In a recent editorial, the American critic Marianne

Transcription

1 Professor Gillian Whitlock, Professor of English, University of Queensland In a recent editorial, the American critic Marianne Hirsch argues that it has become necessary to consider anew visuality and visual-verbal conjunctions in literature. What drives her thinking about words and images and their expressivity now are debates about sight and seeing triggered by times of war. The dissemination of images from the Iraq war and from the area around Ground Zero immediately after 9/11 were carefully controlled, and these restrictions shaped new and urgent contexts for the sustained discussion of words and images, reading and looking, that Hirsch considers. All of these discussions about lines of sight intensified around Abu Ghraib and then, subsequently, the controversy over cartoon images in 2005, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, outraging Muslims worldwide, and prompting violent protests early in 2006 that led to deaths in Pakistan, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Libya. Hirsch argues for the particular importance of the comics in mediating on the conjunction of visual and verbal texts now, and she adopts the term biocularity to grasp the distinctive visual-verbal conjunctions that occur in comics. Discussions about comics as sequential art and recognition of comics as literary artefacts are now increasing in the USA especially: there has been a special issue of the journal Modern Fiction Studies, a useful overview by Hillary Chute in a recent issue of PMLA, and sessions at recent Modern Language Association conventions in the USA. Some of the best reflections on what comics can do are embedded within them as well, for its practitioners are also its theorists, its historians and its critics. Pre-eminent here is Art Spiegelman, whose mighty Maus, a graphic memoir of the Holocaust, demanded that critics take notice of the unique potential of graphic narrative. More recently, Alison Bechdel s Fun Home, a graphic narrative named book of the year by the New York Times in 2006, has fuelled this surge in writing about the unique alchemy of the comics. Here I will focus on Persepolis, the graphic narrative which sent me to Will Eisner, Gillian Rose, Scott McCloud and Spiegelman to grasp the unique dynamics of reading across gutters and frames, and how the graphic language of the comics approaches some controversial issues of representation that arise now. Maus, Fun Home, Persepolis are all consummate works of literature and art that make us wonder about biocularity : how does graphic narrative work to achieve such distinctive and powerful effects on the page? What do we look, see, read and recognise in its distinctive grammar? Will Eisner emphasises that the sequential art of graphic narrative is a distinct discipline of drawing and design and writing, a unique combination that has received little attention in either literary or art curricula. Presciently, given his remarks were first published in 1985, Eisner suggests that thoughtful scholarly concern and serious intellectual work on the graphic technology of sequential art will probably not emerge unless comics address subjects of greater moment (5). With Maus, Fun Home and Persepolis their time has come! Although the distinctive montage of word and image in comics is deeply familiar and even beloved as a memory of childhood and first reading (and Edward Said, among others, has written powerfully about this), the visual and verbal interpretive skills needed for scholarly work on the comics require literacy in interpretive regimes of art and of literature. Ironically, work on these most familiar of texts requires the deliberate acquisition of new interpretive skills for many of us. The vocabulary of the comics represents figures and objects across a wide iconic range from the abstraction of cartooning to realism; its grammar is based on frames, panels and gutters that translate time and space onto the page in black and white; and balloons both enclose speech and convey the character of sound and emotion. This grammar makes extraordinary demands on the reader to produce closure. Art Spiegelman acknowledges the work of closure when he describes the dynamics of reading Maus: I didn t want people to get too interested in the drawings. I wanted them to be there, but the story operates somewhere else. It operates somewhere between the words and the idea that s in the pictures, which is the essence of what happens in a comic. So by not focussing you too hard on these people you re forced back into your role as a reader rather than looker (qtd Huyssen 77). This work of closure draws the passive looker into the engagement (and demands) of reading. In his brilliant (and graphic) elaboration of comics that draws on Eisner s pioneering work, Scott McCloud suggests that no other art form gives so much to its readers while asking so much from them as well. Comics are not a mere hybrid of graphic arts and prose fiction, but a unique interpretation that transcends both, and emerges through the imaginative work of closure that readers are required to make between the panels on the page (McCloud 92). As a medium of expression and communication, comics operate in the between like no other. The panels of comics fracture both time and space, offering a staccato series of frames separated by what McCloud calls the limbo space of the gutters: closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality (67). metaphor Issue 4,

