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Of Mice, Monkeys and Men
writing the Fantastic
Menagerie book
by Sophie Nusslé
Once upon a time, in the early spring of 2005, I was exchanging
private messages on Aeclectic Tarot with Karen Mahony of
Magic-realist Press in Prague. We were discussing their
latest deck project. I had long been a fan of the Tarot
of Prague, and like a good fan, had written gushing messages
to Karen telling her just how good that deck was. As a
lover of fairy and folk tales, I was delighted to hear
that magic-realist was to release a Fairytale Tarot in
the not-to-distant-future. Karen was sighing about the
amount of work they had – working on the deck and
the book was eating up all her and her partner Alex’s
time. “I won’t write the next book”,
she told me. “I’ll find someone else to do
it”. Then she mentioned that despite the heavy workload,
they were already thinking about their next project, a
Tarot deck based on the animal etchings of JJ Grandville,
the 19th Century French illustrator.
At the end of that message, she casually asked – “do
you know anything about Grandville?” I was brought
up in a French-speaking region, where every child knows
the 17th Century Fables of La Fontaine, and very likely
the book version illustrated by JJ Grandville. If they
are lucky, as I was, they will also have discovered Gulliver
and Robinson Crusoe through the keen eyes and lively pencil
of that illustrator. Later, I met him again in the company
of Balzac, the great social novelist, and of the Romantics
Musset and Georges Sand. Although I didn’t know much
about his life, I confidently answered that I’d admired
Grandville since childhood – and knew a fair amount
about the times he lived in. So Karen suggested I write
the book to accompany what was then called simply “the
Grandville Tarot”, and I suggested visiting her and
Alex in Prague, so we could discuss the project.
A few hours later, Karen sent me a few samples. I saw
a king penguin sitting on a throne on the ice pack, holding
a cup, and looking very reluctant to move anywhere, while
his loose socks accordion around his ankles. A half-comical,
half-dignified figure, that King of Cups captured my heart
immediately. The Fool that Karen sent leapt straight into
my imagination. A rat was trudging around the countryside,
looking rugged and determined, ready to take on the world.
Here was a Fool midway between the juggler-vagrant attacked
by dogs in the Tarot of Marseille, and the newer “leap
off the cliff” Fool – though this Fool looked
like a veteran rather than a rookie! I wrote back to Karen
saying I just had to write that book – those images
were too eloquent, and told too many stories, and I wanted
to be the one to tell some of them.
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Fast forward a few weeks to May 2005. I flew to Prague,
and Karen and Alex welcomed me with an open-hearted hospitality
I could only think of as Middle-European. We pored over
thick old tomes full of the etchings of Grandville – “this
fox and hen pair would make a wonderful 7 of Swords”, “we
thought this procession of scarabs in church paraphernalia
would make a good Hierophant”, and “how about
this burning phoenix for Judgement?” I supplied Karen
with some stories to go with the sample cards she had sent.
The Story of the Fool featured a rat that jumped off a
priest’s wardrobe followed by his mouse companion.
Except that, on closer inspection, I began to suspect that
my rat Fool was in fact a lion! I scrambled back to my
Balzac Animal Tales illustrated by Grandville – and
there indeed was the Voyage of an African Lion to Paris.
My imagination could not supply a wardrobe large enough
for a lion to jump off, so it became the second storey
of a barn in the French countryside. Despite my failing
to recognise the king of the Animals in his ragged Fool’s
garb, Karen was pleased with my sample stories. I suggested
a format for the book – in addition to short stories
or vignettes, with more classic card descriptions, for
each card, I would write a section on Grandville’s
life, times and art, another on tarot history, some general
introductory words about the tarot and a “how to
read” section with spreads. Karen wanted to ask another
Aeclectic Tarot member, Paula Goodman Wilder, to write
some sample readings in her characteristic witty reading
style. I was confident that we could make a good book out
of all this.
Back in Geneva, my first stop was our public art library,
to investigate everything they had about JJ Grandville.
I found several of his illustrated books, reproductions
of his lithographic series The Metamorphoses of the Day,
which had made him famous at the age of 25, a couple of
monographs, a study on illustration in 19th Century France,
some journals and letters. I was to find an equal trough
on the internet. Karen, Alex and I had agreed that I would
work off black-and-white rough cards, which they would
put up on the internet on a private work-in-progress site.
That summer was a fairly eventful one for me. I spent
about half my time in the mountains, and the whole of August
in Namibia, Southern Africa. Grandville and his animals
came with me wherever I went. I wrote many of the card
stories and descriptions between the desert and the Atlantic
ocean, in the seaside resort of Swakopmund in Namibia,
in the hot and dry capital, Windhoek, or in small stopping-points
in that vast desert country. I thanked the Tarot Gods for
internet cafés so I could supply Karen with my material.
The contrast between Grandville, his life and artistic
style teeming with animal-like people that made up the
cards, and the rugged, almost empty Namibia, could not
have been greater, but somewhere between the two a space
opened where my imagination could flourish. I was very
keen to set all the stories at the time of Grandville,
and in France. But how to make sure the stories and descriptions
were relevant for our time, and for an English-speaking
culture that would probably know little of 1830s France?
The Namibians, like most Africans, are keen on divination,
so I was given many opportunities to practice my tarot
reading skills during that stay. This daily practice I
was afforded, with people who generally knew nothing of
Tarot, helped me keep my card description real whenever
I returned to my laptop. What, indeed, does a fox running
away with a willing hen have to say about an everyday human
life situation in the early 21st Century?
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After a few months, the project went quiet for a while,
as Karen and Alex concentrated all their efforts on publishing
and launching the Fairytale Tarot. Then in early 2006,
Karen contacted me with the details of the rewrites she
and her professional editor suggested. By then, I had started
a job with the United Nations AIDS programme in Geneva,
and was caught up in a big project there, which involved
a fair bit of travelling. So started one of the craziest,
and most fulfilling times of my life. Every day I would
be writing and thinking about AIDS, and every evening and
late into the night, Grandville and the increasingly beautiful
Fantastic Menagerie Tarot drew me into their transformed
world, where animals and men become each other. Once again,
the divergence between my life and writing was only apparent.
Grandville lived through a terrible cholera epidemic in
1832, at a time when he worked as a political caricaturist.
Famine was endemic in France. In his lifetime, tuberculosis
ravaged Europe, a seemingly unmovable disease that broke
families and gnawed at the fabric of society. Grandville
himself lost three of his four children, and his beloved
first wife Henriette, to various infections. His seemingly
innocent animal drawings grew out of his observations of
a vigorous and creative society, which also had to live
with fear, loss, hunger and constant disease. He drew them
not as escapism, but as social satire and commentary on
the deep contrasts he saw around him. The chasm between
19th Century France and a creative but AIDS-ridden Africa,
closed, bridged by Grandville’s timeless drawings,
and by magic-realist’s astonishing work of selection
and transformation that turned Grandville’s book
etchings into the Fantastic Menagerie Tarot.
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Geneva, 2 June 2006
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