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.
Anthony,
ReplyDeleteIt's so funny that you mention the "toxic environment," because I kept thinking about the toxic environment in reference to the smoking--and David gets cancer in/around his throat, I thought for sure there would be a revelation of the fact that everyone has been smoking around him his entire life, and he had illnesses all through growing up; I felt the smoking issue was really unresolved. I am thinking of when Small specifically draws attention to the smoking when he interrupts David's father's speech with "(PUFF PUFF)" (150); David's father is criticizing the way David slouches, damaging his body, even as he himself is doing damage to David's body as well as his own, his wife's, and Ted's.
Linked to this sense of the toxic environment are, of course, issues of embodiment and inheritance: how David's body seems to literalize the damage his parents and the toxic environment inflict on him, from the tumor in his neck (which he visualizes as the small fetus body growing out of the side of his neck, making the damage into a body within his body), to the illness of his childhood, "getting sick, that was my language" (19): his body communicates what he cannot, what he does not have the words for and/or what he cannot say to his parents; or what they will not hear. Larkin discusses the way all of the members of David's family communicate by embodying their feelings: Mom slams cupboards, Dad "thumped a punching bag," and "Ted, beat on his drum" (17). None of the family is able or willing to communicate verbally with each other, choosing instead to express their frustrations and unhappiness bodily, until, eventually, David literally loses the ability to speak.
This ties in to the issues of inheritance: what we receive (or don't) from our parents, grandparents, and ancestors, and the consequences of those "gifts". At the end of the memoir, David reveals his fear that he has followed, or will follow, in the footsteps of his mother and grandmother to the insane asylum--Larkin asserts that "His mother, sweeping the path outside, suggests that, if not an inmate of the asylum herself, she is at the very least a custodian of the insane and her move to invite David to enter the building implicates him in the intergenerational chain of psychosis" (203), but I think this could be an expression of David's fear of inheriting the psychosis than his actual inheritance: his fear of ending up like his mother, or even his father, despite his attempts to escape them as early as possible. The parent-child relationships and environment that children grow up in shape children in complex ways (which is why being a mom is kind of a scary thing for me--what I teach my daughter really makes a difference to the way she sees herself and the people around her; seems like there is a lot of room to screw up, there), and Small's memoir really illustrates the complicated, dangerous side of this. Small may show the marks of his childhood visibly, but there are obviously deep psychological scars as well.