(over-)reading Chris Ware's Building Stories

I am a little late to the conversation about Chris Ware's ambitious comics project, Building Stories.[1] Much has already been written and said[2] about this book since its publication in 2012. I want to join the conversation not just because it is pretty incredible, as books go, but because it has also suffered from what I would like to call over-reading, a specific case of the over-estimation that many great works are subject to. My purpose, then, is not to write another review the Building Stories, but to think about what different readings of the book might tell us about reading and interpretation in general.

I referred to Building Stories as a book, but this requires clarification. More precisely, it is a box, about twelve by seventeen inches and two inches deep (a bit large for a bookshelf). Inside are fourteen pieces that resemble a variety of print formats: the Sunday comics strip, the floppy comic, the graphic novel, the tabloid, the newspaper, and other less easily classifiable elements.

At the same time, it is simply a book. But as such, its unusual form asks us to consider just what it is that makes a book into a whole. What is the role of the material experience of reading in this, of holding a book, folding and unfolding it, and turning its pages?

In such a context, Building Stories' apparent formal eclecticism might be better characterized as encyclopedic. Katherine Roeder calls Building Stories "a miniature pantheon of comic art,"[3] not simply a catalogue but a literal collection of storytelling formats, graphic and otherwise, established and novel. For Roeder the tactile experience of reading Building Stories is central to this exploration of formal diversity and potentiality, by "taking it out of the museum and off the computer screen and giving us all something we can hold on to." In this sense, the material variety of the elements that make up Building Stories becomes an aspect that unifies them. Each offers a different reading experience, from the small booklet easily held in one hand to the large newspaper-like foldouts that must be opened on a big table or even the floor.

The question is, how do we read a book that forces us to approach it in different ways? The reader who opens the Building Stories box is immediately confronted with choices: where to begin? There is no first page, or, alternatively, there are fourteen first pages. Wherever one begins, there are two elements that are more or less common to all the pieces in the box: story and style. All the stories involve, revolve around, or parallel the life of the unnamed female protagonist and they are all drawn with an insistent graphic regularity that produces innovative panel layouts through principles of symmetry, scale, and repetition. This lends a unity to the contents of Building Stories, but not a linear order.

One way around this difficulty is to accept the order in which the contents have been packed in the box, roughly from smallest to biggest, top to bottom. This results in a semi-linear story, following the female protagonist as a young art student in Chicago into her adult life as a wife and mother, peppered with flashbacks and other narrative interludes and hitting a few appropriately-dramatic climaxes in a number of encounters with death in the larger pieces at the "end".

This is ultimately unsatisfying and insufficient as a "solution" to the text, however, which hardly supports such a banal reading as "one woman's journey to come to grips with life". This top-to-bottom reading of Building Stories does not actually offer any resolution. A series of panels at the end of this particular sequence puts this into relief. We see a kind of time-lapse of the protagonist's daughter, Lucy, at different ages, asking questions of her mother. It's not entirely clear if the protagonist is recalling memories or simply imagining the course of her relationship with her daughter, but whatever the case may be, she is left alone and without a reply to the final question Lucy asks: "Will I be the most important thing you ever do?"

The reader, too, upon reaching the "end" of any given sequence from the book is always left with an uncertainty, a question without an answer. You always could have begun somewhere else and read the text differently. Another story may have been possible.

It is rather seductive to view these possibilities as boundless. This is part of the book's power, no doubt. One presenter at a conference stated that "all of life is in this box" and that we might read it as "a kind of (secular) Buddhist sutra: here's how to turn inevitable suffering into joy."[4] I believe, however, that this is to mistake Building Stories scope for a comprehensiveness or completeness that that text itself does not ultimately support.

Because, in the end, "all of life" is not in the box. Although there is a certain narrative malleability in terms of the reader's approach to the book, there are still a finite number of components, both in terms of stories and physical objects. The book can only speak on and to a limited number of issues. We begin to over-read when we ignore the physical boundaries that the box has so neatly laid out for us, when we forget the materiality of the book so clearly displayed in its many different forms.

The back of the box is illuminating in this regard. The blurb text insulates against over-reading by presenting the work from a certain ironic remove, proclaiming that Building Stories offers "reading material ready to address virtually any imaginable artistic or poetic taste, from the corrosive sarcasm of youth to the sickening earnestness of maturity" and is "sure to sympathize with the crushing sense of life wasted, opportunities missed and creative dreams dashed which afflict the middle- and upper-class literary public". The back of the box forces us to recognize a tension inherent in aesthetic experience: the reader is invited to identify with the story, but must also accept its critique. The text affects us emotionally and calls us to be aware of the conditions -- here, class and race, in particular -- that make that aesthetic connection possible.

For all of its formal ambition, Building Stories is bound by its own pages. It cannot extend beyond the words and images printed in its various elements. But it is the very fact that it cannot contain all of life, that it is necessarily incomplete and irresolvable as a story, that gives it power. The back of the box also carries an illustration of the different printed elements contained within, which gives the impression of suggesting some ideal order of reading: there are dotted lines and arrows pointing from one text to the next, all related to a diagram of a house. The lines, however, lead to dead ends or make little loops, failing to connect all of the pieces depicted in any single order. Instead, the text clarifies that the diagram indicates "appropriate places to set down, forget or completely lose any number of its contents within the walls of an average well-appointed home." This seems to better capture the relation of each part of the book to the others and to the whole: they contain moments of time and place to get lost in. They are part of a larger whole, but, like the rooms of a house, they may be visited in any order, for any length of time. They may be loved or ignored, cherished or forgotten.

For all its unusual characteristics, Building Stories is not a challenge to the supposed linearity of reading in general, whether in novels, comics, or any other genre. Instead, it draws out the non-linear reading practices that we already use with texts that do have a first page and are ostensibly meant to be read from beginning to end. We re-read favorite scenes time and again or flip back to double-check important details; sometimes we look ahead or read the last page first; we skip sections that are uncomfortable or dull; we read one particular book in a series more than the others, and so on.

Whether this means that we should read Building Stories like any other book or that we should read all books like Building Stories, I won't try to say.

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[1] Chris Ware, Building Stories. 2012.

[2] A good starting point is a review in Episode 21 of the Comics Alternative podcast and the follow-up blog post.

[3] Katherine Roeder, "Building Stories: Stories about Art and buildings, and Growing Up." The Comics Journal Oct. 10, 2012. http://www.tcj.com/building-stories-stories-about-art-and-buildings-and-growing-up/
[4] Jean Braithwaite, "Varieties of Nonlinearity in Chris Ware's Building Stories." Paper delivered at the PCA/ACA Annual Conference, April 19, 2014. Chicago, IL.