An old-fashioned patrolman who has certainly seen better days is called to solve a murder so that a (capital) crime can be punished appropriately. An order that is no longer inevitable in this dystopian New York full of robocops, drones and flying vintage cars. The “Street Cop”, also the title of the illustrated short story by US author Robert Coover, chases after a phantom like himself once was. When he was still on the “other side,” he stole and fiddled, and tailed the cops. Until finally, under dubious circumstances, he himself advanced to become the representative of an order that, of course, appears quite shaky and is disappearing more and more.
The protagonist of the story – and almost certainly its author as well – struggles with a world that has obviously gone haywire: entire blocks of streets disappear from one moment to the next and suddenly reappear elsewhere. The city has turned into a confusing 3D printed maze, nothing is where it used to be or should be. And while everything is spatially shifted and reversed, the temporal also seems to be maximally dislocated. Past and future merge in a static present. Nothing moves anymore, neither forwards nor backwards. “Space and time had somehow, and in a strange way, become entwined […]’ this state of affairs is summed up in the exposition of the story.
The famous dictum of the Italian philosopher and communist Antonio Gramsci, according to which the “time of the monsters” is dawning in a world in which the old is dying and the new cannot (yet) emerge, fits very well with the anomic world of Street Cop by Robert Coover. It’s teeming with monsters and monstrosities: ludicrous sexual trends that are closer to death than life, to ghouls, the living dead who feed on human flesh and are kept as pets. Finally, the patrolman is accompanied by a grotesque, indefinable creature whose insides seem to be turned outwards and who is otherwise in a state of formal dissolution. And yet it seems to think and feel.
Coover presents all of this with laconic humor and in the form of an inverted grotesque, in which the comedy does not gradually turn to horror, in the sense of a laugh that gets stuck in your throat, but – the other way around – this permanent horror of the absurd turns out to be a particularly weird joke. The story was brilliantly illustrated by Art Spiegelman, who once achieved international fame with his graphic memoir “Maus”. His pictures play with references from pop and comic culture and stand in a productive tension with Coover’s gloomy, dystopian sound, as they are drawn in bright, bright colors and come across as almost cartoonish. Speaking of which, Spiegelman’s version of the street cop is a prototype cartoon whose mask-like face is that of a man without attributes. The importance of masks is central to Spiegelman’s major work, and here, too, it is far from irrelevant to the question of who is imagining such a horrible scenario and why.
The story is followed by a casual dialogue between the author and the illustrator, which revolves around the themes and the conditions under which the book came about. If you want to know how the two “postmodernists” came together, why Art Spiegelman placed an oversized Covid virion over the protagonist’s head for the cover artwork and why we mustn’t lose our sense of humor in the coming political struggles, you should read it. And the book anyway.
2023-05-20 03:59:23
#time #monsters
