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Opus 160: Will
Eisner's last production, a book entitled The
Plot, is emblematic of the man's creative enterprise. Like much
of his life's work-the Spirit, a comic book crime-fighter without costume
(but with literary pretensions) engaged in noir narratives too complex
for the meager number of pages they were allotted; instructional comic
books with industrial as well as military applications; graphic novels,
the literary aspiration realized- The
Plot is an unprecedented, pioneering undertaking. Because it deploys
the verbal-visual narrative mannerisms of the comics medium, it looks
like a graphic novel; but it is history and polemic, not fiction. It
is also a mystery and a scholarly examination and a cry from the heart.
And it is not entirely successful, like much of Eisner's latterday literary
endeavor. But, again like most of his work, it dares to go where few,
if any, have gone before, and it is therefore typical of the artist's
life-long crusade for the literary status of his chosen medium. We do
not demand of our pioneers that they achieve their objectives perfectly;
we admire them for making attempts that are heartfelt and competently
executed and therefore exemplary and inspirational. Due out at the end
of May, The Plot (150 7x10-inch pages, hardcover;
$23.95) is an impressive manifestation of this kind of bold venturing;
it is, in other words, quintessential Eisner. Characteristically, Eisner was working
on the book through his last hours in the hospital following heart surgery
that everyone thought had been successful. His editor at W.W. Norton,
Robert Weil, spoke with him twice on January 3, "to let him know
that the final revisions to the text, based on his conversations with
historian Stephen Bronner, were now complete. The next morning,"
Weil continued, "I learned with great shock that he had unexpectedly
passed away. ... there was just the slightest comfort in knowing that
this work, which was as important to him as anything he had done in
his 70-year career, was indeed finished." The book takes its name from a wholly
fictional plot to take over the world, a scheme supposedly conjured up by Jews. This outrageous
canard was fabricated by the Tsar's secret police to thwart a tendency
towards modernization in 1890s Russia. Powerful traditional interests
opposed to change sought to divert the Tsar from his intention by appealing
to his anti-Semitism: to that end, they manufactured a document purporting
to be a blueprint for world domination that was formulated at an international
conclave of Jews. According to this document, modernization -discarding
the feudal systems of Russia and the monarchies of Europe-was the method
by which the Jews would achieve their ends. Called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the scurrilous "report"
was first published in 1905, appended to a novel by Nilus Serge, a Russian
religious fanatic and conspiracy nut. The bogus nature of the document
was established beyond question in 1921. A reporter for the London Times was able to demonstrate that
The Protocols duplicated the
gist (and, in many instances, the text, word-for-word) of a book published
in 1864 by an obscure Parisian agitator, Maurice Joly. His Dialogues in Hell was a political attack on France's current ruler,
the usurping Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III): employing imaginary conversations
between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Joly hoped to reveal Napoleon as
a conniving dictator in the mold of Machiavelli's Prince. In other words,
The Protocols was a hoax, and there had
never been anything remotely resembling an international conspiracy
of Jews to take over the world. Despite irrefutable evidence that The Protocols was a forgery and a fraud,
the document has been published again and again, and it circulates still
throughout the world, where the credulous believe in the plot it alleges. I spoke to Eisner in the fall of 2003
just after the publication of his graphic novel, Fagin the Jew, which he described as a "polemic," an argument
intended to refute the stereotypical image of Jews as perpetrated in
the Dickens novel, Oliver Twist.
During our conversation, he said he was at work on another book in the
same vein, this one attacking the astonishing vitality of the spurious
Protocols. He said he'd thought The Protocols had long since disappeared
over the horizon, but one day while surfing the 'Net, he'd encountered
the document-to all intents and purposes, alive and flourishing. He
resolved then to try to do something to undermine its inexplicable vitality.
