MOHIT ABROL

Abstract

Eliot’s poetic corpus rely on the kind of belatedness what Freud called “Nachtraglichkeit” where the narrative enquiry seems entangled with the historical perspective of the present. Eliot’s lyric personae speak and yet fail to narrate the traumatic moments. Eliot’s readers encounter a belated and repetitive re-enactment which inheres in the traumatic moment itself. This paper analyses two graphic novels, Martin Rowson’s The Wasteland (1990) and Julian Peters’ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (2018), where Eliot’s poetic images articulate a ‘feel’ of the text which orients the reader’s attention towards an affective happening such that the reader no longer remains the “silent accomplice” for the comics to function and  proposes to present an affective model where the reader sensorily connects with the text at audible, visual and tactile levels. This paper’s attunement to the affective registers in comics and sequential art hopes to provide a new reading of Eliot’s poetic works.

Résumé

Le corpus poétique d’Eliot s’appuie sur ce type de retard que Freud a appelé « Nachtraglichkeit » où l’enquête narrative semble mêlée à la perspective historique du présent. Les personnages lyriques d’Eliot parlent mais ne parviennent pas à raconter les moments traumatisants. Les lecteurs d’Eliot sont confrontés à une reconstitution tardive et répétitive inhérente au moment traumatisant lui-même. Les échanges faciles entre les personnages lyriques d’Eliot ont des implications spécifiques pour les études sur la bande dessinée dans la mesure où elles mettent en scène une crise épistémologique qui tend à détruire les perceptions du temps et de l’espace. Cet article examine  deux romans graphiques, The Wasteland de Martin Rowson (1990) et The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock de Julian Peters (2018), où les images poétiques d’Eliot articulent une « sensation » du texte qui oriente l’attention du lecteur vers un événement affectif de telle sorte que le lecteur ne reste plus le « complice silencieux » du fonctionnement de la bande dessinée et propose de présenter un modèle affectif où le lecteur se connecte sensoriellement au texte aux niveaux sonore, visuel et tactile. L’adaptation de cet article aux registres affectifs de la bande dessinée et de l’art séquentiel espère proposer une nouvelle lecture des œuvres poétiques d’Eliot.

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Introduction

In the Modernist Age, the underlying frustration levels in the representational patterns come to the surface in the passing encounter between Prufrock and an unnamed woman: “If one, settling a pillow by her head,/ Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all./ That is not it, at all’” (Eliot 2004: 16). The enervated indecision of the protagonist turns neurotic in these lines and expresses the disembodiment of language itself. Prufrock is too cautious to live his life fully, he dares too little, almost to the point of being “neurotically incapable” (Rees 1974: 32) and the impossibility to communicate is not simply intentional here; it shows a larger incompatibility which exists between the semantic implication within the poem and the literary description which shapes it. Through Prufrock, Eliot foregrounds the slippage of signs which renders the entire semiotic model of the poem unstable. However, this instability in the network of relations makes it susceptible to the process of translation. Eliot’s contextual fluidity and incomplete relation of signification within the poem transforms the text into “fragments of a vessel” (Benjamin 1997: 161) which the translator can fashion in such a way that the fragments come to resemble the parts of “greater language” (Benjamin 1997: 161), generating totalities instead of negating them. The task of the translator, in the Benjaminian sense, is to look beyond the attempts to communicate meaning, to be attentive to the work’s afterlife, and to express how a certain thinking about ‘open totality’ becomes necessary. If the task of the translator is considered in this manner and the practice of translation is viewed as delivering a response to the text, the essence of Eliot’s texts permits them to be translated in several modes. Eliot’s poetry then resists monomodal disciplines which rely on textual interpretations through which it has been traditionally understood and opens to different experiments in terms of visual (images and graphics) and acoustic (sounds and music) forms. The translated text exhibits a creative aspect that is suggested by the visual and the acoustic patterns and allows the “subconscious magma of language and experience” (Peter Bush’s phrase) and the peculiar “murmur” (Paul Valéry’s term) of the non-verbal modes within the poem, for instance, the measured act of Prufrock walking through the “half-deserted streets” to be seen and heard (Basnett and Bush 2006: 25; Valéry and Guenther 1954: 216; Eliot 2004: 13). Eliot’s works are effectively reshaped by the multimodal aspects of translational practices which partakes in “personal and affective factors,” as Prufrock’s walk serves as “the space ‘into’ and ‘through’ which the translator is given the opportunity to explore creatively and perform his/her subjectivity” (Nikolaou and Kyritsi 2008: 2). The visual and aural translatability of Eliot’s works allows “this new creativity brought into the target text beyond that which is already found in the original” (Rossi 2018: 390). The multimodal aspects further exemplify the blurring of conceptual boundaries and lay emphasis on the cultural and spatial dimensions of the translational practices in the in the age of emerging technology and constantly adapting media industries. In the context of translation and globalization, the transnational and translocational characterization of texts has converged with the new forms of storytelling which critics have labeled as “transmedia storytelling” (Jenkins 2006: 93), “transmedia adaptations” (O’Flynn 2011: 83) and “transmedia worlds” (Klastrup and Tosca 2004: 409). These new forms of storytelling function as afterlives of Eliot’s published poems and offer fresh perspectives on how to view his works.

