Reading is Fundamental

HATFIELD: There's a scene in the last chapter of Blankets in which you talk about going into the public library (I take it in Milwaukee) for the first time and feeling like a kid in a candy store. Tell me a little bit about your life as a reader -- not as a reader of comics per se, but as a reader, period. What sorts of things did you begin reading when you were on your own? What left an impression on you, maybe even influenced you, in literature?

THOMPSON: It's funny because I came to reading later in life, in some ways. I mean, I was always a reader when I was at home, focused on the Bible, but I really bought into that fundamentalist belief that the only book you need to read is the Bible. I always had guilt issues about reading other material, like "I shouldn't be reading this when I have to tend to the holy Word." There was objectionable material, like there always is, in the best novels. I was censoring that out of my life too.

So [going to the library] was a candy-store experience, a very exciting part of my life. When I left my parents' house, I felt really liberated from the constraints of my fundamentalist upbringing. I remember the first books that I checked out, which really aren't all that risqué -- one in fact was Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund [1930], which was more appropriate than I ever imagined at that moment. I haven't read Hesse since I was 20 or 21, but I do remember that the book is about two best friends. I think they both go to seminary together, or they meet in their religious education, and one of them goes off to be this very devout, monk-like priest and the other is an explorer of the world and of women [the story, set in a medieval monastery, involves Narcissus, a teacher, and his pupil Goldmund - ed.]. These friends have different lives and worldviews, but there's a love between them. It was an exciting book to read at that time. I read Kierkegaard, by the way. So I'm still kind of probing...

HATFIELD: Why did you read Kierkegaard?

THOMPSON: How did I end up at Kierkegaard?

HATFIELD: Did you get to Kierkegaard right away?

THOMPSON: I did, I did. I don't know if I had had some sort of tip from C. S. Lewis or something. I'd been reading C. S. Lewis during my Christian phases, you know, The Screwtape Letters and stuff like this.

HATFIELD: Mere Christianity, things like that?

THOMPSON: Yeah, so C. S. Lewis was maybe one of those gateway authors -- a Christian scholar, but his books aren't particular or necessarily pertaining to just Christianity. He must have dropped some hint about Kierkegaard. Then I got Ben Shahn's For the Sake of a Single Verse [1974, adapting Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge], which was comics. I think Ben Shahn was one of the first graphic artists that I was really excited about when I discovered libraries. I still like him a lot; I was definitely devouring him at that time.

HATFIELD: Do you know Shahn's The Shape of Content [1957]?

THOMPSON: Yeah, I've read that. It's a great book.

HATFIELD: It's a bellwether book -- compelling, beautifully illustrated too. So Shahn was a graphic artist who was outside the purview of commercial comics in the narrow sense, but still a cartoonist, and that struck you.

THOMPSON: I remember the first couple of library experiences more vividly than the rest. Yeah, going to the library was very exciting to me, because I'd always had very strict self-censorship in place, and now I could read anything. And it wasn't that I was seeking out scandalous material, I was just not prohibiting anything.

HATFIELD: In the years since then, what other fiction or narrative writing has left an impression on you?

THOMPSON: Well, when I was working on Blankets, I was still caught up in self-education and I was trying to read what I thought to be the "classics", everything from A Hundred Years of Solitude to, I don't know, Tess of the D'urbervilles and Lady Chatterly's Lover.

That's when I got my hands on Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which was super-influential as a meditation on memory. Certainly it was over my head, but that's what I was most engaged by -- books that were so dense that an average reader like myself could only absorb a fraction of what it had to offer. That was a really profound experience, and I have whole notebooks filled up with little Proustian quotes. It was a huge inspiration. I had a similar experience with Jimmy Corrigan. You'd lose sight of the story; you're just lost in the beauty of it all. It's so scattered, and then you finally reach the last panel of the book, and everything makes sense, and it's suddenly full of that much more meaning and beauty. With Proust it's certainly overwhelming how that last line, rearranges and informs and gives insight to everything that proceeded it.

HATFIELD: It's a big yield at the end. I'm glad I spent a lot of my time living in that book.

THOMPSON: It would have been worth your time even without that line, but suddenly it's doubly worth your time.

HATFIELD: Now the way that Proust deals with the operations of memory, this was something that influenced your work on Blankets?

