck, but above all Hergé's Tintin.
Talk about the landscape (or dreamscape) of my life! I, too, grew up on those comics: Tintin and Asterix, Peanuts and Eagle (my father's particular favourite) - though for us the unquestionable pinnacle was occupied by the seemingly endless permutations of Carl Barks' imagination - even though we didn't even (then) know him by name.
Perhaps, then, I should admit that I am prejudiced. Comics may not be the all-consuming passion for me that they are for Dylan - just one amongst a number of loves - but I understand (and can share) the magic of childhood associations he evokes so well in the Hicksville corpus as a whole.
Funnily enough, the introduction also touches on his Dick Burger-like decision to get involved in the mainstream comics industry: his work on Timothy Hunter and Batgirl and other titles from Dc's edgier arm Vertigo. As he himself puts it:
The money was great and I worked with some nice people ... but the stories didn't come easily. For the first time in my life I was making comics I couldn't respect. As time went on it grew harder and harder to write or draw my own comics. Soon just looking at a comic - any comic - filled me with dread ... I could no longer see the point of it all ... I should have listened to Sam. [viii]
Twain and Melville, too, suffered through their long nights of the soul. Both of them ran into a creative doldrums after the supreme effort of their great novels. It was good to see Dylan Horrocks back on the bookshops again in 2014 with the double-whammy of Incomplete Works and Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen. It seems he has learned to listen to Sam again, after all.
Dylan Horrocks: Hicksville (1998 / 2010)
- Hicksville: A Comic Book. 1998. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2001.
- Hicksville: A Comic Book. 1998. New Edition. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010.
- The Names of Magic. Illustrated by Richard Case. 2001. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 2002.
- New Zealand Comics and Graphic Novels. Wellington: Hicksville Press, 2010.
[available for download as a pdf here]. - Incomplete Works. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2014.
- Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2014.
Homepages & Online Information:
Author's Homepage
Wikipedia entry
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4 comments:
I'm going backwards Jack (I mean in tackling unread Ross Blogs). Re Horrocks and his book. I haven't read it although I know of it as it was written about together with I think it was books by Catherine Chidgey (I read her book), Elizbeth Knox (for my sins, nothing), Anne Kennedy's 'The Time of the Giants' and of course 'Hicksville'. I forget who wrote it but I intended to read them all but got sidetracked. Intriguing idea that our great novel should be a graphic novel. I think that was all of them. I was interested. Meanwhile I picked up Spiegelman's 'Maus'(probably to give to my eldest daughter who mostly only reads graphic novels). But I haven't even a copy of Hicksville. I must get one and see if I agree.
The Great Novel. I could never, after reading it about 5 times, really "engage" with 'The Great Gatesby'. I agree re Moby Dick. It takes some getting into. The start indeed puzzled me as did the enigmatic 'Call Me Ishmael' (which is the title of a book by Olson who did a thesis on Melville as I think did Wystan Curnow). I like Conrad and would be tempted to put 'The Secret Agent' up against Melville but it is a different country (but Conrad's 'Nigger of the Narcissus' is a greater sea novel, whereas Melville's book is a great book. It is like an enormous poem. The start of it, yes. I have that book by Fiedler also! I hadn't thought to read up on Melville I was looking for Thomas Wolfe who he jibes at a bit (I mean he seemed to jibe at the author's relationship with his father). But once a reader gets into Moby Dick it is like a huge slow and almost infinite symphony. Huck Finn and the other one I have read. Not sure if I concur there but I did intend reading more books by him.
That the "great NZ novel" should be a comic (or a long poem?) is an interesting idea.
It is impossible to find one "greatest" thing. The game played by chess players is not chess it is arguing who the greatest chess player was which I suppose applies to boxing and other things, tennis, snooker, and so on.
With some assistance from Marrianne Moore who admired Mohammed Ali he could be claimed s the greatest American poet-boxer!
Well all assiduous Rossean fans are now instructed to get copies of Dylan Horrock's book and read. And report back to this Blog of I suppose it has already somewhat happened on FB...Dylan Horrocks will be pleased in any case. Another interesting post!!
(By the way Roger Horrocks has written some very good stuff, even great. From (his thesis looks as though it is interesting on mosaic in literature), the Auckland Transit Poetry Line (a longish poem), and various other works including his writing for the opera about Len Lye, and a recent book of lit. and film and his book of philosophic poetry which I enjoyed.)
The great NZ Novel eh?
And back to Melville and perhaps Twain, I think indeed it is easier for us to see those two as we can look back whereas there are so many 20th Century novelists who are so good, just in the US. I would point to Faulkner, but Steinbeck and maybe Bellow or Pynchon or Delillo...but wait a minute, aren't I falling into a trap? (The "clue" Jack dropped in was his use of 'being facetious' and 'I Love Dick'....And, and!....I'm sliding into Harold Bloom land! I like the game but I cant buy into it Jack. (But as to US writers I know I have to mention Joyce Carol Oates, and John Cheever (not perhaps of their novels, but their stories). Of course though, it's a game. It is an illusion this greatest work stuff. But it's a fun game arguing about it, as silly and as human as the impulse to do so is....