In this essay, as transmedial explorations of Eliot’s works, I will examine the narrative continuity in Martin Rowson’s 1990 comic book The Waste Land and Julian Peters’ 2018 web comic strip The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The comics medium, having surpassed the classicist division between literary and visual representations (words and images) established by Lessing’s Laokoon in the eighteenth century that “[p]ainting can represent objects existing next to one another in space, and poetry objects succeeding each other in time” (Tatarkiewicz 1980: 63), possesses a unique capability to engage with characters, stories, and cultural contexts across various media platforms to fully grasp the transmedia phenomenon. The comic book adaptation of Eliot’s works and the novel storytelling techniques that result from it fit into the larger trends of media convergence, where every reference to Eliot is repeated and Eliot is treated as a “brand [that] gets sold” (Jenkins 2006: 3). Thus, in the age of media convergence, it is these new connections and their circulation that should be viewed as the afterlives of Eliot’s works due to the active participation of consumers and the technology that is widely available. Comics can serve as a model for these responses, which combine words, visuals, and different media genres to reframe how the plurality of media is perceived. As W. J. T. Mitchell claims, the convergence of comics and media helps us understand how “the world as such” might be seen “as a singular plurality (or should we say plural singularity?)” (Mitchell 2014: 256). Comics, in this sense, serve as “the ideal test [case] for a discussion of inter- and transmedial strategies of storytelling” due to the multimodal perspective they offer (Rippl and Etter 2013: 192). By situating multimodality of the panel sequences, speech bubbles, gutter space and picture plane, I will demonstrate how the reality, the silences and the fragmented language of Eliot’s lyric personae are expressed with varying and modulated intensities in Rowson and Peters’ comic strips. My goal is to analyze how such narratives, which permeate the comics medium and converge with new media (as a result of the inherently “migratory behavior of media audiences”; Jenkins 2006: 2) function as afterlives of Eliot’s works. This essay also aims to highlight affect theory as one of the multidisciplinary approaches for investigating the traumatic encounters in which Eliot’s lyric personae play a crucial role by focusing on the affective registers in comics. In order to offer an analytical framework that can fully capture the social and cultural components of the trauma that underlies the existence of Eliot’s lyric personae in the texts, I will connect Eliot’s original poems with Rowson and Peters’ transmedial analyses. I will then examine how trauma is transmitted and perceived by the readers at two levels: from the personal to the collective level and from monomodal original texts to the multimodal comic strips.

Rowson’s The Waste Land, the comics medium and affective happenings

In Comics and Videogames: From Hybrid Medialities to Transmedia Expansions (2021), Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noël Thon contend that comics and videogames function as one of the most dominant instantiations of hybrid medialities and transmedia expansions in contemporary times. In comics, the goal is not simply to retell a story in a different medium but to alter the previously established storyworlds by utilizing the logic of hypermediacy which emerges from “the use of multiple resources, such as linguistic texts, [and] images…to enable user interaction” (Ng 2021: 50). Eliot’s poems The Waste Land and Prufrock abound in numerous intertextual clues and visual characteristics that enable them to be read across a variety of media platforms. Scott Freer in his article, “Screening ‘Prufrock’: What the Mermaids Sing” (2019) discusses this visual aspect (the ekphrastic dimension) of Eliot’s poems which he considers “instrumental” in its transmedial expansion. The narrative and painterly aspects which have let to the comic book adaptations of Eliot’s works not only capitalize on the “dreamy imagery” and “mental visualization” that the poem contains (Freer 2019: 2) but allows to create a network of affiliations which may, at times, enhance or even threaten the original narrative. Thus, comics are not to be treated as a mere “artistic extension of ‘painterly pictures’ or the mental visualization of the poem” (Freer 2019: 2) still operating along the lines of immersive experience but as actively participating in the transmedial phenomena of dispersing the intertextual connections further where the audience can simultaneously declare their “allegiance and interests” and renounce them (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 232). In the transition from Eliotic references to the atmosphere of Southern California, Rowson’s transmedial work allows the reader to choose the connections which extend between the two and in the process renounce some of them. Rowson’s comic book, in this sense, has a multiplier effect on Eliot’s narrative where Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective Philip Marlowe interrupts the temporal and geographical order of Eliot’s lyric personae but seemingly extends their traumatized selves embodied within “the culture of aestheticism in fin-de-siècle London…to that of violent pulp sensationalism in Depression-era Southern California” (Norman 2013: 748). For example, the first page itself demonstrates two instances of superimposition on Eliot’s narrative. The title “The Waste Land” is set against a backdrop of dark, rainy skies through which the silhouette of Southern California can be seen. Additionally, the book From Ritual to Romance lies beneath Weird Detective Yarns, with a lit cigarette placed on top. The cigarette smoke rises and merges into the dark background, paralleling the transition from Eliot’s depiction of London to Rowson’s portrayal of Marlowe in Depression-era Southern California. Eliot’s lyric personae and the allusions in the poem appear to be “a product of violent action, cut off from their original textual bodies and repositioned to serve Eliot’s aims – [and serve as] a consistent narrative of extratextual trauma and violence” (Badenhausen 2015: 147). Along with the transition in the narrative, Rowson’s comic book carries forward these allusions about the extratextual trauma and violence found in Eliot’s poem.