2 McCloud offers a compelling and graphic anatomy of the art of comics, that introduces key concepts for the analysis of the art. Nevertheless the cartoon wars of 2005 to 2006 are a reminder that as readers and critics we must go beyond McCloud and Eisner to place readers and texts in historical, political and cultural contexts, and to be wary of claiming universalities in the mediations of cartoon drawings and comics. Images and representations of all kinds are caught up in the war on terror and its aftermath. The so-called cartoon wars indicate that graphic art moves as a commodity in a global market, and visual images are processed within vastly different communities of interpretation, and easily co-opted into propaganda. Hirsch s insistence that we live in times shaped by the fearful and even paranoid treatment of images that requires renewed attention to reading and looking seems more than ever necessary in approaching the biocularity of comics. Can we imagine that comics can trigger some freedoms in thinking and imagining now, when cartoons so obviously go to war? Can the distinctive technologies of the comics engage in representations of cultural difference with particular force? Marjane Satrapi s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood is a beautiful book, the first of an autobiographical duet recently adapted into a major film for Sony pictures. Following Linda Hutcheon s recent study of adaptation, I would argue that the film is a distinctive and separate text, with its own dynamics: it is another story in effect. The hardcover first edition of Persepolis in English translation (Satrapi is an Iranian exile who works from the L Association comics collective in Paris) has fine design: a crimson die-cut dust jacket with stylised Persian motifs featuring a cut-out that lets a drawing of Satrapi s young autobiographical narrator peep through; the black and white artwork of the comics is shown to full advantage on the fine quality paper. Satrapi s graphic memoir turns to black-and-white comics to tell her story of childhood and subsequent exile from Iran after the revolution of Persepolis uses irony and satire to reflect on the conflicted and ambiguous relations between Iran and the West Gods and prophets can and do appear in person here! Satrapi s cartoon figures are elemental; they resemble naive and childish woodcuts in their sharply defined iconic black and white shapes, which hearken back to the first simple frames of children s books: Dick Bruna s blocky little figures, or Ludwig Bemelman s Madeleine series. And yet they are sophisticated too. We are forced to pause and reflect on the extraordinary connotative force of cartoon drawing, which both amplifies and signifies: When we abstract an image through cartooning we re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on special details. By stripping down an image to its essential meaning an artist can amplify meaning in a way that realistic art can t (McCloud 1994, 30). In Persepolis figures are sometimes strung together like a frieze, sometimes boxed into frames of varying sizes that contain the balloons and strips of words. Nevertheless, they are at the same time human and expressive and highly individual. Character, nuance, satire are signalled by the angle of a brow a millimetre long, the precise angle of lips and chin, and the curve on a face the size of a thumbnail. In the act of reading we are forced to pay close attention to the changing relations between the images and words in comics, and the shifting gutters and frames that mirror and reflect black to white. In Persepolis 2: The Story of Return, a sequence of images narrates the violent death of a young man, Farzad, chased across the rooftops by the revolutionary guards in Tehran, and Satrapi withdraws words entirely: there are three pages of drawings in frames without words. Satrapi s comics draw on conventions of Persian and Islamic art (for example the tulip as an icon) as well as Western and Christian iconography (versions of the Pieta recur to indicate particularly traumatic memories). There is an interesting and sophisticated process of transculturation at work here, incorporating both Eastern and Western, Muslim and Christian cultural forms into the comics, a form commonly associated with mass entertainment and juvenilia. Although McCloud s remarks on essential meaning are risky, they suggest that the cartoonish drawing in Persepolis can function as a humanising form of representation, with the capacity to invoke reading and recognition despite the intractable cultural difference that can be signified by the veiled figures of Iranian women and girls. Satrapi s approach to this most contentious figure of representation, veiled women, suggests the capacity of cartoon drawing to both amplify and simplify. Comics open some possibilities for different significations; in Persepolis the techniques