Heroes and Villains

In a 2006 interview with The Believer, Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel Persepolis, discusses her attempt in her portrayal of Iran to humanize and complicate the common Western stereotypes of Iran, which George W. Bush had recently dubbed a member of the “Axis of evil.” In discussing her work, Satrapi says, “Today, the description of the world is always reduced to yes or no, black or white. Superficial stories. Superhero stories. One side is the good one. The other one is evil…[but] the world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker; things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.” It’s interesting that Satrapi refers specifically to superhero stories in her response, since this genre of story is intricately linked with comics, her chosen medium. In a sense, Satrapi seems to be encouraging readers to question their pre-conceived notions of graphic narratives overall, and to examine assumptions and stereotypes associated with the format.

It’s interesting to consider some of the works we’ve examined this semester with an eye to their representations of “good” and “evil.” In Stitches, for example, David Small clearly positions himself as a hero, a small child victimized by the inscrutable and cruel whims of his terrible family, who manages, in the end, to overcome the wrongs done to him (even, problematically, the genetic “wrongs” of inherited mental illness). Although Small has the opportunity to complicate the portrayal of “evil” in his book by considering the impact of mental illness on his family, or his mother’s unexpressed homosexuality, he largely glosses over these issues. And his mother’s deathbed tears are similar to the punishments doled out to villains at the end of many superhero stories in that they represent, presumably, her awareness of the wrongs she has committed along with her guilt and regret.

Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism presents a more complex portrayal of “good” and “evil,” although, on the surface, the story follows a traditional crime narrative format, as the citizens of Palomar try to solve a cruel series of murders. Although crime stories often rely on similar didactic representations of right and wrong, Hernadez complicates this expectation in several ways. While Tomaso’s motives for killing are not completely clear, the coincidence of his murders with the sudden onslaught of aggressive monkeys, who are killed by the townspeople seemingly without concern, suggests a kind of animalism at work in human nature, implying that murder may even be an aspect of humanity. Characters such as Doralis and Humberto mimic or resemble monkeys at various times in the story, further complicating the line between human and animal. Even the town sheriff accidentally shoots Casimira while killing monkeys, illustrating that even the act of murder (or protection) might not be easily classified as villainous or heroic.

Mat Johnson engages most overtly with superhero tropes in Incognegro, a story which relies heavily on action sequences and suspense, and centers on several characters who are undercover in some way, who are not what they seem on the surface. Johnson’s work highlights the fluidity of identity, as well as the arbitrary ways that external expressions of race and gender can have a profound influence on the circumstances of a person’s life. Johnson’s work presents a question that is as equally important today as it was in the time depicted in the novel: How is it that two twins, similar in appearance except that one appears more “white” than the other, can live such vastly different lives and have such varied access to safety? Johnson’s use of the superhero trope offers an insight into the ways in which expression through the arts such as writing and drawing is itself a kind of activism. If identity is fluid, as Johnson suggests, then those who shape perceptions of identity wield incredible power. In an act of justice at the end of the book, Zane publishes a photograph, which compels the citizens to take action against the KKK member responsible for killing his friend. In the eyes of the populace, the man’s true identity is subsumed immediately and completely in the photograph. The public, in this case, is clearly made up of people, who as Satrapi says, “find easy answers to complicated questions.” And in a world of such people, the ability to influence and shape perception is perhaps the most formidable superpower of all.

Article on Lynching Photography

While working on my presentation on Incognegro for Monday, I came across a very informative and disturbing article on lynching photography. Many elements of the article speak to the issues discussed in both the graphic novel and Jen's article. Since I cannot attach the file to this post, here is the bibliographic information to help you find it:

Wood, Marcus. "Valency and Abjection in the Lynching Postcard: A Test Case in the Reclamation of Black Visual Culture." Slavery & Abolition 34.2 (2013): 202-221.