The Waste Land by Eliot, along with hypertextual allusions to Lloyds Bank, Faber & Faber, his early poems like “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” and “Prufrock” (written in the 1910s), and his later collection “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” (1939), as well as various other cultural and social signposts from 1920s London, Paris, and Vatican City, make readers of Rowson’s narrative to envision an Eliotic universe with rich biographical layers. This extensive visual and textual transmedial campaign aims to disseminate its impact as broadly as possible, aligning with the capitalist ethos epitomized by the city of Los Angeles. Within this spatial context, urban theorist Edward Soja’s interpretation that “Los Angeles becomes the space that contains all spaces” (Soja 1989: 222) functions synecdochically in Rowson’s comic book as he tries to connect the networked space of Los Angeles with the figurative and mental landscapes of Eliot’s poem as well as with the words and images etched on the comic plane. The first page of Rowson’s story shows a shadowed high-rise building on a rainy night, a dimly lit street with the caption “THE WASTE LAND” (see Figure 1). There are two books lying tilted below the frame with the titles Weird Detective Yarns and From Ritual to Romance getting burned by cigarette ash as the smoke rises and mingles with the rainy night. Here, the intertextual elements present a nihilistic view of modern existence originating from the sight of Los Angeles. This particular type of narrative achievement is made possible by the visual and verbal modes. Rowson’s narrative extends Eliot’s The Waste Land outward towards a new locale and seems to be hinting at a deliberately-crafted ambiguous zone. The high-rise and the endless street offer points of transition and passage for Eliot’s lyric personae to emerge in the hyperspace governed by the logic of late capitalism. At the same time, the liminal space which lies between the two books and the rain and smoke (two defining features of Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century) initiate the cross-pollination of “high art” (as indicated by Eliot) and “modern mass culture” (as typified by Raymond Chandler) (Huyssen 1986: 163). These liminal spaces allow for the emergence of newer subjectivities where Marlowe (the private investigator) openly questions Eliot (who makes an appearance as a character in the comic book) about the “Sesostris Dame,” the “Dead Chauffeur,” and the “Grail Dingit”. In terms of transmedial storytelling, Rowson’s comic book plays an instrumental role in creating an ancillary market for both Eliot and Chandler’s works which can lead to further fan activity, “grassroots convergence” and circulation at global level (Jenkins 2006: 109). In this sense, Rowson’s work serves as an afterlife of The Waste Land and contains the potential to expand the Eliot universe further, fostering a more open and diffused understanding of his works. As Matt Brady notes, “[w]hat comic books can do is amplify the aesthetic effects, lengthen and increase battles, expand universe like never before” (Brady 2008).

Figure 1. Eliot’s The Waste Land remixed with Raymond Chandler’s Hardboiled fiction. Martin Rowson, The Waste Land (London: Seagull Books, 2012), Title page.

In Rowson’s narrative, Eliot and Marlowe’s battles converge and this makes the comic book more tangible. Marlowe’s first interaction with the “old dame” in the section titled “Burial of the dead” (see Figure 2) sends him on a quest in “a new centerless city, in which various classes have lost touch with each other because each is isolated in his own geographical compartment” (Jameson 1970: 629). Not only it intensifies the personal isolation that Marlowe feels where the city presents itself like a maze and resists a final resolution for the detective who is supposed to solve what passes off as a murder mystery, but the depiction also corresponds to “a kind of nothingness creating being, of a shadow projecting three-dimensionality out from itself” (Jameson 2016: 24). Rowson’s comic book shows us bodies that appear suspended in a three-dimensional environment that keeps the appearance of movement and unbalanced gaps without allowing actual movement, so emphasizing character interaction on both an emotional and social level. Marlowe is forced to embark on a quest in order to divert his attention from the nothingness that has engulfed modern life and leave him with only the question of location and his interactions with people and the environment to consider. The old dame’s disjointed narrative, which is delivered in both English and German, is more than sufficient to do this. Rowson’s composition enacts her fabricated incoherence (both visually and verbally) in such a way as to represent how Marlowe’s struggle is embodied and configured by the barren culture and post-Industrial contours of Los Angeles. Marlowe’s battle resonates with the need “which is at once [Eliot’s] need and our own, to keep life going, including the life of the poem in the dark spaces between the words” (Donoghue 2001: 221). However, Marlowe’s need differs from Eliot’s in the sense that the latter exudes hope for the renewal of civilization through his lyric personae, and “the sterile would become fertile; the sexually exhausted might be mystically revitalized” (Moody 2001: 244), whereas Marlowe is only able to participate in the fabrication and depicts a “supine submission to a collective, entropic adversary” (Fontana 1984: 181).

Figure 2. Marlowe’s traumatic encounter with Eliot’s lyric persona. Martin Rowson, The Waste Land (London: Seagull Books, 2012), 2.

Rowson represents Marlowe as a figure who partakes in pain which remains uncommunicable and unsharable simply because the cultural mosaic in which he is suspended is not of his own making. In Rowson’s work, Marlowe’s quest becomes an afterthought, overshadowed by the realization of being deeply entangled within the fabric of Los Angeles, rendering any sense of urgency or motivation moot: “I woke up feeling like death, like someone had undone my head…what was more, I’d never seen fog this brown in L.A, and I seemed to be in the middle of some bank clerk’s convention…. I better follow them…” (Rowson 2012: 9) Marlowe persistently shifts between figurative language and the stark sense of hopelessness embedded within it (where language fails to adequately convey pain) in an attempt to reconcile with the ordeal of suffering. Marlowe’s situation abounds in contradictions, and it is the very nature of these contradictions which aligns the characters, text, and the audience on a shared plane. Rowson is able to visually demonstrate the pain which demarcates the space between Marlowe and Eliot’s lyric personae who appear at regular intervals in the comic book. As a result, the old dame’s vacuous encounter with Marlowe becomes a spatial maneuver resulting from the pathologization of life. In his encounters with women looking at Michelangelo’s sculpture, Madame Sosostris and her tarot cards, his scenes in the pub and coming in contact with Burbank and Bleistein (“a couple of vice squad dicks”; Rowson 2012: 26), and with Tiresias (“the kind of drag queen the vaudeville big boys don’t book any more”; Rowson 2012: 36), all of them accentuate Marlowe’s suffering and make it incommensurable to the present “[which] is marked by loss, and haunted by the specters of both a forcefully forgotten past and an impending future of dehumanization” (Lešnik 2019: 5). In Figure 3, Marlowe seems to be defying the cognitive mastery over the quest-like constituents of his search and attempts to merge with the crowd of suited men with top hats (part of bank clerks convention) which resembles a zombie parade. Rowson’s frame captures Marlowe’s Kafkaesque reaction to seeing the bank tellers and the frame adumbrates with affective intensities that remain inaccessible in the monomodal original narrative.

