Artists' Books

At first glance Antonia Hirsch’s Komma (after Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun) looks like any other novel, bound in black book cloth with a silver foil stamped title.  In fact, Hirsch has mimiced the lettering of the original novel, Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo.  Only when it’s opened does it jar the senses.  Each page is filled with commas, and only commas.

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There is an additional pamphlet with the book containing two essays about Hirsch’s Komma and how relates to the original text.  The Most Inconspicuous Marks by Kristina Lee Podesva talks about commas as a way to create a rhythm and a type of musical “score” in a story and how the lack of commas reflects the lack of navigation the protagonist of the story has in his situation.  Maria Muhle’s Christ Has Come Up From Tucson points out the protagonist’s dependence on the outside world to help create a rhythm in his life.

Trumbo originally wrote Johnny Got His Gun in 1939 as an anti-war novel.  The protagonist is a young man who has been mutilated in combat, having lost both arms and legs and his face.  The story follows him as he struggles with his tragic situation and his attempts to communicate with the outside world.  The book conforms to the rules of punctuation except that there are no commas.  According to Hirsch, the term comma is derived from Greek komma, meaning ‘something cut off.’  (http://www.antoniahirsch.com/projects/komma/1), thus accenting commas in the book accents the amputation.  Hirsch made an accompanying film to go with the book, which has a robotic voice reading Johnny Got His Gun aloud.  The screen remains black, but flashes white when Hirsch has inserted a comma into the text.  The trauma of combat is easy to overlook in North America, most of the wars of the twentieth and twenty first century have been fought elsewhere, and our veterans are hidden away from us upon return.  This book pushes the reader to wonder about what it would be like to be confronting the timelessness and loneliness of living in a post combat void.

Find Komma in the ECUAD library Artists Book Collection.

TAGS Antonia Hirsch, War, Artists Book Collection, Comma, Komma, Anti-war, Film, Dalton Trumbo

Antonia Hirsch is an artist based in Vancouver and Berlin.  She is represented by The Republic Gallery in Vancouver.  She is an editor and writer of the Vancouver-based magazine, Fillip.