The Book of Ashes: Authorial Instructions, Incorporations, and House Rules in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

ABSTRACT:This article examines the apparatus of authorial instructions in Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. It does so by first investigating the role coincidence plays in the literalization of Ware's comic, and then by examining what might be hidden or more deeply at stake in Ware's incorporation of the urn of his father's ashes into the "corrigenda" (or afterword) of his book. My reading takes issue with Ware's assertion of the gap that yawns between his artistic deployment of coincidence in his comic and the blind unfolding of coincidence in life itself; or, as Ware himself puts it, between the "artless, dumbfoundedly meaningless coincidence of 'real' life and my weak fiction." My analysis does not wholly contest Ware's claim, but it does complicate Ware's lamenting the failure of his "weak fiction" by arguing that if his house rules or instructions fail, they paradoxically also prevail. In order to justify this claim, I try to take account of what strangely happens to Ware's "weak fiction" when read in the context of Walter Benjamin's weak messianism.