Figure 3. Rowson’s Marlowe converges with the universe of Eliot. Martin Rowson, The Waste Land (London: Seagull Books, 2012), 9.

Rowson’s Marlowe draws from the narrative sequence of Eliot’s The Waste Land but exposes the threshold (the space designated by the city of Los Angeles) at which the narrative inverts and function solely as a diversionary plot. Eliot’s narrative is radically flattened in this way so that spectators can connect with the physical and sensory qualities of Marlowe’s interactions with the lyric personae. Within Rowson’s comic book, there are multiple repetitions which are at work: the repetition between Eliot’s narrative and Marlowe’s search, the repetition of encounters with the lyric personae, the repetition which constitutes trauma for Marlowe and the repetition (marked by dispersion) of modes which foregrounds the instance of newness and offer the potential for distinctive storytelling. Since the comics medium provides the affective components related to that experience, these repetitions that are enacted through it seem immediate despite its defiance of linguistic articulation. The comic book’s visual composition, which consists of the pages, covers, framing, inking, and coloring as well as its hybrid use of words and images, enables the narrative to remain still while still revealing depth, projecting “the sensorial and affective economy of trauma to manifest within the image” (Lešnik 2019: 6). Eliot’s lyric personae in The Waste Land present the emptiness of the world through a subjectivity which itself has been hollowed out due to the war. Thus, “the dead of war form the ordering silence of The Waste Land” (Krockel 2011: 119) and the visual composition of the comic book aids in anchoring the memory of the traumatic past. When the lover in his conversation with the hyacinth girl states that “I could not/ Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither/ Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,/ Looking into the heart of light, the silence,” his condition represents “the symptoms of war trauma, [as he is] caught between life and death in the withdrawal from reality (Eliot 2004: 62; Krockel 2011: 120). This kind of a formal experimentation necessitates a “cognitive shift” towards the encounter of bodies which are both “actually existing and always potentially something else” (Tabachnick 2009: 4; Richardson 2013: 154). As Philip Tew states, the “[f]ormal experimentation [of the comic books] serves to function as an ongoing perceptual recognition of the nature of things…consequently truth lie at the heart of the enterprise that moves toward a perception of the concrete and material” (Tew 2001: 11). Therefore, the concerns, techniques of inquiry, and reading practices for Eliot’s narrative (through its afterlife as depicted by Rowson’s account) are all influenced by the formal structure of comics. The profoundly spatial aspect of Rowson’s comic book positions the reader or viewer between the narrative and the comics panels where the reader has to simultaneously comprehend Marlowe’s moments of silence and the formal spaces between the panels. Thus, in order to determine their “pathway to follow” (Groensteen 2007: 7-10), comic book readers are always engaged in filling the gaps at two levels, narrational and spatial. By alternating linearity and discontinuity (at narrational and spatial levels) and providing the reader with a visual economy, comics emphasize the mode and medium. However, as Yves Gambier notes, “[t]here is a strong paradox: we are ready to acknowledge the interrelations between the verbal and the visual, between language and non-verbal, but the dominant research perspective remains largely linguistic” (Gambier 2006: 97). As an afterlife to Eliot’s narrative, Rowson’s comic book then transforms the reading practice into a performance where the author/creator and the reader/viewer are equally engaged in the construction of meaning based on the spatial layering (or horizontal flattening) of the narrative. The affective dimension constituted by the different modes (the visual and the verbal) that relate at a dynamic level can offer an interesting framework to understand (and respond to) the traumatic encounters that Marlowe and Eliot’s lyric personae exhibit in the text. This is an important aspect while dealing with the specificity of the multimodal perspective that emerges from comics. The relationship between different modes demand that the linguistic approach be abandoned in favor of nonverbal and primarily perceptual signals:

the conscious or unconscious psycho-muscularly based body movements and intervening or resulting positions, either learned or somatogenic, of visual, visual-audible, and tactile or kinesthetic perception, which, whether isolated or combined with the linguistic and paralinguistic structures and with other somatic or objectual behavioral systems, possess intended or unintended communicative value. (Rennert 2008: 205)

