Before Walter Benjamin decided to write his huge, and unfinished, Arcades Project, Louis Aragon published one of Benjamin’s inspirations: Paris Peasant (1926), a hypnotic book that counterpoints two highly significant spaces in the French capital in the nineteenth century: passageways and parks. Like his companion in alcoholic, poetic adventures, André Breton, Aragon strolls through a Paris that floats, where every corner and door can lead to a hallucination or a dream. Three very different writers are among the heirs to that seminal work: Benjamin, narrator and philosopher, or philosophical narrator; novelist and essayist Georges Perec (the lists of police stations, tax and post offices could well belong to the author of Species of Spaces [1974]); and the graphic artist and scriptwriter David B. For when Aragon describes in great detail the Passage de l’Opéra, he takes two bookshops as his points of reference, one inside the passage and one outside it: Rey and Flammarion. This could be the secret avant-garde starting-point of Incidents in the Night (1999). Reinventing surrealism. Reinventing Paris. And doing so by weaving vignettes, digressions, and dreams via the connecting thread of bookshops.
This two-volume comic, which promises a sequel that will probably never appear, because David B. is well known for abandoning projects, begins with the combination of a dream and a bookshop. The hero, who is very like the author, dreams in 1993 of finding volumes two and three of a serial or magazine entitled Incidents in the Night, fantasy stories set at the turn of the nineteenth century. From that moment he begins a pathetic, oneiric, and epic search for the other volumes. A search that will lead him to cross paths with Azrael, the angel of death; with Enn, the ancient god of slaughter and oblivion; with a detective hardened by a thousand dirty tricks, whose archive hoards all the despicable events that have occurred in the city and the government; with a gang of criminals who hide and multiply; and, above all, with the most emblematic booksellers in Paris, because the key to his investigation lies in its bookshops: nodes of a network that give the city another meaning.
Incidents in the Night was preceded by two other volumes, which display a similar imagination, and are set in the years after the First World War and feature protagonists who originally appeared in Reading the Ruins (2001). These two installments in the Black Paths series make clear the author’s interest in the historical avant garde and his investment in dream-states and the subconscious. He reconstructs Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Dadaist adventures in Fiume and plants the seed that comes to fruition in his later work: in the final pages the protagonist, Lauriano, “was writing articles for Incidents in the Night, each time under a different pseudonym. He tried to appear as little as possible in all the events in his lifetime. He sharpened his senses on a search for signs of Never-Never Land.” If these projects can be seen as two acts in the same brilliant theatrical drama, the colour in Black Paths (the work of colourist Hubert, using David B.’s originals) distances this work from pulp fiction and brings it close to the plastic arts in the era he describes and the artistic explosion that took place between the two world wars. Incidents in the Night, however, could only be in black and white, because, although the world it depicts is equally surreal, its paths are truly black, with no possibility for the love and happy ending of its predecessor.
The result of David B.’s comings and goings in that Paris of second-hand bookshops and criminal connections, of police departments and apartments where the most savage murders are committed, is even stranger than D’Annunzio’s milieu in Fiume. It is a fascinating topography that contains as many elements from the city of surrealists and Oulipo as the pulp tradition of Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris and the comic underground. Yet at the same time it is, above all, absolutely personal. Like From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, which reveals a symbolic, secular London (which Moore extracts from the work of post-situationist Iain Sinclair, that dark sage of the metropolis, the obverse of the luminous Peter Ackroyd, the city’s official biographer), Incidents in the Night forces us to look at the city in a new way; one that is mythological, mythographic, topsy-turvy, and dazzling. Beyond the story, pages, and Paris, the work beats with a timeless narrative of destruction. Digressions that relate various, post-Babylonian versions of the myth of the universal flood, the first genocide carried out by the gods, and the extinction of the huge prehistoric mammals—the first extinction carried out by human beings—carry the comic to stratospheric flights, even though they are descents into hell. Constant switching from adventures to philosophical reflection, from action set in slums to Kabbalistic connections, from the story of the detectives to mythological figures, make Incidents in the Night a masterpiece. In my opinion, it is the author’s most important work.
David B.’s major works shift between reality and imagination, between realism and dreams. His best known title, Epileptic (1996), which is also a family tale based on the figure of his sick brother, is an artist’s autobiography where one sees the genealogy of his vocation and craft, drawing on the huge artistic resources of his imagination to escape the crushing nature of reality via a myriad of mythological creations. His illustrations in Best of Enemies: A History of US and Middle East Relations (2012), a three-volume pop history written by Professor Jean-Pierre Filiu, are initially faithful to the text; as the series proceeds, however, they transmute by degree—and entirely in the second volume—eventually becoming the freest possible interpretation of the accompanying words. Pages and pages of interpretation. A torrential, symbolic visualization of the universe. I think we get the best of David B. when reality is the starting point, but not necessarily the destination, as in Black Paths or Incidents in the Night, because he translates whatever material he is working with—documents or dreams—into his own referential graphic universe; a universe that is more dreamlike than documentary.
All the works I have mentioned share a vision of a world rent by conflict. The criminal gangs in Black Paths or Incidents in the Night, with their confrontations and massacres; the dozens of skirmishes and wars between the United States and various Middle Eastern countries in The Best of Enemies, whose prologue connects these images of violence to “The Epic of Gilgamesh”; the author’s family’s confrontations with doctors, neighbours, and other individuals in Epileptic. This is also true in other, lesser titles like False Faces: An Imagined Life of the Wig Gang, written with Hervé Tanquerelle, which represents a universe of conflict between law and crime, order and chaos. Black Paths’s most blood-curdling vignettes of those struggles are represented by visceral etchings, inspired by painters like George Grosz, in which men are equated with dogs. Elsewhere, these representations take us to mythical drawings inspired by sacred texts and legends. Which means that, for David B., surrealism and the language of comics are merely vehicles for connections with the collective subconscious and its gallery of shapes and symbols, with the gods we have been killing, and with the violence of our own origins.