But if there was such a thing allowable, just for the sake of argument....then...
Well, yes, of course the idea of a Great NZ Novel is always going to be more of a starter for ten than a serious concept, but - for myself, at any rate - Hicksville certainly has what it takes.
The fact that it's a comic is really neither here nor there. Dylan Horrocks has gone on the record repeatedly to say that a comic need not have words - or pictures - to be seen as a comic. For him, it's a kind of platonic creative entity.
The Great Gatsby is, perhaps, a matter of individual taste. I think it's one of the most beautifully written pieces of fiction I've ever read: more like a poem than a novel. But if you read it for the story it would certainly disappoint.
Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn make a great double-act (a bit like the Iliad and Odyssey, perhaps: profoundly different and yet beautifully complementary ...
Re 'The Great Gatesby' I'll read that again. Yes, the Illiad is different but necessary to read. Moby-Dick I felt had a powerful poetic quality. The start, yes, with Queequagg and so on, put me off, so I stopped, the later, slowly read it.
In theory I don't differentiate between any media for my own purposes, but of course as myself the residue of both loving certain comics means my focus shifted to reading what I suppose I would have to qualify as almost normative writing.
But I have "read" some comics. And with my Dewey Decimal Project (reading and sampling all areas of (my local library) at more or less random: I thus forced myself to read both genres and subjects I was not accustomed to. I sampled the contents more or less randomly. But then I started on my own books either sampling or reading them all. I then wanted a range of dates of publishing as libraries throw out things (not all) before say 2008. Of course they keep copies and have classics.
This meant I plowed through everything, samples from every aspect, including children's, foreign languages whether I could read / understand them or not (I copied or photographed). I purposely made it hard my avoiding photocopying and writing things out by hand, even copying diagrams..etc
But this was to extend the range of the way things were written etc but as it happens there were things that so fascinated me everything (or most) was read.
In really strange areas I found things not suspected. In one area, I think it was bio, a mad doctor, father in a middle class home, a woman in the US who organised rescues of mockingbirds, an athlete with medals who suffered psychological trauma etc. There were amusing things and other. This was accompanied by my regular reading which is chaotic also!
Now, that widened my experience (it was like a journey) but I haven't read that many graphic novels. How is the comic or graphic novel defined if there are no images or words? Is it that a kind of writing, in a certain way, kind of "telegraphic", can be a novel?
I wonder if people are rushing to buy up copies of our greatest novel after this post. I would also think of 'The Bone People', 'Tarzan and Elvis' by Nigel Cox (that title not available as you probably know but it is under another title).
The writing one might sneak in as a novel is 'End of the Golden Weather' and the movie I really liked.
I have heard claims for books by Maurice Gee. I've only read two by him.
Well perhaps your Hicksville is a good stab (I haven't read Catton's book even though I got a F.E. to support her success.) What about Dr Jack Ross? EMO? I felt that Rapatahana's 'TOA' was brilliant...a kind of reply to Stead's 'Smith's Dream' and possibly also to 'Once Were Warriors' which is good also (the movie leaves out the girl, who is beaten etc, her seeing the European people next door). Perhaps the 'message' overrides it too much. Then there is Ken's strange long novel which has moments of brilliance but I feel is somehow not unified, or the characters, main, lack sufficient definition and development. But still there is a brilliance about it for sure.
I suppose that those NZ writers who will write "great" lit. in the future are now mainly short story writers, as I think that is a great way to start.
Dr Hamilton usually has a long list of neglected and interesting writers. Craig Harrison is good going by 'The Quiet Earth'.... (Oh well, time permitting, read the earlier posts by Jack, I say to myself...).
I've read Hicksville now. I did enjoy it. (I do have a problem reading comics and graphic novels, which kind of oscillates, I was [not severely] but fairly strongly told of the inanity of comics by my mother and this has affected my reading of them. I did read them, but with or without my mother's urging (and I still tend to favour "real books" over comics although this is only me, there is no logic or value position I can claim). Despite all this I did get into the novel pretty well, it did draw me in. It is original in a way Rapatahana's 'TOA' and many other examples ('The Bone People), Harrison's books, Keri Hulme's 'The Bone People', Nigel Cox. Others you have mentioned on here including Bill Direen's 'Song...' and dare I say it, your own 'EMO', Ken Ross's often pretty way out and high on quirk factor writings and others...But the good side of all that is to remind us we have that depth right here. Of course we look all around us for examples but we get back to here. Writing here if not actually (obviously) writing "about" here. But of Hicksville I wasn't completely convinced. I liked it a lot -- the plot and themes are great and I tend to agree -- but I preferred some of the things in 'Incomplete Writings' (some were cosmic). My daughter Dionne who is big on graphic novels liked it but felt that the graphics were not as good as in his later books.
One thing, it shows, in some ways, a very untypical -- or typical NZ (or anywhere) in which the untypicality (with, o.k., local themes) is what makes it atypically "typical": but unique and strong. That uniqueness and that courage to say: 'this is writing, it is valid, I am going out side the limits, and so on' is something of it. I like the librarian in Hickesville! Thumbs up but the gnz Nov. remains elusive!
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