Graphic grotesque? Comics adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal and Bruno Schulz

Abstract

Although the practice of adapting the classics of world literature into the comic medium has always been popular, there seems to be a shift in preference away from the classical adventure stories toward the more experimental (or, at least, less realist and “adaptogenic”) texts from the literary canon. If we concentrate on the “Slavic” situation, among the more recent graphic narrative adaptations we do not discover only the usual suspects with a rich adaptation history such as Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, but also less obvious names such as Bohumil Hrabal (Une trop bruyante solitude (2004) by Lionel Tran, Ambre, and Valerie Berge) and Bruno Schulz (Heimsuchung und andere Erzahlungen von Bruno Schulz (1995) by Dieter Judt). This essay explores the Hrabal and Schulz examples in order to tackle the question of the adaptability of modernist or at least less realist – in this case: grotesque – literature into visual artistic media – in this case: comics. As Linda Hutcheon has demonstrated, adaptations are the result of a complex process of “creative reinterpretation” and “extensive, particular transcoding”. What this essay focuses on, therefore, is whether, and if so, how these graphic narrative adaptations of modernist fiction have reinterpreted and transcoded the typically grotesque features of their literary counterparts. The analysis shows that comics adapters can choose, on multiple levels, between a plethora of more or less medium-bound devices to compensate in an inventive way for the so-called “sacrifices” made during the adaptation process. In their adaptation Tran, Ambre and Berge, while omitting the more ludicrous traits of Too Loud a Solitude, managed to retain the intriguing complexity of both the content and the form of the protagonist’s inner musings over his own tragedy. Judt, for his part, may have sacrificed part of the equivocality of Schulz’s phantasmagoric literary world, but he clearly succeeded in visually rendering the grotesque imagery, the semiotic density as well as the narrative salience of the adapted text. As critical readings of their literary counterparts, finally, Judt’s work hints at the dominance of semiosis over mimesis in Schulz’s stories, whereas the Hrabal adaptation demonstrates the universal applicability of the novella’s humanist theme.