I have mentioned several aspects of Reinhard Kleist’s biographical work Cash: I See a Darkness elsewhere on this sit, and it’s such a well-done work that I need to return to it one more time! Lest I be accused of being predisposed toward any work featuring Johnny Cash, I will say that by the time I read this graphic novel, I had been living in Nashville for two years and had never once listened to a Johnny Cash song. (I have listened to plenty now, though, and I’m a bit of a convert.) I first learned of Kleist’s work—which isn’t so much a graphic novel as a biography in graphic novel form—while scrolling through the history of Max & Moritz Prize recipients. Kleist’s work won in 2008 for “Best German-language Comic,” and the award is well justified. I was skeptical at first—how could the life of a musician be adequately portrayed in a work of Sprechblasenliteratur? A film adaptation, I could understand—audience members would be able to hear whichever songs the director chose to include in his biopic. But a graphic novel?
We’ve already looked at the innovative way in which Kleist visually differentiates words that are sung from words that are spoken, as well as how he deals with the presentation of language (German versus English) in the previous section on the Sprechblase. But these aren’t the only ways in which Kleist presents Cash’s music. Let’s take a look at the following three pages, wherein Cash performs “Big River” before a Tennessee audience:
Kleist’s presentation is pretty standard when Cash takes the stage in the first panel of page 58: he begins with a wide-angle shot (to borrow another film term) to establish the scene; the next panel is a close up of Cash’s face as he introduces the song. The background has disappeared here, but we know from the previous panel that the stage is behind him—an automatic act of closure on our part. But then, Cash strums the first chord of the song, and suddenly the titular big river appears behind him. Kleist transports us from the stage, from the act of viewing a performance, and puts us directly into the song. He doesn’t even include lyrics until the very end—the song is translated entirely into images. If we know the song (which I didn’t until, having read this part of the book, I looked it up), then we can hear it playing in our minds as our eyes move from image to image. Our reading slows down and keeps pace with the song: we decide which images represent which lyrics; consequently, the time we spend looking at a particular panel depends on how long the attached lyrics last in our heads. Thematically, Kleist is telling us that Cash’s music has the power to transport his listeners into the world he creates with his music. In this case, it is not clear that this visualization of sound is nondiegetic. We can very well imagine that, like us, the audience members in the book see the song play out in front of them. At first, they see Cash standing in front of the riverscape; but then, Cash the performer disappears and becomes the first-person narrator of the song—he inhabits this song world, too. The listeners on the page are transported into the world of “Big River” so completely that they only reappear once Cash has finished singing—and we are drawn right in with them.
Rather than creating a “meta” moment that brings us out of our immersion, Kleist takes us even deeper into the world he depicts by representing the act of visualization that we carry out when we listen to a song. We translate the words and sounds into meaning—in this case, into images. Kleist doesn’t bother depicting how the song sounds. Instead, he presents an interpretation of what the song means and what effect the song has on the audience. He is not concerned with replicating the experience of hearing sound, which is the purpose of speech balloons and sound effects in comics; rather, he replicates the creation of meaning experienced by those listening to Cash’s music. Both music and comics produce meaning in their respective audiences. What Kleist accomplishes here is a translation from aural to visual without any of the half-measures of sound effects or musical symbols—a translation of essence, not appearance.
As we saw earlier in the scene portraying Cash and Carter’s performance of “Jackson,” Kleist does not do this for every song that comes up in the course of his narrative, but he does do it more than half a dozen times. For some, such as the rendition of “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” (69-73), Kleist translates Cash’s original lyrics into German and uses them as dialogue to help carry the story. Others are completely wordless, like the depiction (translation?) of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes:”
Not only is this song’s story told wordlessly, but the style of drawing is completely different from the rest of the work (compare Cash to the other figures in the final panel on page 117). The change is jarring—no warning is given on the preceding page—just like the song is meant to make the audience uncomfortable, to shake them from their complacence and bring them face to face with the difficult issues surrounding the United States’ abysmal current and historical treatment of Native Americans. Without attempting to replicate any of the words or sounds of the original song, Kleist successfully conveys the tone and message behind Cash’s original song. A few words are necessary, as in the first and second panels on page 114 (or the dollar symbol in the third panel), but none of these are direct quotes from the song—they simply aid us in the identification of certain objects and places. Some of the images are more difficult to match to particular lyrics from the original song (the last panel of page 115, for example), but the narrative comes through with perfect clarity: forced by financial difficulty to fight for the capitalist system that had robbed them of their land, Ira Hayes and his comrades who survived WWII found upon their return that the conditions of their people had not improved; turning to alcoholism, the war hero Ira Hayes died drunk in a puddle—and the cycle continues.
It’s a hard song to hear—and a hard story to see. Cash meant to convey that even a hero like Ira Hayes can be criminally mistreated because he belongs to an unprotected minority group. Cash’s sorrow and rage at this systemic injustice are conveyed in Kleist’s purposefully simplified artwork: we understand by the time we reach the final panel on 117 that this problem is not unique to Ira Hayes, but to all oppressed peoples. Operating purely within the visual realm, Kleist’s depiction resembles Cash’s original not in sound, but in spirit. The visceral nature of Cash’s original is on full display in Kleist’s brilliant adaptation.
Visualizing Sound in Comics 