History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels

CHAPTER SIX: Games Without Frontiers: The Representation of Politics and the Politics of Representation in Schuiten and Peeters’s: La Frontière Invisible

Games Without Frontiers The RepResenTaTion of poliTics and The poliTics of RepResenTaTion in schuiTen and peeTeRs’s LA FRONTIÈRE INVISIBLE ”ainsi fut construit jadis et se construit sans cesse le monument cartographique à jamais présent—hors-temps , hors espace—de la représentation, le monument mémorial du roi et de son géomètre.” [and thus was once built and is unceasingly built the forever present, cartographic monument—outside of time, outside of space—of representation, the memorial monument of the king and his surveyor] —Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (1981: 220) ”when we make a map it is not only a metonymic substitution but also an ethical statement about the world . . . [it] is a political issue.” —J. B. HarLey, “cartography, ethics, and social Theory” (1990: 6) In a chapter of his essay Le portrait du roi [Portrait of the King], entitled “Le roi et son géomètre” [The King and His Surveyor], Louis Marin reflects on the hegemonic nature of mapping by analyzing Jacques Gomboust’s  map of Paris, not only as an epistemological object characteristic of scientific endeavor during the reign of Louis XIV, but also as a political chapTeR six —fabRice leRoy 117 118 Fabrice Leroy project designed to assert and glorify Louis’s absolute monarchy (Marin : –). Although more recent studies on cartography have furthered the analysis of the inherent linkage between politics and the production of spatial knowledge and identity (Crampton : ), Marin’s essay remains a seminal model in the field of political semiotics and discourse analysis, and clearly shows how power relations are inscribed within representational systems, and vice versa. Interestingly, Marin’s chapter also describes quite adequately the codependency of a political leader and his official cartographer, which is at play in La frontière invisible [The Invisible Frontier], the latest, two-volume installment of Benoît Peeters’s and François Schuiten’s ambitious series of graphic novels, “Les cités obscures” [Cities of the Fantastic]. This subject matter echoes a consistent network of meta-representational strategies and political themes within Schuiten and Peeters’s body of work, which I will examine in this essay. La frontière invisible tells the story of a young cartographer, Roland De Cremer, who enters the professional world when he is appointed to the Cartography Center, a strange, dome- shaped structure in the middle of a desert, in his home country of Sodrovno-Voldachia (figure ). Although De Cremer’s new surroundings constitute the archetype of the fantastique [fantastic] locus Fig. 1. de cremer in front of the cartography center (La frontière invisible, vol. 1, p. 10)© schuiten-peeters / casterman. 119 Schuiten and Peeters’s La frontière invisible (isolated, alienating, labyrinthine) and entail intertextual references to Dino Buzzatti or Julien Gracq narratives of a young man assigned to the remote outpost of a faceless power, the story is more Bildungsroman than fantastic melancholia, as it focuses primarily on the professional and sentimental education of the inexperienced cartographer. From the beginning, De Cremer is confronted with conflicting methodologies and agendas. Yet uncritical of his own cartographic training, he tends at first to simply objectify maps, does not question their bias or authority, and remains generally in an undialectical relationship with the documents he is required to archive, analyze, and produce. However, his understanding of mapping devices is quickly problematized , when he receives contradicting advice from two colleagues. I use the word “problematized” here in the Foucauldian sense, meaning that “an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices which were accepted without question, which were familiar and ‘silent,’ out of discussion, becomes a problem, raises discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions” (Foucault : ). On one hand, De Cremer must adjust to a recent government mandate, which requires new scientific methods of inquiry: the collection of “objective ” data by a computer-assisted process, under the supervision of the mysterious and menacing Ismail Djunov, a néotechnologue [neo-technologist] brought in to modernize the center’s methods of mapping. Djunov’s strange and tentacular machines—full of tubes, wires, buttons, and displays of all kinds (: ) —are themselves consistent with a recurrent theme in “Les cités obscures”: the early modern machine, retro-futuristic in its appearance, part utopian technology, part monstrous device, which characterizes the alternate , otherworldly modernity of Schuiten and Peeters’s parallel universe. La frontière invisible contains...