“The Vertigo of Reiteration through Adaptation: Nicompictopoop Representations in City of Glass and Smoke.”

Abstract

Focusing on Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s movie Smoke as well as on the graphic novel adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, this paper examines the dazzling reiteration and mirror effects at play in the visual adaptations of Auster’s fiction, and which in the end only deepen the endless mise-en-abime already present in “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” and in City of Glass. Disenchanted with a postmodern world of fragments and simulacrum, Auster’s patch-work nevertheless strives for a re-enchantment of the quotidian through story-telling and art-making, as means to create pure, inspiring images. Central to Auster’s fiction and their filmic or comics adaptations, many intertextual and metatextual devices bring to the foreground the question of art as language.