The Circles in the Squares: Analogical Thinking in 釦硃梭棗鳥矇 and 捩梗梭梭矇硃莽 & 紼矇梭勳莽硃紳餃梗 by P. Craig Russell
Author: Shiamin Kwa
Source: The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics Crucial Decade, LSU Press
Publication Type: Chapter in a book
Abstract: P. Craig Russells opera adaptation comics, 釦硃梭棗鳥矇 and 捩梗梭梭矇硃莽 and 紼矇梭勳莽硃紳餃梗, are referred to as opera adaptations, but it would be perhaps more accurate to describe them as adaptations of the same source texts that were set to music by Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy, operas for which they are now best known. But before they were operas, 釦硃梭棗鳥矇 and 捩梗梭梭矇硃莽 and 紼矇梭勳莽硃紳餃梗 were famous plays. Richard Strauss used Wildes play as his book (libretto) to compose his opera 釦硃梭棗鳥矇, and Debussy set Maeterlincks dialogue to music. Russells comics use the play texts as the libretto for his own original creations, comic books that use visual imagery rather than music to emphasize the text and draw attention to the patterns inherent in those plays. Leitmotifs are evoked with the carefully orchestrated use of color and recurring shapes instead of chords and harmonies, complementing the structures of these two stories. In Russells visual language the reader is drawn to the repetitions, symbolism, and strict rules of plots that are fairytale-like in structure. Yet, while comics may share some formal characteristics with music, as they share formal characteristics with other art forms, they evoke a practice that is discreet to the comics form itself. Russells works articulate the theatrical event as medium-specific adaptations, not as representations of musical form, but as performances of these libretti in comics form. These opera comics convey the themes inherent in Wildes and Maeterlincks plays, but not with musical devices. Instead, they accomplish the imperfections of communication with the juxtaposition of incompatible shapes. Both plays are about the very ineffectiveness of language to broach the distances between people. Shapes are manipulated in both of these adaptations to the same effect: within the regular frames of the rectangular panels, Russell employs circular shapes (wells, cisterns, pools, pupils of the eye) as visual reminders of more metaphorical ideas of voids that are central to both 釦硃梭棗鳥矇 and 捩矇梭梭梗硃莽 and 紼矇梭勳莽硃紳餃梗. At the heart of each of these plays is a fundamental distrust of the communicative power of language in shaping what and how we know: in both 釦硃梭棗鳥矇 and 捩梗梭梭矇硃莽 and Melisande, characters exchange words, often exhaustively, yet they are as incapable of understanding the other as they are of conveying their own thoughts. Russells comics, like the operas inspired by the same plays, use his chosen medium to contemplate this fundamental question of the troubled ways that we use to try to know each other.