The Plot is his try at it. "Over
the years," he writes in his Foreword, "hundreds of books
and competent scholarly articles have exposed the infamy of The Protocols. These studies, however, are written mostly by academics
and are designed to be read by scholars or by persons already convinced
of their fraudulence. I have spent my career in the application of sequential
art as a form of narrative language. With the widespread acceptance
of the graphic narrative as a vehicle of popular literature, there is
now an opportunity to deal head-on with this propaganda in a more accessible
language. It is my hope that, perhaps, this work will drive yet another
nail into the coffin of this terrifying vampire-like fraud." Many
of the graphic novels Eisner has created over the last 25 years have
explored the Jewish community of his youth, growing up in the Bronx.
As a Jew, he experienced anti-Semitism himself, and he has written about
it before, notably in The Heart
of the Storm and in The Dreamer, graphic novels with a strain
of autobiography in them. But Fagin
the Jew is a direct assault on anti-Semitism; and The Plot is likewise at attack on the virulent Protocols. The pages of The Plot look like
the pages of most of Eisner's graphic novels: instead of tiers of panels
comic-strip style, the pages display visual vignettes that define their
narrative function by artful arrangement of light and dark, a shape
in one panel forming the border of the next panel. Eisner adds subtle
tones to his pen-and-ink renderings with a gray wash, giving some sequences,
particularly street scenes in early 19th century Europe,
a delicate dream-like quality. Visually, the volume is as handsome an
achievement as any in the Eisner library. As
a narrative, or argument, the book takes shape in three segments. In
the first, Eisner traces the origins of The
Protocols, starting with Joly's diatribe; in the second, he compares
the texts of The Protocols and
Joly's Dialogues in Hell; in the third, a chorus
of actual incidents-trials, newspaper articles-reveal the deception
and show that The Protocols survive
every rebuttal and return, time after time, as viciously potent as ever.
The
first section, the longest in the book, is the most successful. A historical
narrative, it takes on the ambiance of a detective story as Eisner takes
us from the mostly failed life of the pamphleteer Joly to the Tsarist
court and then back again to France, where the fabrication of The Protocols takes place, using Joly's book as a guide. Then we return
to Russia and meet the slightly mad fanatic Nilus, whose publication
of The Protocols assures that they will circulate
widely. As the unraveling of a mystery, the narrative has an inherent
suspense, and because Eisner is able to focus for rather lengthy passages
on a succession of characters-first Joly, then the Russian aristocratic
plotters, then the forger in Paris- the factual recitation is personified
and fosters our interest in much the manner of a novel. As sometimes
has happened in his graphic novels, Eisner's characterizations slip
occasionally into bathetic melodrama, but over-all, the maneuver is
nevertheless effective: putting characterization in the service of exposition,
Eisner is able to present historical fact as biographical drama, a tactic
in itself likely to sustain our engagement-even though the "mystery"
of the origins of The Protocols is alone sufficient to the
task. The
second stage of Eisner's argument is also effective but in a quite different
way. We meet Philip Graves, the reporter for the London Times who exposed the forgery in 1921. And for 17 pages, we
get a comparison of the texts of The
Protocols and Joly's Dialogues
-page by page, running side-by-side. We can easily see how the language
of the fiction was adopted to manufacture the fraud. And Graves, who
is making the same comparison as we are, occasionally comments on what
he sees: he points to one passage which appears identically in both
documents, saying, "A clever metaphor, no wonder The
Protocols copies it." As narrative, which presumes suspense,
this section is scarcely engaging; but it is not intended to be. Here,
Eisner is calling upon the most persuasive witness to testify to the
fakery of The Protocols: the documents themselves, which, taken together, prove
the one to be the source of the other. And the source is not fact but
fiction, as made-up as The Protocols
itself. The device is inarguably effective. The
last section of the book is somewhat disjointed. Beginning with Hitler's
use of The Protocols to shore up his case against
the Jews, Eisner takes up in sequence the various re-emergences of The Protocols and the ensuing court cases
and other exposes of the document, each of which ends with the participants