The interaction between the visual and verbal elements in Rowson’s frame where Marlowe is able to merge with the bank clerks depicts an excess of the bodily transfiguration (Marlowe almost becomes a bank clerk marching towards Lloyds Bank). Marlowe’s reaction to the situation at the bank clerks’ convention experiences a shift in auditory, visual, and tactile perception as, in that precise moment, his quest takes on a trans-generational and trans-temporal significance. The frame is engulfed by the resonant sound of the chiming clock, momentarily stilling Marlowe and the bank clerks to the point where their identities blur. As Richardson notes, “[i]t is precisely that which is always…exceeding the body’s actual. It is the substance of relationality, that which connects body to body, body to itself, world to body. Affect is both of and more than the body” (Richardson 2013: 154). Marlowe, Eliot’s lyric personae and the readers become embodied in a relational structure with indefinite forces and capacities. Every interaction between Marlowe and other characters can be seen as a stage that evolves with the narrative’s progression, yet maintains the involuntary and visceral intensities experienced within their bodies, akin to the resonating chime of a clock while Marlowe tails bank clerks during the convention. Marlowe is shown as observing the clock as its chime resonates, enveloping the frame with sound. It is the affective economy which adds density to the frame expressing the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected. The affective dimension transforms the entire exercise of reading the panels in a comic book into a performance since it enables, what John Hodgkins in his 2013 book The Drift: Affect, Adaptation and New Perspectives on Fidelity, calls “a generative drifting of affective forces between works, between mediums” to take place (Hodgkins 2013: 2). The manifestation of trauma (which Eliot went through due to the experience of living through WWI and due to the socio-political upheavals of the modernist era) as defined by “its lack of integration into consciousness” (Caruth 1995: 152) in her seminal work Trauma: Explorations in Memory, occurs in the textual gaps and narrative ruptures, and its traces (which cannot be grasped by cognition) propagate through intensities. Hence, Rowson’s comic book adaptation of Eliot’s poem transmits trauma through the surface, composition and the monochrome sketches of bodies which are beyond the fixities of language–bodies which are traversing through the phantasmagoric reality (along with Marlowe) and continually striving to awaken–rather than trying to interpret trauma, which would require linguistic approaches. It is “[t]hrough the very emergence of affect, by means of a textual embodiment, [that] the experience of trauma… [is] shared and transmitted” (Lešnik 2019: 7). Thus, the trauma that Eliot experienced at a personal level which the following lines from his 1915 prose poem, “Hysteria” capture perfectly (“I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles”; Eliot 2004: 32) and the psychological anguish that he felt due to the war which appears from his letters regarding Vivienne’s brother Maurice  (“A boy of nineteen…who is quite used to the sight of disjecta membra and has spent nights when he couldn’t sleep in shooting rats with a revolver, he has made me feel comparatively immature”; Eliot 2009: 162) are shared and transmitted in The Waste Land in terms of affective intensities which remain unrepresentable and inarticulable. From the monomodal text from whence they arise to the multimodal comic book in which they are amplified, these affective intensities provoke new shifts and transitions that demand a direct interaction with the reader (thereby turning the entire process into a performance).

Additionally, through these affective intensities and an active engagement with the reader, comics are able to highlight how trauma exceeds the personal dimension and should be positioned at a collective level. In Figure 4, Marlowe discovers himself curled up on the bank of a river, a taste of mud in his mouth. The title “The Fire Sermon” is shown in the frame that spans two pages and has tree branches that hang over the river bank in an eerie manner. The figure of Buddha and a rat can be seen next to Marlowe’s lying body. The rat’s attempt to approach Marlowe’s body, believing it to be dead and its positioning next to the Buddha figure symbolizes the ultimate reality about suffering and death and Marlowe’s reverie seems to reverberate with the same tendencies. Marlowe’s monologue (a manifestation of his dulled senses and enlarged consciousness) comes across as deferential toward what the Buddha and the rat signify precisely because many people dumped on the riverbank in a similar manner never wake up, they end up being dead. Marlowe’s seemingly wasted self underscores the emergence of an enervated consciousness which is both trans-generational and trans-historical (by relating to Buddha and rat) just before the final precipice. After the chaotic scene in the bar where Marlowe is beaten and eventually thrown onto the riverbank, the failed adventure symbolizes the simulacrum that seems endemic to the hardboiled story set in Los Angeles and features hired guns (Burbank and Bleistein), corrupt individuals (Marlowe’s partner Miles and his wife Sibyl Fisher and Madame Sosostris), and lowlife women (who are willing to show Marlowe “a good time if you like”; Rowson 2012: 43).

Figure 4. The figure of Buddha, rat and Marlowe connected in an affective field. Martin Rowson, The Waste Land (London: Seagull Books, 2012), 22-23.

The sermon by Buddha assumes a cleansing rite which Marlowe ironically participates in by lying stupefied on the riverbank with dirt in his mouth. However, Marlowe wakes up and returns to play the same pointless game, in contrast to the act of resurrection that the sermon alludes to. Rowson’s frame values the space in which Marlowe operates and strips away the representational aspect of Eliot’s narrative. Moreover, the post-representational feature of the comic book underscores and transmits trauma which remains unrepresentable. Marlowe’s lying body is affected by the possibility of death as he chokes on mud and smell the moist air making him relate to the feeling of death by water. The affective intensity emerges from the swollen skin that Marlowe feels on his body and the heightened sensation which is capable of generating a visual and textual embodiment of trauma traversing across generations. Rowson’s frame then is able to depict the indefinite, inarticulable and, precisely, the unlocatable feature of trauma which is simply perceived as emanating from different sites, the modernist culture, the fragmentation of the modern subject, Eliot’s struggles, The Waste Land, Eliot’s lyric personae, Marlowe’s search, Marlowe’s encounter with Eliot’s lyric personae and so on. Through the use of comics medium, Rowson’s narrative is able to capture the collective context in which trauma should be understood. Thus, the images and the words, their multimodal interactions, and the affective potential that emerges from comics serve as a valuable object of study to understand the transmedial afterlives of Eliot’s poetry. Similar to Rowson, Peters places a strong emphasis on the visual materiality of comics and their capacity to interpret Eliot’s poems in a variety of ways. But Peters goes a step further by offering a web comic that takes part in a number of additional transmedial characteristics, which I will discuss now in greater detail.