of cartooning, and the grammar of frames and gutters that shapes the comics, contests the dehumanising frame of reference that frequently shapes representations of veiled women in Western art and texts. We see this from the very beginning of Persepolis on the first page of the first chapter: The Veil. The soulful gaze of the young girls recently shrouded with the hijab introduces the veil with high drama, but also with irony as its significance is presented from the perspective of the pre-adolescent schoolgirl, the very cartoonish figure of Marji which features the face as a powerful icon. For Marji, a schoolgirl at the time of the Islamic revolution in 1979, the imposition of the hijab and the segregation of the school into gendered domains are signs of momentous social change. But Satrapi s drawings register this in the child s view and with the child s irreverent sense of proportion and significance. For example, in the frames following that first page, satire prevails as we see the schoolchildren using their newly acquired veils as toys in the playground, to skip and play hide and seek. In this way, 4 English Teachers Association of NSW

3 Satrapi uses the child s view to cut things to size and to put the veil into a different frame. Where else could a graphic memoir that sets out to address cultural difference begin in these times? The veil is, after all, an intractable symbol of cultural difference that sets Muslim women apart. As Manuela Constantino points out, Persepolis 1 was published in France in 2000, at a time when the country was struggling with the debate over veiled Muslim girls in public schools. The French Ministry of Education approved the book for inclusion in the literary curriculum of private schools in France, where it has been promoted as an educational tool to represent and foster a more liberal viewpoint on Muslim cultural practices. Satrapi s hand-drawn aesthetics plays deliberately on the symbolism of the veil, which carries so much weight in Western eyes. As critics have pointed out, the visual image of the veiled child on the cover of Persepolis can be particularly disturbing from some perspectives: a dissonant combination of the familiar (the universal cartoonish figure of the child which, as I have suggested, recalls Bemelmans and Bruna) and the strange (the veiled and radical other). The effect of this dissonance recurs in Satrapi s cartoons. From those very first frames we see that Satrapi will incorporate the veil in cartoons that characterise girls and women as distinctive individual and human agents (unlike Azar Nafisi s Reading Lolita in Tehran, where women become human and fully alive only when they cast the veil aside). In Persepolis differences of emotion, personality and physique among veiled Iranian girls and women remain vivid, and this is an important statement of gender politics that is sustained throughout Satrapi s cartoons and their configuration of veiled women. Cartooning isn t just a way of drawing, it is also a way of seeing: The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled... we don t just observe the cartoon, we become it (McCloud 1994, 36). In emphasising the particular force of comics, and the demands they make on readers, Scott McCloud argues that cartoon drawings of the face in particular promote identification and becoming : the more cartoonish (as opposed to realistic) a face is, the more it becomes an icon that has the capacity to produce recognition and associations in our own image. By drawing the figure of the veiled child in cartoons, with emphasis on the face, Satrapi is using an icon that is particularly powerful in triggering a humanising and empathic frame of reference. The figure of young Marji on the first pages of Persepolis is highly iconic, a style of cartoon drawing that triggers association and recognition. The association of the veil and the child has a plenitude of signification, a unique effect that Naghibi and O Malley call a dissonant combination. Of course there can be no singular association suggested by Satrapi s veiled and childlike avatar, but the entry of cartooning into the discourse of the veil opens some new possibilities for cross cultural recognition:... given how contested the visual representation of the human is, it would appear that our capacity to respond to a face as a human face is conditioned and mediated by frames of reference that are variably humanising and dehumanising (Butler 2005, 29). With this in mind, an encounter with the cartoonish Marji is an opening, an interpolation of readers into a frame of dissonance, association and juxtaposition that draws on the distinctive technologies of comics. Although the sharply defined contours of black-andwhite cartoons are especially powerful in representing the harsh constraints of fundamentalism following the Iranian Revolution, Satrapi refrains from embellishing drawings of the West to produce a stereotypical contrast to the Middle East. In fact, when Marji leaves Iran she goes to a convent in Austria where the veiled women and the institutional surroundings of Catholicism echo the austere public places of the Islamic republic. A memorable chapter in Persepolis 2, The Socks, suggests that