Cartoonists+Classics: On Isolation and the Companionship of Great Books
A short essay on the impact that three classic books had on my life.
Prefatory note: From March 5 to April 3, my startup Hederis will be running a Kickstarter campaign, to raise money to print some books that will showcase the capabilities of our software. We partnered with talented illustrators to create custom covers and interior illustrations for three classic works of literature: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Each of the books that the artists chose happens to be personally significant to me, and as you’d expect from good art, the covers they’ve created give a new dimension to my experience with these classic texts.
I read all of these books for the first time during the same phase of my life: I had just graduated from St. Johns College (where we followed a curriculum centered on reading), and was spending a year teaching English at a high school in France. I never had to help put food on the table when I was growing up, but my family was by no means wealthy and I had to work hard for the few luxuries I had. My life during the first half of that year was meager and lonely: I was a foreigner in a mid-sized country town, struggling to attain fluency with both the language and social customs. I brought two suitcases with me, filled mostly with clothes. I owned neither a computer nor a cell phone, and for entertainment, I had a disc-man and a handful of CDs. I didn’t have speakers, but sometimes I’d set my old headphones on the table and turn the volume up as loud as possible — it was barely the volume of soft conversation, but it was enough to fill the emptiness of my small rented room.
The local library carried me through many quiet nights. I’d challenge myself by reading the French editions of books I knew, but they had a small selection of English-language books, and I slowly worked my way through all of them. This was the first time I read all three of the books in this campaign, and all three of these books resonated with me and the isolation I felt during that transitory period of my life.
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis exemplified that lost feeling not only of being a foreigner, but of having recently graduated from college with no sense of direction; to wake suddenly, and find that the foundation you’d built your life on thus far has all fallen away. Eileen Chavez’s cover highlights the beauty of this confusion and disarray, and challenges us all to ask what we are, and what we’re growing into.
With growth comes decay, and with decay comes Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian, too, is a character outside society, wondering where he belongs, and Alissa Sallah perfectly captures that bleak internal landscape in her cover art. Is Dorian torn with regret, or is that a tiny smirk I see at the corners of his mouth? What does it mean to be evil, and what does evil look like today?
Patrick Keck also explores the idea of evil and what it looks like today, in his cover for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’m a lover of horror, so Dracula naturally became one of my favorite books. A lot of horror is about the unknown — the fear of what might be hiding in the dark, the fear of instability. Patrick’s cover pulls the character of Dracula away from the polished specter that we all know, and instead beckons us to confront the grotesque.
Winter passed into spring, and eventually I made friends, and found myself accepted by the town. (I remember the day well: every week I’d go into the local bakery, where the woman working behind the counter would greet me as a stranger, with a surly, business-like demeanor, and I’d leave with my loaf of whole wheat bread that I’d eat with jam in the mornings. But one day, out of the blue, she smiled as I walked in, and greeted me as an old friend, and that was it: I was welcome.) But I think fondly of those quiet early days, reading alone, and day-dreaming about what life could be.