 Peters’ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, participatory culture and the poetics of trans-trauma

By extending the narrative settings, characters, and plots across many platforms, the increased user/audience interaction in the digital realm and the collaborative and participatory culture produce new modes of expression, enabling the central meaning of a given text to become transmedial.[1] Peters’ website where he hosts and circulates his comics and illustrations is a case in point to understand Eliot’s transmedial afterlife. Like Rowson, Peters engages with Eliot’s narratives (specifically with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) and adds a valuable contribution by providing a web comic adaptation (constituting 24 pages or vertical panels which is now available in a print version) to unlock Prufrock for “a new generation raised on visual communication” (Peters 2020). Peters’ online comic strip is only partially digital because it does not make use of online graphic design tools like Adobe Illustrator, Canva, and CorelDraw. Peters seems to be following McCloud’s observation that many of the comic strips that are accessible online are “still no more than ‘repurposed’ print at heart” (McCloud 2000: 203). Peters’ online comic strip, however, has an advantage over Rowson’s comic book because it is a part of the digital environment, where browsing speed, screen resolution, and image quality matter more than the ink used within the panels. This is because it is part of the “participatory culture one which sees the public not as simply consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined” (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013: 2). It is the inherent quality of comics to make the reader/viewer participate in the meaning-making process. A web comic simply brings out this tendency more visually and forcefully. As McCloud states, “[a]ny comic on the web is in hypertext’s backyard…[and] hypertext is, after all, a powerful and progressive force in information design—an idea that strives to match the ability of human thought in a way the technology of print never could” (McCloud 2000: 215).

Peters’ version of Prufrock does not involve the telling of the same Prufrockian dilemma which appears in Eliot’s poem in a different mode and or on a different platform. Instead, it projects a new entrant with its own set of visual information into the Eliotic universe, which Rowson expanded upon in his comic book in the 1990s. In this sense, Peters’ web comic is not a repurposing or a remediation of Eliot’s narrative and lyric personae, a derivative of sorts of the transmedial storytelling by adapting a storyline to a different platform. Peters’ web comic closely resembles Jenkins and Anne Zeiser’s approach, which holds that transmedia in the digital age can be whatever you want it to be and is more about convergence than classification: “If you set aside semantics, then transmedia can be what you want, as long as it tells a broader story across multiple platforms and engages your project’s audiences in that story” (Zeiser 2015: 20). By employing comics’ inherent tendencies in terms of emergent properties, Peters’ version serves to heighten the reader’s perception of Prufrock’s neurosis. The audience is made to feel the immediate resonance of drawn bodies and the emergent sensory information determines the way the reading of Peters’ vertical panels takes place. In figure 5, Peters depicts six monochrome frames which are devoid of a moving body but perform a double-movement of its own by concealing the narrator himself and revealing with luminous potentiality the broken relationality with the world during his walks in the deserted-streets and restaurants with oyster shells and the restless nights spent in cheap hotels. Depending on the narrator’s point of view, various perspectives that emerge from the frames (the street is viewed from the front, the cheap hotel room is viewed while standing next to the bed, providing only a partial view of the room with a chair and a small painting of a semi-nude woman hanging on the right-hand side, oysters on the floor in the restaurant are viewed from a low angle, the zigzag streets are viewed from an aerial view, and so on) converge the reader’s perception to not only the spatial and intensive qualities of the objects (the shape, the size and the position) but also relate to the underlying emotion that these objects gazed by the narrator seems to convey. The reader’s overall perception of the frames is able to override the sequence of images and perform a durational movement in Bergsonian sense where the fragmented parts tend to posit a pre-existing whole. Prufrock’s neurosis results from the intellectual passé in perceiving this connection which has been ruptured. Peters’ frames are performative in allowing this back-and-forth movement between the fragments and the wholeness that the fragments embody but are incapable to realize. These frames further posit the pre-reflective, pre-cognitive and pre-social aspect of the embodied and experiential approach which remain seeped at a level which is beyond representation and aid in encountering (albeit perceptually) the visceral contours of Prufrock’s neurosis. These frames, along with the perception that results from them, presuppose the entire body which remains absent from the picture plane and are, thus, not determined by the visual experience alone. As a result, the embodied approach which Peters’ comic strip offers is of considerable significance as it allows the reader to infer intracorporal and sensory information which is attuned to the affective regime and does not rely upon the economy of signs that Eliot’s original narrative is based upon. At the same time, being a web comic, Peter’s Prufrock is able to circulate as a fragment in different digital environments and become part of various discourses which require “the rethinking of social relations, the reimagining of cultural and political participation, the revision of economic expectations, and the reconfiguration of legal structures” (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013: 3). One particular pedagogical aspect is underlined by Peters in the preface to his book, Poems to See By (2020), noting that teachers often contact him to suggest how his comic strips have played an instrumental role in teaching children in classrooms and “to clarify their own interpretation of a poem, even if it differs significantly from my own, which is obviously only one of thousands” (Peters 2000). This suggests that other kinds of digital configurations of Prufrock in future (its use in marketing and advertisement as an icon and its shareability across social networking sites in the form of a meme, gif or a joke) cannot be ruled out.

Figure 5. Peters’ frames, Prufrock’s fragments and fractured culture. Julian Peters, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 2018 (https://julianpeterscomics.com/page-1-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-t-s-eliot/)

