Broken Frontier

The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904-1913) by Winsor McCay 'Silas". Ulrich Merkl, 2007.

"Absolutely everything has been imagined during one night or another by one mind or another, and then forgotten." - Luis Buñuel

Have you seen Ulrich Merkl's The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend? It's a marvel. Lying open here on the desk in front of me, it measures almost 3 feet across. The pitch-black cover, superimposed with weird images in negative white and grey, presages the world of dreams inside. Most of the book's 464 pages are filled with 369 impeccably restored, annotated selections of this most bizarre and delightful comic strip. It also includes 137 pages of beautifully-designed introductory material, including two essays by historian Alfredo Castelli and an essay on dream interpretation by Jeremy Taylor. Merkl made masterful design choices, frequently using black, white and red, symbolic colors of the human psyche.

Merkl also includes a DVD containing high-resolution scans of all 821 episodes of the strip, a catalogue raisonné (600 pages), and a short animation by McCay of his fluid and engaging Gertie the Dinosaur. I think you will perish from creative malnourishment if you do not read this book.

The running gag in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend involves Welsh rarebit. A person will eat rarebit before bed. This person will have a crazy dream. He or she will then awake, swearing never to eat rarebit again. The bulk of each incredible strip is the dream itself, strange as dreams are, involving physical impossibilities as dreams do, and often turning to distressing nightmare, as dreams will. And it's always funny.

What is it about this humble treat that inspires comedy? It's the cheese, of course! The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend helpfully includes a recipe for this turn-of-the-century nacho, found on a dishtowel. In the top of a chafing dish (at my house, a saucepan), combine 1 Tbsp. butter, 3 Tbsp. ale, and one-half pound cheddar cheese (the milder and creamier the better), cubed. Add a little mustard or cayenne and cook slowly, stirring, until the cheese is melted and the ingredients are well-combined. Serve over toast.

Notorious as a cause of indigestion, the modern man blames his nightmares on cheese. To the howling consternation of Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge scoffed at Marley's ghost. "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese…" In McCay's strip, under the influence of rarebit, a man opens his head to count his marbles. Another man tries to commit suicide by jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge, only to bounce off the surface of the water. A moralizing shadow prevents a man from drinking. A woman opens a new umbrella and it quickly grows as big as a building, sweeping her away on the wind.

This book delivers a mother lode for people eager to bend their analytical skills to the task of interpreting comics. Last month, Dutch picture-analyst Huib van Opstal published his appreciation of McCay and The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, previously excerpted in this column. Van Opstal provides an accessible overview of McCay's work, including his career as a filmmaker, and his use of cinematic techniques in his comic strips. He shows us some of the ways that McCay was influenced by modernity, and notes some of the ways that typical features of modernity (like urban life, technological innovation, and futuristic visions) appear in McCay's strips. Above all, van Opstal provides the reader with a deep appreciation for McCay as artist and craftsman.

Van Opstal loves Merkl's Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, showing real appreciation for the magnitude of Merkl's contribution to scholarship. It truly is remarkable. In the only blot on the whole wonderful project, Merkl and van Opstal waste time on a most unsatisfying discussion of the question of McCay's influence on comic strip and film culture.

For example, Merkl suggests in several places that panels or gags from Dream of the Rarebit Fiend might have influenced sequences in Disney's 1964 film version of P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins. But beyond identifying a handful of similar panels, Merkl doesn't offer any evidence of influence, nor does he suggest that evidence might exist.

Merkl even suggests that Dream of the Rarebit Fiend influenced Luis Buñuel's film classic L'Âge d'or. Made in Paris in 1930, L'Âge d'or is embraced by some as the greatest classic of surrealist cinema. Every single image in this 60-minute film is designed to shock the viewer's sensibilities. Merkl extracts a mere 6 images that remind him of panels in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, and then writes that L'Âge d'or "owes a great deal" to the comic strip.

If you see a melting clock, you are going to recognize Dalí's influence. But if you see an image of a man kicking a dog, you won't associate it with McCay. You could walk down any street, in New York or Paris, and see a man kick a dog, or slap a woman, or abuse a blind man. A cow in a bed is an unsettling image in Buñuel's hands, and while McCay joked about barnyard animals in bed, too, it's hard to imagine that McCay's panel was Buñuel's reference. The two images don't have anything in common.

It would be incredibly cool to find out that Luis Buñuel, that great dreamer, was a fan of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. But this is as yet unknown, and unlikely, given Buñuel's antipathy to the bourgeois and the formulaic. Van Opstal writes, "Two examples showing close resemblances for instance, are probably just a link in a chain which, no doubt, and in due time, will prove to be much, much longer." But while he begins with this wisely tentative approach to the question of McCay's influence, he then reverses himself in the same paragraph, writing, "Uncontestedly, their* 1930 surrealistic short film 'L'Age d'Or,' was scripted from A to Z from Winsor McCay's Rarebit episode."

We can only assume that van Opstal has not recently viewed L'Âge d'or, or perhaps I haven't yet read the episode of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend in which McCay portrays the Duc de Blangis as the Christ.

Without solid research demonstrating real influence, all this amounts to worthless speculation. And the discussion obscures other, far more interesting questions raised by Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, such as the meaning of human cruelty in a mechanized world, or images of the "self" in modernity, or the influence of Freud's research on turn-of-the-century art in America. The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend gives you all you need, and more, for a lifetime of inquiry, and enjoyment. For information on ordering, visit the book's home page.

*The script of L'Âge d'or is credited to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.