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Portfolio A Gorey Gallery A selection of drawings by Edward Gorey. (Click to display images in a new browser window. Best viewed with browsers higher than 3.0)

Concealing, not revealing, is the essence of scandal. Gorey knows this well: "I feel that I am doing the minimum amount of damage to other possibilities that may take place in a reader's head." This is a lesson Gorey has learned, in part, from classic silent film. One of his favorites, he told the Christian Science Monitor, is "Vampyr" by the Danish director Carl Dreyer: "You don't see a thing and I think it's the most chilling movie I've ever seen. I think your own imagination does a better job."

In fact, Gorey's work is formatted very much like an incredibly baroque storyboard for a silent film. Each vignette alternates between panels of painstakingly ornate hand-lettered text and black-and-white illustrations. Like silent film, the juxtaposition of image and text allows us time to consider both, as separate but inseparable parts of the same work.

Gorey's prose sometimes resembles the delightful nonsense of Edward Lear and the jabberwocky of Lewis Carroll. He recognizes that the same things that make their work succeed are at work in his own prose: "Nonsense really demands precision. Like in the Jumblies. Their heads are green and their hands are blue. And they went to sea in a sieve. Which is all quite concrete, goofy as it is." But he also evokes high modernists like Gertrude Stein. "L'Heure Bleue" is full of such Steinian wordplay:

I thought it was going to be different;
It turned out to be(,) just the same.
What is food?
It's a small town in New Hampshire.

This could be a phrase straight out of Stein's "Tender Buttons." The crucial difference is that Gorey, unlike Stein, can illustrate his consciousness as it streams. In this case, he makes it a wordplay: "L'Heure Bleue" is narrated by some vaguely canine creatures wearing sinister bandit masks over their eyes and sweaters emblazoned with the letter "T," who hold cards bearing various letters of the alphabet, leaving the impression that the arbitrary story line is the end product of an extended game of doggy Scrabble.

Gorey's phobias may not be waning, but neither are those who adore him for them. There has been talk of an animated TV series (sadly, many among the PBS set know Gorey only for the animated credits he created for the "Mystery" series). Clifford Ross and Karen Wilkin released a monograph on Gorey, "The World of Edward Gorey," in 1996. Tattooed and mohawked young adults lurk around the Gotham book mart, an unofficial museum of Goriana, searching out anything Gorey. Even Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, the minor-league Gothette, gave Gorey the dubious honor of making his video for "The Perfect Drug" into a live-action knockoff of his work. One can also see his influence in the ascendancy of the graphic novel -- and the willingness to take seriously the work of certain graphic novelists, like Alan Moore of "Watchmen" and Neil Gaiman of "The Sandman."

Not that Gorey himself desires cult status, mind you. As he told the Globe in 1998, "When I think of other things that attain cult status, they strike me as somewhat feebleminded. I mean, I suppose it's better being a cult object than nothing at all. But I don't see how anyone has time to be really famous. I might get people dropping by who are slightly -- unhinged."

salon.com | Feb. 15, 2000

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