The transmedial and productive capacities of Peters’ version of Prufrock seem to imply that it is motivated more by the fan attachment than by adapting Eliot’s story. Naturally, the latter is necessary for the former to come into effect but it also sheds light on the relationship between Peters’ transmedial storytelling and the participatory fandom which is, in some ways, essential for its success and further circulation. This can be seen in the screenshot of Peters’ conversation with website visitors who left positive comments in the comment box (see Figure 6). Peters’ web version of Prufrock serves as an illustration of the transmedial afterlife of the poem because it has enabled and intensified audience engagement with Eliot’s narrative (significantly at a grassroots level which Jenkins considers to be a vital aspect of media convergence) and fostered a community where fans can discuss and debate Eliot’s lyric personae with the comics creator, who has a similar level of interest in Eliot’s poem. Scott Freer notes based on his interview with Peters: “Drawn to ‘Prufrock’ as a teenager when an English Literature teacher recited the poem in class, Peters was immediately struck by the opening line and the ‘atmospheric street scene […] unfurling itself in front of my mind’s eye’” (Freer 2020: 3). In light of Peters’ “fannish participation” (to use Paul Booth’s phrase), it can be argued that this particular version of Prufrock also serves as an interesting example of what Benjamin W. L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa call a “transtext” which “accounts for both the institutional (or industrial) contributions (read Rowson’s version of The Waste Land) and user-made ones (read Peters’ version of Prufrock) in relation to the cross-media expansion of a story universe” (Booth 2019: 279; Derhy Kurtz and Bourdaa 2017: 5). With Peters’ visual rendition, Eliot’s fans can situate Prufrock at” the center of myriad cultural intersections” (Stein and Busse 2012: 10) and further iterate and circulate it as per their own desires. Not only will this blur the gap between official and unofficial accounts of Eliot’s poems but transform the readers into “prosumers” (Alvin Toffler’s term) who can “produce/create media contents, from the ability to set up an online communicative account to using software to generate digital contents and programming” (Scolari 2019: 326). There already exists an application of “prosuming skills” (ibid.) with regard to Eliot’s Prufrock which has spanned numerous fan-based entries and interpretations of the poem. Altiera Cunnigham, also known as Alt, a netrunner who creates the Soulkiller program in the game, is kidnapped and slain, and her digital ghost narrates Eliot’s Prufrock in one of the most popular video game franchises, Cyberpunk 2077. A quick glance at these online entries reveals how fans of the game interpret Prufrock as having a neurotic condition, which Alt’s consciousness mimics to reveal her psychological predicament and mark the beginning of a dystopian world that is rife with corruption, despair and death, and is overwhelmingly dark in every sense. It is noteworthy to recognize that it is Prufrock’s nervous gestures which have been transmitting across varied modes and media (as can be seen from Peters’ web comic and the example above) morphing and modulating at every step. The reemergence of Prufrock’s neurosis in different storyworlds demonstrates the collective level at which trauma operates and makes Eliot’s Prufrock a case study for deeper comprehension of it.

Figure 6. Peters (the producer), fans (the consumer) and some praise of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Julian Peters, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 2018 (https://julianpeterscomics.com/page-1-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-t-s-eliot/)

An interesting aspect emerges from Eliot’s Prufrock and Peters’ visual rendition of it, that is, the spectral quality associated with trauma. Alt’s consciousness which is haunted by its past and Prufrock’s neurotic conflict which keeps him immobilized, like the etherized patient on the table, points to the spectral relation they seem to have formed with the world. In Figure 7, Peters depicts Prufrock who is afraid with an expression which tends to resist any referentiality. Prufrock seems spooked by the eternal footman who is holding his coat with a sly smile on his face. However, his spooked expression conveys that which is in excess, which can only be perceived in a multimodal narrative. Prufrock is haunted, in short, by that which is unrepresentable. Peters’ frame projects a stream of confused auditory and tactile signals with their preoccupation with the physical and haunted landscape which Prufrock finds himself in. The haunted utterance (“And in short, I was afraid”) and the spectral expression on Prufrock’s face indicate a wider pattern that transforms the entire poem into “a phantasmatic incarnation of the lost” (Foley 2017: 206). Eliot’s Prufrock becomes a “trans-traumatic narrative” as a result, in which the affective traces are seen as conveying the psychic conflicts and trauma as “secrets” or the way that the “phantom,” as described by the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, operates.

Figure 7. Prufrock’s hollow expression and the formation of the spectral connection. Julian Peters, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 2018 (https://julianpeterscomics.com/page-1-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-t-s-eliot/)

In Traumatic Affect (2013), Meera Atkinson discusses the operations of “trans-traumatic narrative” and the “poetics of trans-trauma” to address the relation of I to the Other which does not share access with the Other and is yet related by the affective intensities which radiate between them thereby making trauma trans-generational and collective in nature (Atkinson 2013: 247-8). She emphasizes the “hauntological” evocation in Caruth’s theorization of trauma according to which it repeats itself and “returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 1991: 4). Atkinson employs Derrida’s notion of the “specter” and Abraham and Torok’s notion of the “phantom” to argue how ghostliness makes its way into the text and establishes a “continuum” between the past and the present (Atkinson 2013: 261). It is the sudden appearance of the hauntological factor that has reduced Prufrock’s space to that of a threshold in Peters’ version of the narrative. Prufrock has raised eyebrows and a vacant expression with light almost completely covering his face, suggesting how depleted of vitality he has become after coming into contact with his own spectral relation. However, as Caruth and Atkinson argue, trauma cannot be located; to Prufrock it feels sudden due to the demand it makes on the survivor since it “lacks the assurances and guarantees associated with cognitive and conceptual certainty” (Calarco 2021: 135). Prufrock’s spectral relation is bereft of interpretation. Instead, it is deconstructive in Derridean sense by creating the threshold between life and death, presence and absence (Atkinson 2013: 251). Even though Julian Wolfreys claimed in his work Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (2002) that “all forms of narrative are spectral to some extent” (Wolfreys 2002: 2), it can be argued that “any narrative modality, genre, or textual embodiment” (Wolfreys 2002: 1) tends to evade the spectral logic by exhibiting its propensity to cognitive certainties, at least initially. This is another connection between trauma and affective intensities since the element of ghostliness (which derives from Prufrock’s expression) can be perceived, and not interpreted, only tangentially. Therefore, as Atkinson states, it is through the affective traces that the poetics of trans-trauma which is inter-generational, trans-generational and collective can be perceived and witnessed. Peters’ hybrid model embodies the perceptual field in which Prufrock operates despite appearing to be immobilized. It follows that Prufrock’s expression is symptomatic of an immobile body which has come in contact with the excess (the spectral relation) and needs to be purged. Prufrock’s neurosis results from an overcharged body which cannot be purged and therefore exerts the demand for an external intervention for which Prufrock is etherized and made to lie on the table like a patient. Prufrock’s stupor and bodily suspension ironically expose the affective and sensorial field in which the readers enter and engage with the text and through which trauma is transmitted realizing the true potential of the poem as a trans-traumatic narrative. This extends and expands the ways that transmedia storytelling—of which Peters’ web comic stands out as a prominent example—can be used to investigate and comprehend Eliot’s poems.

