Book-Art
Anthologies
Alternative Publishing

Paul Zelevansky's Trilogy (1991)

There is a familiar tradition of the book as a repository for words, customarily set in uniform typography that is cast into rectangular blocks, sometimes accompanied by illustrations; there is a secondary tradition of books with pictures, customarily captioned. Whereas the first could be described as words sometimes accompanied by pictures, the second exemplifies the principle of images sometimes accompanied by words. There is another, less familiar tradition in which words and pictures have equal status, accompanying each other, so to speak; so that the words remaining in your head long after you have read the work—the afterimage—are as strong as the visuals, or vice versa. The classics in this third tradition include The Book of Kells, Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, and the visual books of William Blake; and though most of us are familiar with such contemporary popular examples as the comics, the higher examples are less known. In this last respect, I’m thinking of Tom Phillips’ The Humument (1980) and Bern Porter’s Found Poems (1972) as the contemporary masterpieces, to which should be added Paul Zelevansky’s trilogy, The Case for the Burial of Ancestors (1981, 1986, 1991). All have epic structures; all took years to become complete; all mix classical materials with contemporary moxie; all regard the book as a medium capable of containing a multiplicity of interests.

II

It seems odd in retrospect that Wyndham Lewis, who was a great painter as well as a major writer, never broached this third tradition; but given the compartmentalization of contemporary criticism, it is scarcely surprising that none of his critics, to my recollection, address this omission.

Other contemporary American books that realize this visual/verbal balance (and likewise tend to mix fact with fiction) are Arakawa and Madeline H. Gins’s The Mechanism of Meaning (1979), Alain Arias-Misson’s Confessions (1974), Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), Merce Cunningham’s Changes (1969), Dave Morice’s Poetry Comics (1982), J Marks’s Rock and Other Four-Letter Words (1968), Jean-François Bory’s Post-Scriptum (1970), Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days (1967), Warren Lehrer’s French Fries (1984); but the obvious difference between them and the Zelevansky trilogy is scale. The last is not only bigger but touches on more dimensions of experience.

The principal sources behind the Zelevansky trilogy are the Old Testament, the major myths, Moby-Dick, The Magic Mountain, hieroglyphics, Georges Seurat, Fra Angelico. He once told me that his favorite composer is John Coltrane; his favorite movies, Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1962), Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). You need not look too far in Zelevansky’s trilogy to see reflections of all this eclectic collection of sources—reflections not only in specific textual details but in the variety of representational styles.

Zelevansky has done painting as well as performance, just as Phillips has composed music and painted canvases and Porter has done various arts (not to mention physics); but it is in spine-bound books that we find the sum of their intelligence and imagination.