assuring themselves that this time, The Protocols are finished, discredited for once and all. And then,
on the next page, the infamous document re-surfaces and is again responsible
for death and destruction, ending in the now expected chorus of satisfaction
that it has, again, been decisively refuted, never to cloud the minds
of people again. Then on the next page, the cycle resumes. Here, too,
Eisner's method is understandable, but in leaping decades at a time,
the narrative loses its momentum. Still, the chorus supplies this section
with its ironic unity. Sadly, the recurring epitaph also suggests that
the colossal humbug is still not dead; it may well emerge again, thriving
on human ignorance and bigotry, which has, throughout the history of
The Protocols, nurtured the
life of this insidious deception. The
authenticity of Eisner's interpretation of the jaded origins of the
nefarious document is attested to by essays that bookend the work. In
his Introduction, the distinguished international novelist Umberto Ecco
discusses "the patchwork" of sources that make "The
Protocols an incoherent text," the very incoherence revealing
"its fabricated origins." In an Afterword, Stephen Eric Bronner,
who has studied The Protocols
extensively and written about it, puts the document in historical
context. A concluding section footnotes the sources of Eisner's presentation
after which a bibliography supplies an extensive list of scholarly works
on the subject. The Plot may not be Eisner's best work,
but it is a story, an argument, that profits greatly from the application
of skills it took a lifetime to develop. Eisner turned to this project,
as he says, convinced that the techniques of a visual-verbal medium
could do what scholars haven't been able to do-convince the wider popular
audience that The Protocols is false. Alas, as Eisner's
narrative itself reveals, the exposes have not taken place entirely
in the shaded groves of academe where they could be ignored by a larger
readership: newspapers and the popular press have also publicized the
nature of the fraud-to no avail. But "comics" may succeed
where other media have failed. In his steadfast dedication to his medium,
Eisner hoped the vibrant blend of words and pictures would make the
case both more persuasively and pervasively than the others. Perhaps,
at last, the stake has been driven into the heart of the monster. Or
not. We
cannot help but remark, as Tom Underhill so perceptively does in his
review in The Comics Journal (No. 267), on the ironic
parallel between Joly and Eisner: Joly also had high hopes for his book.
He hoped his Dialogues in Hell
would bring down the tyrant Louis Napoleon. It didn't. Underhill
thinks Eisner was "self-aware enough" to construct the parallel,
thereby tempering the seeming naivety of his aspiration for his book's
effectiveness. But I'm not so sure. Eisner portrays Joly as a fanatic,
obsessed by an impossible dream. When he depicts himself at the end
of The Plot, encountering
yet another instance of the perverse obduracy of the nefarious Protocols, Eisner is puzzled but hopeful,
not obsessed. And on the last page, he shows us that he realizes that
the despised book is still alive, still wreaking havoc. Besides, Eisner's
hope, he says, is to drive "another nail" into the coffin
of The Protocols, not the final nail. Eisner
was certainly aware of the futility of any ambitious expectation for
a book-any book-but I don't think he constructed a deliberate echo of
Joly's fate in his own hopes for The
Plot. The image of Eisner at the end of the book is not as obvious
an invocation of the picture of Joly at the beginning as Underhill suggests
it is. The parallel Underhill sees provides the book with a cautionary
patina. But Eisner scarcely saw his cause as hopeless or doomed to failure. Eisner's
hopes were both more and less ambitious than Joly's: Eisner's hopes
were much more long-range than Joly's passionate dream of fostering
a revolution in his lifetime. Eisner hoped that a book with a mainstream
publisher would make it into places that the product of graphic novel
publishers could never aspire to-the nation's classrooms, where it might
influence tomorrow's citizens rather than just opening the eyes of today's.
He was consequently pleased that Fagin the Jew was published by Doubleday,
which also produces books for schools. With The Plot, Eisner may have upped the ante a bit: W.W. Norton is a publisher
of both scholarly and popular works, undeniably an uptown house, and
Norton has already announced that it will be re-issuing all of Eisner's
graphic novels. The Plot may
not be a graphic novel-a fiction-but its classification scarcely matters:
it has achieved a status for visual-verbal narrative that, like most
of Eisner's work, shows the way for others to follow.
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