Conclusion

While adhering to Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling, this article has examined Eliot’s poems The Waste Land and Prufrock and how their core elements operate in Rowson and Peters’ transmedial versions. It has also related the deeper impetus emphasized by Jenkins’ theorization in his work Convergence Culture to the study of comics, which is that it can expand and/or compress the original story to provide a unique feature that is appropriate for the platform it uses (the print or the digital). In this sense, comics do not simply serve as “remediations” of the original texts (to use Bolter and Grusin’s terminology). Rather, through its multimodal interactions and the embodied approach which grounds the affective and sensorial dimension, comics serve as “ideal test cases for a discussion of inter- and transmedial strategies of storytelling” (Rippl and Etter 2013: 192). Rowson’s comic book illustrates the comics’ inherent capacity to engage with the reader, making reading a performative act (thereby becoming post-representational) and further highlights the transmedial tendency of participatory culture that Jenkins discusses in his work. In the complex interplay of the image and the word something happens, “something emerges that falls in-between both” (Brillenburg Wurth 2011: 2). By revealing its post-representational character, comics provide one of the ways to perceive and witness the “unrepresentable” and “unspeakable” aspects of the traumatic encounter. Rowson’s version of The Waste Land which is saturated with affect captures ‘the sense’ of the trauma that Marlowe encounters when interacting with Eliot’s lyric personae. Comic books can document trauma and, as Dominic Davies points out, “often contribute in turn to a subsequent (re)shaping of future trauma narratives” due to their generative power and the embodied response they demand from their audience (Davies 2020: 8). Rowson’s version of The Waste Land exemplifies the transmedial afterlife of Eliot’s poem, achieved through its visual expansion and narrative compression. This is accomplished by incorporating elements such as Marlowe from the American hardboiled tradition and the cityscape of Los Angeles. Rowson’s use of the comics medium adds a distinctive and unique dimension to Eliot’s narrative. Moreover, the movement from Eliot’s monomodal poems to Rowson’s multimodal account and further to Peters’ web version increasingly posit the co-creational aspect of transmedia storytelling. This form of characterization recognizes the kind of narrative extensions and the democratic potential that Rowson and Peters’ versions bring to the original poems in terms of their transmedial afterlives. These visual explorations pave way for a much more complex, organic, participatory and diffused understanding of Eliot’s poems.

 

Notes

[1] Due to the technology’s rapid advancement over the past few decades, which created the perfect atmosphere for information to be learned and disseminated independently, media platforms have  undergone significant shift. The easy access and the multimodal nature of technology have led to the rise of new competencies like navigating the web through textual, visual, and audiovisual information, interacting on social network sites (SNS), sharing and creating pictures, participation in virtual environments, live streaming, coding and gaming practices which have their own set of rules, and watching movies and animation, all of these show how transmedia skills appear to be fully integrated into the digital environment. In addition to the convergence that is occurring at the media level, there is also a convergence of devices, with smartphones, laptops, and tablets emerging as the essential tools of the digital age. At the same time, the faster speed of internet with the roll-out of 4G and 5G networks have created a zone where network lagging and latency (sometimes leading to buffering) have been reduced to a relic like some of the ‘old’ media applications and features. In media studies, these digital era-technologies and their ongoing evolution (ChatGPT-4, an AI-powered tool that has recently been released can parse both text and image) are not treated as “neutral tools,” as simply there and prioritizing the act of communication over the medium in which it occurs: as Jentery Sayers suggests, “practitioners should be cognizant of not only the values and histories embedded in technologies, but also how those values and histories shape interpretation” (Sayers 2018: 1). As a matter of fact, computers and its graphical applications, such as geotagging, augmented reality, and triangulating different geographic locations, have really been employed in ways that fully transcend the communicative function. Hence, even the immersive experiences provided by books and movies could never match the navigable space which are being provided by these digital environments. Now, reading requires scrolling, primarily vertically (top-down) panels and occasionally horizontally-aligned (left-right) images, since the « infinite canvas, » to use Scott McCloud’s phrase, arose on the internet. (McCloud 2000: 200-202). This digital access to infinitely-available and navigable space has significantly changed the way users interact with new media making it dramatically participatory and procedural (a machinic program employing a complex mechanism “in terms of algorithms and heuristics” to offer the users an information highway) (Murray 1997: 84-85).

 

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Mohit Abrol is currently pursuing PhD in Literature from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India. His research interests include the Modernist milieu and aesthetics, the Postmodern Condition, Continental philosophy, Marxist Studies, comics studies, trauma studies, political violence and the idea of justice. He is working on Bergson’s influence on Eliot and to overcome the fundamental divide between Eliot the poet and Eliot the philosopher such that Eliot can primarily be seen as a philosopher-poet.