EIN BILD ROMAN STÜCKEN A Pictorial Novel In Pieces - Captain ...

sition of his ‘trade partners,’ immediately sniffing the
opportunity in the power antics of an Indian chieftain
or the provincial smugness of a distiller from Orléans.
Instead of making friends, Pamphile in any case prefers to
form strategic alliances even with his closest associates;
he ruthlessly asserts his authority
over the ship’s crew, but then conspiratorially
draws the cabin boy
to his side. If as a pirate—in this
regard he is an almost romantic
character—he might still be willing
to act the gentleman, his inner
entrepreneur does not show such
tact nor, certainly, any mercy. He
uses any situation that presents
itself to his advantage, and that
includes his encounters with us,
his readers.
Although we first hear of his
adventures in a sort of flashback
(and, as it were, by accident: a
manuscript is read out loud during
a dinner party), we gradually
become accomplices to Pamphile’s
unsavory deals. We are also ‘live’
observers, eye witnesses to a parallel
narrative strand of the convoluted
fable in which the menagerie
that populates this novel in
such large numbers is killed off,
one by one, in rather ignominious circumstances—the
cat, for instance, starves to death; the ape suffers a ruptured
colon; the bear is court-martialed and executed …
If Dumas here flirts with the genre of the animal fable,
then in order to bring home to us, in cold print, that
there is no deeper meaning: in vain will we hope for a
moral lesson to this story.
Capital must remain in constant flux in order to become
profitable, and so the narrative constantly careens
223
Hans-Jürgen Hafner – Capital(ist) Capture Cruises
back and forth between temporal and narrative levels, insatiably
ingesting genres and styles. The voracious structure
of the text, the literary space it flimsily delineates,
they constitute their hero. In terms of its textual form,
Dumas’ Captain Pamphile is the product of an equally
pragmatic and success-oriented
undertaking, and in this sense almost
shockingly self-reflective—
it is an expression of the prevailing
conditions through and
through: a cruise out to capture
audiences, and in this it is the
perfect complement of its hero,
faring much better when it is not
encumbered by any moral. The
topography of this story, thought
up for a contemporary bourgeois
readership, matches the world of
tangible and disposable goods.
The horizon of its imagination is
delineated by an uncompromising
materialism.
Capturing the bounds
of the situation
“‘Pure painting’, relieved of the duty of
signifying something, is an expression
of the individual sensibility of the artist
and of his originality of conception—in
short, according to the famous phrase, ‘a corner of creation seen
through a temperament’.” 9
André Gill, Les Triomphateurs du Salon
(Edouard Manet), colored lithograph,
title illustration of L'Eclipse, 1876
In this regard, the source on which Reski and Weber’s
painterly-collaborative pictorial novel in pieces is based
is an excellent choice. But it is surely not surprising that
Dumas’s adventuresome and fragile Pamphile novel, taken
as the screenplay for a representational-illustrative,
post-media-painterly Gesamtkunstwerk collaboration