THOMPSON: I don't know... That sounds pretty pretentious. Suffice to say, I love the book and it was a tremendous inspiration. Also very influential during that time was Nabokov. I tried to devour all his books, but especially Ada, or Ardor [1969], another big meaty tome. Those were the ones I was really gravitating toward, any book that was really fat and juicy. It's another one that's over my head. Nabokov's work reads like poetry, even his more comedic books like Pnin or the more straight forward adventure/tragedy of Lolita. But Ada is just a dense crazy tangle.

HATFIELD: It's funny, Nabokov is often known for the playfulness and the self-referential nature of his work -- take Ada or Pale Fire for example, or Lolita for that matter. Whereas a lot of readers looking at Blankets or looking at your work in general have, fairly or not, called it sort of achingly sincere, right? That's not a phrase I would associate with Nabokov. So how do you think that work left an impression on your work?

THOMPSON: Well, my other favorite novelist at the time was Henry Miller. I don't think there's anything about my work that's Miller-esque, either [laughter]. It's on the opposite end of the spectrum.

HATFIELD: Was it a case of needing to read something that was so very unlike what you were doing? Not needing, but wanting to?

THOMPSON: It was just a matter of exercising the garbage-in/garbage-out principle. If a cartoonitst wants their medium to break out from its limited confines, then they need to be fueling themselves with something other than pulp novels and Dungeons and Dragons.

HATFIELD: Is there something about the investment of time that it takes to read a big, meaty book of prose that makes you take a different attitude toward that than you would toward, let's say, your more catholic comic reading?

THOMPSON: Yeah... I guess I'm a snob in comics, too, but with books, I feel like I gotta really read the important literature; I have to read literature.

HATFIELD: What is it about Henry Miller that kept you reading him?

THOMPSON: The passion, and that creative virility that I was talking about before. With Miller, it extends beyond creative virility [laughs], but it's really, really contagious. It doesn't have a lot to do with my real life, and I know that Miller's created this sort of caricature of himself in a lot of his greatest books, like Tropic of Capricorn, but it's that passion and that energy that pulsates through the whole book... That's in Nabokov too. There's so much that's poetry -- every single phrasing. It's just so beautifully worded, the textures and the way things sound when you read them, the energy and the rhythm and flow. A lot of post-postmodern novelists, hip young writers, have thrown away that poetry, and have tried to give it a more simplified core. I don't like that sort of writing, I like the ornamentation.

HATFIELD: You like punch-drunk writing, the kind of writing that takes some pleasure in itself?

THOMPSON: Exactly. I would get off on my own little tangents, where I would read all the Nabokov novels, or I'd read all Kundera's novels -- I love Milan Kundera. Henry Miller too, I was very all-consuming. I'd neglect a lot of stuff; it's a pretty spotty self-education. I found the people I really loved and then I just --

HATFIELD: Plowed through them.

THOMPSON: I confess to being a really lazy reader the last couple years. When I started on [my graphic novel] Habibi, I read a lot of non-fiction, books about the history of the Middle East. I didn't know any of this stuff, you know. Books on Islamic art and architecture, Koranic studies, certain environmental issues, slavery, and...

HATFIELD: These are all apropos of themes in Habibi?

THOMPSON: Yeah. I was reading non-fiction with an agent, to inform my book.

HATFIELD: Reading about Islamic culture and Koranic studies from within your own religious background, is there some inherent fascination there for you, coming from something so different?

THOMPSON: Yeah. I don't think of them as that much different. They're all -- Judaism, Islam and Christianity -- all born from the same father, Abraham. Being in Morocco and being around, not fundamentalist Muslims, but sort of casual, everyday Muslims? They weren't extremist jihad fundamentalists, but people with conservative, old-fashion-y beliefs about marriage, pre-marital sex, homosexuality, family values shaped by religious texts. They're the exact same people I grew up with in Wisconsin, in small, Midwestern Christian churches -- exact same ideas and mindset. I love reading the stories that I grew up with from the Bible in other contexts, like in the Koran. The Genesis creation story is pretty much the same, but there are subtle differences. You know, the Noah story, and Abraham and Isaac -- or Ishmael, depending on who you side with.

HATFIELD: So there's recognition, but an awareness of difference.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

HATFIELD: Just enough difference.

THOMPSON: Yeah. There's so much beauty to Islamic culture. After the whole anti-Arab, post-September 11 propaganda, I thought was important to focus on the more positive aspects of Islamic culture and the beauty that exists in their faith. I still think it's there. I think there are fucked-up things about Islam -- Christianity, too. It's when people start getting fundamentalist...

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #268.]

All site contents are © 2002