Through the course of this semester, we have seen characters depictions that range from realistic to cartoonish on varied points on Scott McClouds depiction pyramid. "Caricature" is often used interchangeably with "cartoonish" to mean features exaggerated or masked from real life. However, a drawing style like that in Persepolis allows characters to be abstracted, certain features like the eyes exaggerated, without falling into the trap of caricature, exaggerating certain features to be intentionally ugly or off-putting. In Arab of the Futures, many but not all of the characters were drawn as caricature, intentionally exaggerating characters' least flattering features, often coinciding with the characters that reader is intended to sympathize with the least. The implicit case was made in the book that beauty and ugliness correspond to goodness and badness. A manipulative move, or simply another of the comic writer's tools? In this case, the author, the autobiographical narrator came off as unreliable, someone whose perspective was so skewed that they could not tell an impartial or an honest story.
Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons uses a caricature style to tell its short stories, but unlike in Arab of the Future, the caricature style served to make Lynda a more reliable narrator. specifically because the caricature is used for self-deprecation. The truths (fictional truths?) in the book were confessional, often painted her in a bad light, but that was exactly what made the stories affecting. Instead of making the case that beauty equals goodness and ugliness equals badness, the ugliness seemed just a fact of normal existence. In fact, as the reader is aware of Lynda the artist who penned the stories, the more caricature she drew her younger self, the better it made her the artist seem more reliable, trustworthy, and a better person. Her regret over her actions seemed matched with the way she depicted herself on the page.
Caricature can be used to manipulate the way the reader feels about the event on the page. When the caricature is used to distort a sense of reality in a way that paints the narrator in a more positive light, particularly in work of an autobiographical nature, where we are aware of the artist/writer as a person or character in themselves, it gives us the impression that the narrator is unreliable. However, when it's used for self-deprecating purposes and the subject matter matches it, it can boost the reliability and likability of the narrator.
I've been thinking a lot about this, and I definitely think you're right--the uglier Barry drew her Lynda character, the more tenderly I felt toward her, with the opposite happening in Arab of the Future--but I think it's a little more complicated than ugliness equaling humility and beauty equaling shallowness.
ReplyDeleteIn One Hundred Demons, though I was stricken not only by Lynda's "ugliness" but by the ugliness of the drawing style in general, it never seemed like Barry went out of her way to *point out* the character's ugliness, and it also wasn't a way of forming hierarchies between characters. All of the characters in Barry's work seemed to be ugly, stylized with goofy features, awkward shapes, lines, colors, etc. No one was beautiful, so Lynda's oddness fit in.
In Arab of the Future, Riad's beauty was in direct opposition to the ugliness of the characters we were supposed to look down upon. Beauty was a tool meant to form that hierarchy of beauty equaling purity and goodness and ugliness equaling stupidity, ignorance, poverty, badness. Beauty and ugliness *meant* something, in a way Barry never tried to assign between characters. Also, I think that distinction implied by Sattouf is so itchy to so many of us because it's so...expected. It's been that way for *so* long, the princess maiden being beautiful and therefore pure, the wicked witch being ugly and therefore dangerous, and so many racial caricatures working in that vein with ugliness working to other and ostracize. Sattouf relied on a painful cliche to do something that, in our eyes, made him look small, petty, and (to me?) outdated. Barry took beauty out of the picture entirely and normalized strangeness.