“We’re all important people,” says Henrietta, one of those secondary characters uttering major thematic pearls in “Horizontal Collaboration.” She continues, “Sometimes, to be that, we have to act in secret.”
Secrets, from poorly hidden to preciously held ones, move the drama of this lushly drawn and subtly told graphic novel. “Horizontal Collaboration” is the comics debut of the team of Carole Maurel, artist/illustrator/animator, and Navie, filmmaker and screenwriter. First published by Delcourt in French in 2017, it has been translated to English by Margaret Morrison and brought to UK/US readers by Korero Press.
Written by Navie and Illustrated by Carole MaurelIn this poignant, female-centered graphic novel created by writer/artist duo Carole Maurel and Mademoiselle Navie, the taboo of “sleeping with the enemy” is explored through the story of a passionate, and forbidden, affair. In June 1942, married Rose (whose husband is a prisoner of war) intervenes in the detainment of her Jewish friend and then accidentally embarks on a secret relationship with the investigating German officer, Mark. There is only one step between heroism and treason, and it’s often a dangerous one.
The term “horizontal collaboration” was a derisive label for women in WWII -occupied France who took up romantically with occupying German soldiers. Those are the circumstances of the extramarital affair between main character Rose and German intelligence officer Mark, which we learn about when Rose discloses the story decades later to her granddaughter Virginie. Grandmother Rose’s frankness is a surprise to Virginie, who supposes that the loveless marriage with her grandfather Raymond (a POW during WWII) means that Rose has never experienced love. On the contrary…
Rose’s reverie sends us into a World War II-era Parisian apartment building populated with stories of singular characters, particularly women, whose separate ways of seeking significance and pursuing passions point to the cross-cutting ways love compels and devastates us. Set to 1940 speeches by de Gaulle and newsreel-like reminders of the occupation era, we soon meet apartment manager Andrée and her blind, wise husband Camille, young women Simone and Josephine, mad old Madame Flament, and Rose and her son Lucien, who are busily helping to harbor Jewish friends. After a whirlwind of quick introductions interspliced with collage-like pages of personality and interiority (of blind Camille’s cloud of voices, of young Anaël’s childlike imagination), we experience the moment of Rose and Mark meeting as its own impressionistic full-page spread:
Here is where “Horizontal Collaboration,” which should be judged and experienced purely on its own terms as a graphic novel and not a story divisible from its art, does what makes it extraordinary. Like many stories akin to it (I think of Yelin’s “Irmina” or parts of the recently collected Jason Lutes “Berlin”), “Horizontal Collaboration” brews dramatic concoctions of desire, shame, compassion, and cowardice between its characters, tensions that will not be new to consumers of historical fictions caught up in high romance of these kinds of period pieces.
But Navie and Maurel triumph in exploring how the visual spatialization of isolation and connection, the sequential rhythms of longing or regret, the emotional colortones of judgment or elation, and the visceral action of lust and death can play out on a page. Moreso than most books I’ve read this year, “Horizontal Collaboration” seems to revel in the illustrative resources and emotional resonances of the graphic novel medium, even while it borrows heavily from the stylistics of animation (where Maurel’s animator chops show through brilliantly) and the histrionics of melodrama (where, I imagine, Navie’s experience in cinema and podcasting play a part.)
Flat out, the book is a beauty to gaze upon.
Ironically, though, the gaze of others, particularly the hegemonic gaze of various male authoritarianisms, is an overriding concern of the story. Simone pressing against the demands of her young womanhood, including from her mother, while her heart looks elsewhere. Judith’s bully of a husband, cruelly trampling her yearning for tenderness while policing women’s desires. And Rose, locked in the impossible place of improper, ravenous love.
That gaze is part of the reason Camille, the blind concierge, who “can’t see anything” but can “hear everything,” takes on such importance as a reflector of the real hopes, beyond the outward and visible, of the women and children around him. Yet his blind prophetic grasp, a poultice of empathy, can’t prevent the marching of history that will harden or harm the novel’s women. Maurel’s art has exceptional tonal range, as convincing with liberation as with oppression, with barbarous horrors as with gentle affections. So Rose and Mark’s furious stolen kisses feel earned, even as the leaned-in judging gazes of the street passers-by feels earned at the same moment. And so it is that the story’s climactic confrontations with the ugly sides of all the history around them and all the human cost of our dehumanizing regimes feels tangible without negating the very real agency of our protagonists.
However destined or doomed, the inhabitants of this 11th arrondissement apartment building are brought to stunning life in the breathtaking artistry of Navie and Maurel’s story. Critics might feel dissatisfied with an insufficient condemnation of Nazism (as if that should be any concern… yet tragically it stands as one these days), or with stories too fleetingly developed. But both critiques would seem to unfairly expect of the story’s women the same under-considered demands as they suffer in the story itself. Indeed, before they snap themselves and each other into their “proper” places, Navie and Maurel mercifully give these characters the pages and panels to let their beating hearts– their capillaries of pain, their veins of hope– show forth. Whatever the risk.