representations of veiled women have been fundamental to Satrapi s acquisition of her craft. As an art student in Tehran after the Revolution, Marji and other women learn to draw in segregated studios, and the only model available to them is the chador-clad woman. In a single elongated frame, undisrupted by gutters, Satrapi draws the women students themselves veiled as they sit in a circle around the singular figure of the veiled model: the archetype of the silenced Muslim woman offered for their reproduction (literally and figuratively). There are no dialogue balloons in this sequence of five panels, just the remarks of the autobiographical narrator, Marji, in handwritten script across the top: We tried. We looked... from every direction... and from every angle... but not a single part of her body was visible. We learned nevertheless to draw drapes (145). And so she does. In Persepolis, drawings of veiled women refuse the stereotype of the nondescript archetypal Muslim woman. Satrapi s female figures are human and full of character and individuality with the veil. The drapes are part of this characterisation, and the distinctive art of cartooning which both simplifies and amplifies, and encodes ways of seeing, as McCloud suggests draws the veil as part of the identity of Muslim women. Satrapi both records and practises the tactics of subversion that many women of her generation deployed after the Revolution, and this is also part of the story of The Socks. Marji wears red socks beneath her chador, the small detail that signals resistance. She explains this in small frame where the autobiographical narrator addresses the reader directly: It s only natural. When we re afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection, our fear paralyses us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators repression. Showing your hair or putting on makeup logically became an act of rebellion (148). In another episode in Persepolis 2 from this same period, metaphor Issue 4,

4 The Exam, Marji sits for the drawing exam to enter the College of Art and study graphic arts after her return to Tehran. She knows that, in the wake of the Iraq-Iran war, when propaganda is rampant and 40 percent of places are reserved for children of martyrs and those disabled by war, one exam topic will be the representation of The Martyrs. In a single large frame that dominates the page, Satrapi includes the image of the crayon and Marji s hand as it draws in the framed space. The image in the process of being drawn here is also extraordinary, and across the top of the frame the narrator describes her tactics: I practiced by copying a photo of Michelangelo s La Pieta about twenty times. On that day, I reproduced it by putting a black chador on Mary s head, an army uniform of Jesus, and then I added two tulips, symbols of the martyrs, on either side so there would be no confusion (127). There is of course considerable confusion here! Satrapi has turned to the tradition of the pieta artwork depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the body of the dead Christ earlier, in Persepolis 1, to signify a moment of trauma when her mother collapses as the young Marji leaves Tehran for Europe. Here, on this second invocation of Christian iconography, the intent and meaning is different. Marji is subverting the political correctness required by the examiners by incorporating a Christian archetypal image of compassion and suffering into an Iranian nationalist composition. She is also remarking that the tendency to glorify martyrdom and suffering in propaganda is not peculiarly Iranian or Muslim. There can be no simple universality in the associations produced by the comics, but their graphic vocabulary opens up some new spaces for exploring memory, history and trauma, calling attention to discursive structures and how we understand them (Chute 1017). Like Spiegelman, Satrapi deliberately deals in images that are intractable and overdetermined, intensifying the work of closure across the frames of the comics. Said explores the idea that comics free us to think and imagine and see differently, and they do this by requiring of us an active process of imaginative production whereby the reader shuttles between words and images, and navigates across gutters and frames, and in the process is moved to see, feel or think differently in the labour of producing narrative closure. This labour of reading and looking for closure is at the heart of the opening that graphic narratives can make in shaping affective engagements and recognition across cultures. The idea that the unique vocabulary and grammar of comics and cartoon drawing might produce an imaginative and ethical engagement with others may seem to discount the recent sad story of the cartoon wars. Yet this controversy reminds us of the precariousness of life at stake in debates about visual culture, and understanding the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and recognition now is more than ever important work in the humanities. Gillian Whitlock, a professor in the Department of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, has published on comics in book chapters and articles. This essay is an overview of her published work to date. References Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, Chute, Hillary. Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative. PMLA 122, iii (May 2007), Chute, Hillary. Decoding Comics. Modern Fiction Studies 52 4 (Winter 2006), Constantino, Manuela. Marji: Comic Strip Heroine Breathing Life into the Writing of History. Unpublished paper, Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL:Poorhouse, Hirsch, Marianne. Editor s Column: Collateral Damage. PMLA 119 (2004), McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New York: Harper, Huyssen, Andreas. Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno. New German Critique 81 (2000), Naghibi, Nima & O Malley, Andrew. Estranging the Familiar: East and West in Satrapi s Persepolis. English Studies in Canada 31, ii-iii (2005), Said, Edward. Homage to Joe Sacco. In Palestine, by Joe Sacco. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 2. The Story of a Return. Sydney: Random House Australia, Spiegelman, Art. Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Act of Outrage. Harper s Magazine Jul 2006: Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon, Whitlock, Gillian. Autographics: The Seeing I of the Comics. Modern Fiction Studies 52 4 (Winter 2006), Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, English Teachers Association of NSW

5 FANTASY: not just child s play by Dr Kim Wilkins, University of Queensland Avid readers. English teachers love them. There is a certain kind of avid reader you may recognise. Nose perpetually in a large book. A very, very large book; often with a castle on the cover. These are fantasy readers. Some teachers still despair of turning these students on to suitable literature, but that would be a great underestimation of the power of the fantasy genre. I have felt this pressure, myself. My work is a blend of fantasy and historical fiction and while I am highly considered in my field I have won the Aurealis Award four times I am still not considered serious fiction in some quarters. It is rare that a work of fantasy finds its way onto the shortlists of our biggest literary prizes (more likely if it is a work of children s or young adult fiction), despite the fact that some very fine writers are at work in this genre. For too long now, fantasy fiction has been dismissed as something trivial, childish, mere escapism. Germaine Greer s teeth-grinding, when Tolkien was declared author of the century in 1997, demonstrates a typical summation. It is a nightmare that a fantasy writer should receive such an honour when his work, and the rest of the genre, is characterised by the flight from reality. Putting aside the fact that Greer grinds her teeth with monotonous and noxious regularity, this idea that fantasy is the opposite of reality and therefore cannot be taken seriously, is an idea that we can challenge readily. Let s start with Tolkien. Despite the fact that he refused to acknowledge any allegorical meanings in his work, one cannot read the final scenes on the slopes of Mount Doom the compassion and desperate camaraderie between Frodo and Sam, their musings on the nature of conflict without being reminded that Tolkien served in the trenches during the first world war. Lord of the Rings is a war story; it is about huge conflicts and their impact on small people. Trivial? Hardly. This is the material that serious fiction prides itself on. The addition of elves and dwarves serves, in my opinion, to divert the eye, so that these fierce ideas are felt more subtly: in the heart rather than the head, if you can forgive my romanticism. In Australia, the thematic triumvirate of race, class, and gender is given centre stage over and over again as matter for serious literary consideration. Fantasy fiction, with its faux medieval trappings, is easy to overlook in the search for grittier, more visceral, more real representations. But anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the genre will recognise that race and class, and especially gender, are central to the characterisation and narrative development of most fantasy stories. The medieval trappings themselves became overly associated with Victorian medievalism (knightly heroism often used to justify imperialism) and with Nazism (via Hitler s love of Wagner); but let us remember that England was colonised and recolonised during the medieval period. Questions of who has the right to rule, who has the right to decide the fates of others, are deeply embedded in both medieval literature and in the fantasy fiction that draws so heavily on it. I am currently at work on a fantasy series that is loosely based on Anglo-Saxon history and culture. In my story, five daughters of a powerful warlord grapple with problems of power, religion, and love. My research is based largely on historical and literary sources about and from the seventh and eighth century, and my goal is to imbue my story with both a sense of history, but also a sense of what that history signifies now, in the present. I had the first glimmerings of the idea for this series while teaching medieval literature to undergraduates in One of the tasks I set them, if they were willing, metaphor Issue 4,