Gilbert Hernandez Interview

Interview with Gilbert Hernandez

Love and Rockets interview at 2007 comic con

Toxicity in Stitches

Throughout the graphic narrative Stitches, the reader is confronted with images that are both unexpected in the moment and left seemingly unresolved. As Ilana Larkin explains in “Absent Eyes…,” Small uses the juxtaposition between image and text to create a third level of narrative meaning. However, there are occasions in the narrative when images alone are juxtaposed, leaving the reader to fill in gaps and make sense of the fragmentation. For instance, the very first panel of the narrative depicts a Detroit factory spewing smoke into the night air. Throughout the narrative, there are other depictions of factories as well (page 66, which precedes the trip to Indiana; page 260, right after the therapist tells David his mother doesn’t love him; and page 284, just before his father explains that the x-rays gave him cancer). However, no textual mention is made to these factories. On the one hand, this creates a sense of expectation in the reader (or at least it did in me) that factories/pollution/toxicity will feature importantly in the narrative in some way. When we learn that David has cancer, it is possible to assume that he may have contracted it due to the toxic environment of Detroit’s factories. Additionally, other elements further accentuate a sense of toxicity in the environment, such as cigarette/pipe smoke and car exhaust, and this yet again adds to the ambiguity of what may have caused David’s cancer. On the other hand, though, when the reader discovers that the father’s x-rays gave David cancer and when by the end of the novel the toxicity of the natural environment remains explicitly undiscussed, the reader must grapple with how to situate these images into the larger narrative. As a result, there is an initial sense that this issue has been left unresolved; these images seem out-of-place or as incidental features of the landscape. Nevertheless, in true Freudian, psychoanalytic fashion, it is only through the context of the later events that these earlier images can be reinterpreted and re-situated in the larger narrative. In hindsight, these scenes of physical and environmental toxicity become visual metaphors for David’s emotionally toxic childhood. The smog, smoke, and exhaust ridden atmosphere of Detroit is shown to be less toxic in many ways than the Small household. After all, David’s parents, and not the literally toxic surroundings, caused his eventual cancer and psychosis.

Nature & Identity Paradox in Fun Home

I’ve been interested in the ways that Alison Bechdel uses nature in Fun Home, particularly in connection with some of the ideas that Hillary Chute raises about triangulation and the ways words and images work together in comics to more accurately represent truth.

Bechdel writes, “I have suggested that my father killed himself, but it’s just as accurate to say that he died gardening.” She then describes her father’s love of trees and flowers, and how this seemed suspect to her as a child, indicative of a lack of masculinity in her family that influenced her own gravitation toward strength and toughness. On the one hand, Bechdel’s father’s interest in landscaping is another example of his interest in cultivating a particular kind of household façade, while on the other it is, from young Bechdel’s perspective, a clue to her father’s secret identity and a danger to her family’s integrity, as well as an influence on her own identity.

Bechdel later describes the summer of her father’s trial, using the cicadas and the trees felled by the storm as physical manifestations of the unrest and unease of that time. She links the overwhelming sexuality of the cicadas to her developing body, and wonders “whether or not my hormonal fluctuations were the cause” of the “chaos” in the household that summer. The suggestion that Bechdel’s physical changes might have somehow contributed to the issues with her father is interesting, and reflects a complex perspective on the ways that family influences identity. Just as Bechdel adopts more masculine habits in response to perceived feminine weakness in her father, she suggests that he, too, may be influenced by her own sexuality and perceptions of gender.

Similarly, Bechdel’s experience with the snake while on the camping trip raises questions about the extent to which identity is inherent and the degree to which it is shaped in relation to one’s family and environment. When confronted with the nude calendar, Bechdel rejects its explicit portrayal of femininity and asks her brother to call her “Albert” in an effort to mask her gender. After seeing the snake, at the end of the trip, Bechdel sits in the car, while her brothers laugh about breasts, and explains that she had “failed some unspoken initiation rite, and that life’s possibilities were no longer infinite.” For both Bechdel and her father, the snake seems to represent the stark, biological “nature” of gender, indisputable in its physicality, but deeply at odds with their more nuanced and varied emotional experiences of gender.

When Bechdel asks her father why he is going to a psychologist, he responds “I'm bad, not good like you,” which highlights the paradox of identity central to the book. Bechdel’s father suggests that identity is inherent and unchangeable and possesses (or lacks) value. At the same time, defining his own identity in comparison to Bechdel’s highlights the ways that she and her father shape and influence one another throughout the book. Chute suggests that the interplay between images and words helps to counteract the limitations of each mode of narration, that truth exists somewhere in the spaces afforded by hybrid narration. In the same way, Bechdel illustrates the ways in which she and her father’s identities are both bound to and separate from one another, established in the nebulous relationship between the strict demarcations of nature and the fluid and invisible characteristics passed on through familial interaction.   

"Make It New" - Modernism & Fun Home

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is in many ways a Modernist work of literature. Beyond the fact that it references numerous Modernist novels and has a fascination with James Joyce in particular, its form and themes show traces of Modernism as well. One of the work’s most striking Modernist qualities is its recursivity. Overall, the work is reflexive and labyrinthine, as it circles around the absence of Alison’s father, Bruce, and around his hidden homosexuality. Bruce’s death not only created a void physically, but in retrospection, his apparent suicide casts a pall over all the memories that came before. Likewise, Bruce’s homosexuality, which is only discovered at the end of his life for Alison, creates a lens for her to retroactively understand many events from her childhood and many of her father’s behaviors. In its recursivity, Fun Home rejects a linear narrative and instead looks at elements of Bechdel’s life from different perspectives. Additionally, each chapter could almost stand alone as one way, among many, to tell the story of Alison’s childhood, from her early life growing up to her coming out as a lesbian and to her father’s death. In this way, the story seems reminiscent of Faulkner in particular, where stories within a novel often follow different perspectives or themes that combine into a narrative shaped mostly by the presence of an absent force.

In Hilary Chute’s reading of the work, she acknowledges many of its Modernist elements. When discussing the relationship between Alison and Bruce, Chute focuses on two primary themes: contact and progeny. Regarding contact, Chute highlights the embalming room scene where Alison hands her father a pair of surgical scissors. Although they come close to touching, uniting themselves over death, their hands never meet, leaving a gap between them. While Alison and Bruce are indeed drawn together by their few similarities (e.g. a love of literature and homosexuality), and while Bruce’s death sparked Alison’s interest in the archive of her childhood, which ultimately resurrected her relationship with her father, they have nevertheless taken distinct paths in their lives which, unlike the paths in Proust, never fully touch. Additionally, Chute acknowledges the text’s similarities with the works of Joyce, and discusses how, like Daedalus, Alison is indebted to her father and shares many similarities with him, yet she feels compelled to take her life in a different direction and to reject many of his ways. Alison rejects her father’s (seeming) heterosexual life with its subsequent procreation, closetedness, and sublimation, and instead seeks artistic progeny, openness, and honesty. Therefore, as the tagline on the cover declares, the novel is “refreshingly open” in more ways than one.

A final Modernist feature of the text that was not discussed, however, is the novel’s Poundian interaction with the past. Chute discusses in great detail Bechdel’s laborious process of re-creating and interacting with the archive, hand-drawing not only each frame of the comic, but also taking pictures of herself posing as each character in each frame and hand-copying letters, photographs, books, and diaries. Beyond the artistry, personal connection, and performativity evoked by this process, it is also reminiscent of Ezra Pound’s Modernist injunction to “Make it new.” And, in many ways, I feel that Alison’s struggle to make things new is one of the most prominent ways in which she differs from her father. For Bruce, the past needs to be re-created exactly how it was. Bruce is more Victorian, traditional, and classical: he restores a Victorian house, he enjoys biographies, and he is shown twice reading about the perfection of classical sculptures of the human body. Bruce has no desire to change the world around him; he does not want to alter the codes and structures that surround him in his small, Pennsylvania town. As a result, he lives a conventional life, all the while struggling to express his homosexuality in covert, closeted ways. Alison, on the other hand, is Modernist, unconventional, and forward-thinking. She does not dream about the past; she uses the past. For her, the archive, Modernist literature, Greek myth, and her own childhood memories are not things to be conserved or recreated. Rather, they are frameworks which she can inhabit and reformulate to say something new, to gain new insights into not only what took place when she was younger but to understand where and who she is now. Fun Home, for me, incorporates Modernist stories, of Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and Stephen Daedalus, in a similar way that Joyce uses the Odyssey, Eliot uses Buddhism, or Woolf uses Freud’s Oedipus Complex. All of these Modernist authors take structures from the past (whether the distant or the immediate past) and incorporate them into their works. This functions as a way of using that framework to provide a unique perspective for the story, but it also provides a way of changing that framework and accentuating its shortcomings.